Ted Cruz is a troll, although his venue is Senate Committee Hearings rather than online interaction. Between his behavior during the Chuck Hagel confirmation process and his behavior yesterday during the committee debate on Senator Dianne Feinstein's assault weapons ban and clip limits, he's proved he's only interested in disrupting and getting a reaction from his prey.

He wanted a reaction, and he got one:

“I’m not a sixth grader. Senator, I’ve been on the committee for 20 years,” Feinstein said. “I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in, I saw people shot, I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons, I’ve seen the bullets that implode. And Sandy Hook youngsters were dismembered… I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal with the Constitution. I have great respect for it.”

“You know, it’s fine, you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it, but just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well-educated and I thank you for the lecture,” Feinstein said.

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Fox News took a break from their BENGHAZIGATE! and ZOMG FISCALCLIFF!!!! coverage this morning for a little EEEEEK TERRISTS!!! update.

The Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence committee commissioned a federal report to identify prison facilities in the U.S. that are suitable for housing Guantanamo detainees, concluding the option is viable -- despite congressional opposition to such a plan when the Obama administration proposed it.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think my backyard would be a great place for Gitmo detainees. For one, my kids' playscape is in disrepair.

On the other hand, this country has a) lots of prisons; b) lots of military bases; and c) lots of open space. So unless you think these guys have superhuman powers, or just wet the bed at the sight of a Muslim, there's no good reason why we have to keep spending over $100M a year to keep them in Cuba.

Safe food isn't a controversial issue, right? President Obama supports the food safety bill -- even the Republicans support it. So why hasn't it passed? The holdup seems to be that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she'll offer an amendment banning bisphenol-A, the nasty little chemical and known endocrine disruptor found in virtually all food and beverage containers -- which upsets the companies who make the stuff. The container industry is a huge one, and banning the substance so widely used could have major economic effects at a time when we're barely holding on. Hopefully they'll come up with an effective compromise with Feinstein:

A year after House Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly approved legislation to improve food safety, public health advocates are growing frustrated that the Senate has yet to take up the bill.

A coalition of food safety groups tried to turn up the pressure last week on Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), running newspaper ads in the lawmakers' two states featuring constituents who fell seriously ill from food poisoning. The ads urged Reid and McConnell to move the bill to the Senate floor and pass it.

"Time is short -- there are not a lot of legislative days on the calendar and we're seeing [food] recalls every week," said Erik Olson with the food and consumer product safety programs at Pew Health Group. "There is obviously a lot of interest in making sure folks know this bill has broad public support and that there is really no reason not to move this. It would show that Washington can get something done."

[...] The bill, which would be the first major change to food safety laws in 70 years, is designed to give the Food and Drug Administration vast new regulatory authority over food production. It places greater responsibility on manufacturers and farmers to produce food free from contamination -- a departure from the country's reactive tradition, which has relied on government inspectors to catch tainted food after the fact.

The legislation follows a wave of food-borne illnesses over the past four years, involving products as varied as spinach and cookie dough, which has shaken consumer confidence and made the issue a priority for many lawmakers and the White House. Food illnesses affect one in four Americans and kill 5,000 each year, according to government statistics. Tainted food has cost the food industry billions of dollars in recalls, lost sales and legal expenses.

The measure also would give the FDA authority to order a recall if it suspects contamination -- authority it does not currently have. It would allow the FDA to quarantine a geographic area, blocking the distribution of suspect food to the rest of the country. And the agency would gain access to records at farms and food production facilities.

Amos Lee-Soul Suckers

Did you believe them

When they told you they discovered you

And that everything is free as long as you do what they tell you to

You think it's true

But nothing could be further from the truth, my love

Did you even listen

When they told you to change your name

And that nobody wants honesty when looking at a perfect frame

Play the game

It's a particularly uninspired line up for the Sunday shows. By the sheer number of Judiciary Committee members scheduled (Chairman Pat Leahy, Ranking Minority Member Jeff Sessions, Chuck Schumer, John Kyl and Dianne Feinstein) that Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan will be the topic of choice. Elsewhere, Pennsylvania Senate Democratic rivals Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak face one another on State of the Union. And if you're looking for something a little on the lighter side, former First Lady Laura Bush will be on Fox and Friends to pimp her new book.

ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Andrew Sullivan, Katty Kay, Joan Biskupic and Pete Williams. Topics: The Goldilocks Pick: Why Do Liberals Fear Elena Kagan is Just Alright? Why Politics Favors Arizona's Tough Immigration Law

CNN's "State of the Union" - Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah; Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Prime Minister of Greece, the David Cameron and Nick Clegg coalition in Britain and a roundtable discussion on the global economy with Larry Summers.

"Fox News Sunday" - Former first lady Laura Bush and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

All of the senators representing west coast states -- California, Oregon and Washington -- have introduced a bill banning Pacific offshore drilling.

Cantwell appeared at a news conference at the Capitol with Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both of California, as well as Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Two other sponsors, Sen. Patty Murray, and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, did not attend.

Feinstein recalled "thick black tar"despoiling the waters after the 1969 oil spill near Santa Barbara, which helped spawn the modern environmental movement.

Absent a permanent ban on drilling, "there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will not happen again," Feinstein said.

I remember the Santa Barbara oil spill too. I took the picture at the top of this post at Surfers' Point in Ventura, less than 20 miles south of Santa Barbara. The beaches in this area are home to endangered birds like these:

The thing is, that Santa Barbara spill took place 40 years ago and it's still not completely gone. If you take a walk on the beach by UCSB in your bare feet, you'll come home with blobs of tar on your feet. The brown pelican is finally making a comeback after fighting back from the Santa Barbara oil spill and then the impact of DDT on its eggs. At sunset, you can see pelicans skimming the shore, looking for that last school of fish before the sun goes down. They're magnificent.

Our coastlines are our first non-renewable resource, not oil.

Advocates for more domestic drilling say the proposed West Coast ban would lead to even more imported oil.

"This is more of the same that we've had for 30 years" under the federal ban, said Dan Kish, senior vice president of policy for the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that believes tapping into America's petroleum potential is one answer to energy independence.

Kish said it was particularly galling that California wants to cordon off its coasts when it's the nation's largest energy user. He said polls show the majority of American favor offshore drilling.

Blocking new oil explorations, Kish said, may simply send more ocean tankers carrying foreign oil toward California and elsewhere.

Mr. Kish, we will have to figure it out. I'm just not willing to sacrifice this...

...for the risk of losing it.

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[H/t Heather]

You know, you gotta figure that if every Republican and all the Villagers are in agreement that taking up immigration reform is a bad idea for Democrats, then -- reverse barometers being the valuable tools they are -- there's high likelihood that it's a good idea.

We'll find out soon enough, because Democrats are proceeding apace anyway -- and doing so in the face of the near-certainty of uniform opposition from the GOP:

One Democratic aide close to the issue noted that in the wake of Graham’s abandoning negotiations, Schumer is continuing to meet with a handful of Senate Republican lawmakers — Scott Brown (Mass.), George LeMieux (Fla.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Judd Gregg (N.H.) and Dick Lugar (Ind.) — and that the summary is part of a dual-track alternative for moving forward.

According to this aide, under the new alternative, if Republicans continue to reject bipartisan overtures, Reid, Schumer and Menendez would look to have a handful of other top Democrats co-sponsor the legislation, including Durbin and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the second ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security.

Menendez said his preference would be to have Republican support, but that it was more important to have a framework that can be publicly distributed so that Senators “can begin the debate and move the process forward.” Menendez said he was still optimistic that the chamber could pass a bill this year, even though no Republicans have indicated they might support a bill.

“If we put our effort to it, and we have presidential leadership and we have Republicans who truly want to see immigration reform versus just talk about it, I think it’s possible,” Menendez said.

Senate Democrats’ decision to move forward on their own drew applause from Hispanic lawmakers in the House, who have seized on Arizona’s tough new state immigration law to ramp up the pressure for the Senate to act on a comprehensive bill this year.

Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) described the proposal Senate Democrats floated Wednesday as a “responsible bill that basically reflects the principles that were discussed with Lindsey Graham.”

“It is the kind of bill that could be supported by any Republican who truly believes that the broken system should be fixed,” Velázquez said. “So it is time to stop playing politics with this issue and do the work the American people sent us to do here.”

We're hearing that a press conference announcing the bill is scheduled for 5:45 p.m. EDT in D.C. today. We'll keep it covered.

