As late as 2005 U.S. intelligence agencies had “high confidence” that Iran was building a bomb, but in a stunning reversal the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) ordered by Congress in 2006 concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The Israelis and Iranian dissidents, in particular, are not buying it - and there’s good reason for skepticism.

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The Associated Press tried to flog last week’s hostage drama at NY Sen. Hillary Clinton’s Rochester, NH, presidential campaign headquarters into a full-blown crisis that showcased Hillary’s ability to stay cool and levelheaded: 

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Fmr. Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) have taken the lead among Iowans who say they “definitely” or “probably” will attend their respective party caucuses on January 3^rd, according to The Des Moines Register’s latest poll.

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Before your New Year’s resolutions have all been broken and forgotten, the presidential nominations could be a done deal, what with IA holding its primary January 3^rd, followed in rapid succession by NH on January 8^th , MI on January 15^th and more than 20 states holding primaries or caucuses Feb. 5^th. Reports the Los Angeles Times:

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The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson captured The Stiletto’s sentiments to a T when he wrote in a recent column, “Finally, we’ve got a real presidential campaign on our hands. Wake up, those of you in the back row, because it looks as if the long-running seminar is finally over.” After detailing the internecine fighting between Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Barack Obama (D-IL), Clinton and John Edwards (D-NC), Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Mike Huckabee (R-AR) and John McCain (R-AZ) and Mitt Romney (R-MA), he adds, “Ain’t it grand?”

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Clad in her “asbestos pantsuit” at the Dem debate in Las Vegas, Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY) showed the media – which heaped scorn on her for coming down with the vapors over being engaged and attacked by her opponents – that she could dish it out and take it. What she didn’t show the voters was that she could answer a question directly and forthrightly (this time, she had trouble getting her position on NAFTA straight).

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Abortion, gun control and gay marriage are the three most reliable issues that get conservative and religious “values voters” to turn out in the primaries. This election cycle, there’s another issue that trumps this unholy trinity: the global spread of Islamic fundamentalism (or Islamofascism, as some prefer). The Associated Press reports:

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Well before the September 11 terror attacks, U.S. government officials worried about Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and other despots creating and stockpiling biological weapons – and supplying terrorist groups with the means to wipe out entire cities with smallpox infection, for instance.

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In an op-ed published by The New York Times, former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto (1988 to 1990; 1993 to 1996) and head of the Pakistan People’s Party, writes:

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Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty made good on his vow to contest the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling that the city’s 1976 handgun ban is unconstitutional, because the Second Amendment applies to individuals as well as to militias - and the Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up the issue of what the Founding Fathers meant by these words: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

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Remember the warm reception that Rudy got when he spoke at Regent University back in July? Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson all-but-endorsed him then, and just made it official the other day at the National Press Club in Washington.

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Second-tier presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) pulled off a first-rate fundraising coup, netting $4.3 million in online contributions from 38,000 donors in a single day, bringing his total haul to $7.3 million in 4Q 2007. No other Republican comes close to Paul’s 24-hour feat, but Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has him beat at $6.2 million.

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University of Maine sophomore Rebekah McDade, a journalism and political science double major, says she dropped a History of Mass Communications course on the first day when associate professor Paul Grosswiler “offered extra credit to class members if they burned the American flag or the U.S. Constitution or were arrested defending free speech,” reports the Bangor Daily News.

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Pay-as-you-go (AKA “pay-go”) – the budget rules Senate Dems adopted require Congress to pay for spending programs and tax cuts – has put Dems in a bind in the “mend it, don’t end it” effort to enact yet another one-year freeze of the alternative minimum tax. The party that won the mid-term elections in part on promises of enforcing budget discipline, must somehow offset the resulting revenue shortfall. Natch, the offset won’t come from cuts in entitlement programs but from increased taxes, reports The New York Times: 

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Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) is running for vice president – Hillary Cinton’s (D-NY) No. 2, specifically (that is, assuming hyperventilating pundits are overestimating the significance of her sub-par performance in the October 30th debate).

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Even as American Jewish groups were championing the Armenian Genocide Resolution, lobbyists from Turkey and Israel relentlessly pressured members of the U.S. House of Representatives to squelch the symbolic bill, which was tabled late last week by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

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In July Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, were sexually abused and brutally murdered by parolees Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, who now face the death penalty. The Hawke-Petit family – including husband and father William, who survived the attack – were members of the United Methodist Church in Cheshire, CT, a liberal activist church “where parishioners take to the pulpit to discuss poverty in El Salvador and refugees living in Meriden,” reports The New York Times.

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Last month, New York State Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) would reverse a post-9/11 policy by the Pataki administration to deny a driver’s license to anyone who could not prove legal status – immediately prompting at least a dozen county clerks who operate DMV offices as agents of the state to announce they would flout the new rules.

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The Associated Press reports that Al-Qaida sympathizers are furious with Al-Jazeera television for allegedly excerpting Usama bin Laden’s most recent audio tape to take his quotes out of context, creating a false, misleading and inaccurate account of his words and intent.

