Australian leader: Al-Qaida wants Obama  —  SYDNEY, Australia - Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.

Don't ruin economy over tiny temp rise  —  Our Thought For The Week comes from the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny.  Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers …

Kristol: Obama Is 'The Opposite Of Lincoln,' Would Have Been Pro-Slavery  —  Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, IL, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous "House Divided" address.  In his speech, Obama reiterated his call to redeploy U.S. forces out of Iraq by March 2008.

Rumors of War  —  Jalal Sharafi was carrying a videogame, a gift for his daughter, when he found himself surrounded.  On that chilly Sunday morning, the second secretary at the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad had driven himself to the commercial district of Arasat Hindi to checkout the site for a new Iranian bank.

McCain Taps Cash He Sought To Limit  —  Just about a year and a half ago, Sen. John McCain went to court to try to curtail the influence of a group to which A. Jerrold Perenchio gave $9 million, saying it was trying to "evade and violate" new campaign laws with voter ads ahead of the midterm elections.

Victory Is Not an Option  —  The Mission Can't Be Accomplished — It's Time for a New Strategy  —  The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war.  Victory, as the president sees it …

Cheney's To-Do Lists, Then and Now  —  RETURNING to the White House after the Memorial Day weekend in 1975, the young aide Dick Cheney found himself handling a First Amendment showdown.  The New York Times had published an article by Seymour M. Hersh about an espionage program …

The Liberal Case For Strict Constructionism?  —  Imagine my surprise when the New York Times ran an op-ed yesterday on the evils of an overly large federal government and the wisdom of following the Constitutional framework for sovereign states united in common defense.

A Blog's Blast Damage  —  The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management.  —  A great example is the recent firestorm over a column that never appeared in The Post …

Breaking: US "Reveals Iran Evidence"  —  And as expected, it falls far short of a "slam dunk" case.  The anonymous briefing at which no recording devices were allowed involved a lot of claims and not a whole lot of actual evidence.  —  Here's the Reuters story. … And the BBC's version:

Is it an accident that Genuine John Edwards has chosen this moment to emerge?  —  They want you to be so cautious it makes it hard to say anything'  —  In the fall of 2005, John Edwards sat down with a pad and pen and scrawled out three simple words: "I was wrong."