Profiles In Political Courage?  —  It's not often I disagree with my friend John Podhoretz at The Corner, but today's post on John McCain and CPAC struck me as rather odd.  In response to a post by Kathryn Jean Lopez that scolded McCain for skipping both NRI and CPAC, John said that McCain was right to stay away:

Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis  —  Clinton White House asked Wellesley College to close off access  —  Hillary Rodham, in a 1965 freshman photo when she was president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans, with the cover page of her senior thesis from 1969 on radical organizer Saul D. Alinsky.

Plame film in works at Warner Bros.  —  Studio sets movie about CIA leak scandal  —  Warner Bros. is developing a feature on the lives of Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the married couple drawn into a D.C. firestorm.  —  Plame's status as a CIA agent was revealed …

A new twist to an intriguing family history … WASHINGTON // Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.  —  But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now …

Sources: GOP lawmakers tried to influence federal investigation  —  WASHINGTON - Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico pressured the U.S. attorney in their state to speed up indictments in a federal corruption investigation that involved at least one former Democratic state senator …

Poll: The Politics Of Health Care  —  Most Americans Favor Universal Health Care, Give Democrats Edge On Improving System  —  (CBS) Americans think the U.S. health care system is in need of major repairs, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll.  —  Nine out of 10 say the system needs …

When Dick Cheney Talks, Pakistan Listens  —  Brian Ross and Habibullah Khan Report:  —  Pakistan intelligence sources say a second high-ranking Taliban leader has been taken into custody, as the country appeared to be responding to Vice President Dick Cheney's showdown meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY.  Now, now, Other Klein, just because you're already a bundle of authorial anxieties doesn't obviate my point.  Two years ago, you were a columnist at (I think) the highest-circulation newsweekly.  Whether each column deadline manifested as an icy ball of terror …

YouTube Oppo Of The Day  —  1. Sen. Barack Obama, speaking in a fairly impoverished Cleveland, saying he wants "everybody here to pony up five dollars, ten dollars for this campaign.  I don't care how poor you are, you've got five dollars."  —  2. An anti-Giuliani video, just in time for CPAC.

Rice Names Critic Of Iraq Policy to Counselor's Post  —  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has tapped Eliot A. Cohen, a prominent writer on national security strategy and an outspoken critic of the administration's postwar occupation of Iraq, as her counselor, State Department officials said yesterday.

Al Gore's Inconvenient Loot  —  Former Vice President Al Gore has built a Green money-making machine capable of eventually generating billions of dollars for investors, including himself, but he set it up so that the average Joe can't afford to play on Gore's terms.

Second Shift  —  The BBC reports: … "Gee," remarks Jessica Valenti, "wonder why that is."  Well, I like to wonder.  Later, the piece gives us the specific numbers: "an employed woman does 15 hours a week of housework when she lives with her employed partner, up from 10 hours when single."

Music Of the Spheres  —  You might not have noticed, but we broke another U.S. space record last month when astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria logged his 67th hour of spacewalking.  If you consider that the equivalent of the Guinness record for pogo-stick bouncing (23.11 miles in 12 hours and 27 minutes) …

Immigration indigestion  —  It is often said that "politics makes strange bedfellows," but it is the immigration debate that is making even stranger bedfellows — causing otherwise conservative Republican members of Congress to clamor for draconian restrictions on businesses and for greater mandatory use of Social Security numbers.