Hillary campaign acknowledges that one of its Iowa county chairs passed along an Obama Muslim smear email.

Greg Sargent has the latest.

Late Update: Greg talks with a recipient of the email.

Later Update: Check out the villainous email itself.

Fred Thompson provides his take (warning: could cause drowsiness ) on the Iran NIE over at RedState. I can’t really make out what his point is. It’s a hawkish point of view with some attempts at statesmanlike “perspective.” But in his rambling style he hits on one argument that I suspect we’ll see a lot more of from the Iran hawks:

Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium for allegedly peaceful purposes, but which would allow them to easily transition to a nuclear weapons program at any point in the future. Maybe even now–now that so many seem willing to forget Iran’s past deceptions and ongoing intransigence. After all, a nuclear weapons program is simply an extension of the process by why uranium is enriched for civilian nuclear fuel.

This notion that a civilian nuclear program opens up the whole pandora’s box of nuclear weaponry is the last leg the bomb-Iran-now crowd has left to stand on. I won’t pretend to be a nuclear weapons expert, but my layman’s understanding of nukes is that Thompson and his ilk are just dead wrong. The physics may be the same at some very basic level (the atomic level, I suppose), but weaponization, not to mention delivery systems, is a whole different ballgame from civilian nuclear power production. I’d be interested in hearing more from readers who have expertise in the field.

Freshman Rep. Gillibrand (D-NY) expecting child in May.

Despite what you might have heard–or thought you heard–about the convicted Arkansas rapist freed while Mike Huckabee was governor who went on to kill two Missouri women, you ought to take a look at Murray Waas’ piece today on the case.

There’s more to this than first meets the eye, not the least of which is that the case became something of a rallying cry for the anti-Clinton brigades because the perpetrator, Wayne Dumond, was convicted while Clinton was governor and one of Dumond’s victims was a distant Clinton cousin. So the political pressures that were brought to bear on Huckabee were different than the usual law and order variety.

The editor of the Washington Post‘s Obama Muslim rumor article defends his handling of the piece.

Late Update: The Horse’s Mouth has the latest, um, breaking news.

A couple of new campaign TV ads just out that are worth a look. Rudy Giuliani’s latest is a paean to Reagan that mangles the history of the Iran hostage crisis. Not too many years ago, Tom Tancredo’s newest anti-immigration screed would have passed for a spoof of a GOP campaign ad.

Dan Bartlett, on the White House’s use of right wing blogs:

I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

Since the release of the new Iran NIE on Monday, we’ve been debating just when the president and his key advisors know the basic gist of what the new report would show. Take them at their own word and they really didn’t know anything until just this last week. As soon as they knew, we knew, they would say.

Sure Mike McConnell mentioned something to the president back in August. But he had no way of knowing that this “new information” would dramatically undermine the claim that Iran was on the brink of going nuclear. And as the president said yesterday, “He didn’t tell me what the information was.”

Yet I’m hearing from a lot of directions that the basic gist of the report — that the Iranians aren’t nearly as close to going nuclear as we’d been led to believe — has been circulating at least in intelligence circles for some time. In other words, this NIE has been sitting either literally or figuratively on the president’s desk for months.

Now, along those lines look at this September 22nd post from a site called Swoop, which I hear is put together by some pretty knowledgeable DC insiders.

In our last key judgment on Iran, we noted that the main driver of possible military action has switched from Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program to Iranian activities in Iraq. This conclusion is hardening. Intelligence Community (IC) sources tell us that a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran is near completion. This concludes that Iran remains many years – as much as 10 – away from a weapon. Thus, the WMD argument will not gain traction from the IC. Iraq, however, is a different story. Pentagon officials have told us that the stress on the Iranian threat to Iraqi stability in the Petraeus and Crocker testimony is entirely deliberate. These officials say that the Sunni elements with whom the US military has been cutting deals in Anbar province are violently “anti-Persian” and have convinced US commanders to see Iranian meddling as the source of destabilization. With Anbar representing the one clear success of the “surge”, the US military is highly motivated to protect it against the perceived Iranian threat. This was the source of Petraeus’ allegation that Iran is trying to build a “Hezbollah-like” anti-US militia in Iraq. A new US base is under construction near the Iranian border and checkpoints are being erected along roads leading from Iran. For immediate purposes, this does not change our assessment that military force against Iran remains unlikely in the short-term. But it does add a new source of tension alongside the WMD factor.

Just one blog post, definitely. But the key point is right there: word was out that the NIE deliver the goods for the Iranian bomb enthusiasts, that the “WMD argument” for war would not “gain traction from the IC (i.e., Intelligence Community).”

What it all comes down to is what the president says he didn’t know about until the beginning of December was already being chatted about on insider national security blogs back in September. Does anybody still believe he hasn’t known this for months?

I will say this: I’m extremely impressed at how prepared the Huckabee campaign seems to be to deal with this ten year old story.

Guess it wasn’t his final answer.

Dana Perino takes another crack at explaining what Mike McConnell told the president about Iran back in August …

“In August, DNI Director McConnell advised President Bush that the intelligence community would not be able to meet a congressionally imposed deadline requiring a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because new information had been obtained just as they were about to finalize the report.

He said that if the new information turns out to be true, what we thought we knew for sure is right. Iran does in fact have a covert nuclear weapons program, but it may be suspended. The Director advised that there were many streams of information that had the potential to be in conflict, and it would take more time to vet it all to determine validity, and that’s why they were not able to meet the deadline.

Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn’t be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data.”

Dripping with credibility, no?