Dr. Shakeel Afridi

After Capitol HIll collectively expressed considerable outrage, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to cut $33 million from Pakistan’s foreign aid package — $1 million for each year of the sentence against the doctor, Shakeel Afridi. The reduction comes on top of the more than 50 percent of the aid a Senate panel cut earlier this week.

But the U.S. State Department didn’t ramp up its rhetoric so dramatically, maintaining its position that Afridi is detained without basis. A spokesperson said the U.S. will continue to let the Pakistani government know about that position. The softer line might reflect the possibility that Afridi’s verdict could easily be overturned.

Afridi, who ran a vaccination drive to collect data that the U.S. has credited with helping to find Bin Laden, was tried under a British colonial-era law that does not carry a death penalty, according to the New York Times. (The L.A. Times reported that “Afridi could have been given the death penalty.”) Having never approved of his detention, however, the U.S. still objected to the sentence. Asked about the issue yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said:

We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held….

I think we’ve said that we don’t see any basis for what’s happened here, and so we will continue to make those representations to the Government of Pakistan.

Watch the video:

In February, Clinton said of Afridi: “His work on behalf of the effort to take down Bin Laden was in Pakistan’s interests as well as in America’s.” On CBS’s 60 Minutes in January, Panetta was more outspoken on the matter, calling actions against Afridi a “real mistake on their part” and crediting his help and making a case similar to Clinton’s:

This was an individual who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation. He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan, he was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism.

A Pakistani lawyer speaking to CNN said it was likely the case could be overturned — something Nuland subtly alluded to in the briefing when she said the legal process wasn’t necessarily complete. The lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that the tribal court is not based in Abbottabad, the site of the bin Laden raid. He told CNN: “If this punishment is challenged by Dr. Afridi’s family in the Superior Court of Pakistan, there is a good possibility that the sentence will be turned around.“

SEBELIUS: This can take the form of outright discrimination, like when people are given substandard care or are turned away from a hospital or local clinic because they happen to be lesbian or gay.

Often, the barriers are more subtle, like when doctors and nurses don’t take the time to understand the health needs of their LGBT patients

In other cases, health care providers violate patient confidentiality and disclose the sexual orientation of their LGBT patients. This can put LGBT people who are not “out” in their communities, at risk of discrimination, social exclusion, physical violence, or even death. And it leads many LGBT people to risk traveling to distant care facilities in order to prevent this from happening.

Because of this, LGBT populations are often invisible and unacknowledged. But they are there, in considerable numbers, in every country in the world.

Sebelius also acknowledged that she’s all too familiar with these barriers “because they still exist in my own country.”

Respondents were asked to choose [PDF, page 27] between “preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action,” or “avoiding a military conflict with Iran, even if means Iran may develop nuclear weapons.” Built into these questions is the assumption that military action can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or, conversely, that the lack of military action may ensure an Iranian nuclear weapon. Policy experts in Israel and the U.S. have consistently challenged this understanding of the Iranian nuclear showdown.

Last month, former Israeli internal security chief Yuval Diskin warned that :

[Israel's leadership] presents a false view to the public on the Iranian bomb, as though acting against Iran would prevent a nuclear bomb. But attacking Iran will encourage them to develop a bomb all the faster.

Indeed, the pollsters at Pew could take some lessons from Diskin about avoiding false trade-offs between bombing Iran and preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon. They could also have listened to Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor who observed that “an attack on Iran wouldn’t add anything to our security.” Or they could have watched former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan’s warnings on 60 Minutes that an attack on Iran would “ignite regional war” and “there’s no military attack that can halt the Iranian nuclear project. It could only delay it.”

In the U.S., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized that “giving diplomacy a chance” is the best “way forward,” and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. (appointed by George H.W. Bush) Thomas Pickering warned that “[A military strike] has a very high propensity, in my view, of driving Iran in the direction of openly declaring and deciding [...] to make a nuclear weapon.”

Finally, and from perhaps the least political source, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that “an attack could have considerable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions” but “it is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.”

This uncertainty was nowhere to be found in Pew’s questions which posed a clear tradeoff between taking military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and “avoiding a military conflict” at the expense of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon. This tradeoff presented to poll respondents fails to take into account the overwhelming evidence that no such trade-off exists. President Obama has committed to “preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and said it was “unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” But the willingness of politicians and pollsters to portray a tradeoff between military action and Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon promotes an inaccurate set of policy choices which, ultimately, may undermine efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.

Today, Limbaugh turned his attention to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Limabugh said that Clinton “has reached a pinnacle and all she is is a secretary,” adding that the left has “the strangest definition of success.”

Limbaugh then said he was being prodded to talk about Clinton’s need to wear “Spanx,” but suggested she had a greater need for “Spankles.” Spanx are undergarments designed to reduce the visibility of body fat. Listen:

You can listen to Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke here.

The New York Post ran one photo on its front page under the banner headline “Swillary,” apparently upset that she imbibes the same liquid as much of the rest of humanity.

But perhaps the best reaction to the shocking news that Hillary Clinton can have a good time goes to Nile Gardiner from the Heritage Foundation, who appeared on the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto to attack Clinton for “embarrassing” herself:

Hillary Clinton is a public servant, she’s out to serve the American people, to advance US interests. And I think that conducting herself in this way, as a senior US official on the world stage, doesn’t advance American interests in any way. In fact its downright embarrassing. It’s as though she’s auditioning for the sixth series of Jersey Shore rather than representing America on the world stage as the Secretary of State.

