Fox News Radio host John Gibson asked Liz Cheney for her thoughts on Barack Obama’s recent trip to Dover Air Force Base to witness the arrival of the bodies of U.S. troops who died in Afghanistan. Here is her response, via TPMDC:

News breaking that SF Mayor Gavin Newsom is dropping out of the California Governor’s race. This pretty much clears the field for former Governor and current AG Jerry Brown. Given the generally Democratic nature of the state it means we will be back in the 70’s again.

The ongoing negotiations between Honduras’s coup leaders and president-in-exile Manuel Zelaya have borne fruit:

U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones faces Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Kremlin, Oct. 29. The American right will no doubt have a field day with this article from Russia’s leading business daily, Kommersant. According the Kommersant’s Vladimir Solovyev, the White House has made clear that it is eager to see the START III nuclear reduction treaty signed before President Obama...

Laugh in Tune! Listen to the Capitol Steps’ Halloween Show ‘Politics Takes A Holiday!’ on your local NPR station or online! Find an NPR Station or LISTEN ONLINE

Moving on to another French view of the Afghan conflict, Laurent Joffrin of the newspaper Liberation suggests that however bad the situation may be, the West in the person of President Barack Obama should not pull out of Afghanistan – yet. For Liberation, Laurent Joffrin writes in part: “A second round in the presidential election has now been scheduled. The outlines of a state, painfully, are...

Is it a fact that President Obama is ‘dithering’ – as former VP Cheney has said – over a decision on Iraq? In his editorial for Le Figaro yesterday, influential French columnist Pierre Rousselin seemed to agree, if not in a much more sympathetic fashion than Mr. Cheney. For Le Figaro, Pierre Rousselin writes in part: “From theory to practice, Obama is having a decidedly hard time...

The Washington Post breathlessly tells us today that 33 lawmakers are being investigated for questionable conduct that includes defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling. Granted, this is a legitimate story in Washington. But for the rest of the nation, it most likely will produce a collective yawn. “What else is new?” they might ask. The report was prepared in July. It was accidentally leaked...

Front page of the NYT: Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan its negotiators agreed to last week to send its stockpile of uranium out of the country, according to diplomats in Europe and American officials briefed on Iran’s response. And yet, over at Memeorandum, as of 11:00 am ET, the top three memes were about Congressional ethics inquiries, the race in...

Just to be clear, I have not read the entire House health care bill which dropped on our heads like a roughly 2,000 page albatross yesterday. (I’ve gotten through the first hundred or so, and my hat is off to anyone who reads fast enough to have finished the whole thing already.) However, Americans for Tax Reform have the manpower to split up the job and have helpfully identified the laundry list of new...

Two days after his 90th birthday, Edward Brooke was at the Capitol yesterday to receive the Congressional Gold Medal from President Obama and scold Mitch McConnell for his failure to be bipartisan. Brooke, the first African-American ever elected to the Senate in 1966 as a Republican from Massachusetts, took the occasion to tell his party’s leader: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen....

I use the words, “stands witness,” because they have a very singular significance. George W. Bush did meet privately with selected families of fallen Americans, but he did not put himself there on the tarmac in the dead of night to witness, directly and in person, the graphic human consequences of his war policies. Whether the war in Afghanistan, or any war, is justified and necessary, or not, to...

Incredibly, President Barack Obama’s in-depth Afghanistan review is underplaying the evident peril that arming unruly warlords empowers them to use American war techniques to scuttle his agenda and settle mutual scores with more lethal force instead . It is fast-forwarding two great dangers. First, it is ensuring that Afghanistan can have no central government in Kabul capable of enforcing discipline on the...

The Watertown Daily Times has endorsed Republican Dede Scozzafava for the race to represent the 23rd Congressional District in New York. Below is their endorsement. The national attention focused on the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District has proved exhilarating, frustrating and slightly irrelevant. Political analysts have cast the three-way race in different ways. Some have described...

Message to America: A bewildered man emerges Wednesday from a restaurant in Peshawar, Pakistan, to a scene of utter devastation. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed at least 107. If this editorial from Pakistan’s The Nation is anything to go by, Hillary Clinton’s “hearts and minds” visit to Pakistan is, as the headline says, “falling flat”...

Now that most economists, our government, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street Barons, and our ignorant and shallow 24/7 info-entertainment Media pundits have pronounced that the recession is over, there are no more excuses. For all those people still lounging around on unemployment benefits, given up looking, or working at temporary and part-time jobs, get off your lazy duffs. There are no more excuses. Take...

From the local CBS affiliate in Boston:

Yes, yes, to fight the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. But eight years later, American blood and treasure are still being poured into a country of dirt-poor, illiterate people who support themselves by growing poppy for opium and heroin under one of the most corrupt governments in the world. As Barack Obama makes a midnight visit to honor the incoming dead and console their families, critics may sneer at...

The vote is in. Tom Friedman says no more troops for Afghanistan. Why? When I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it. America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start...

From a Politico email alert: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled a health reform bill Thursday that would cost $894 billion over 10 years and includes a public option. It meets President Obama’s goal of not adding to the federal deficit, cutting the deficit by about $30 billion in the first 10 years. And now it gets interesting. Full story here.

Tom Friedman says don’t send more troops to Afghanistan, because there are no positive trends to build on, like the Anbar Awakening before the surge in Iraq. Yet back in 2007, Friedman condemned the surge precisely because there was no progress to build on: January 3, 2007 Now President Bush wants a “surge” of more U.S. troops to Baghdad, in one last attempt to bring order. Whenever I hear this surge...

Speaking as one who has been critical of most of President Obama’s domestic initiatives this year, I find myself in the curious position of having to praise him three times in one week. First, he moved to finally provide long overdue improvements to the nation’s power grid. Then he worked with Congressional leadership to shut down foreign tax dodge schemes. (Sadly, with Charlie Rangel’s name...

David Adams commanded a US advisory team in the Afghan province of Khost. Ann Marlowe reported from Afghanistan. They write, From the beginning of 2007 to March 2008, the 82nd Airborne Division’s strategy in Khost proved that 250 paratroopers could secure a province of a million people in the Pashtun belt. The key to success in Khost—which shares a 184 kilometer-long border with Pakistan’s lawless...

There’s plenty of material out there, but Steve Biddle’s article in TNR [subscription only] stands head and shouders above the rest. Even if you’re against more troops, you should test your logic against Biddle. For example, NYT columnist Nick Kristof wrote: The United States was born of our ancestors’ nationalistic resentment of a foreign power whose troops we saw as occupiers, not protectors....

When I read this item at Politico over coffee this morning, I had to double check and see if I hadn’t inadvertently followed a link to The Onion. A new bill is being introduced which would make it far more difficult for people to hide their assets in foreign banks to avoid paying taxes on the money. Good idea! But it’s being introduced, in part, by Charlie Rangel. (I’ll give you a moment to...