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From the LA Times:

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Maliki embraced Obama’s plan, saying: “That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” Maliki said he was not making an endorsement in the presidential race.

The endorsement of the Iraqi Prime Minister for a plan that calls for combat withdrawal - an effective end to the Iraq War - is enormous news. Ironically only the LA Times fronted the story, owing to pressure exerted from the White House for the Iraqi government to issue a retractment, which they (vaguely) did. When the New York Times ran the story they ran it as a story focused on the implications for al-Maliki given the disapproval his comments generated with senior White House and US military leaders. Even so, this offers the most real possibility of an actual conclusion to the Iraq War we’ve had since it began. The lead of Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki, effectively supports presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s 16-month time-table for withdrawal, and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has repeatedly stated that he would respect Iraq’s sovereignty on the issue of withdrawal (though his plan calls for no immediate withdrawal and indefinite military presence). It’s unlikely that McCain would actually advocate such a speedy withdrawal since it would be near political suicide, but this is the clearest hope the American public has had yet for an actual termination to the War. A full rundown with the official responses of the candidates is here.

Related: While the mainstream press was slow to run this story, The White House press corps inadvertantly emailed this story to their entire list (instead of the intended internal list) immediately after Der Speigel, the source of the Maliki interview, ran the story on the wire.

From the NY Times:

Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race….Despite audience resistance, Mr. Stewart contended, his show had been able to develop a distinctive angle on Mr. Obama.Noting that the senator seems to emphasize the historic nature of his quest, Mr. Stewart said, “So far, our take is that he’s positioning himself to be on a coin.”…Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said of Mr. Obama, “There’s a weird reverse racism going on. You can’t joke about him because he’s half-white. It’s silly. I think it’s more a problem because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to have any flaws.”

Perhaps there’s a actual reticence comedians have to make fun of Obama. But McCain may just be an easier target. McCain revels in giving the press the sort of personal access that invariably exposes him to the risk of poorly-phrased quotes getting caught on camera. He offers that access because it results in more favorable press coverage, but the collateral cost may be ready-made comic materials. Obama, on the other hand, has run a very disciplined campaign that offers little casual press access. Less access results in less unscripted conversation, and less room for error.Again, it’s very possible that some jokes about Obama get discarded because of racial sensitivity or political ideology. But McCain’s offered a steady stream of pre-packaged jokes this campaign season and you can’t blame comedians from running with jokes that are practically prewritten.

From the NY Times op/ed section:

Campaigns generate headlines with the tough decisions they make. On Thursday, Barack Obama’s campaign made waves with an easy one. Mr. Obama’s decision to leave the public financing system elicited the predictable outrage among reformers (and the McCain camp), but it was probably the most obvious and inevitable decision he’ll make all year — justified both politically and ethically.

By freeing his campaign from the public system, Mr. Obama can continue to raise donations from his vast base of supporters, who have made his campaign thus far the best-financed in history. Mr. Obama is rightly counting on them to raise far more than the $84 million in public funds he could expect to receive from public financing.

Mr. Obama may be on slippery ground because of his previous commitment to stick with the public system. But given that his campaign essentially embodies the ideals of reform — to a degree no one seriously thought possible just a few years ago — it’s going to be difficult for the McCain campaign or the chorus of scolds to generate much traction on the issue. After all, Mr. Obama’s all but certain financial advantage in the campaign will be derived from donors of modest means — not wealthy vested interests.

Obama left the publicly funding election system for a system funded by the public. There are two chief complaints; that he said he would work with the Republican nominee to have a fairly funded fight and now he’s breaking his word, and that this sets a dangerous precedent. Obama has disingenuously claimed his reason for leaving is to level the playing field since history the Republican camp have used “527 groups” — third-party political groups that aren’t allowed to coordinate their efforts with the campaign, but are freed from all other financial limits. (The most famous being the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that ran a smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004 campaign.) The reality is that the Republicans haven’t really deployed any 527s this cycle, though they may, and the better and more honest reason would simply be that Obama would be foolish to turn down the likely hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors he’s likely to get.

In an ironic twist, John McCain who has been loudly complaining about Obama’s lack of ethics is actually violating federal election law during this primary season. He opted into the public system to guarantee a loan, then backed out of the public system without permission which is illegal. The Federal Election Commission is currently without enough members to vote on the matter, but the chairman (a Republican) has denounced McCain’s action and improper already.

So what does this all mean? Obama will campaign hard in more states than any other candidate ever has, and will campaign in every state in the union, which no one has ever done. He’ll do so in the faint shadow of his questionable reasoning, while McCain will continue to spend until the Republican National Convention money he is legally barred from spending. After the RNC, he’ll be limited to the $84m and whatever the independent 527s want to invest on their own advertising.

This also means that somewhere between $200m-$400m will be spent on the campaigning for this election, on top of the countless millions already spent. Ad into that what the various networks have spent on their staff, ad revenue, etc and we have an election cost escalating far beyond more countries’ GDP. The race of the president of the United States is certainly important, but that seems an obscene amount of money in light of the cheap costs dent poverty, disease or illiteracy around the world.

Image courtesy Jay D on Flickr.

From David Brooks at NY Times:

My first thought on the running mate question is that to balance his ticket, Barack Obama should pick a really old white general. Therefore, he should pick Dwight Eisenhower. John McCain, on the other hand, needs to pick someone younger than himself. Therefore, he also should pick Dwight Eisenhower.