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Former AZ Gov. turned pastry chef Fife Symington  is not the only pol who’s claimed to have seen a UFO. In her new book, “Sage-Ing While Age-Ing,” actress Shirley MacLaine claims presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) “had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington, when I lived there.”

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One of the especially specious arguments against the Armenian Genocide Resolution was that Congressmen are not historians, and are unqualified to determine whether the systematic slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks constitutes “genocide.”

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Rudy turned in his usual solid performance during last night’s Republican presidential debate in Orlando, FL, but Sen. John McCain (AZ) won hands down. All that testosterone on stage, and McCain was, without a doubt, The Man. At one point in the debate, asked about President Bush’s naivete in dealing with the Russians, McCain said, “When I looked into Putin’s eyes, I saw three letters: K … G … B.” 

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President Bush met with the Dalai Lama at the White House on Tuesday, one day before he is to receive a Congressional Gold Medal. Chinese officials warned that the planned ceremony would have “an extremely serious impact” on relations between the countries, reports The New York Times, because China regards the Tibetan spiritual leader as a separatist and said “foreign leaders must stop encouraging his ‘splittist’ mission.”

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More than 60 years ago, Polish-Jewish scholar Ralph Lemkin coined the term “genocide” precisely to describe the scale and brutality of the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.

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Columnist Robert Novak notes that Mitt Romney is asked about Mormonism “wherever he goes.” Novak adds that Romney’s belief system is “the source of opposition to his candidacy” and that loyal Republicans have told him they “could never vote for Romney because of his religion.” And it’s not just loyal Republicans Romney has a problem with; Novak cites a Newsweek poll that found 28 percent of Americans would not vote for a Mormon.

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Have you ever noticed that presidential candidates Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sound like conjoined twins when it comes to the Iraq War (second item) and U.S. foreign policy? Here’s how Paul answered Chris Matthews’ question on whether we went to war in Iraq over in the most recent Republican debate:

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Considering the astonishingly high rate of misstatements and factual errors tumbling from Fred Thompson’s lips since he declared his candidacy a scant month ago, all eyes were on him during yesterday’s Republican debate sponsored by CNBC, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal and the Michigan Republican Party, held at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

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The last time The Stiletto looked at what Rudy was up to, he had just entered a lion’s den to give a speech at Regent University, the Christian college founded by conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, and left the stage to thunderous applause. Now that Rudy’s finally gotten off the phone – dude, pressing the “END” button for several seconds will turn the phone off until you are done with your speech – The Stiletto decided to pull together one of her periodic (and somewhat labor intensive) Rudy roundups:

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Please don’t stay, you gotta go!

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In a recent editorial, The New York Times laments a “vexing” problem that is slowing embryonic stem cell research: “There are distressingly few women willing to donate their eggs for experiments at the frontiers of this promising science.” Why? Well, here’s The Times’ explanation:

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In “The Opinionator” (a New York Times blog), Chris Suellentrop addresses one of The Stiletto’s pet peeves. Some newspapers covering the Buddhist monk uprising, use the dateline “Burma,” others use “Myanmar.” Geography not being one of her strong suits (remember, she’s the product of public school education), it actually took The Stiletto a day or so to realize that all the action was occurring in one country, and wasn’t a regional revolt involving heretofore pacifist monks. 

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In an article about alternative student newspapers increasingly foregoing print editions to exist solely on the Internet, Inside Higher Ed quotes Dan Reimold, a journalism Ph.D. candidate at Ohio University wondering “What would students do if they got to create a media by them, for them - to create whatever they want, and not have to worry about what’s always been?” Probably this: 

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“The Brave One” traces one woman’s journey from victim to vigilante when her fiancé was beaten to death, and she was left for dead after being set upon by a three thugs in Central Park one evening. Leaving aside the fact that no sane or savvy New Yorker would walk in Central Park at night, Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is the archetypical “enlightened” (read: liberal) New Yorker: She hosts a talk show on NPR called “Street Walk,” which takes listeners on a sentimental journey around New York City to recapture days gone by and preserve fading memories for posterity; is engaged to David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews) a younger man, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from India; and lives in a funky, not-quite-safe neighborhood in upper Manhattan. 

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More than one-third of the people in the United States under the age of 65 had no health insurance for some or all of 2006 and 2007, according to Families USA, an advocacy group representing the uninsured. The most recent census data pegs the number of people in the U.S. without insurance in 2006 at 47 million people, but this is an annual snapshot that does not count those who had no health coverage for only part of the year. 

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Columbia University president Lee Bollinger exercised his free speech rights by giving guest lecturer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a good tongue lashing. It is doubtful his words swayed the Iranian despot – “OK, OK, the Holocaust happened, and I will dismantle my nuclear program just as soon as I get back home!” -  but with his tough talk “Bollinger had clawed his way back to semi-respectability in polite society by insulting his guest - not the usual practice in polite society, but consider the depth of the hole Bollinger had dug for himself by insisting on being a good academic liberal,” as Dallas Morning News columnist Bill Murchison put it.  

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