The NYT's Helene Cooper reports that President Obama is pointing out that passing a bill is going to be difficult in the current environment. No doubt that's true -- and one hopes he is merely observing a truism rather than backing off his earlier powerful remarks pushing for immigration reform. As we observed then:

The Arizona craziness is a good example of why we can't let comprehensive immigration reform wait.

We know that lots of Democrats, especially the Blue Dogs, want to put immigration reform on the back burner till after the 2010 election. After all, it's the kind of issue that defines them: Blue Dogs always pander to conservatives on key issues, because they think that wins them more votes in the end than standing up for core principles.

In this case, as we saw from the 2008 election results, it's also nonsensical:

It's also apparent, from these results and from polling, that the nativists' "deport them all" immigration policy is wildly unpopular -- and that, moreover, Americans in fact take a pragmatic view of immigration: They're not interested in shipping out illegal immigrants, they're interested in seeing them become legal citizens.

The evidence is that voters get behind progressives who talk straight common sense on immigration -- as opposed to the fearmongering and scapegoating inherent in the Arizona Republican approach, which inevitably leads to the institution of a police state and the destruction of families.

It's also looking like Harry Reid will be pushing immigration reform as well. And there are many more reasons than fearful Blue Dogs why it's a politically smart move, too. Just ask those 200,000 people who gathered in D.C. last month.

Clearly, passing this health-care bill is just the beginning, because it doesn't really contain strong regulatory powers. It was pulled under reconciliation rules, and Obama reportedly will try to introduce it later:

WASHINGTON -- A Democratic plan for new federal power over health insurance rates was dropped Thursday from the final health care bill, squeezed out by the way the Democrats are pushing the bill through Congress.

Rolled out with fanfare just weeks ago, the Democratic plan was a response to double-digit rate increases proposed by health insurance companies in California and elsewhere.

It was first proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., then picked up by President Barack Obama.

It would have given the federal government the power to reject proposed rate increases. It also would have allowed the secretary of health and human services to order insurance companies to give back part of premiums if the government decided that the companies spent too much of their incomes on salaries or advertising.

The Massachussets election is being recognised as a ‘wake-up’ call by Obama and Democrats, but the immediate knee-jerk reaction by Democrats is baffling – like watching hapless animals woken from a sound sleep and, blinded by the light, scurrying madly and bumping into the furniture. Only not quite so amusing.

First, we had Senator Jim Webb (D) breathlessly insisting that the Massachusetts results was a 'referendum on health care reform,' and the way to restore the respect of the American people for government was to ‘suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated.’

…say, whut?? Capitulating to the right-wing demands, with Mitch McConnell and the rightwing hooting with delight is going to restore my respect for government leaders? Remind me again, Senator Webb – who won the last election? You’re sure not acting like a winner.

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief when Senator Dianne Feinstein pipes up with her equally peculiar reading of what exactly is the message voters in Massachusetts were trying to send to Congress… apparently, when the boat is sinking, that’s the time to slow down bailing out the rising water.

'I can tell you the situation has changed dramatically,' she said. 'And I think it’s a sweep across the country (…) everything is jobs and the economy and education. People are worried about education. You see anger. People are worried. And when they’re worried they don’t want to take on a broad new responsibility.' Like health care reform. Oh, and climate change, too, far too much trouble with the economy in such bad shape. So much for any legislation on capping carbon emissions.

Besides – and this is where I bristled – us poor little ordinary folk aren’t smart enough to understand things like health care reform or climate change. 'It is so big it is beyond their comprehension. (…) In my view when people are earning, when their home is secure, when their children are going to school, and they are relatively satisfied with their life and there’s a problem like health care -- they want it solved. It doesn’t threaten them. The size of this bill threatens them. And that’s one of the problems that’s got to be straightened out.'

Riiiiiight. Lemme see if I’ve got this – the bill for health care reform, which started out with what the vast majority of people on just about any poll you want to name said they wanted, namely single payer, then got bipartisanized and watered-down and added and subtracted and amended and debated and distorted and delayed to satisfy all those lobbyists and Big Pharma and health care insurers by gutless Democrats is now too bloated and complicated for the poor brains of us little people. Dianne, you’re doing my head in.

