So Many Candidates -So Many Problems

International:
Iran Plans to Conduct Missile War Games
Iran plans three days of military maneuvers, including short-range missile tests, beginning Sunday - its first since the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions against it in late December, state-run television said.

"The elite Revolutionary Guards plans to begin a three-day missile maneuver on Sunday near Garmsar city," said the broadcast. The city is located in northern Iran on the edge of Kavir desert, about 60 miles southeast of Tehran.

"Zalzal and Fajr-5 missiles will be test fired in the war game," the television quoted an unnamed commander of the guards, as saying. Both are considered short-range missiles.

Iran conducted three large-scale military exercises last year as tensions with the West and the United States rose. Read all about it here

Chavez to U.S.: 'Go to hell, gringos!'
President Hugo Chavez returned to his weekly radio and TV broadcast Sunday, extolling the ideals of socialist thinker Karl Marx and telling U.S. officials to "Go to hell!" for what he called unacceptable meddling in Venezuela's affairs. Read more here

National:

Hillary Makes It Official

Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination with unrivaled political strengths and challenges to match, a former first lady turned senator, soon to be tested in a campaign unlike any other in American history.

While Clinton seeks to become the first woman commander in chief, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is in the early stages of what promises to be the most credible White House campaign ever by a black politician.

One year before the first caucus and primary votes are cast, sheer star power sets them apart from the pack of contenders who will now begin to debate the war in Iraq, health care, federal deficits and more.

"All things considered, she is a little bit more a front-runner than Senator Obama," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster not aligned with any candidate. He put the odds at "better than 50-50 that the nominee will come from that pair." Read more here

McCain: Bush Escalation Is Too Small

In October 2006, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called for “another 20,000 troops in Iraq.” In January 2007, President Bush accepted the idea and announced he would send 21,500 more soldiers into the middle of Iraq’s civil war. McCain quickly endorsed the strategy.

Since that time, McCain has been slowly back-pedaling from the escalation plan, offering numerous reasons for why the strategy will not succeed. He has argued the Pentagon was “dragging its feet” in implementing the strategy. Now, he is arguing that the escalation is too small.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, McCain said, “I would have liked to have seen more” troops sent to Iraq. He added, “If it had been up to me,” more U.S. troops would be on their way into Baghdad. Watch the video

Kristol On War Critics: ‘It’s So Irresponsible That They Can’t Be Quiet For Six Or Nine Months’ This morning on Fox News, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol said that opponents of escalation in Congress are “leap-frogging each other in the degrees of irresponsibility they’re willing to advocate.” Kristol said, “It’s just unbelievable. … It’s so irresponsible that they can’t be quiet for six or nine months,” adding, “You really wonder, do they want it to work or not? I really wonder that.”

NPR’s Juan Williams told Kristol his analysis was “totally ahistorical,” and pointed out that yesterday was the deadliest day for U.S forces in Iraq in two years. “There’s something going on here you might pay attention to as opposed to just the politics of, ‘If you don’t support this president, you don’t really want us to win.’” Watch the video

In Other News:

The cost of the Iraq war per month now stands at $8.4 billion. “The Pentagon has been estimating last year’s costs for the increasingly unpopular war at about $8 billion a month. It rose from a monthly ‘burn rate’ of about $4.4 billion during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003.”

Ten major companies — including General Electric, DuPont, and Alcoa — “have banded together with leading environmental groups to call for a firm nationwide limit on carbon dioxide emissions that would lead to reductions of 10 to 30 percent over the next 15 years.”

Rich Little, the comedian chosen by the White House Correspondents Association to headline the annual correspondents dinner, has been told by organizers of the event that “they don’t want a repeat of last year’s” performance by Stephen Colbert.” “They don’t want anyone knocking the president. He’s really over the coals right now, and he’s worried about his legacy,” Little said. “I won’t even mention the word ‘Iraq.’”

From The Right: Benny Morris: The Next Holocaust Will Be Different The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

From The Left: Frank Rich: Lying Like It's 2003 Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could imagine we'd already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?

Scooter Libby, the mastermind behind the White House's bogus scenarios for ginning up the war in Iraq, is back at Washington's center stage, proudly defending the indefensible in a perjury trial.

Ahmad Chalabi, the peddler of flawed prewar intelligence hyped by Mr. Libby, is back in clover in Baghdad, where he purports to lead the government's Shiite-Baathist reconciliation efforts in between visits to his pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.

Quote Of The Day:
Reading of "A Whale Of A Challenge" by Garrison Keillor -listen here, original article here
Ambrose I. Lane Sr

(Sources: AP, MyWay, CNN, FOXNews, CommonDreams, XM169ThePower, DrudgeReport, ThinkProgress, Bloomberg, LittleGreenFootballs, LATimes, NYT, TownHall, SFChronicle, Attytood, TruthOut)