You know things aren’t good when you see a headline about Pakistani refugees fleeing to Afghanistan.

The best news I’ve seen out of Iowa so far is that Rudy Giuliani appears set to finish behind Ron Paul.

Rudy’s the purple line there that just crossed below Paul’s red line near the very bottom. But now Bob Novak says a Ron Paul third place finish is a real possibility.

Frankly, I can see it. This is basically a two man race between Romney and Huckabee. The race for third is among candidates almost twenty points behind those leaders. Prof. Franklin’s average of the last five polls has it McCain (12.4%), Thompson (10.8%) and Paul (7.2%). One thing you have to say for Paul’s supporters is that they’re committed, on many levels.

Rep. Lantos (D-CA) to retire at the end of this term due to esophageal cancer diagnosis.

From Vanity Fair’s press release on their new Scaife article …

In his first interview in eight years, Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Pittsburgh banking fortune who sunk nearly two million dollars into exposing Bill Clinton’s misdeeds and infidelities and is now facing the end of his second marriage because of an affair, tells Vanity Fair writer Michael Joseph Gross that philandering “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.” Scaife talks about a “very pleasant” lunch he and Clinton had last summer and says he “never met such a charismatic man in [his] whole life.”

Asked whether his behavior is hypocritical given his political commitments, Scaife does not refer to moral principles but to his own history. His “first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, and he doesn’t believe monogamy is an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.”

Is Rudy’s campaign in free-fall? Join us as we look at the numbers …

Watch this episode on Blip.

Justice Department launches criminal probe of destruction of CIA torture tapes.

Late Update: AP reports that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has named an outside prosecutor to handle the criminal investigation.

Later Update: Who is John Durham? Paul Kiel takes a look at the deputy U.S. attorney in Connecticut whom Mukasey named to oversee the investigation.

Later Yet: We’ve posted the text of Mukasey’s statement announcing the investigation.

Even Later: There’s some question about whether it is proper to call Durham an “outside counsel.” He will not have the independence of Patrick Fitzgerald, for example, in the Plame investigation; rather, as acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, he will report to the deputy attorney general just like any other U.S. attorney. The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has recused itself, presumably because most of the most important terrorism cases have been handled by that office.

There are a couple stories up today about how the Obama campaign is supposedly advertising on Drudge and speculation about how this might enrage Democratic partisans. Now, I don’t know anything specifically about this case. We’re planning to put in some calls. But at the moment our reporters are tied up working on another story.

However, in the course of building TPM over the last few years I have, quite in spite of myself, become something of an expert on the ins and outs and mechanics of online advertising.

The simple fact is that just because you see candidate X’s ad on site Y does not mean that candidate X ‘advertised’ on that site, in the sense of deciding to do so or necessarily knowing anything about it. These days the vast majority of internet advertising — especially in the non-MSM world where sites don’t have their own in-house ad sales forces — is done through intermediaries often called ‘remnant’ ad bureaus.

The advertiser can just say I want my ad to be viewed this many times, or I want it to play in this geographical area or on sites with a certain demographic, etc.

So, just to be clear, maybe the Obama camp has decided to do some advertising on Drudge. I have no idea. But simply seeing an Obama ad show up on Drudge’s site does not tell you anything. They might well be as surprised as anyone.

Does the White House have any confidence that the Musharraf government can conduct a full and fair investigation of Benazir Bhutto’s death? That and more on Pakistan in today’s White House press briefing:

Greg Sargent: Could there be a connection between Hillary’s hostility towards the press and its own treatment of her for the last 15 years?

Rudy hits the air waves with the first Benazir Bhutto assassination political commercial.

I will say this: I am heartened by the fact that Rudy’s campaign not only seems to be definitively swirling around the bowl but that he also seems committed to shuffling off this electoral coil with no dignity intact. I think we may be tumbling toward the aesthetic or comedic version of a parallax view in which the reality and parody versions of Rudy’s campaign are meeting their long-anticipated convergence.