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Lil' Luke told Andrea Mitchell that Mike Pence and Gov. Daniels had a great opportunity to get into the Senate election race now since Bayh just screwed the Democratic Party and decided to not run anymore. Lil' Luke was very excited about this report because it turned a bad news day into one of great excitement, but obviously he got horrible information from his village informants.

See, the problem is that there isn't enough time for Pence or Daniels to gather all the signatures needed to file as a candidate.

Howie Klein writes:

The GOP is stuck with Coats because it's too late for Pence or Daniels to file. But because Coats and Bayh did file, the state Democratic Party gets to pick a Bayh replacement. Early speculation is that Ellsworth can have it if he wants it and if he doesn't, it'll go to Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel or ex-Rep Tim Roemer, Ambassador to India. It has now been confirmed that Harold Ford hasn't flown around Indiana in a helicopter or filed to pay taxes there.

Mike Pence came out with a statement that he isn't running. The Village loves these types of stories much more than actually informing Americans about important legislation. What the heck is Lil' Luke talking about?

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Well, we already knew that Rand Paul's brand of "libertarian conservatism" was actually a front for the far-right beliefs he gets from his father -- even though he's done his best to scurry away from the consequences of having revealed that extremism inadvertently when Rachel Maddow put it in a context that mattered -- in this case, the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

But you know it's going to keep bubbling up, nearly every time he opens his mouth. For instance, in a recent interview with an English-language Russian news station recently, Paul held forth on immigration [via Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress]:

Paul: I recently have been talking more about satellite observation. They say you can sit in front of the store here and a satellite can read the headline on your newspaper. So I think you could also monitor your border with satellites, and then you just have to have some means of intercepting people who come in illegally. You could have helicopters stations positioned every couple of hundred miles.

I think you just have to have some means of intercepting people who come here illegally. You could have helicopter stations positioned every couple of hundred miles. And I think you could control your borders and control your borders within months if you had the willpower to do it. And I think neither party in our country has had the willpower to control our borders.

Q: Why not?

Paul: I don't know. Some of it may be labor force, things like that. But I'm not opposed to letting people come in and work and labor in our country, but what I think we should do is, we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship.

A lot of this is about demographics. If you look at new immigrants from Mexico, they register 3-to-1 Democrat. So the Democrat Party's for easy citizenship and for allowing them to vote. I think we need to readdress that.

We’re the only country I know of that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen. And I think that should stop also.

It's worth noting that Paul is not only opposed to providing a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already here, but he is apparently also opposed to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. You know, the one that reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This is a bit odd, don't you think, for someone who not only constantly cites the Constitution and calls himself a "constitutionalist," but also accuses his opponents of "violating the Constitution" at every turn? Indeed, only earlier in the segment he declared that President Obama's health-care reforms were "unconstitutional."

Note the words that people like Rand Paul never want to use when they talk about this, but which are what we're talking about here -- namely, birthright citizenship.

And contrary to Paul's assertion, there is a long list of nations [predominantly in the Americas] that practice jus soli. Moreover, it's not, as the Wikipedia entry explains, a particular innovation of American law, having its origins in British common law:

Birthright citizenship, as with much United States law, has its roots in English common law. Calvin’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 377 (1608), was particularly important as it established that under English common law “a person's status was vested at birth, and based upon place of birth--a person born within the king's dominion owed allegiance to the sovereign, and in turn, was entitled to the king's protection." This same principle was adopted by the newly formed United States, as stated by Supreme Court Justice Noah Haynes Swayne: "All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural- born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country…since as before the Revolution."

That, of course, hasn't stopped the Nativists who want to either overturn or ignore the Constitution. Indeed, Paul is just echoing the latest efforts of Arizona's immigrant-bashing nativists. And as we noted then:

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They are calling them the baby faced robbers.

Police in Ohio are searching for two brazen girls, believed to be as young as 12 and 14, who robbed a bank in a Cincinnati suburb and escaped a police dragnet that included a helicopter and dogs.

The baby faced bank robbers, one believed to be 12 years old and the other 14 or 15, entered the 1st National Bank in Symmes Township, "walked up to the bank teller, and gave the teller a note demanding money," Steve Barnett, spokesman for the Hamilton County Sherriff's Office, said in a statement.

Neither of the girls carried a weapon, but "the teller gave the suspects an undetermined amount of U.S. currency," according to Barnett.

The bank was robbed at 3:19 p.m. There was one teller, but no customers in the bank at time. No one was injured. The girls were last seen fleeing in a easterly direction from the bank.

The girls weren't taller than five foot four. Talk about an easy robbery. Didn't they have to fill out a withdrawal slip at least to get the cash? Things just keep getting weirder and weirder.

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(h/t Heather of VC)

Ed Rollins, who has run many a Republican campaign, crushed Sarah Palin's decision to quit her job as Alaska's governor on CNN's State of The Union yesterday. He called it a disaster and went as far as saying that he was insulted by it.

I guess she wants to go on the TV and the book tour circuit instead of helping Alaskans who voted her into office. Times are tough right now and she'd rather leave them all behind than try to help them get through this economic meltdown. Rollins didn't pull any punches.

ED ROLLINS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I think yesterday was a disaster, Friday was a disaster for her both in the sense that she was very incoherent in articulating why she was quitting and what she wanted to do with it.

And as I always say, you call press conferences to answer questions, not to basically raise questions. I think the serious thing here is 311 days ago, very few people in America, very few Republicans outside of Alaska knew who this woman was. She had a tremendous first few weeks as a campaigner, but she got super imposed on top of the Republican establishment. It's sort of like taking a helicopter and putting her on top of Mt. Everest, which John McCain was flying it.

