Hillary Clinton rejects Israel's claims of secret deals with the Bush Administration regarding the settlements. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

Reich: How Pharma and the insurances cos plan to kill the 'public option' in health care reform.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

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Actually it came some time ago. But here's a telling public opinion nugget. A big majority (58%) of self-identified conservatives now support allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

For the population as a whole, support stands at 69%.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

I've suggested in my posts on the settlements issue that an Israeli government can't withstand any serious tension in the relationship with the United States. So as long as he remains popular at home, Obama holds almost all the cards in his battle with Netanyahu over settlements. Jeffrey Goldberg suggests that that is precisely what Obama is trying to do: topple Netanyahu's government. I've considered that too. And at some level I think he's right. But at another level I think the question is over-determined. I think that Obama and his people know that right now they have to start a series of steps that lead in the near term to a peace settlement. Settlements are the logical place to start. And whether it simply halts settlements, leads to Bibi's overthrow or forces him into a new coalition, every result gets you closer to the goal which is in the interests of the US, the Israelis and the Palestinians.

"Modern day lynchings" seem to happen to people who get caught trying to do old-fashioned lynchings.

For its latest cover, National Review goes with an Asian caricature of the Hispanic Sonia Sotomayor over the title "The Wise Latina."

Bay Buchanan: My karate-chopping racist staffer was the victim of a "modern day lynching."

Justin Elliott is usually pretty invisible to our readers but every once in a while we let him out from behind his curtain running the many moving parts of our front page news section to hone his reporting and writing chops. He dogged that NYT Page 1 story last month about the purported recidivism rate of Gitmo detainees, showing how what the Times reported didn't match what the (flawed) Pentagon report it was based on actually said. Conservatives quickly scooped up the Times story as a key talking point in opposing the closing of the Gitmo prison. Today the Times ran an extensive correction to the original story, and the paper's Washington bureau chief concedes it should not have been on the front page.

The U.S. Justice Department steps into the investigation of the murder of Kansas abortion doc George Tiller.

Why is it that the people who most insist the Holocaust didn't happen in the past most want it to happen in the future?

TPM Reader DL reports in on the Gordon Brown doings:

I am in the UK at present. I grew up here. The suggestion that Gordon Brown's government may not last the weekend was yesterday's news.

Some odious Blairite careerists, e.g. Blears, Purnell, have thrown their toys out of the pram. Good riddance.

Brown has structured a swift cabinet reshuffle. That much is becoming apparent in the last hour. It may be a weaker collection of characters, but enough heavy hitters like Mandelson, Darling, Miliband remain, with a few retreads and some interesting personalities such as Glenys Kinnocks getting on board, and Alan Sugar being made a Lord. Yes, there is widespread unhappiness among backbenchers, but rebellion there is not.

Brown survives is the story.

The subtext on how convincing the Conservative victory has been remains to be written, but local results so far suggest some voters walked away from them too (down 6% from the last local election). The full extent of the protest vote will be better known when the totals of the so called fringe parties, such as the Greens, UKIP etc. are tallied up on Sunday.

Brown does not need to go to the country until June 3rd, 2010. I would bet the farm that he will take as much of that remaining 12 months as possible. Brown has the opportunity to spend a year on the world stage with Obama. He's not going to walk away from that history. (And why David Miliband relinquish an opportunity to be involved in some Obama inspired modus vivendi in Israel and Palestine?)

The Labour Party will not win the next election, but it can work to avoid being obliterated, and, if anything, today's results suggest that the Tories may struggle to get more than a 20 or 30 seat majority. Brown knows the more time he has with Barack, the better.

We gave Sen. Inhofe's press secretary a chance to explain what the senator meant when he said that the Cairo speech was "unAmerican" and that he wasn't sure who's side Obama is on.

McClatchy has posted an interesting sampling of Iraqi reaction -- official and otherwise -- to Obama's Cairo speech.

Good column by Joe Klein on Charles Krauthammer's defense of the settler case and the 'natural growth' flimflam.

Maybe not quite on the order of "I am not a crook" or "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," but this declaration from Gordon Brown is a measure of the depth of his political troubles: "I'm not arrogant, and I'm never complacent."

For those who haven't been following this lately, the immediate cause of Brown's government being on the brink of collapse is Labour's dreadful showing in local elections. But it took more than one event or series of events for Brown to find himself in such perilous political waters. Not least among them was the MP expense scandal that brought down the Speaker of the House of Commons.

This is pretty rich -- both for Sen. Sessions (R-AL) and CNN for taking his line at face value. Sessions is saying he can feel Sonia Sotomayor's pain over being called a 'racist' since he was called a 'racist' too. Of course, in Sessions' case, it was for persecuting civil rights workers and calling an African-American employee "boy" and telling him to be respectful when talking to whites. But, hey, same difference, right?

Late Update: When I first did this post it was in reference to the online story CNN posted. Later though we saw this video version of the same story.