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For those of you who aren’t addicted to politics like chocolate-covered crack, there’s yet another debate tonight — this time on CNN, and not that irritating MSNBC with its crappy anti-Mac website.

It’s seven weeks till the Iowa caucus. I’ve gone through kind of a roller coaster on this campaign, first thinking Joe Biden would emerge quickly in the spring as the obvious candidate of experience, then settling into a slow-but-steady state of calm, but dipping into the occasional bouts of I-hate-my-country despair, in all honesty.

I have a feeling about tonight, and I have a feeling about Iowa. I feel it in my bones like arthritic joints before a big storm. It’s still going to be a hard press to make a stand in Iowa and try to blast out of the caucuses with the momentum to stun New Hampshire, but it’s really within reach, and I’m no longer using the word “quixotic” about this bid. You just wait; Iowa is going to shock you. Hope you get to watch tonight, and I hope Wolf friggin’ Blitzer gives Biden more time than Russert and Williams did last week.

And I hope Pakistan can run itself for a few hours while Joe is on stage.

On Friday, Caucus4Priorities, some bunch-of-hippies PAC headed up by Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen that wants to cut defense spending and re-route the money to happier domestic agendas, endorsed John “My priority is a 28,000sf house with a recreational building” Edwards. This “sweet” deal, as the papers like to pun it, apparently comes with 10,000 bleating Iowans that have pledged to caucus for the endorsee. A CBS News story talks of Edwards’s defense-cutting plans thusly:

If elected, Edwards said he would examine the nation’s missile defense system and the F-22 fighter jet.

“The idea that America, over the long-term, can control the spread of nuclear weapons — and just look at what’s happening in Pakistan as a perfect example of this — is a fantasy, it will not happen,” he said.

Good thing CBS decided to cherry-pick missile defense and the F-22 as cost-cutting opportunities for Edwards, because if you look at the rest of the candidate scorecard, you’ll notice how many other defense programs about which they just couldn’t get a real answer out of John Edwards.

Reducing the nuclear stockpile? Undecided.

Cancelling the DDG-1000 destroyer or C-130J transport plane? Undecided.

Pledge to eliminate earmarks in defense spending? No answer.

It probably won’t surprise any of the regular readers who I’m about to tell you had answers to all those questions that Caucus4Priorities would have found favorable: Joe Biden. And of course, by record alone, those hippies should’ve given Dennis Kucinich their much-deserved support, since he’d pretty much cancel everything deadly under the sun and fight global terror networks with his pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. But I guess C4P hasn’t got the balls to gamble on anyone outside the top three.

Hippies.

Greenville, SC, is a lovely town; if you ever have the occasion, I suggest a weekend getaway there. I would not, however, suggest any kind of getaway in Islamabad.

While I was in Greenville interviewing Senator Joe Biden about Pakistan, among other things, General Pervez Musharraf decided to suspend the constitution in Pakistan and declare a general charlie-foxtrot. If I had only checked my stupid email on my crappy cellphone while waiting for my face time with the Senator, I could have gotten his first, raw reaction to the actualization of the kind of suck he warned us about in last Tuesday’s debate. Little old me and my camcorder. But no, I had to settle for the much less exciting, measured, official statement after we drove off in opposite directions and everyone checked their damn PDAs:

“General Musharraf’s decision to declare a state of emergency and suspend the constitution underscores the need for the United States to move from a Musharraf policy to a Pakistan policy. President Bush should personally make clear to General Musharraf the risks to U.S.-Pakistani relations if he does not restore the constitution, permit free and fair elections and take off his uniform as promised. Then, we have to build a new relationship with the Pakistani people, with more non-military aid, sustained over a long period of time, so that the moderate majority in Pakistan has a chance to succeed.” –Joe Biden

But yeah, Greenville is nice.

I come from a Republican family, but they are good people, and as much as a Huckabee government would frighten me on so many policy grounds, I would be far, far happier with my kin voting for someone who is a genuine, principled conservative than a guy like Rudy Giuliani. “Mayor of 9/11” my ass, Rudy has got to be one of the most irritating, hot-headed, ignorant weirdos running for Commander in Chief of this great nation, and I can only hope the pro-lifeness of my Catholic family gets them to vote for anyone but this sack of French showers.

As waterboarding comes up more than Britney Spears in the news this week thanks to the confirmation hearings of Michael Mukasey, Rudy decided to weigh in thusly

MR. HUNT: Let me try a couple of national security questions. Waterboard. You have noted the Congress has not outlawed it, and that you say it’s not necessarily torture; it depends on the circumstances. John McCain says you are wrong and he says you haven’t served in the military and have no experience in the conduct of warfare. Do you know more about torture than John McCain?

MR. GIULIANI: I can’t say that I do but I do know a lot about intensive questioning and intensive questioning techniques. After all, I have had a different experience than John. John has never been - he has never run city, never run a state, never run a government. He has never been responsible as a mayor for the safety and security of millions of people, and he has never run a law enforcement agency, which I have done.:

[Emphasis mine]

Rudy use that same old tired crap in his press availability here in Atlanta about the top 3 Democratic candidates, and that’s fine. But for him to whip out the same tired-ass talking points against a POW in his own party? I’m sorry, but you’d have to have a particular fetish for flogging yourself in your own nay-nays to think that Rudy is the man you want to represent this country, particularly if you claimed to believe in Jesus.

And also if you want to keep this nation safe from nuclear threats:

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran!

This is some seriously disturbing news from Bush’s last gasp at being relevant: U.S. has “urgent need” to outfit stealth bombers with bunker busters.

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran. The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator…. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”

There doesn’t appear to be any potential targets for a bomb like that in Iraq. It could potentially be used on Taliban or al Qaeda hideouts in the caves along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there would be no need to use a stealth bomber there. So where would the military use a stealth bomber armed with a 30,000-pound bomb like this? Defense analysts say the most likely target for this bomb would be Iran’s flagship nuclear facility in Natanz, which is both heavily fortified and deeply buried.

Hooray.

I just got back from listening to Hillary Clinton accept the endorsement of Congressman John Lewis and deliver a bunch of canned, fluffy Let’s Turn This Country Around rhetoric that left her devoted following weak in the knees.

Bla, bla, bla.

Almost a thousand miles away, at almost the exact same time, a political event that hints at what it’ll really take to turn this country around was going down in Iowa. I’d like to see Hillary pull off something like this:

The Oscar and Felix of politics? Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, would be strong contenders for “The Political Odd Couple of the Year Award” – if one existed.

On matters of policy, they don’t share that much in common – except what to do about Iraq.

So, the two presidential hopefuls will meet up in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday to talk about their plan to bring stability to the war torn nation. Specifically, the two senators will discuss their legislation that calls for decentralizing Iraq’s federal government and giving more control to local and regional groups. Their amendment passed easily in the Senate last week.

“Partisan politics must not come in the way of finding a solution to the war in Iraq,” Biden said in a statement. “The overwhelming majority of Americans want us to get our troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible without leaving chaos behind.”

Over on an Iowa blog, a John Edwards supporter looks at this kind of event and gets angry:

But this really annoys me. Aside from the fact that I think any partition plan is doomed to fail, Biden is throwing Senate Republicans a life raft. Now they can credibly say that they have voted for a solution to the Iraq problem.

Talk about the kind of retarded partisan-at-all-costs attitude you expect from some DailyKossacks that have the Right foaming at the mouth to accuse us yet again of being national security nincompoops! Yes, let’s not try to change course in Iraq because it’s better partisan politics to keep Republicans over the barrel! Great idea, demoinesdem!

To know me is to know that many Republican politicians make me want to eat glass, but come on: getting this country out of Iraq safely — and getting a better health coverage system, and ameliorating the Iran situation, and shifting our national energy portfolio away from the destruction of the planet — is going to take just this kind of bipartisanship, like it or lump it.

Today, Hillary Clinton had John Lewis by her side.

Well yeah, that was the easy part.

While the Biden-Brownback-Boxer (et al) amendment passed last week 75-23 with impressive bipartisan support, the White House and its underlings immediately began attacking it, because accepting the recommendations of the amendment would mean confronting the reality that Bush’s pipe dream of a strong, centralized, peace-loving Iraqi government is just an ephemera. Soon after, we heard that the current, impotent Iraqi government itself was opposed to the BBB amendment, but as it turns out, that was probably just because Bush’s ambassador Crocker told Prime Minister al-Maleki a bunch of lies about it and trotted him out to toe the Bush party line. Radio Free Europe listened to the Arab street and found that some op-eds in Iraqi and neighboring papers were screaming that the sky was falling:

[Observers] believe this decision raises many questions concerning its timing, intention, and hidden objectives. First of all, we have to say that this decision is completely unacceptable to all Iraqis, except those who falsely believe that this decision supports the provisions of federalism in our constitution. They don’t realize that this decision is a dishonest attempt to confuse federalism and division; consequently, this decision will abort the attempt at federalism.

Except no, it doesn’t. Sure, if you ask an Iraqi on the street how they feel about “partition,” they’ll open a hookah of whoopass on you, what with all the unsuccessful previous attempts by Western powers to draw arbitrary lines in the sand and call ‘em states. Fortunately there are more rational editorials over there pointing out that such misleading rhetoric “only serve opportunists.” (Oh my gosh, you mean Hizballahi “newspapers” can be paranoid and hysterical?!) And the Iraqi president himself now understands that the intent of the resolution was to encourage a renewed drive to implementing the actual Iraqi constitution, and not whatever myth the Bush administration might have sold him:

Today, Senator Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. President Talabani welcomed the Senate’s approval of the Biden-Brownback amendment last week supporting federalism in Iraq, on a bipartisan vote of 75-23. He expressed his strong belief that the amendment promotes the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq and is not, as some have mischaracterized it, a call for partition. He also emphasized that the amendment is completely consistent with the decision Iraqis have made to adopt a federal form of government in their Constitution.

In addition, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki [said], “They said they welcomed federalism. If federalism is what they really meant, why not? Federalism, after all, is stipulated in the Constitution. We, too, talked about federalism as this is a constitutional issue.”

So quit calling it partition, damnit, you’re just dragging this war out.

My boy Joe got a little ornery on a question or two last night during the 715th Democratic debate on MSNBC, and with good reason. Firstly, the reliable ol’ Dodd clock shows that Biden, the smartest foreign policy guy on the stage, barely edged past Dennis Kucinich (by one second — that’s within measurement scatter) to come in third-to-last on talk time, which is astounding for a guy known widely for wordiness.

That may be an excusable sin in the eyes of those of you concerned primarily with domestic concerns like health care and, um, well, okay health care. But guess what else happened yesterday? In a classic congressional dance of one-step-forward-one-step-back, two amendments were passed in the Senate that opened doors to closing one war down while gearing up for a new one.

With solid bipartisan support, Joe Biden’s long-standing argument — that a political solution in Iraq (which will hopefully allow us to draw down forces without leaving the country in flames, unlike Richardson’s plan to run like hell and hope for the best) will most likely succeed with a loose federal government (as their constitution actually calls for) — finally took legislative form with the passage of his amendment. Co-sponsored by Sam Brownback (R-KS), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Arlen Specter (R-PA), John Kerry (D-MA), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX), and five others, the amendment passed 75-23, with Barack Obama deciding he was too sick to participate in the first serious policy-based refutation of George Bush’s pipe dream that we can flip this Iraqi house by remodeling it in our own image.

Republican Senator John Warner, instrumental and influential in almost all things related to Iraq, called the vote an “extraordinary moment because it marks the high-water mark of all the many debates and resolutions we’ve had in terms of bipartisanship.”

Sounds like the accomplishment of someone who can move into the White House and actually get things done with support from both parties, doesn’t it? Someone unencumbered by the baggage of the past, perhaps?

It was a touchy moment when Biden brought up the dark side of the Clinton legacy, but time is running out as we round the bend into the home-stretch of campaigning for January, and the second tier candidates have to start making some noise to get any attention from those of you who seem to have failed basic math or just live by the Book of Armaments: “Four shalt thou not count…five is right out.” Yes, Hillary Clinton is smart, she is a fighter, and God knows the Clinton political machine is a juggernaut unlike any in our time. Her primary lead seems unassailable, and I’m sure she will wage a brutal and effective campaign against any Republican they throw at her. And she just may defy the odds, defeating the armies of conservatives driven to the polls just to vote against another Clinton, and take the White House. But then what? What will the second Clinton White House achieve once 48-49% of Congress is too busy poking needles into voodoo dolls of her to show up for a conference committee? Like Biden said, it isn’t fair that Hillary gets stuck with that baggage because of the past, but that’s reality.

“There’s a lot of very good things that come with all the great things that President Clinton did, but there’s also a lot of the old stuff that comes back,” Biden said. “When I say old stuff, I’m referring to policy — policy.”

[It] was Biden’s remark that laid bare a central quandary about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: whether she can justifiably take credit for her husband’s successes while sidestepping the controversies and lingering questions that make some voters wary of another Clinton presidency.

Joe had to clarify with “policy — policy,” because he’s asking for your vote and no one wants to offend anyone on stage like that; I don’t have such reservations, however, and you should be smarter than that, too. We all know that it ain’t just in Bill’s policies, it’s in his pants, like it or lump it, not to mention eyebrow-raising campaign finance skirmishes and personnel shakeups. And to put it quite simply, for me anyway: why does being First Lady count so damn much as a reason to put someone in the White House? And since when did we become a monarchy, ruled term-in and term-out by members of the same two families?

Well, if she does wind up our next president, yesterday’s step forward on Iraq was met with a step back on Iran in a vote that might give y’all some indication of where the next Clinton White House’s foreign policy priorities will be. As if to balance out the positive stand against the president on Iraq, Clinton and 75 other senators who have no clue how Iran works voted to label part of a foreign sovereign government a terrorist organization, in a move Senator Jim Webb called “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.” John Edwards was right to suggest that this shows Clinton learned nothing from the mistake of giving Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq.

Yes, it is true that Iran, through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is causing trouble in Iraq by training and arming Shia militia in its own foreign policy whim that, when you really try to be objective about it, isn’t any more deplorable than the things the United States did throughout the Cold War in Central America. Yesterday’s move is therefore about as diplomatically tenable as it would have been had the Soviet Union declared the CIA a terrorist organization. Iran is already on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror; they are already under the decade-old ham-handed ILSA sanctions. We still have conventional tools of statecraft to confront Iran for objectionable military misadventures without trying to dissect what is a mind-boggling matrix of a government that is almost impossible to treat like it bears any resemblance to our neat-and-tidy Western org charts; trying reading a book, senators.

And more importantly, we still have ways to deal with Iran without laying the first cornerstone for another neocon argument for war in the Middle East. But if you all want to nominate us a president who’s cool with going along with that just because you’re fond of the happy memories of her last name, go right ahead then. I’ll try not to hold it against you when the fit hits the shan.

Like bookends on a week of stupid, MIT tries to one-up UF.

While quite possibly as stupid as Andrew Meyer is nuts, Star Simpson was wise enough to comply with law enforcement.

Shame, ’cause I’m already bored with YouTube again.

In the mailbox from Jane’s today: a badass new gadget from German company SPELCO that is on display this week at the Defense Systems & Equipment International (DSEI) Expo in London. (Upcoming.org: your one-stop shop for local indie rock concerts and wholesale export of death!) You are going to want to be the first kid on your block with one of these new Gryphon advanced parachute systems!

I’m Batman!

While not achieving a greater insertion distance than a conventional HAHO (high-altitude high-opening) parachute drop (40km), these Wile E. Coyote wings let you get there in 15 minutes instead of an hour, and with stealth! (No word on whether it can be used to catch dragons.) A future version is expected to be outfitted with small turbine engines for powered, terrain-following flight below radar over 100km — but not for, you know, leaving the scene of the strike. From Yahoo.UK, where news is cooler,

The rough Spelco flight plan would call for departing the aeroplane at 33,000-odd feet and gliding down. From 20,000 feet the jets will light up, and the Gryphon troopers can fly high for best range or hug the ground for stealthiness. Once the fuel runs out, it’s glide and then pop the chute to land as normal.

As for getting home again from 178km into bandit country, Jelitko says “it’s not for the German forces.” He says he’s been invited to take the Gryphon to America, but so far hasn’t done so due to concerns over people copying all his kit and perhaps not paying.

The US forces might be able to suddenly open up an air corridor into defended airspace quickly enough to extract a team of Gryphon troopers before they ran out of supplies or got hunted down or overrun. A stealthy Gryphon insertion followed by a massive air assault might be an option where there was a target which might move away on short notice, or if there were hostages who might be done in at any sign of a rescue mission.

Jelitko also says that people have asked why not have a rocket or something, and simply take off again after the mission, boosting oneself up to gliding height once more.

“But I’m not crazy,” he says.