Watch it:

Gardiner’s remarks stunned even guest host Stuart Varney, who was filling in for Cavuto. Varney asked Gardiner if he would support a rule stating that no senior public official must ever be seen in a bar with a drink and/or dancing, to which Gardiner responded that he thought it was “a pretty good idea.”

Fortunately, Varney promised to give his viewers “both sides” of Hillary Clinton drinking a beer, so he invited on GOP strategist Dee Dee Benkie. To her credit, she defended Clinton, saying that “she deserves a few beers.”

But if you’re Hillary Clinton, you can be attacked by conservatives for both being too uptight and for having too much fun.

It’s a process that begin in 2007, when Clinton dressed up the decidedly gimmicky process of having supporters vote on a campaign song by turning the big reveal into a spoof of the ending of The Sopranos:

What’s great about the spot is not just its piggy-backing on the cultural capital of one of America’s most iconic shows, but the way it played with popular conceptions about the Clintons themselves, the idea that Bill has a weakness for junk food, that Hillary can be a nag and possess an epic side-eye.

She displayed the same kind of self-awareness in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver the next summer, when she thanked “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” for supporting her during the campaign. This time, the cultural artifact wasn’t as universally applicable—it was gender specific, and itself considered a little dorky and sentimental. And rather than using it to transform herself, Hillary used it to double down on something about her that had been widely remarked on, her preference for blocky, brightly-colored coordinating ensembles.

She owned her dorkiness, the way she seems to be owning the scrunchies her staff reportedly wants to take away from her today. It’s easy to forget how hysterical people were about Hillary’s hair during the first Clinton campaign and during the Clinton presidency. But she couldn’t do anything right, and now she seems rather determined to do what she wants whether it’s au courant or not. I saw her rocking a particularly elaborate scrunchie with a tweedy coat at a screening at the MPAA earlier this week, where she spoke about watching Luc Besson’s Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady on the plane on her recent trip to Burma.

Maybe it’s just that Clinton is finally legitimately powerful enough, and powerful in her own right, not to have to care one whit about whether anyone thinks she’s cool. But after so many years of trying to please everyone, Clinton appears to be trying mostly to please herself when it comes to her personal style and presentation. And the rest of the world’s caught on to the idea that Hillary is someone whose approval they should want, rather than the other way around.

But the National Journal reports today that Clinton is bypassing Ros-Lehtinen’s hold and authorizing the aid anyway:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is allowing U.S. funds to flow to the West Bank and Gaza despite a hold by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a rare display of executive-branch authority sure to anger the key lawmaker concerned about protecting her congressional oversight role.

A State Department official said that the letter was delivered on Tuesday to key members of Congress informing them of Clinton’s decision to move forward with the $147 million package of the fiscal year 2011 economic support funds for the Palestinian people, despite Ros-Lehtinen’s hold. Administrations generally do not disburse funding over the objections of lawmakers on relevant committees.

The State Department official told the National Journal that said that withholding the funding could “undermine the progress that has been made in recent years in building Palestinian institutions and improving stability, security, and economic prospects, which benefits Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

REENA NINAN: How successful has the U.S. been in getting and preventing Israel from taking unilateral action against Iran?

CLINTON: Well we’ve worked very hard with Israel on all levels from the military, intelligence, strategic, diplomatic level to make sure we were sharing information, that we knew what each other was assessing. And it’s our very strong belief, as President Obama conveyed to the Israelis, that it is not in anyone’s interest for them to take unilateral action. It is in everyone’s interest for us to seriously pursue at this time the diplomatic path.

Watch the full interview (with Clinton’s comments on Iran starting at 1:30):

Clinton’s view is shared not only by top U.S. officials — including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and reportedly Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey — but also Republicans in Congress, senior Israeli officials and the Israeli public.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime — though U.S. and Israeli intelligence has not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration — as Clinton said in her interview with ABC — vows to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the possibility, but the efficacy and consequences of a strike raise serious questions, leading the U.S. to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The people of the United States join you in welcoming the opportunities of this new year and the possibilities for strengthening ties of family and friends. And as we face new challenges, we remain committed to our support for universal human rights and the freedom of expression — rights that promote peace and progress.

(HT: Right Wing Watch.)

It also seems fitting that Weaver, who played a First Lady who had to endure the indignity of being cheated on in Dave, gets to come back and play the hell out of the next chapter in that real-life story.

I appreciate that we’ve gone from stories where the woman gets to be the President’s wife or girlfriend, as in Dave or The American President, to stories where she gets to be one of the most powerful people in the free world entirely in her own right.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that it would be extremely difficult to cast a credible Obama. Fred Armisen’s impression of the president is laughable. Jordan Peele has Obama’s voice entirely locked down, but he doesn’t particularly look like him. I have no idea if Adrian Lester has the voice, or could figure out how to do it, but he’s got the look, or could pull it off plausibly. I also really like the idea of the main character from Primary Colors, who was responsible for wrangling John Travolta’s Bill Clinton stand-in character, returning to the movies as Obama. There are obvious decent stand-ins for Hillary: Emma Thompson could also step back into those shoes post Primary Colors, not to mention my personal favorite candidate Judith Light. But Obama is tricky—and important—to get right.

Whether Political Animals works at all will hinge on who ends up playing the FLOTUS-turned-Secretary of State. I adore Judith Light, who is a year younger than Hillary and can also rock the hell out of her haircut, and would love to get her back on television, so she’d be my vote. Greg Berlanti, who created Political Animals, hasn’t had a hit in a while, but he at least exhibited some creative thinking in Jack & Bobby, a futuristic reimagining of the childhoods of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. Lots of details remain, but I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.