When legislative leaders count votes before a bill comes to the floor they call it a “whip check.”  It’s an old English phrase referring to those who kept the dogs in line during a foxhunt.

With all the barking about health care these days, Speaker Pelosi will need some pretty stout lashes to hold Democrats in the pack. But she and President Obama also possess more tools than you think to flog wavering lawmakers.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Last week New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the health care bill “an up or down vote on the Obama presidency.”  And as a result, the arm-twisting leading up to the vote will require the mother of all whip checks. Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics updates the count daily.

Both parties in Congress elect their respective “whips.” In the House, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina holds the position for the Democrats and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia for the GOP.  The position has been formally part of the congressional leadership since around the end of the nineteenth century. But because health care is the big enchilada, this one lands on Pelosi’s plate. “She’s the real Democratic whip on this one,” a House Republican leadership aide told me.

The fate of the legislation lies in the accuracy and persuasiveness of the Democratic vote counters. Yet the process is largely unknown to the world outside of congressional insiders. 

The health care bill includes another strange procedural twist.  Democratic leaders in Congress decided to first bring up the legislation the Senate passed in December for a vote in the House.  If it passes, the bill could go directly to the president for his signature.  Democrats are promising wavering House members they will make changes to the bill in a subsequent piece of legislation that will be considered as part of the budget reconciliation process (which requires a simple majority to pass in the Senate).  But it’s unclear when, or even if, this will happen.  As one veteran member of Congress used to say, “Fixing a bill in the Senate is the political equivalent of promising ‘I’ll respect you in the morning.’”

Typically when the “whipping” starts on a major bill congressional insiders say, “The candy store is open.”   For wavering Democrats, that means requesting changes in the legislation in exchange for their support – make this modification, add this or that and I’ll support it. Bargaining like this goes on routinely behind the scenes.  It’s all part of making the great legislative hot dog.

Former chief of staff to a House Democrat was informed of Massa's history of sexual assault in 2006.

Obama's nuanced and persuasive rhetoric:

"The time for talk is through." -- July 20, 2009.

"The time for talk is over." -- March 10, 2010.

Obama's approval rating at 43%, according to Rasmussen.

Bart Stupak gets a Democratic primary challenger over abortion.

Sean Penn on Hugo Chavez: "every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies."

Allahpundit: Patrick Kennedy goes nuts over media’s Massa coverage.

The Washington Post reports that the House Ethics committee will close its ethics investigation into Eric Massa:

The committee concluded that Massa's resignation put him outside the reach of any punishment the committee could dole out, and would render any findings of wrongdoing irrelevant. But the move appears likely to set up a political battle with House Republicans, who are already complaining in campaign ads that Congressional Democrats are unwilling to look too deeply into or punish the ethical transgressions of their own.

While the committee traditionally loses jurisdiction over a member when that member resigns, that's not the case when the allegations involve someone else working for Congress. For example, in 2006, Republican Mark Foley resigned on September 28, and the House Ethics committee didn't release its report until December 8.

According to Politico, Massa is alleged to have had "improper physical contact" with "several men who worked for him — including at least one intern."

So why aren't the Democrats investigating the harassment of congressional staffers and interns now? Is the most open and ethical Congress ever willing to investigate sexual misconduct with pages but not interns?

Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future would drastically overhaul the American welfare state in a free-market direction. The Congressional Budget Office says it would solve the entitlements crisis through a series of changes to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. The Roadmap also includes a fundamental tax reform -- one that Ryan says, and the CBO assumes, would bring in revenues equivalent to the long-term historical average of 19-percent of GDP. Two new studies dispute that figure, however. I talked to Ryan this evening to get his response.

"We feel good about our numbers," Ryan told me. "You can tweak a plan to get it toward a historic trend." He's referring to a Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center study that says the Roadmap would fall short of its 19-percent goal over the next 10 years, bringing in revenues of somewhere between 16.6 percent and 16.8 percent of GDP. In a statement last night, Ryan said that "the purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue -- not the other way around." He reiterated that argument in his conversation with me today. "The point is the spending."

Philip Klein made some salient observations in a post earlier today:

There's good reason to believe, based on economic theory and empirical experience, that at least some portion of that "lost" revenue would be recouped by higher GDP. But the overaching point is that the Ryan plan, as scored by the CBO, shows that there's a way to balance the long-term budget by keeping taxes at historical levels rather than raising them to levels that would cripple the economy. If critics acknowledge that Ryan's reforms to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the health care system can make our nation solvent as long as we maintain historical levels of tax revenue, and the only argument left is over how to maintain historical levels of taxation, then I'd say that's a major victory for Ryan.

The other charge critics make is that Ryan's tax changes would hurt the poor. That's the theme of a second report by the liberal Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), which concludes with this: "It's difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge." It's impossible not to notice the snide tone. But sarcasm isn't always persuasive.

The $2 trillion figure is a reference to the Bush tax cuts, which Ryan's plan would make permanent for everyone. (One should note that by this measure, the Obama tax plan will also "lose" some revenue, since the president only wants the tax cuts to expire for upper-brackets.) But Ryan also cuts spending over time. Obama does not.

As for "requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more," that's a swipe at Ryan's zeroing out the stimulus and replacing the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax. You see, Ryan says the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in Obama's stimulus bill is spending, not tax cutting. He'd eliminate it. And CTJ counts a reduction in that spending as a tax hike.