Photo courtesy Smothers52 at Flickr.

From Talking Points Memo:

We seem to have arrived at an equitable compromise: Sen. Clinton is staying in the nomination race while Sen. Obama drops out to move on to the general.

America is growing weary of the media coverage for a primary already mathematically concluded.

Bruce Springsteen endorses Barack Obama just before the Pennsylvania primaries:

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

The endorsement of superstars shouldn’t really matter than much. They are, after all, just talented artists at best and marketing vehicles at worse (you wouldn’t care who the Jolly Green Giant endorsed would you?). But Springsteen may be slightly different, because millions have identified with his songs in a profound and personal way beyond what a normal musician achieves. Mariah Carey will likely never have someone claim Hero defined their life. But it’s possible someone might keep a copy of The River for just that reason.

For confirmation of Bruce’s cool (though not precisely his relevance), check out this video of him performing Dancing in the Dark with a street musician in Copenhagen.

This week the military and diplomatic leaders in Iraq came before Congress to testify about progress. Members of select committees were able to speak and ask question to find out precisely where we war in our “war on terror”.

A number of Senator performed capably from both parties. Time focused on a single line of questioning that came at the end of a long day of hearings:

Obama hit Petraeus and Crocker with an artful series of questions about the two main threats: Sunni terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Iran. He noted that al-Qaeda had been rejected by the Iraqi Sunnis and chased to the northern city of Mosul. If U.S. and Iraqi troops succeeded there, what was next? He proposed: “Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace of al-Qaeda but rather to create a manageable situation where they’re not posing a threat to Iraq.” Petraeus said Obama was “exactly right.”

Obama asked Crocker about Iran: We couldn’t expect Iran to have no influence in Iraq, could we? “We have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq,” Crocker replied. “The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces.” Obama then pursued Barbara Boxer’s previous line of questioning: If Iran is such a threat to Iraq, why was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted with open arms and apparently a lot of official kissing in Baghdad last month? “A visit like that,” Crocker said, avoiding the question, “should be in the category of a normal relationship.”

At which point, Obama dropped the hammer. The current situation in Iraq was “messy,” he said. “There’s still violence; there’s still some traces of al-Qaeda; Iran has influence more than we would like. But if we had the current status quo and yet our troops had been drawn down to 30,000, would we consider that a success?” Crocker, semi-speechless, chose to misinterpret the question, saying a precipitous drawdown to 30,000 troops would be disastrous. But Obama’s question was more diabolical. He was saying, Hey, al-Qaeda’s on the run, and Iran is probably more interested in harassing the U.S. military than having another war with Iraq. How much better does the situation need to be for us to leave? He had taken Joe Lieberman’s dart and beaten it into a plowshare.

When General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker took the stage before the Senate, and then the House there were a few important notes. The first was that neither was equipped to answer the fundamental questions of the war; answers about why we are there, why we’re not leaving, and our fiscal policies are the territory of Bush, Rice and others. But Petraeus and Crocker have provided generally honest appraisals about what is happening, and the course they believe we should take.
Because of their limited context it was difficult to leverage any pressure for bigger answer - Senator Russ Feingold expressed his dismay he only has the general and ambassador to question for that very reason. Obama’s point was important, then, because is was one of the few moments when we did get a bigger answer than Petraeus and Crocker could give. But leading them to agree that we had reasonably met the measures of success we’d accept as a premise for future drawing down right now, it’s a reasonable inference that there is a separate agenda at work in Iraq.
When Secretary Gates announced yesterday that that military would not reduce its size this year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said:

The president still doesn’t understand that America’s limited resources cannot support his limitless war. Let me be clear: This is not a so-called troop pause. With today’s announcement, the president has signaled to the American people that he has no intention of bringing home any more troops.

Instead he is leaving all the tough decisions to the next administration. President Bush has an exit strategy for only one man, himself, on January 20, 2009.

Perhaps there is another reason, more or less noble. But at least we have an idea why we’re not staying, thanks to this week’s hearings.

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, originally uploaded by Andrew Gascho.

I’ve often thought how powerful it would be to have images from Good Friday and Easter - to see Jesus on the cross, his followers in despair, and then to see, perhaps, images from Mary when she saw the angel in the empty tomb. Not only would it be a powerful and moving visual narrative, but what a persuasive evangelistic tool, right?
In a recent New York Times article about Obama’s historic speech on race…

The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida, described Mr. Obama’s speech, in which the Democratic presidential candidate discussed his relationship with the former pastor of his home church in Chicago, as a kind of “Rorschach inkblot test” for the nation.

“It calls out of you what is already in you,” Dr. Hunter said, predicting that those desiring to address the topic would regard the speech as a spur, while those indifferent to issues of race might pay it little heed.

Regardless of what photos, video or first-hand accounts of Christ on the cross we may have, they will never do more than call out of us what’s already there. Perhaps that means that to you, a good man was martyred that first Good Friday, case closed. Or perhaps to you, Christians reverse engineered history and proof is simply evidence of a vast conspiracy.

My belief is the third option - Jesus, the incarnation of God, died a horrible and painful (undeserved) death through torture.

Pictures would be nice, but they’d only confirm what I already know to be true.

(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy chubbywabi at Flickr)