“It’s impossible, really, to caricature this White House.”

WASHINGTON — What a surprise — that someone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” (the “God is great” jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan’s religious beliefs.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison by Jan. 22 was followed by a series of mistakes and missteps by his administration that will delay the prison’s closure for months, according to a report from a policy organization with close ties to the White House.

The healthcare battle appears to be helping Republicans running for the Senate.

Two Quinnipiac polls released Thursday show the leading GOP candidates in Connecticut and Ohio growing their leads.

Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) leads Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), 49-38, and former Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has opened his first leads over two potential Democratic opponents.

PRINCETON, NJ — More Americans now say it is not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is a first since Gallup began tracking this question, and a significant shift from as recently as three years ago, when two-thirds said ensuring healthcare coverage was the government’s responsibility.

I don’t typically watch Oprah. But I won’t miss Monday’s interview with Sarah Palin. The appearance is supposed to be about Ms. Palin’s new memoir, but a lot more will be riding on the encounter than book sales.

After last year’s brutal presidential campaign, Ms. Palin is now reintroducing herself to the American public. Nothing less than her future in American politics-and a possible run for the White House in 2012-hangs in the balance.

John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s well-regarded 2002 work The Emerging Democratic Majority begins with a vignette set in Virginia. They tell the story of a telecom executive named Mark Warner, who runs a moderate campaign that appeals to upper-middle class suburbanites and working class rural voters, and manages to put together a winning coalition that, if imitated in other states, might put the Democrats in power for decades to come.

A crucial fact about today’s Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don’t mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative, which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened-and that it has happened with surprising speed.

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If you knew nothing more of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama than what each man said about freedom at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, it would still be painfully obvious which of the two was a fierce defender of liberty, and which the avatar of toothless internationalist generalities.

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago was one of the most exhilarating events of the 20th Century. No one could fail to be moved by the joy of people who tore down a loathed monument to tyranny. Today, when all that remains of the Wall is a few sections preserved as historical artifacts and graffiti-stained chunks sold in souvenir shops, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe remains a glorious moment but also, in some ways, a bittersweet one.

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Just talked to a very insightful Capitol Hill Watcher who doesn’t think Harry Reid has the votes in the Senate to pass anything resembling comprehensive healthcare reform. You can count out Lieberman, Landrieu, Nelson and maybe even Bayh.

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) – Universal Pictures has agreed to pay $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club to settle complaints about fake news archives used to promote the movie “The Fourth Kind,” the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.

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NEW DELHI (Reuters) – The heavy punishment of illegal file sharers on the web will be counter-productive in the global fight against Internet piracy and copyright infringement, the director-general of a United Nations agency said on Thursday.

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