From the AP …

In a break with past Bush administration policy, a top U.S. diplomat will for the first time join colleagues from other world powers at a meeting with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, The Associated Press has learned.

William Burns, America’s third highest-ranking diplomat, will attend talks with the Iranian envoy, Saeed Jalili, in Switzerland on Saturday aimed at persuading Iran to halt activities that could lead to the development of atomic weapons, a senior U.S. official told the AP on Tuesday.

Official contacts between Iran and the United States are extremely rare and although Washington is part of a six-nation effort to get Iran to stop enriching and reprocessing uranium, the administration has shunned contacts with Tehran on the matter.

I’d almost forgotten that top McCain economics advisor Phil Gramm’s only real experience in the non-influence-peddling part of the private sector was as an investor in a 70s soft-core porn movie.

Not that there’s anything wrong that …

I think TPM was one of the first places to note that what most of the media was playing as McCain calling for an Afghanistan Surge (TM) today was actually his abandoning his position and adopting the position Obama’s been pushing for a year. Even Mark Halperin eventually caught on. But it’s hard to keep your record of being ahead of curve.

Now I see this post from my old pal Juliet Eilperin who reports at the Post’s Trail blog that just after giving his speech adopting Obama’s Afghanistan policy, McCain hopped on the Straight Talk Express (TM) and changed his position again. After telling the crowd in Albuquerque that he would send three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, that he might get NATO to supply the additional troops instead. “We need to work that out, we need to have greater participation from our NATO allies, and we need a lot more help from our NATO allies,” said McCain.

Now, as we noted, he may have switched his position because the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently said that while we need additional troops in Afghanistan we can’t send any because they’d have to come from Iraq.

A short time after that McCain spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace said that some of the additional brigades would be NATO troops and some American.

The Obama camp is sharply critiquing the numbers behind today’s front-page NYT companion piece to its new poll, titled “Poll Finds Obama’s Run Isn’t Closing Divide on Race.”

Planned Parenthood launches new swing state TV ad hitting McCain on issue of whether health insurance should cover cost of birth control. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

What is it with the Gulf of Mexico? It’s become a breeding ground for GOP myths about oil, as they push for expanded offshore drilling.

China is drilling for oil in Cuban waters off Florida!

Katrina caused no oil spills!

Here’s Kit Bond (R-MO) last night on Hardball, riffing on the Katrina myth:

At the TPMCafe Book Club, Ross Douthat continues the discussion of his new book, The Grand New Party: Our agenda might not be the ticket, but the current GOP agenda definitely won’t be.

This takes some real cojones. A short time ago on a conference call with reporters, Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, declared that Obama brings the same failed approach to Iraq as President Bush:

“We cannot afford to replace one administration that refused for too long to acknowledge failure in Iraq with a candidate that refuses to acknowledge success in Iraq.”

Scheunemann was, of course, a significant proponent of the Iraq invasion and as Josh noted the other day worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi and the other usual suspects in pushing the U.S. toward war with Iraq.

Obama plans to open 20 new field offices, including a handful in some of the reddest corners of the state.

The terrorists get to pick the central front in the “War on Terror”: