Peter Baker, the White House correspondent for the New York Times, is very worried about the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo's membership in the White House press pool:

“This is really troubling,” said New York Times reporter Peter Baker in an email to POLITICO. “We’re blurring the line between news and punditry even further and opening ourselves to legitimate questions among readers about where the White House press corps gets its information.”

A new survey on public attitudes on international issues conducted by Pew and the Council on Foreign Relations is gonna make the Cheneys squeal with delight:

Charlie Savage writes that a new inspector general's report on the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department will tell us what we already knew about how the division was run by political appointees under George W. Bush prior to the tenure of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey -- as an agency completely uninterested in fulfilling its historical mission of protecting the civil rights of minorities:

I understand what Glenn Greenwald is arguing when he notes the absence of a human rights pitch in yesterday's Afghanistan pitch, but Obama certainly didn't mind fudging when it came to human rights at home:

During the campaign, candidate Barack Obama said the Iraq War was unnecessary, and that it had drained resources from the more relevant conflict in Afghanistan. He pledged to properly resource that conflict. Liberals hoped -- as they did with his position on gay marriage -- that he didn't really mean it. Well he did, he does, and tonight, the president announced that he will be sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to beat back the Taliban and establish conditions for a drawdown beginning in 2011. Neither his sobriety in delivering this message nor his lack of right-wing catch phrases should be interpreted as a lack of commitment. This is what he said he would do.