The business consumption tax would be passed on to the consumer, making it regressive. But Ryan notes that Americans indirectly feel the consequences of the above-average U.S. corporate tax rate today, through lost wages and higher prices. And these effects are regressive, too. Unlike the current situation, Ryan goes on, the business consumption tax "is cleaner, simpler, and it's on paper." It would also make American exports more competitive than they are today. "I believe it's a better deal," he says. Most important: "It's more uniform. You can't play social engineering."

The dynamic effects of Ryan's reforms are impossible to predict. Over time, government would shrink, investment would expand, and America's credit rating would improve. America would become a haven for foreign capital. Her citizens would have more individual choice and, yes, more individual responsibility. "Policies such as these," Irving Kristol wrote decades ago in his essay "The Republican Future," "have the obvious advantage of reconciling the purposes of the welfare state with the maximum degree of individual independence and the least bureaucratic coercion." No wonder Paul Ryan is smack in the middle of liberal sights.

Bill Burck and Dana Perino break news today: Eric Holder failed to disclose that he signed onto a brief in support of Jose Padilla in a 2004 Supreme Court case:

"Holder and company made the argument that traditional law-enforcement tools, such as wiretaps, search warrants, Mirandized questioning, and the like, have served the nation’s security well and were sufficient to do the job. The government need not resort, they argued, to holding terrorists caught in the U.S. as enemy combatants, with no right to a criminal trial or to remain silent or to counsel during questioning, particularly if they are U.S. citizens."

Holder and his co-authors wrote in 2004:

"[We] recognize that these limitations might impede the investigation of a terrorist offense in some circumstances. It is conceivable that, in some hypothetical situation, despite the array of powers described above, the government might be unable to detain a dangerous terrorist or to interrogate him or her effectively. But this is an inherent consequence of the limitation of Executive power. No doubt many other steps could be taken that would increase our security, and could enable us to prevent terrorist attacks that might otherwise occur. But our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens."

Burck and Perino continue:

"Holder apparently failed to disclose his involvement in this brief when he was up for confirmation early last year, even though the Senate questionnaire he was required to fill out specifically requested such information and directed him to provide to the Senate Judiciary Committee copies of any briefs filed with the Supreme Court. He disclosed three amicus briefs but made no mention of this one — or another one renewing his support for Padilla when the case returned to the Supreme Court again in late 2005. (The 2005 brief is much like the 2004 brief, except the language on acceptable risks is absent.) Had Holder disclosed these briefs to the Senate Judiciary Committee, no doubt he would have been extensively questioned about the views expressed in them. It is disappointing, and perhaps troubling, that he did not."

A Republican Senate Judiciary Committee aide confirms to ABC News that Holder failed to disclose this brief.

House Democrats are defending huge amounts of territory in this year's midterm election. The latest Cook report says Democrats have 53 seats that rate as "Lean" or "Tossup," while Republicans only have six. Nevertheless, today the DCCC announced its "Red to Blue" program targeting 13 Republican House seats. Roll Call's write up is here. The Hill's write up is here.

These are slim pickings for Democrats. For starters, two candidates -- Bryan Lentz (PA) and Roy Herron (TN) -- are running to replace retiring members of their own party. So "Red to Blue" is not really the best way to describe them. "Dear God Keep it Blue" would be better.

Moreover, of the thirteen races, Cook currently lists just three as "tossup." And only one, John Carney's battle to replace retiring Republican Mike Castle, lists as "Lean Democrat." All the other races are Likely Republican or Lean Republican.  Yes, her California district went 52-47 for Obama in 2008. But it's hard to see how Mary Bono Mack, who won that year by 16 points, will lose in a Republican cycle when Obama isn't on the ballot.

The Democrats' best chances? We've already mentioned Carney. And then there's Dan Seals, who's running to fill Mark Kirk's seat in Illinois. Obama won his district by 23 points in 2008. Cook says the race is a tossup. And Seals has powerful friends (see photo).

Joe "You Lie" Wilson makes the list of Democratic targets, but something tells me he won't lose his McCain-supporting South Carolina district in 2010. One notable absence from the list is Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the conservative whom liberals love to hate. The rhetorical bomb-thrower has two Democratic challengers, but neither won enrollment in the initial batch of "Red to Blue" candidates. Which isn't really a surprise. Barring divine intervention, Republicans who survived the Democratic maelstrom in 2006 and 2008 have a better-than-even chance of keeping their jobs in 2010.

If this doesn't reassure Democrats in the House, I guess Van Hollen can just pass along Obama's heartening message: "The difference is me."

“I don’t think there are any districts in the country where the outcome of this great debate on healthcare reform is going to cost someone their seats,” Van Hollen declared just days after a recent poll showed Americans are losing confidence in the majority party.

The Daily Caller's Mike Colapietro has written a head-to-toe profile (with various stops along the way) of "Manhattan Madam" Kristin Davis, made famous by the Eliot Spitzer scandal. She is now running for governor of New York. A few highlights:

Davis earned a bachelor's in business from St. Mary's College and worked for a hedgefund. Her call-girl enterprise was complex: "She had more than 100 girls and operated in five countries, with a call center in Uruguay. She could dispatch a $1,000-plus-an-hour call girl to a hotel or residence in Paris, Berlin, Gstaad, Rome, New York, L.A., Miami, Dubai, Montreal or elsewhere within minutes."