The Democrats are still not listening. The people (that’s us over here, the little people standing by the ballot boxes) don’t want you to 'slow down' on health care or climate change. Or the economy, or financial regulation of corrupt banks, or reforming oppressive labour laws, or working on solutions for unemployment relief and job creation, or restoring civil liberties, or ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan or any of those issues you all ran on. That’s what we elected you to do – not to decide what issues are too complicated for voters to ‘understand’. Because we understand all too well when we’re being patronized – something Coakley found out the hard way in Massachusetts.

Us little people might not like what you’ve been doing over the past year, but that doesn’t mean that we want you to not bother doing the job at all. The health care bill may be a piece of crap – because you made it a piece of crap. So, go ahead, scrap the bill. But don’t slow down on health care reform. Wake up and listen to what the people in this country are desperately trying tell you! We’ve had enough of Democrats dragging their feet. We’ve had enough of ‘going slow’. Going slow is killing the country, and is killing the Democrats. The United States is the only western industrialized nation that does not have universal health care for its citizens, the only one – and we’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for it since 1912. How much slower can we possibly get?

It can’t be that complicated, as Norway has it, and Japan, and the UK, and Sweden, and Italy, and Portugal, and Cyprus, and Spain, and Iceland, and even Kuwait and Bahrain and Brunei and the United Arab Emirates, for crying out loud! It is unconscionable, it is inhumane, it is a dire neglect of duty for Democrats to tell the people who voted them in on the promise of health care reform (among so much else) that America cannot do what Iceland can do. What Spain can do. What the UAE can do.

Slow down? The people of Massachusetts just gave the Democrats the biggest kick up the rear they could and that is the message Feinstein heard? Slow down?

Somehow, I don’t think it’s the little people of this country who are having trouble with issues beyond their comprehension.

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You can't go wrong doing the opposite of almost anything Sen. Saxby "Toy Soldier" Chambliss, the man who specializes in smearing real soldiers like Max Cleland, proposes. And Dianne Feinstein, the woman who's never met a war or black-box op she didn't like? Rep. Jim McGovern, on the other hand, is a rare voice of reason:

A roundtable discussion on Afghanistan strategy from This Week with George Stephanopoulous:

STEPHANOPOULOS:There's a report in Newsweek this morning -- it's actually on the cover of Newsweek, where the vice president is pointing out that this year we're going to spend about $65 billion in Afghanistan, about $2.25 billion in Pakistan. And according to the report in Newsweek, this is what the vice president went on to say in the National Security Council meeting: "By my calculations, that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question: Al Qaida is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?"

What's the answer?

FEINSTEIN: Well, this whole situation is a bit of a conundrum. I basically agree with Senator Chambliss in what he said. I think reconciliation -- the first thing has to be to stop the violence. It has to be security. The Taliban has to know it cannot take over all of Afghanistan because the next step in Pakistan. And that's very serious.

And the Pakistanis are only recently beginning to show, I think, their mettle. I think Swat was a big wake-up call for them. I listened to the Pakistani foreign minister yesterday, and they -- they seemed to have much more get-up-and-go, to really be -- be able to work with us in securing some of the FATA areas and other -- other areas. So I think that -- that's really critical.

This is not an easy situation. Nothing is straightforward. Our allies have 39,000 troops. That's a lot of people over there. They, I gather, will continue their involvement on that level. I think we ought to press for them to increase it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's not going to happen.

FEINSTEIN: I think obviously -- I know it's not, but financially, we ought to have more financing from the rest of the world community. We cannot be everyone's gatekeeper, everyone's policeman, and I think what's lacking in the world is some universality of putting together movements which can change the dynamics in difficult situations.

STEPHANOPOULOS: General Keane, what do we do now in Pakistan? Three major attacks in the last week. Yesterday, the most brazen attack yet, the insurgents take over their army headquarters. It would be like coming in to the Pentagon. And how do you see the interrelationship between putting more troops in Afghanistan and putting more pressure on the situation in -- in Pakistan?

KEANE: Yes, the elephant in the room with Pakistan -- and, also, to a certain degree, with Afghanistan -- has always been, their lack of understanding that we're going to stay in that region. They -- they're not sure we are.