Everybody else climbed up that ladder, and all of the sudden she's on top of the mountain. She didn't like it -- or she did like the top of the mountain. What she didn't like was coming back to Earth, flying back to Alaska to her job as governor.

I think the reality here is her biggest mistake is walking away from the job as governor. She would have at least had a record to run on. She is going to have a partial record today that's going to be very incomplete. I found her very insulting to other governors. We have 22 other Republican governors, 19 of whom are basically going to be out of this office after running in two years. Nine are term limited and many others have to run. And she basically said in the last year you run around and do all kinds of things, and I would predict to you every single Republican governor like most Democratic governors are at their desk trying to figure out how to get through the economic crisis. I think she insulted them. I think to a certain extent it showed a naivete and I think she basically left a big, big void in her resume.

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W)

NY Times: (reg. req'd.)

The Air Force's senior civilian official and its highest-ranking general were ousted by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday following an official inquiry into the mishandling of nuclear weapons and components, senior Pentagon officials said.

The Air Force secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and the service's chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, were forced to resign after the inquiry found that both leaders were responsible for "systematic and cultural failings in how the Air Force carried out its important mission to assure the security of the nation's nuclear arsenal," according to a senior Pentagon officials.

Never before has a defense secretary ousted both a service secretary and a service chief, according to senior Pentagon officials. Since taking office 18 months ago, Mr. Gates has made accountability of theme of his tenure. He has also fired senior Army officials, after disclosures of shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the service's premier medical facility for wounded soldiers.

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the erroneous shipment.

Most troubling, the senior Pentagon official said, was that little had been done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure after it was disclosed last year that the Air Force unknowingly let a B-52 bomber fly across the United States carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

I so wish I was just being snarky. Atrios found this from the Charlie Rose Show:

I am so horrified by this macho over-compensation manifesting itself as foreign policy that I must again ask, when you say something so heinous, so egregious, so over-the-top offensive, why in the HELL are you allowed a continued place on the national platform?

I think that Tom "F.U." Friedman and the NYTimes public editor deserve to have you ask them that question, don't you? Otherwise, I'm thinking that maybe we should take up a collection to send Tom to Basra (no Kevlar vest in the Green Zone, guarded by 100 troops and Blackhawk helicopters for him) and let him go door to door and see how the Iraqis left would respond.

AttyTood:

OK, you can't say that CNN and its diplomatic reporter, Richard Ross, don't care about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. In fact, just seconds ago "Your Trusted Name in News" just aired one of the few full-length reports I've seen on the situation in Darfur, or more accurately the situation on 42nd Street in Manhattan, since the story was merely an interview with a cab driver who happens to have immigrated from Darfur.

Apparently Tom Friedman, the Pulitizer Prize winner of global cabbie journalism, is advising CNN now.

I kept waiting for the twist in the story, but there was no twist. That was the entire story. CNN found a guy from Darfur who now drives a cab in New York. (Although, as I learned from the story, there are apparently 100 others like him.)

And yet, they could afford a helicopter to give us door-to-door coverage of Paris Hilton's return to LA County Jail.  I bet Ross put in a whole ten minutes trying to find a cabbie from Darfur...that's called being committed to true journalism. (/snark)

YahooNews: (h/t NonnyMouse)

Denmark is considering boosting its contingent in Afghanistan by 200 troops to 600, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Wednesday.

Earlier, the government presented plans to withdraw troops from Iraq. Fogh Rasmussen said no firm decision had been taken on the Danish troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan, "but we cannot exclude that we will go from the present 400 to 600."

The prime minister said Wednesday that his country will withdraw its 460-member contingent from southern Iraq by August and transfer security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, and that the decision had been made in conjunction with the Iraqi government and Britain, under whose command the Danish forces are serving near Basra.

Fogh Rasmussen said Denmark would replace the troops with surveillance helicopters and civilian advisers to help the Iraqi government's reconstruction efforts.

"The Danish battalion will be brought home by August," Fogh Rasmussen told reporters in Copenhagen. "We expect that the Iraqis during 2007 will take over security in southern Iraq."

And the coalition dwindles further. Italy's whole government is tottering, largely from their participation in the Afghan war and ties to the US military and even Lithuania is considering pulling their 53 troops.

UPDATE: The Italian premier has announced he is resigning in the face of overwhelming public dissent against his keeping troops in Afghanistan.

You're doing a heckuva job, Bushie!

(h/t NonnyMouse)

ITV :

The first images of a daring rescue mission in which four Royal Marines strapped themselves to the wings of helicopter gunships in a bid to rescue a colleague have been published.

The four commandos flew into a fierce gunfight in southern Afghanistan on Monday clinging to the stabiliser wings of two Apache helicopters in a bid to recover the body of 30-year-old Lance Corporal Matthew Ford.

L/Cpl Ford, of 45 Commando Royal Marines, had been killed instantly by Taliban fire as he participated in a 200-soldier assault on a fort in Helmand province.

When the marines fell back to regroup they realised the section commander was missing and hatched the dramatic rescue bid.

Watch the footage here.

Yahoo:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 20 American service personnel were killed in military operations Saturday in one of the deadliest days for U.S. forces since the
Iraq war began, and authorities also announced two U.S. combat deaths from the previous day. The day's worst loss came from the crash of a U.S. Army helicopter northeast of Baghdad that killed 13 service members. An attack Saturday night blamed on militiamen in the city of Karbala killed five soldiers. Roadside bombs killed another soldier in the capital and one in Nineveh province north of Baghdad.