TPM Reader N, commenting on my list of top contenders for Best Testimonial Trainwreck …

Did I miss something? Isn’t Fredo on their somewhere? His last testimony before the Senate was unbelievable. Surely he deserves to be in the hunt?

Yeah, I’ll grant you this. But the others are the ones that stand out more in my mind. And you also have to figure that he’s a very strong contender for category 2, Outstanding Achievement in Improbable Forgetfulness.

I for one could not be happier that we finally seem to have a real race on our hands in both party nomination battles. But we’re clearly in the point in the swing where coverage is wildly exaggerating the changes in the races. This evening at the gym I heard Anderson Cooper making some completely wild-eyed claim about the biggest transformation ever or some such nonsense. So I thought I’d stop over at the Intrade predictions market to see what they have to say. And they don’t show much change at all.

Hillary’s a bit off her high, which had her probability of winning in the low 70s. But she’s now at 67.5% chance of winning. Obama has moved a lot, from 12% in early mid-October to 21.6% now. For what it’s worth, as I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that Hillary bet was overpriced. The odds of her winning were never that high. A lot of dumb money out there. If I had some money to bet I might have been able to make some.

On the Republican side there’s even less volatility. Rudy Giuliani is still given a 42% of winning the nomination. That’s down from about 47%, with Shag Fund and probably that bad debate performance knocking a few points off him. Again, way overvalued. If you’re a speculator I’d better against. That’s way too high.

The most pressured option I can see, at least among people who have any chance of winning, is Romney. In just the last couple weeks he’s fallen from a high of 32% to just 24% today. Even with Huckabee’s surge, that doesn’t make sense to me. I still think Romney’s chance are better than people realize. Huckabee, of course, is the big pick up — under 4% little more than a month ago and now at 13.4%.

I haven’t seen any references yet to any of the Republican presidential candidates or Joe Lieberman getting asked about the new Iran NIE. If you see news accounts of any of them getting asked, please send us the links.

Late Update: Rudy’s apparently already trying for a stealthy pro-active flipflop. From the Times …

“For years now, the Islamic Republic of Iran has defied and played games with every international effort aimed at persuading the country to halt enriching uranium,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said in a statement. “Sanctions and other pressures must be continued and stepped up until Iran complies by halting enrichment activities in a verifiable way.”

That was a shift in tone from his previous comments, but he did not say that he may have overstated the case against Iran.

In October, speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Mr. Giuliani said: “As we all know, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and they’re threatening to use them. If I’m president of the United States, I guarantee you we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they’re not going to get nuclear weapons.”

This is a pleasure to read. Recently, Charles Krauthammer wrote an aggressively vapid column claiming that the recent breakthrough in stem cell research, which allows scientists to trick skin cells into acting like embryonic stem cells, vindicates the restrictions President Bush placed in the way of stem cell research. He called attention to the work of James A. Thomson, the researcher who was both the first scientist to create embryonic stem cells and was also the key researcher on the new breakthrough. Today, Thomson and Alan Leshner respond, explaining that his conclusions are flawed and that he doesn’t understand the basic science.

If only it were so easy on foreign policy …

The 2004 operations manual for the detention facility at Guantanamo has been leaked and posted at Wikileaks. TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman is digging into it and needs your help. Take a look.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that the US Intelligence Community strongly believes that the Iranians shuttered their nuclear weapons program in 2003, this is the first President Bush has heard about it. So the president wants us to believe that with all his constant intel briefings that he didn’t hear anything about this until just now?

The Post reports that President Bush “first learned in August or September about intelligence indicating Iran had halted its weapons program and was advised it would take time to evaluate.”

One part of the article suggests that VP Cheney only got briefed on the findings yesterday. But the Post article also has this passage …

Several of those involved in preparing the new assessment said that when intelligence officials began briefing senior members of the Bush administration on the intercepts, beginning in July, the policymakers expressed skepticism. Several of the president’s top advisers suggested the intercepts were part of a clever Iranian deception campaign, the officials said.

This bears more looking into. Rather than August or September, it seems that the White House started getting briefings as early as July suggesting that the administration’s public claims about an Iranian nuclear program were false. But the policy-makers didn’t accept the intel.

Hillary’s pollster now claims the campaign’s attack on Obama’s kindergarten ambition to be President was a gag. Funny guy.

Oh, for the days when the need to parse presidential language was only a matter of distinguishing different kinds of sex acts. Now it’s necessary to hold the president to account for starting wars, bamboozling the country and causing untold numbers of deaths.

We appear to know now that the Iranians shuttered their nuclear weapons program in 2003. The president apparently had strong indications this was the case back as far as last summer and the intelligence became progressively more clear in the fall. And yet here he was through most of the fall escalating his rhetoric against Iran and rattling the sabers for a potential military confrontation.

Yet, as several readers have noted, when you look back at his speeches, there’s evidence that the president was shifting his terms because he knew that the intelligence on which his push for war was based was likely too collapse.

If you go back to his October 17th press conference, the one where he spoke of ‘World War III’ he changes his wording. It’s no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it’s the necessity of “preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

That’s the tell.

That change is no accident. He wants claims that will survive the eventual revelation of this new intelligence — while also continuing to hype the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat that his spy chiefs are telling him likely does not exist.

Look at the expressions on Bush’s face and the evident discomfort as he gets ready to fib and weave about when he knew the intel on Iran.

Pay particular attention to when he says he was told there was new information back in August but supposedly didn’t ask what the ‘new information’ was. And then: “He didn’t tell me what the information was.” Right …)

Yep, Rudy’s Mideast Advisor Norman Podhoretz says the CIA is fibbing about the Iranian nuclear program to protect the Iranians from an attack by Bush or Rudy.

I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”