Colapietro is frank about Davis's assets (with comparisons to Dolly Parton and Jayne Mansfield) and describes her smell, upon meeting her in a bar, as "intoxicating."

How did she end up doing time? "Spitzer rolled on Davis as part of his agreement with the government not to prosecute him. Davis’s live-in boyfriend testified in secrecy to the grand jury. The lawyer she hired told her to gather evidence on Spitzer then turned it over to him for plea-bargaining. He promptly lost the records when she refused to turn over all her cash to his trust account prior to her arrest."

After her release from Riker's, Davis met political operative Roger Stone, who introduced her to Von Mises, Rand, Hayek, and Friedman. It then dawned on her that she was a libertarian. (Davis supports gay marriage and the legalization of pot and prostitution.)

Congress Daily reports today that the Senate may try to find a way to pass the Senate bill without a final House vote. Sounds improbable, but Rube Goldberg would be proud.

I present to you the Slaughter Solution, devised by Rep. Louise Slaughter. (What Sen. Death Panel was not available to put his name to it?). Via Congress Daily ($):

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. "Once the CBO gives us the score we'll spring right on it," she said.

NRO: "Crucially, it gives the lie — in a big, big way — to the Democratic narrative that health-care reform should and will be finished via simple "majority rule," and not bound up in the arcane rules of the United States Senate."

From the GOP Leader blog: "You see, Democratic leaders currently lack the votes needed to pass the Senate health care bill through the House.  Under Slaughter’s scheme, Democratic leaders will overcome this problem by simply 'deeming' the Senate bill passed in the House - without an actual vote by members of the House."

In the above 2008 video of a Human Rights Watch panel, lawyer Jennifer Daskal says that the U.S. interrogators had done "things the United States has called war crimes when carried out against Americans."

Daskal, who once defended Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr, was tapped last summer to work in the DOJ's "National Security Division and to serve on a task force deciding the future of Guantanamo and its detainees."

As Tom Joscelyn has reported:

Daskal was one of the human rights lawyers who openly urged President Obama to stop the military proceedings against Omar Khadr, calling him a “child soldier.” 
 
Khadr was neither a child, nor a soldier, at the time he reportedly killed an Army medic. Khadr comes from a known al Qaeda family dedicated to Osama bin Laden. He was trained in al Qaeda camps and served a senior member of al Qaeda. There is even a video of Khadr manufacturing and placing IED's in Afghanistan. Khadr is a terrorist, not a soldier.

The above video shows Daskal calling Khadr a "child soldier" and claiming that he is entitled to an education financed by the U.S. government:

Let’s really think about who Omar Khadr is and what he’s accused of doing. He’s a child soldier. He’s a victim of his circumstance. He is hardly the worst of the worst. He is hardly the mastermind of 9/11 that the President said they were going to prosecute through these commissions. And he is being trotted out as an example as proof that the military commissions work in a system that was never designed to try someone like Omar Khadr. I want to talk briefly, just reiterate a little bit of what was already said about the obligations, the international obligations regarding the treatment of children who are in custody. The rules say ‘no prolonged detention’. Omar Khadr’s been in detention for almost six years now. The rules say kids must be rehabilitated. Omar Khadr has had no educational opportunities he’s had absolutely no rehabilitation whatsoever. He’s had no schooling, no chance to improve himself. He’s been held for over a quarter of his life in custody—without any—any education either by the US government or at the assistance of the [unintelligible]. And the rules say you need access to an attorney. Omar Khadr was held for several years before he was ever given access to an attorney.  And he was only given access to an attorney because the Supreme Court ordered it in connection with another lawsuit. Now the blame, clearly here is on the US government.

This is all standard fare for your average lefty-lawyer. Daskal suggests that international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions apply to illegal enemy combatants--and therefore the United States ought to apply the same standard of treatment to foreign terrorists as it would prisoners of war. And teenage terrorists have a right to an education provided by the U.S. government. She is entitled to her ideology, and Eric Holder and Barack Obama are entitled to have an activist lawyer help set detainee policy at the Department of Justice. The American people are also entitled to know that her ideology, like other pro bono Gitmo lawyers, is that of a radical civil libertarian, as Charles Krauthammer put it.

Over at The Cable, Josh Rogin reports that the Obama administration's strategic engagement with China seems to have less to do with broad foreign policy objectives than the more narrow issue of arms sales to Taiwan.

When top Obama administration officials went to Beijing last week, they had a broad agenda for discussion, including Iran, climate change, and North Korea. What did the Chinese want to talk about? Taiwan, Taiwan, and Taiwan.

Several China experts close to both sets of officials said that Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and National Security Council Senior Director Jeffrey Bader went to China with the understanding that they would have substantive discussions on some key issues of U.S. interest, but the Chinese side used the opportunity to try to bargain for an end to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, something Beijing has wanted for decades and now feels bold enough to demand.

Bold is certainly one way to put it -- Beijing has no problem sharing ballistic missile technology with Iran, selling fighter jets and small arms to the brutal Mugabe government, and propping up the massive North Korean army. China is in no position to lecture the United States on arms sales, particularly air defense assets like the Block C/D F-16 and Aegis missile technology to a small democracy like Taiwan. Rogin's report addresses this hypocrisy:

Meanwhile, although the Obama administration moved forward, eventually, with the Bush administration's left over deal to sell Taiwan some arms, the White House declined to see Taiwan any F-16 aircraft as part of the recent $6.2 billion arms sales package.

Some China watchers fear that the Obama administration is cementing a custom by which the U.S. continues to sell some arms to Taiwan while simultaneously ignoring the ongoing decline of the island's actual defense capabilities in the face of massive and increasing Chinese deployments across the Taiwan Strait.

So China has effectively leveraged the United States to discontinue supplies of basic integrated air defense systems and interceptor jets to Taiwan, while aggressively boosting their own air superiority (the PLAAF is the third largest in the world). If only Germany had been able to pull off a similar foreign policy coup prior to the Battle of Britain (by August 1940 thousands of American built aircraft were under order by the British government).

If Obama is trying to heighten tensions in the Taiwan Strait, stripping the Republic of China of their air defenses is precisely the way to go about doing it. Once Beijing can achieve air supremacy over Taiwan, invasion will follow. The world's lukewarm reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia certainly has some gears spinning in the heads of Chinese strategists, so it's in Obama's best interest to nip a potentially volatile situation in the bud now. Sell the F-16 C/Ds to Taipei, and throw in a couple of Aegis systems in for good measure. Worst case scenario, we use those arms sales to leverage China on Iran and North Korea.

Honestly, would it kill the State Department to use a little realpolitik here?

With everyone from the New York Times to Republican establishment lawyers and Lindsey Graham suggesting the Gitmo lawyers are proud heirs to the tradition of John Adams, it's worth recalling that three lawyers allegedly showed photos of CIA officers to 9/11 plotters -- and may have broken the law in the process. As the Washington Post reported in August:

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Investigators are looking into allegations that laws protecting classified information were breached when three lawyers showed their clients the photographs, the sources said. The lawyers were apparently attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the agency's interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.

If detainees at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are tried, either in federal court or by a military commission, defense lawyers are expected to attempt to call CIA personnel to testify.

The photos were taken by researchers hired by the John Adams Project, a joint effort of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to support military counsel at Guantanamo Bay, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry. It was unclear whether the Justice Department is also examining those organizations.

Both groups have long said that they will zealously investigate the CIA's interrogation program at "black sites" worldwide as part of the defense of their clients. But government investigators are now looking into whether the defense team went too far by allegedly showing the detainees the photos of CIA officers, in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.

Eric Holder's Justice Department has shown a keen interest in investigating CIA interrogators and those who wrote the interrogation memos. Whatever came of the DOJ's investigation of the lawyers who may have outed CIA agents to al Qaeda? As far as I can tell, there haven't been any updates to this story in the Washington Post since September. Wouldn't it be good to know if any of the DOJ lawyers who represented or advocated for detainees were involved in the investigation?

Is the investigation ongoing? A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, and an email to the ACLU was not immediately returned.

Update (1:37 p.m.): An ACLU spokesperson referred questions to the DOJ.

My native Virginia does extremely well in the latest Forbes rankings of the nation's wealthiest counties. As the Washington Examiner points out, 12 of Forbes's 25 most prosperous counties are in the Washington Metro area. Who says public service doesn't pay?

Joking aside, the transformation of the DC area over the last several decades is absolutely stunning. As recently as the beginning of the Reagan presidency, outer Fairfax County, where I grew up, was a relative backwater. Now the growth stretches west beyond Loudoun County (the wealthiest county in the nation) and south beyond Prince William County (fourteenth on the Forbes list) and even Stafford County (number twelve). Some people --they may be insane -- commute to work in D.C. from as far away as beautiful Charlottesville. And there's no end in sight. Some folks in Fairfax County want to incorporate the million-person entity as one big city. One day in the future, it will make little sense to distinguish between the Washington metro area and the Richmond metro area. They will have fused.

These changes are not only due to the expansion of government and government contracting. They also have to do with new, innovative industries like the tech and biotech sectors, and with business friendly tax and regulation policies, in Virginia especially. The growth has fueled immigration and development and kaleidoscopic diversity all while maintaining a high quality of life. It's truly something to behold.

The wealthy Virginia suburbs of Fairfax and Loudoun went Democratic in 2006 and 2008, but swung back for McDonnell in 2009. He won Fairfax 51-49 and Loudoun 61-39. He won Prince William, Stafford, and Fauquier Counties, as well. The national GOP better pay close attention to Virginia politics. McDonnell is the model for an optimistic, friendly, economic-centric conservatism that can succeed in a rapidly changing world.

Howard Dean has resurrected his "Hit the Bat" gimmick in an effort to raise money to "fight for a public option" in the healthcare bill.It looks hokey now, but it's worth remembering that "Hit the Bat" was the first serious political fund-raising success on the internet. By September of 2003, Dean raised $25 million, mostly from small, individual donors, online. Deaniacs would come to Dean's site, read the blog, comment, and pony up their credit cards, all in one swoop. It was pioneering stuff.

It's also worth remembering that even though Dean led the field in fundraising (and media adoration), he lost 16 consecutive primaries/caucuses, with his only win coming in Vermont, after he had withdrawn from the race.

Rep. Joe Donnelly, in an interview with his home paper, says he'd rather take the health-care bill piece by piece, and confirms he is a Stupak Democrat:

Donnelly likes a lot about the bill, but its language on abortion is a "fatal flaw." For him, it is a deal breaker. "I would not vote for it," he said. He figures there will be a vote within a month or so. The abortion language is unpopular with "a significant" number of congressmen. It has the potential to kill the bill, he said.