And -- and given our track record in Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, there's reason for that skepticism. That's why Musharraf and this regime to this day has a hedging strategy with the Taliban. We have to convince them that we're there, that Pakistan's stability is in our national interest. And we also have to prove that, as well, by stabilizing Afghanistan.

I agree with the senators. If we ever lost in Afghanistan, that contributes directly to destabilizing Pakistan. So our actions in Afghanistan relate clearly to Pakistan.

KEANE: The other thing, to get specifically to your point, we're starting to make some headway with Kiyani and the generals in Pakistan, to pull forces away from the Indian front, so to speak. We have great difficulty convincing them that the major threat to the nation-state is, in fact, the ranging insurgency inside the nation- state and not the external threat of India. To us, it's self-evident, but to them it's not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not.

KEANE: And that's the reality of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We're just about out of time. I want to go once around the table with this question: What's the one thing you want President Obama to have in mind as he makes these decisions?

CHAMBLISS: Our troops and the stability of our troops and -- and the fact that we're giving our troops what they need. And I mean, from the top down, we've got to make a decision from the leadership standpoint whether we're giving more troops, but we've still got to make that commitment of making sure that we're enforcing and reinforcing them like we need to.

MCGOVERN: I would urge them to keep in mind that stabilizing Afghanistan should not mean and does not mean enlarging our military footprint there. I think it would be counterproductive.

I also think we're going bankrupt. We have wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, hundreds of billions of dollars that are all going on to our credit card. Our kids and our grandkids are paying for this. You know, we need to be smarter about where we deploy our -- our resources. And I think enlarging our military footprint in Afghanistan would be a mistake.

We need to come up with a strategy that includes an exit strategy because it'll also put pressure on the government of Afghanistan to step up to the plate, which it has not done so far.

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It's one thing for the Bernie Sanderses and Russ Feingolds to openly question the mission in Afghanistan. It's quite another for Dianne Feinstein to do so.

KING: Well Senator Feinstein, you're the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. To the question of where this ends, it is eight years after 9/11. We've paused and reflected on that just the other day. You see the things that we can't see, the intelligence. Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we any closer to finding Osama bin Laden, and does the president have a clear strategy, in your view?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I can tell you this. A lot of the leadership has been taken out of al Qaeda. I can say and I think you would agree that Afghanistan and the Pakistani border are still the major safe haven, the major safe haven for terrorists in the world. And these are people who will, if they can, come after us, not necessarily the Taliban, but certainly al Qaeda and other affiliated groups.

So we have to consider that. We have about 60,000 troops there, another 8,000 are moving in with our allies, it about equals the force that is in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, the president has had no request for additional troops up to this time. My view is that the mission has to be very clear. I don't believe --

KING: Has to be means it is not now?

FEINSTEIN: I believe it is not now. I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan. I believe it will remain a tribal entity.

I do believe that clearing out Al Qaida, clearing out the Taliban is a bona fide part one of the mission. I do agree that training Afghan troops, Afghan -- Afghan police is an important piece of the mission.

I believe the mission should be time limited, that there should be no, well, we'll let you know in a year and a half, depending on how we do. I think the Congress is entitled to know, after Iraq, exactly how long are we going to be in Afghanistan.

Feinstein is actually more charitable about the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan than the commanding general on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, who said this week that there are no signs of major Al Qaeda anywhere in the country.

But as far as the wariness of the viability of Constitutional democracy in Afghanistan, you need only look to their recent election, into which the opposition leader is now seeking a criminal investigation. He has accused Hamid Karzai of treason and "state-engineered fraud". Despite this, Karzai will probably win election on the first ballot, and a vote that has been horribly compromised will be made official. We saw in Iran how this can lead to violence and chaos, and Afghanistan is not nearly as stable. Without a viable partner in the government, as Feinstein says we cannot expect an endless commitment. Yet because Karzai is Pashtun the US will likely back him in this fight, alienating the other ethnic groups in the region. Kalashnikovs are flying off the shelves in the Tajik areas. Civil war is not an unlikely scenario at this point.

This further limits the mission, away from state-building and toward dealing with the elements in the country willing to deal. Otherwise we set ourselves up for a decade-long slog that will only end with more dead and more treasure squandered, to little effect. And yes, as Sen. Feinstein says, that process should have an end date.

(h/t Heather)