Is the administration cherrypicking the intelligence on global warming — and which government experts get to talk to the press?

Bush challenges anti-freedom world leaders to support freedom in the middle east.

As we noted a couple months back, one of the biggest Social Security bamboozlers in this cycle is Peter Roskam, who’s running in Illinois’ 6th District, the one left open by the retirement of Henry Hyde (R).

Roskam is currently a state senator. And last year when a vote came up on whether or not to phase out Social Security with the Bush privatization plan, he ducked out and didn’t vote at all.

We still have our contest going to see who can find out what Roskam’s position is on phasing out Social Security. But now we’ve got an example of just how hard that’s going to be.

Roskam told AARP that: “My position is that we must find a way to strengthen and protect Social Security without raising payroll taxes, without reducing benefits, without raising the retirement age and without privatizing the system.” But he answered “yes” to the National Tax Payers Union’s survey on whether he supported privatization.

So the bounty in the contest still stands at TPM t-shirt and two TPM mugs for the first reader who can get a straight answer out of Roskam on where he stands whether or not to partially phase out Social Security and replace it with private accounts. If you’re interested, see the contest rules here.

Ralph Reed debates Jim Wallis at Wallis’ new blog, God’s Politics.

Rep. Bob Ney’s handpicked would-be successor calls on him to resign.

Some process issues maybe?

You probably remember last week that the judge in the Saddam Hussein genocide and general evilness trial told Saddam that he didn’t think Saddam was a dictator.

Now comes word that the judge has been tossed for lacking impartiality. That seems understandable, I guess. But a government spokesman, Ali Dabbagh, says that “this was a decision by the cabinet of the prime minister.”

Isn’t something like this supposed to be up to a higher judicial authority?

Quite a bit has come out in the last week or so pointing to the conclusion that the Bush administration is making serious preparations for a major military strike on Iran. The tea leaves are always difficult to analyze because you have to weigh the fact that a strike is totally irrational against the fact that the administration is led by folks whose irrationality has been demonstrated again and again. The one piece of data that makes me think they’re really going to try it, however, is the news that Don Rumsfeld has apparently put Abram Shulsky (head of what was once the ‘Office of Special Plans’ (OSP)) in charge of a new DOD outfit, modeled on the OSP, to stovepipe bogus Iran intel from the likes of Manucher Ghorbanifar straight to administration leaders.

That tells me that fundamentally Condi Rice is just window-dressing, like her predecessor Colin Powell, that the Cheney-Rumsfeld Axis remains in place and in charge and that we’ll probably be at war with Iran before too long unless someone can stop them.

As we’ve been reporting over at TPMmuckraker, there’s a new conservative attack group on the scene this year, backed by the man who was the big money behind the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, Bob Perry. It’s called the Economic Freedom Fund, and the group has aggressively targeted House Democrats in at least five districts. In all five districts, the Dems are leading, but conservative analysts obviously think that a barrage of negative advertising might close the gap.

We’ve been doing our best to keep track of the group’s activities, but we need your help. Some of the group’s work, like robo call push polls (for which they’ve been sued in Indiana), doesn’t have to be reported to the FEC. And the TV ads we only know about after the fact. That means the only way we can know what they’re doing is if we hear about it from TPM readers, local bloggers or the local press.

With $5 million in start-up cash from Perry, they’re sure to pop up frequently this election. So if the group’s active in your district, let us know.

For the meeting before they were against it.

Minnesota Republicans are bashing a Muslim House candidate for taking political contributions from a Muslim leader who President Bush met with and praised.

A heart-warming family story: Parents (with the awkwardly appropriate surname ‘Kampf’) kidnap their daughter and take her across state lines for an abortion after they discover the baby’s father is black.

The Kampfs are white.

19 year old Katelyn Kampf escaped from her parents car in Salem, New Hampshire and called the police.