E.J. Dionne asks: Should Obama agree to face to face debate with John Boehner.

No Charts, no spray on tans, no teleprompters. Mano a mano.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) tweets: “No tv today. I’m so sick and tired of looking at the nut job in Florida.”

Justin Elliott reports on how much play the Koran-burning story has been getting in the Muslim world for weeks, before it became the dominant news story in the States. This is an important point, and it makes the hand-wringing over the U.S. cable nets’ saturation coverage seem a bit quaint.

The only caveat I would offer is that I’m not sure the Koran burning has been as damaging to U.S. interests in the Muslim world as the American backlash against the Park51 project (nee “Ground Zero Mosque”). I was visiting with an Arab journalist at a dinner this week, and she told me that Arab elites understand that, as she put it, “You can do anything in America.” So the Koran-burning stunt is seen for what it is. But the reaction to Park51, especially considering how much of it was driven by conservative elites in the U.S., has been far more troubling to Arab observers abroad. That’s anecdotal, but it rings true to me.

Pastor Terry Jones and Rush Limbaugh were high school classmates: Central High School Class of 1969, Cape Girardeau, MO.

Eli Lake, on the remarkable continuity between Bush and Obama on counterterrorism, wartime exigencies, and the breadth of executive power.

Pentagon planning to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of an Afghan war memoir by a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer because it supposedly contains classified information: Read More

Trendline for President Obama’s approval rating over the last 12 months:

Federal judge in California declares ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ unconstitutional.

Our Ryan Reilly catches up with Alan Keyes and gets his read on the Koran situation and finds out his secret plan to stop the Park51 community center and the Koran burning festival. Natural law is also in the mix. See the video.

News network mainly responsible for whipping up anti-Muslim furor, Fox News, will take ‘high road’ and not broadcast actual Koran burning, if it happens.