Is the sun rising or setting on Joe Lieberman?

Setting, apparently.

Charles Krauthammer sure does see an awful lot of Hitlers on the horizon.

Why did Alaska GOP Sen. Ted Stevens (the $250 million “Bridge to Nowhere” Ted Stevens) say he’s holding up a $15 million proposal to create transparency in government spending?

He’s worried about the cost.

National Republican Senatorial Committee panicked about Dem Sherrod Brown’s challenge to endangered GOP incumbent Mike DeWine?

Here’s how much the NRSC has spent on the Ohio race to date this year: $656,054.58. And a new NRSC-sponsored ad campaign is saturating the Ohio airwaves – a “huge buy,” a Brown adviser concedes.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), the chamber’s top video-based medical diagnostician, will likely face punishment for lying on his medical license renewal form. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

If you’re interested in a somewhat more scholarly, even-toned effort to defuse Iran-related hysteria, I would recommend this PDF report on the subject from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (i.e., Chatham House) in the UK.

Okay. Forget about Iran for a moment. Why is The Washington Post panicking about SAT scores?

The dramatic decline in SAT scores announced yesterday raises the issue of whether there is something wrong with the new test or, even more worrisome, with the lessons being taught in high schools.

Sounds bad. But how dramatic was the drop? Well, reading went from 508 to 503 and math went from 520 to 518. That doesn’t sound especially dramatic to me. Say you knew two families with kids applying to college. One kid gets a 1028 on his SAT and the other kid gets a 1021. Are you really going to say something dramatically different to the parents of Kid B? If Kid B’s parents were all freaked out because their kid did seven points worse than Kid A, wouldn’t you tell them to chill out? Certainly, I would.

What’s more, they changed the test. They added a new writing section. Adding a new section to the test means, presumably, that this year’s round of kids spent slightly less time studying and preparing for the math and reading tests than did previous cohorts. And so they did slightly worse. Seems to me it’s about what you’d expect. If we see a years-long trend of continued decline, then you can call me and worry. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t be concerned with the quality of American high schools, but I don’t see any dramatic new evidence of a worsening problem. What’s more, the students who are being worsed-served by the system are almost certainly the ones who aren’t taking the SAT.

Reader M.E. reminds me that The Washington Post is part of the same business enterprise as the Kaplan test prep company and therefore has a large financial interest in spreading paranoia about SAT performance.

Normally, I don’t like to fling these kind of “follow the money” accusations around without evidence, but it is true that I don’t see the country’s other major newspapers describing a 0.7 percent decline in scores as “dramatic.”

Back to Iran. Talk of a unified Qaeda/Iran/Hezbollah/Syria menace is nonsense as a casual scan of actual Sunni jihadist views will make clear. As Fred Kaplan notes, if Churchill and FDR had operated with the Bush mentality, “they might not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union (out of a refusal to negotiate with evil Communists), and they might have therefore lost the war.”

It’s worse than that, though — they might have proposed attacking the Soviet Union in the middle of the war because Bolshevism and Nazism were both species of Eurofascism.

Is there a second “secret hold” on the porkbusting database bill? And does it come from a Democrat?