The Associated Press has a long, ominous-sounding article about the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division and its efforts to prevent a recurrence of 9/11. I would suspect that 99.99 percent of New Yorkers are grateful for the department’s work, which has helped keep the city safe, but the AP suggests we should fear the cops–not the terrorists. Writes the AP’s Adam Goldman:

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

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From today’s sweeping Pew Research Center opinion poll come two definitive reasons why Sarah Palin probably won’t be announcing a presidential run:

1.) A full 41 percent of Republican voters say there is absolutely no chance they’d vote for Palin. To put this in perspective, more Republicans would be open to voting for Ron Paul.

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Word of Rick Perry’s criticism of Mitt Romney on the Laura Ingraham radio show has been making the rounds, but I think it’s less than people are making it out to be–though I think that makes it more interesting, not less.

Here’s how Talking Points Memo described the exchange:

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New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who never expressed much curiosity about the religion of Democratic presidential candidates, is suddenly burning to find out more about the Republican field’s religious beliefs:

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

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Dueling headline alert. From the New York Times:

NATO Helps in Hunt for Qaddafi as Rebels Gain Momentum

And from the Associated Press:

Pentagon: US, NATO not in manhunt for Qaddafi

Well, they can’t both be right.

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After writing some thoughts on Isaiah Berlin, I came across Norman Podhoretz’s splendid essay on Berlin. Podhoretz’s article is worth reading for all sorts of reasons, but I wanted to call attention to just one part of it.

In writing about a dinner party in New York given for the Berlins by Lionel and Diana Trilling and attended by Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, as well as the British poet and critic Stephen Spender, Podhoretz referred to it as “one of the best and most serious discussions I have ever participated in.” The reason, he wrote, is, “Contentious issues and their many ramifications were explored with frankness on both sides, without any rancor, and with everyone trying to do justice to the position against which he was arguing instead of reducing it to an easily ridiculed caricature.”

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Nate Silver has a characteristically interesting look at the numbers behind the new Gallup poll giving Perry an early 12-point lead over Romney. Silver makes a couple of good points about the dangers to an early Perry surge–first and foremost, a win in New Hampshire that could encourage party elites to drop Romney.

But I believe Silver vastly understates another danger for Romney, which may tempt Romney into a false sense of security but which represents a time bomb the campaign will have to defuse as early as possible–if possible, that is. Silver writes:

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Deep within his bunker, Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with Bush-era National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It seems the mad colonel must have tired of Ukrainian nurses and his all-female bodyguards. Sometimes the less we know about Middle Eastern dictators, the better.

The rift between President Obama and Big Labor has been growing for some time, and it may come to a head during the president’s upcoming jobs speech. While the AFL-CIO hasn’t explicitly announced it will cut off Obama’s reelection campaign, its leader Richard Trumka fired a few more warning shots this week.

The labor union says it’s pursuing a new campaign strategy, focused more on strengthening its own grassroots support and political influence than electing Democratic politicians, Politico’s Byron Tau reports:

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President Obama hit a new low in today’s Rasmussen poll. His total disapproval is at 57 percent, against 42 percent approval – a 15 point spread. We are a long way from the soaring vision he set forth in his Inaugural Address two-and-a-half years ago:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.

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Jonathan ably takes Larry Derfner to task for Derfner’s reprehensible justification of terrorism as an “anti-occupation” tactic–one that Derfner says Israel invites and is thus responsible for. But the key part of that to me was the recognition of Derfner’s “logic” when approaching the situation from extreme leftist ideology.

There are two reasons leftists have stopped getting elected in Israel. The first is, their policies have plainly failed. But the second reason is, leftists started being honest (though I doubt Derfner’s bloodlust is shared by his ideological compatriots, many of whom are true pacifists). Once upon a time, revered Israeli peaceniks spoke of the indivisibility of Jerusalem. Once upon a time, Ehud Barak criticized peace deals brokered by Benjamin Netanyahu from the right, even as Bill Clinton’s campaign strategists were preparing to help Barak oust Netanyahu. It was all a game–but apparently the game’s over.

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Why has Obama continued to blame Bush for the lagging economy? Because apparently it still resonates with the public. According to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll, Americans don’t approve of the president’s economic performance, but they continue to blame President Bush and congressional Republicans for getting the country into the mess:

While Republicans have pushed to cast the sputtering economy as Obama’s fault, Americans place their blame elsewhere. Fifty-one percent say that George W. Bush is most to blame for the down economy, while 31 percent say it’s Obama.

At the same time, 44 percent of Americans say that “a lot” or “most” of the blame should be put on the shoulders of congressional Republicans, while 36 percent say the same of congressional Democrats.

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Muammar Qaddafi’s demise may be imminent, but the mad colonel refuses to give in. In the past few days, his loyalists have managed to fire Scuds at liberated towns, more out of spite and ideological animus than for any other reason.

This should be of concern to anyone who says the United States can contain a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran. It may be true the Iranian regime isn’t suicidal. But, as Qaddafi’s actions demonstrate, that all goes out the window if the Iranian people have risen up (even without outside support), and the regime is counting its final hours. In such a scenario–which, given the Iranian peoples’ animosity to their leaders, isn’t unlikely–what would stop the most retrenched, ideological core of the Revolutionary Guards, which in theory would have the command and control of Iran’s nuclear arsenal, from launching against enemies in the Persian Gulf, Israel, or us? The answer is not much. In such a situation, deterrence breaks down, because neither the United States nor Israel would retaliate against a country whose regime had already changed. I explain further, here.

The point where we reach the limits of civil debate about policy is, like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous description of pornography, hard to define but you generally know it when you see it. That’s the only possible reaction to a blog post by Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner who wrote on Sunday to say the actions of the terrorists who murdered eight Israelis near Eilat last week were justified. Yes, you read that right. Derfner, a veteran journalist who has enjoyed playing the enfant terrible house leftist at the centrist Post for years, wrote on his personal blog to say Palestinian terrorism against Israelis is “justified.”

In doing so, Derfner has exposed the fundamental flaw in the left’s position on terror. His obscene post will, as he predicted, lead some of his fellow countrymen to call him a traitor, and Israel’s enemies will cite it in defense of their policy of murder. But the significant aspect of this piece is it shows how pious liberals who believe the blame for the conflict falls upon the Jews are inevitably led to the justification of murder.

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