Rudy and Edwards trade blows again over terrorism.

And in the back-and-forth, Rudy’s strategy is laid bare.

Bradley Schlozman to revise his testimony? Stay tuned.

Update: Bloomberg reports that he just might.

Fun facts.

A new poll finds that the same percentage of Americans know about John Edwards’ $400 haircut that know Saddam didn’t have WMDs.

Here’s a good example of the problem. In 2001, the White House put a guy named Peter Kirsanow on the US Commission on Civil Rights. Turns out he’s a full-time ‘vote fraud’ bamboozler. Here he is at a senate hearing yesterday trying to get ‘vote fraud’ nonsense added to a bill intended to make voter intimidation a federal crime.

As you’ll note virtually every claim he makes has been discredited — most recently by the US government study the White House attempted to cover up.

Brownback vows to sting Romney in Iowa straw poll. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Is the Wyoming law dictating that the late Sen. Thomas (R) be replaced by another Republican unconstitutional? Vikram Amar says so. And he makes an interesting argument. Not sure I’m persuaded. But it’s worth a look.

With Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Mullen replacing Gen. Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Wall Street Journal noticed an interesting trend among top military officials.

Adm. Mullen, like many of his four-star colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was skeptical of the decision to send additional U.S. troops into Iraq.

This comes on the heels of Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute’s admission that he, too, registered his opposition to the president’s surge policy.

And that came on the heels of Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing his own opposition to the surge.

In other words, Bush will have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a “war czar,” and a Pentagon chief — arguably the three most important war-related posts in Washington — who are at least skeptical of the central strategy underlying the president’s Iraq policy.

Odd.

It’s not that we need additional evidence of Bradley Schlozman letting partisanship drive his “voter fraud” prosecutions in Missouri, but evidence keeps coming anyway.

A voter fraud case brought by the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., just five days before last year’s pivotal congressional elections was rejected by a Missouri prosecutor as being too weak and as inappropriate to pursue so close to the elections.

Mike Sanders, a Democrat who was Jackson County’s prosecutor at the time, declined to elaborate on his reasons for not taking the case, but noted that even if he had sought indictments, he would have been “incredibly reluctant” to bring charges on the eve of balloting.

“As a prosecutor, you have to be incredibly mindful of the power you have and the potential that exercising that power has to influence public opinion just five days before an election,” said Sanders, who is now the Jackson County executive.

The disclosure is likely to add fuel to allegations that U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman rushed for political reasons to bring the criminal charges despite a Justice Department policy discouraging pre-election prosecutions.

Ya think?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down yesterday with the editors of the New York Daily News to discuss Iraq policy. She repeated most of the mantras we’ve come to expect from administration officials, including the obligatory sense of impatience.

“[O]ur patience is not endless — not just the patience of the American people but the patience of the administration.

“They’re hard issues, but they don’t have the luxury, really, of time.”

Top administration officials, including the president, say stuff like this all the time. Iraqis need to get better, faster. Our patience is limited. Ours is not an open-ended commitment.

The Bush gang really needs to change its rhetorical approach, because none of this makes any sense. Or more to the point, the rhetoric is entirely inconsistent with administration policy.

Bush’s approach to the war is predicated on the notion that our patience has to be endless. To do otherwise would be to leave before the job is done, which would mean, as the White House sees it, the decline of Western civilization. If our patience is limited, we might abandon Iraq, leaving terrorists to fill a power vacuum that will endanger the world.

Rice added that Iraqis don’t have the “luxury” of time. This echoes the recent comments of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who insisted, “The clock is ticking.” This, too, sounds nice, but contradicts the war strategy. As the administration sees it, if Iraqis are given a finite amount of time, the “suiciders” and “dead-enders” will think we’ll eventually leave, and they’ll “wait us out.”

Put it this way: it’s not helpful for Rice to suggest time is of the essence when the rest of the administration is talking about the “Korean model” in which the U.S. will maintain a presence in Iraq for the next five decades.

Take a wild guess who shared these words of wisdom during a recent commencement address (via Jonathan Schwarz):

“While it’s wonderful to have the world literally at our fingertips, the tsunami of information at our beck and call has the potential to drown us and actually make us less informed…. Surfing the web may be fast and fun, but sometimes pursuing knowledge requires you to go in the deep end — and not just dip your toe in the shallow water. […]

“The proliferation of celebrity magazines makes Lindsey Lohan’s latest stint in rehab seem more important than what’s happening in Darfur.

The kind of fluff that accosts us on the newsstand may seem like harmless fun, but it should also come with a warning label that says it can rot your mind and distort your values.”

The words of Al Gore? Bill Moyers? Eric Alterman?

Try Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News, who would appear to have some power over how the mind-rotting fluff is reported to a national audience.

I have to say, Couric’s remarks at Williams College last week sound encouraging, but they would be far less breathtaking if they matched her journalism. On Thursday night, the CBS Evening News’ top story was Bush and Putin discussing missile defense, to which the network devoted two minutes and 35 seconds. The next longest item was Paris Hilton’s release from jail, which garnered two minutes and 25 seconds.

During the half-hour broadcast, the Paris Hilton “news” got more coverage on CBS than a roadside bomb killing a U.S. soldier, the immigration legislation, and passage of the stem-cell bill combined — times two.

Please tell us again, Katie, about how the media exaggerates the significance of celebrity nonsense.