Mitt Romney will unveil a health plan today — and following up on his success in signing a health plan in liberal Massachusetts, this new one will be almost nothing like it. That and other news in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

Scranton, PA US Attorney bites the dust over ties to organized crime figure.

Late Update: A quick discussion with my crack US Attorney reporting team suggests that the article linked above may be a bit misleading about the reasons for Marino’s departure and that US Attorney Thomas Marino may have been preparing to cash in his chips for other non-muck-related reasons.

I agree with Matt on this one. It is extremely important for the Democrats to nominate someone who doesn’t think like a loser. And assuming that any failure of the president’s anti-terrorism policies will automatically be a political boon for the Republican party means thinking like a loser.

It also signals a lack of confidence either in your own policies or the American people’s reasoning powers. And quite possibly both. And whether or not your policies make sense and whether or not the American people know jack you just can’t be an effective advocate of those policies unless you think average Americans can be persuaded that they make sense.

Otherwise, you are permanently off balance, ill-prepared and incoherent.

China to launch four month “war” against tainted Chinese-made toys.

Max Boot: Ditching consensus view of Vietnam as a policy failure is “bold .. skillful bit of political jujitsu” from President Bush.

It is uncanny how, even now, a few iffy columns and questionable news stories can completely upend the conventional wisdom in Washington, even in the face of vast amounts of contradictory evidence. What’s even more amazing is how many Democrats actually start to believe it. I don’t think it is too much to say that the conventional wisdom is now that unexpected success from the surge may possibly leave the Democrats off balance in September rather than the Republicans. Sure, political progress is still non-existent, the thinking goes, but no one can deny the success of the surge in purely military terms. I think I must have seen at least a half a dozen major news stories in the last week or so following this story line.

But is any of this true? Setting aside strategic progress are we even making tactical progress? Are we even reducing the rates of violence which the theory at least said should open the door to political progress?

Kevin Drum broke down the numbers from the Brookings Iraq Index and the answer seems to be pretty clearly, No. One key decision Kevin made was to make a seasonal comparison — not how were June and July compared to March and April but how does June/July 2007 stack up against June/July 2006. The answer? Not well. As Al Gore once put it about a different topic, all the numbers that you want to be up are down and vice versa. Or just about all of them.

Dennis Ross advising Obama on Middle East policy.

(ed.note: The site I linked to, JTA.org, appears to be temporarily unavailable.)

At TPMmuckraker today we’ve been explaining the ‘boomlet’, if that’s the word for a manufactured boomlet, to return longtime CIA asset Iyad Allawi to power in Iraq as the successor to Prime Minister Maliki. He’s signed on a big ticket GOP lobbying firm to make his case, Barbour Griffith & Rogers. And his account at BGR is being handled by Robert Blackwill, who until recently was the Iraq coordinator at the White House. So he probably gets his calls returned.

But here’s something else that’ll probably come in handy. The Iraqi National Intelligence Service turns out not to be funded by the Iraqi national government but rather by the Central Intelligence Agency. Go figure.

And the INIS, in turn, is run by Allawi’s longtime pal Hazem Shaalan.

I confess that I have a much greater tolerance for these sorts of creative approaches to national sovereignty and democratic change when I have any confidence the puppeteers have a clue what they’re doing. But, that said, it would seem Mr. Allawi may be the coming man to continue Iraq’s democratic revolution.

It’s appropriate in a way that BGR (see post below) should be representing Iyad Allawi in his quest to retake the mantle of power in Iraq as BGR early set itself up as a go-to DC lobby shop for finding love and riches in Iraq.

It was BGR, you’ll no doubt remember, which set up former Bush FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh with his own Iraq rainmaking outfit, New Bridge Strategies (“your bridge to success in Iraq”).

Perhaps not surprisingly the New Bridge Strategies website seems to have shaken off this mortal coil like so many other Iraqi ventures and people since we last checked in with them back in 2004.

But other profit centers have opened up. So I’m sure they’re on to other promising leads.

Longtime backer and GOP bigwig withdraws support from Rep. Doolittle (R-CA).