Donnelly was formerly a "yes" on health care.

Rep. Jim Marshall of Georgia was thought to be one of Pelosi's suicide Dems—one of the 39 "no" votes she could possibly turn into 'yes' despite the political peril— but he will stay a "no," reports Greg Sargent:

“Marshall is a no,” Marshall spokesperson Doug Moore tells our reporter, Ryan Derousseau.

Marshall is one of 39 Dems who voted No last time that reform proponents were hoping to flip to Yes, in order to make up ground and get to 216 votes. The confirmation that Marshall will vote No reduces that pool a bit.

Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah, whose brother got a judicial appointment last week on the same day Matheson met with the president about possibly backing the health-care bill, remains undecided.

Jim Geraghty notes a new poll that shows why switching to a "yes" on health care is termed a suicide vote. This thing's "popularity ranks somewhere between Tiger Woods and Toyota accelerator pedals" in swing districts.

The numbers show ominous news for House Democrats Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, Betsy Markey of Colorado, Baron Hill of Indiana, John Adler of New Jersey, Steve Driehaus and John Boccieri of Ohio, Dina Titus of Nevada, Mike McMahon of New York, and Jason Altmire and Chris Carney of Pennsylvania.

The highest level of support for the bill is 40 percent, in Titus and McMahon’s districts; even there, opposition runs 52 percent and 46 percent, respectively. The lowest level of support is in Carney’s district, at 28 percent.

Opposition is pretty strong across the board, lowest at 46 percent in McMahon’s district, highest in Markey’s and Carney’s districts at 58 percent.

Voters in every district said the vote would be “very” important to their decision this November, ranging from 63 percent in Giffords’s district to 81 percent in Altmire’s district.

Last week, the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo, who have demonstrated their aversion to radical Islam in a series of recent clashes with extremist infiltrators, took another  significant step toward ridding their new republic of Muslim fanatics.  A self-proclaimed imam, Xhemajl Duka, who had come to Kosovo from his native Albania, was deported back there.   The mosque he had erected in the village of Marina, near the central Kosovar city of Skenderaj, was closed by local authorities.

Shutting down mosques and religious schools to prevent their use for radical indoctrination is increasingly the local weapon of choice against the Wahhabi threat in the Balkans.  Last month, the Bosnian government arrested the main Wahhabi leaders in their country, in another small village where the local residents had, in 2007, shut down a mekteb, or religious primary school.

Mekteb mischief was an important factor the Kosovar action against “imam” Duka’s presence.  Duka appeared on the scene in the aftermath of the 1998-99 war in the territory, with support from an Islamist charity, Mercy International, based in Western Europe and linked to Al-Qaeda, according to U.S. and foreign investigators.   Duka opened the mosque in Marina in 2002 and, among other activities, took in orphans, who are sadly numerous in the republic – folk songs about them are widely heard, and teachers mention how often pupils enrolled in the public schools lack parents.  But in Duka’s religious lessons for children, as claimed by residents of the village and its surroundings, he forced girl children to put on niqab and the abaya – the face veil and full-body covering that, even in Saudi Arabia, are not imposed on prepubescent girls.

Duka tried to claim he had no sympathy for Al-Qaeda and that that his endeavors were purely humanitarian.  But 6,000 local Muslims signed a petition enumerating their complaints against him.  The radical preacher then argued that the signatures were collected in favor of the Kosovar secular intellectual Albin Kurti, now on trial for his opposition to European abuses in governing the republic, and had been misused to attack Duka and his mosque.

A copy of the petition was obtained by the enterprising staff of the Kosovo daily Express, which has stood out for its relentless reportage on the Wahhabi problem, and showed that the signatories specifically called for closure of Duka’s mosque, naming him and spelling out the abuses they wanted to end.   Municipal officials added that Duka’s financing was foreign and under investigation.

The end of Duka’s fundamentalist campaign in Kosovo began at 9 AM on March 2, when the mosque in Marina was closed indefinitely by Kosovo police, acting on a warrant from municipal inspectors.  Officers placed police tape around the building to bar any visitors.  Notwithstanding the Wahhabi interloper’s claim of support from the villagers, the shutdown was accomplished without incident.

For those of you familiar with The Two Coreys, didn't you think Corey Feldman would have been the one to die of an overdose? Of course if you followed the eponymous reality series on AE, it soon became clear Corey Haim was the one with the problems.

The child actor and later teen star of films such as The Lost Boys (and more mindless fare like License to Drive and even more mindless fare like Blown Away—which every guy watched solely because of Nicole Eggert) had developed a terrible cocaine and valium addiction that he just couldn't shake—he was found unresponsive at his mother's home this morning and pronounced dead shortly after. But while most of the tributes coming out now refer to Haim's role in The Lost Boys, a terrific '80s vampire flick that also starred Kiefer Sutherland, we shouldn't forget the best movie he ever made: Lucas.

Haim was only 14 at the time when he played the role of a high school misfit: Lucas has fallen in love with the cheerleader (Kerri Green) who naturally thinks of him as a friend—she's really in love with the quarterback (Charlie Sheen). But Lucas is willing to go the distance for her and tries out for the football team, suffering indignity upon indignity at the hands of other players (including one played by Jeremy Piven). So obsessed is he with the cheerleader that he doesn't even notice his bandmate's crush on him (a very young Winona Ryder). There aren't any decent clips of Lucas (except a sappy trailer and this three-second bit) so just add it to your Netflix queue.

As for Corey Feldman, there's something about him that reminds me of our senior writer Matt Labash. (The comparison really annoys him.)

Wow, the message mavens have been working overtime in Democratic leadership this week.

Harry Reid gushed about how losing only 36,000 jobs was "really good," and a "big day" in America. While it was an improvement, it's hard to arge the right tone to take was, "really good."

Now, Nancy Pelosi is declaring, "We have to pass the bill so you can see what's in it."

“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting. 

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

Video, here.

Meanwhile, David Axelrod is defending himself against charges of Obama sycophancy...from the New York Times!

Pelosi is defending against the idea that Democrats are in "chaos."

And, we find out that Rahm Emanuel and pretty much anyone else who ever came in contact with Eric Massa has been defending themselves against unwanted tickle fights for some years now.

Move along. Nothing to see here. Back to your regularly scheduled programming about Republican infighting and disarray.

The Florida Republican, now leading primary challenger and current governor Charlie Crist by 32 in one poll, released his first TV ad today. He sounded a common theme, saying "Washington is broken." Unlike Obama, he believes it's broken because it can't stop spending money, not because it can't "come together" to spend even greater gobs of it.

"Americans need Republicans who will stand up to Obama, not join him," he says, in an allusion to Crist's much bickered over support of the Obama stimulus.

He also personalized his pitch employing his, as Obama supporters might say, his "compelling personal narrative" to connect with voters.

"As the son of exiles, I know what it means to lose to gift of freedom," he said, referring to his Cuban immigrant parents. "And, that's why I know we cannot and will not allow America to fail at this time, in this way."

Rubio's clear ease and competence in front of the camera (not to mention his poll numbers) continue to bear out Tea Partiers' and conservatives' early backing of him. My only quibbles are that the lighting seems a little dark, and he mentions his four children, but only three of them really get any face time.

Scott Brown to write his memoirs.

BREAKING: Marco Rubio did not get a back wax. Whew!

Obama's new poverty scale: "Another paradox of the new poverty measure is that countries such as Bangladesh and Albania will have lower poverty rates than the United States, even though the actual living conditions in those countries are extremely bad. Haiti would probably have a very low poverty rate when measured by the Obama system because the earthquake reduced much of the population to a uniform penniless squalor."

The White House not exactly fired up about Alexi Giannoulias' chances: “We’ve got at least one potential member of Congress -- Alexi, stand up -- from the state of Illinois.”

Oh, snap! Democratic infighting gets good: Markos warns Kucinich to vote for health care or the netroots will primary him.

What Obama hath wrought: "Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, re-engaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions."

Uh oh: "A plurality of Democrats believe the health-care plan will increase the deficit and a majority say it will likely mean higher middle-class taxes."

The Hill's latest whip count.

Why does the parliamentarian hate sick people???

The election of Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a New New Deal. James Carville gushed that Democrats would rule for 40 years. But Obama has had great difficulty enacting his agenda, mainly because the public is opposed to it. Health care reform is in trouble and cap and trade is dead. The stimulus blew a trillion dollar hole in the budget and the economy still shed 4 million jobs in 2009.

Why hasn't Obama "pivoted" to jobs, like the White House said he would do? Because he understands that he's done what he can -- if all the stimulus did was save the jobs of state and municipal government employees, then $15 billion in temporary, targeted payroll tax exemptions will not spur recovery. After the pivot, Obama would have nothing to do but cheerlead and wait until the economy recovered on its own (which it seems already to be slowly doing). At least health care reform gives him something to talk about.

What Obama has definitely created is a right-wing counter-punch. Political philosopher Michael Walzer describes the left's dilemma well in the new issue of Democracy. Here's Walzer:

1993 doesn’t seem so different, but the ’30s and the ’60s were very different. In those decades there was a vibrant left politics, a movement politics, a grassroots politics, which doesn‘t exist today. The labor movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement–all these drove politics leftward. By contrast, Obama’s liberalism has no base. I am sure that surveys would show that he has a lot of support on the issues, maybe even majority support, but this is the kind of support that manifests itself almost entirely in opinion polls, not in the streets or in union halls and churches. What is necessary for a strong leftward pendulum swing is some form of mass mobilization. In addition to the people who tell pollsters that they would like, or would have liked, say, an extension of Medicare to people in their 50s, there have to be people who go to meetings, march in demonstrations, organize in their communities, raise money, and make enough noise so that politicians start worrying about their re-election. The right has been mobilized in exactly that way, at the base, for decades now–through the evangelical churches, the National Rifle Association, the anti-abortion movement, and much more. But since the right also has corporate power and vast amounts of money on its side, mobilization is less critical for it. For the left, it is everything. The only advantage we have is numbers–or, that’s the advantage we used to have.

I'd second the notion that the left does not have that advantage any more. As Walzer notes, it is the right that is marching in the streets. All the energy is there. Which is why you see Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Eric Massa (on Glenn Beck yesterday) to James Hoffa attempt to co-opt the Tea Party movement.

Perhaps that energy will dissipate over time. Or perhaps it will grow stronger and culminate in the election of a new, Republican president in 2012. We really don't know. We do know that political conditions rarely stay the same for long. Democracy is a quarterly; Walzer and the others who participated in its must-read symposium wrote their essays at a low point. If Obama signs health care reform into law, he will once again be apotheosized to no end. Like the man who can sense an approaching rain storm, I'm picking up faint signals of an impending (but temporary!) liberal comeback.

(Incidentally, I just finished Walzer's Spheres of Justice. Highly recommended if you want to learn more about how liberals believe goods should be distributed in society.)

John Schwartz of the New York Times has published a piece on the reaction of some conservatives to an ad by Keep America Safe asking for the DOJ to identify government lawyers who previously represented or advocated on behalf of terrorists. The Times, of course, was eager to highlight dissent within conservatives’ ranks over the controversial advertisement.
 
The conservative critics argue that the lawyers’ work on behalf of detainees is a strictly noble pursuit. They point to John Adams’ representation of British soldiers after the Boston massacre as evidence that the lawyers are simply the heirs of a longstanding and honorable legal process. The comparison is absurd for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Adams did not represent America’s enemies during an actual war, as the lawyers in question have.
 
But the Times article also ends with this:

David Remes, a lawyer who represents 18 detainees, said in a telephone interview from Guantánamo that the deeper point of the attack on the lawyers was political.

The goal, Mr. Remes suggested, “was to make the Obama administration and the Justice Department even more gun-shy than they are on Guantánamo issues.”

What do the conservative lawyers think of David Remes?
 
He is no John Adams.
 
What the Times does not say is that Remes used to work for Attorney General Eric Holder’s old law firm, Covington & Burling. Remes left the firm after an infamous pants-dropping incident in Yemen in 2008.
 
Keep in mind that Yemen is currently home to one of the strongest al Qaeda affiliates in the world -- and has been a major recruiting hub for al Qaeda for two decades. That’s why so many Yemenis ended up at Guantanamo in the first place (they comprise more than 40 percent of the current population). To this day, Osama bin Laden maintains deep and troubling ties within the country.
 
According to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (LB), here is how Remes explained why he dropped his pants (emphasis added):
 

“At the press conference in Yemen — this is a society where the rule of morality is so strict — I wanted to drive home the degree of humiliation that these searches cause by illustrating a typical body search,” Remes told the LB. “The physical abuse they can stand. The verbal abuse they can stand. But when the military punishes Muslim men by shaving off their beard, or by forcing them to disrobe — for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine. . .I wish people paid as much attention to the suffering and torment in Guantanamo as they paid to the way I sought to dramatize it.”

 
In other words, on behalf of his Yemeni clients, Remes wanted to demonstrate how anti-Muslim the American military is at Guantanamo. He said this during a time of war, in one of the growing fronts of that war. This does not advance America's interests or legal process. It harms her image further in the Muslim world. Yet, some lawyers will undoubtedly justify this as a service to Remes’ clients.
 
Would John Adams have dropped his pants inside Britain during the Revolutionary War in order to smear American forces and gain sympathy for his clients? No, that was not how the revolutionary John Adams behaved.
 
To drive home the point, Remes gave an interview to the Yemen Post that same month, during which he said (emphasis added):

They said that in addition to the bad conditions they face every day, they now go through constant physical body searches. They are searched before they enter every room. The search involves pulling down their trousers and having guard’s hands enter inside their underwear, and that is a terrible violation of the personal dignity of these men in particular, and because of their religious beliefs they feel strongly offended and increases their misery. Another complain (sic) that they told me was the punishment of forced nudity they were forced to go through. This clearly violates the Geneva Convention. This is all humiliation. In addition, it seems that this humiliation is done for the sake of humiliation. It is not physical torture only, but physiological torture as well. 

 
Again, Remes portrayed American military personnel at Gitmo as being anti-Muslim. In reality, Gitmo has long been compliant with the Geneva Convention. The idea that the American military is humiliating Muslims just for the “sake of humiliation” is a disgusting smear.
 
During another interview with the Yemen Observer in July 2008, Remes played the blame Bush game and said America has a “neocolonial mentality.” He said shaving detainees’ beards was a tactic comparable to those “practiced by the Nazis against Jews in the 1930’s.”
 
Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric does not serve some noble legal process. It adds to the well of anti-Americanism that exists in Yemen and throughout the Muslim world.
 
In the same Yemen Observer interview, Remes described his clients as innocents who are wrongly detained. “Crimes against the US would consist of September 11, the attacks on US Embassies and the attacks to the USS Cole. One of my clients is Abdul-Slam al-Hailah. Is he a terrorist? He is a prominent businessman from Sana’a, very influential, very much respected, and well-connected,” Remes said.
 
The name of the detainee Remes referred to can also be rendered as Abdul al Salam al Hilal. To answer Remes’ question: Yes, there is every indication that al Hilal is a terrorist – and an important one at that.
 
Steve Hayes and I previously profiled him for The Weekly Standard. According to documents produced at Gitmo, U.S. intelligence authorities concluded that while al Hilal worked for the Yemeni government’s political security organization (PSO) he used his well-placed position to move al Qaeda terrorists around and get some freed from jail.
 
