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- Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2010, leading to the usual speculation about a presidential run in the next decade. More interesting is how this announcement affects the unresolved battle for the U.S. Senate seat, since any certification for the winner must pass through Pawlenty's hands first.
- Barack Obama is set to nominate Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.) for secretary of the Army, which will create the third vacancy in New York this year, and the second requiring a special election to fill the seat. McHugh was the co-sponsor of a bill which would have prevented Obama from closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and opposed Robert Gates' proposed "cuts" to the Defense budget. But McHugh agrees with the President on DADT, so it's all good!
- James Fallows, who currently lives in China, notes the odd discrepancy between John Pomfret's sober analysis of Sino-DPRK relations and Anne Applebaum's baseless speculation -- "really, paranoid hysteria" Fallows avers -- despite both being Washington Post writers. Actually, the bigger mystery is why Post opinion editor Fred Hiatt allowed good analysis to infringe on the op-ed page's usual doses of Richard Cohen's whining and George Will's smug defenses of his own ignorance.
- This Bruce Bartlett column in Forbes makes a lot of great points about the libertarian obsession with economic freedom drowning out any common ground they might have with liberals in other policy areas. Indeed, it's hard to take libertarian politics seriously when, as Bartlett snarks, "As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn't extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want."
- Remainders: Salon's resident wingnut describes Ronald Reagan in terms usually reserved for deities; Obama's Open Government Dialogue gets spammed into oblivion by the birthers; Chris Bowers is making sense on where we stand with the "culture wars;" and Mitt Romney for GM CEO?
--Mori Dinauer