In the summer of 2000, al Hilal visited the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, which was used by al Qaeda to recruit and facilitate the movement of terrorists around the globe. The Italians monitored the institute for some time and shut it down (at least for a time) after the September 11 attacks. The Italians wiretapped the institute, and found al Hilal saying:

Well, I am studying airplanes! If it is God's will, I hope to bring you a window or a piece of a plane next time I see you. .  .  . We are focusing on the air alone. .  .  . It is something terrifying, something that moves from south to north and from east to west: the man who devised the program is a lunatic, but he is a genius. It will leave them stunned. .  .  . We can fight any force using candles and planes. They will not be able to halt us, not even with their heaviest weapons. We just have to strike at them, and hold our heads high. Remember, the danger at the airports. If it comes off, it will be reported in all the world's papers. The Americans have come into Europe to weaken us, but our target is now the sky.

 
This was well in advance of the September 11 attacks. That quote, as well other evidence and allegations pertaining to al Hilal’s case, is freely available on the Times’ web site. It is easy to see why U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the Milan wiretaps, including the one cited above, “link the alleged Milan al Qaeda cell to the 11 September 2001 massacres in the United States.”
 
But the Times isn’t interested in that story -- or how Remes has slandered American troops and pretended that bad men are innocent Muslims detained by the “neocolonial” American empire.
 
The paper is only interested in the conservatives’ infighting and the conservatives cited aren’t really interested in the actual facts of what the lawyers they defend have been doing all these years.
 
John Adams would be ashamed.
 

President Obama takes his insurance-company-bashing road show to St. Louis today. He will hold a campaign-style event at St. Charles High School, where he'll urge the public to rally behind him and his team of bounty hunters.

Expect Tea Partiers to protest. Missouri is not the most pro-Obama state around. He lost to John McCain there in 2008 and Roy Blunt holds a narrow lead over Robin Carnahan in the race for the U.S. Senate.

The White House wants Congress to vote on health care reform before March 18, when the president leaves for the Pacific. Congress says the White House is being ridiculously optimistic. The latest whip count is here. "Undecideds" and "Lean Nos" still outnumber the "Lean Yeses."

This won't be the first White House deadline Congress has blown. Remember, Obama initially wanted this legislation on his desk before last summer's August recess. And no wonder! If that had happened, those pesky town hall meetings may not have been so rambunctious and public opinion may not have headed south so quickly. Lucky for Congress, liberals are forgiving and the deadline is always pushed back.

A confusing legislative process has not masked the bill's fundamental weakness: its cost. Fifty-seven percent in the latest Rasmussen poll say the bill will hurt the economy because of its spending and tax increases. Universal health insurance is something a rich country in a time of plenty can afford -- not a rich country that is struggling to emerge from a painful recession and whose entitlement programs are more or less insolvent. As Greg Mankiw notes, "Even if you believe that the spending cuts and tax increases in the bill make it deficit-neutral, the legislation will still make solving the problem of the fiscal imbalance harder, because it will use up some of the easier ways to close the shortfall." If the bill struggles to find supporters for the rest of the year, it will be because of abortion and cost.

Obama knows how to make an audience swoon. But he still hasn't figured out a way to make a free lunch.

Cue Paul Ryan:

'Nuff said.

For your eyes and ears:

NPR embeds with the Marines in Marjah.

Doesn't sound like Justice Roberts wants to go to next year's State of the Union.

Iron Man 2 trailer:

In a great post at NRO, Andy McCarthy corrects Lindsey Graham.

Here’s Graham:

“I've been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all[.]... This system of justice that we're so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer.”

Here’s McCarthy:

“This is specious. 'The unpopular' are not 'required' to have 'an advocate' if (a) "the unpopular' include war prisoners seeking to challenge their status as enemy combatants (or unprivileged belligerents) and (b) by 'advocate,' Graham means a lawyer. In fact, Sen. Graham was a sponsor of the Military Commissions Act which not only endorsed a system that did not provide counsel for detainees but further (and quite properly) sought to deny those detainees access to the federal district courts.”

Being a military lawyer assigned to defend a particular serviceman, or to defend a particular terrorist detained before a military commission, is distinguishable from volunteering pro bono on behalf of yourself and your law firm on behalf of a terrorist detainee. McCarthy also considers just how wonderful for our nation those pro bono lawyers for al Qaeda terrorists are, and he finds a strong witness against them: Lindsey Graham.

Here’s Graham in the Senate debate over the Military Commissions Act:

If I could add one thing on this point:  perhaps the best evidence that the current Rasul system undermines effective interrogation is that even the detainees’ lawyers are bragging about their lawsuits’ having that effect. Michael Ratner, a lawyer who has filed lawsuits on behalf of numerous enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, boasted in a recent magazine interview about how he has made it harder for the military to do its job.  He particularly emphasized that the litigation interferes with interrogation of enemy combatants:

"The litigation is brutal [for the United States]. We have over one hundred lawyers now from big and small firms working to represent these detainees. Every time an attorney goes down there, it makes it that much harder [for the U.S. military] to do what they’re doing. You can’t run an interrogation … with attorneys. What are they going to do now that we’re getting court orders to get more lawyers down there?"

So it seems like Lindsey Graham in 2006 would disagree with Lindsey Graham's assessment in 2010 that these defense lawyers really “made us all safer.” Leaving aside the broader question of whether representing terror detainees is generally admirable, the fact is (as noted here many times before) that some of the pro bono terrorist lawyers have behaved badly; some of these lawyers and their organizations have trashed the military and the CIA and the U.S. government, going well beyond merely providing full and fair representation for their clients. That’s one reason why it was important to know who the terrorists' lawyers now at the Justice Department are, and what they’re working on. Which Eric Holder was refusing to tell the American people.