John McCain considers him an affable dinner companion; the US again considers him a world leader in good repute; join us as Muammar Qaddafi does the UN, the G8 and pretty much the whole world in today’s TPM Qaddafi slideshow …
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH): Rahm’s “wrong” on public option’s chances in the Senate.
The FBI has made two arrests in the last 48 hours in separate undercover operations in which would-be bombers were given fake explosives which they proceeded to try to detonate near major buildings. Below are excerpts from FBI press releases.
[O]n September 23, 2009, [Michael C.] Finton drove a van containing what he understood to be explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the federal building. Finton got out of the van, locked the door and got into another vehicle driven by the undercover FBI officer and drove away. Within a few blocks of the federal building, Finton made a cell phone call to remotely detonate the purported bomb in the van. FBI agents arrested Finton immediately after he attempted to detonate the device.
Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, 19, has been arrested and charged in a federal criminal complaint with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Smadi, who was under continuous surveillance by the FBI, was arrested today near Fountain Place, a 60-story glass office tower located at 1445 Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas, after he placed an inert/inactive car bomb at the location. Smadi, a Jordanian citizen in the U.S. illegally, lived and worked in Italy, Texas. He has repeatedly espoused his desire to commit violent jihad and has been the focus of an undercover FBI investigation.
In both cases, the FBI said there was no connection to the alleged terror plot in New York and Colorado, though I wonder if they didn’t bring these cases to conclusion as a result of the widespread coverage of the NYC investigation, which was apparently terminated prematurely because an alleged misstep by the NYPD tipped off the target.
The 76-year-old associate justice was taken from the Supreme Court to a Washington hospital earlier this evening as a precaution after feeling faint.
Sen. Schumer and Sen. Rockefeller seemed surprisingly confident that the health care bill will contain a real public option on a conference call that ended a short time ago.
Said Schumer: “The health care bill that is signed into law by the President will have a good, strong, robust public option.”
TPM’s Ben Frumin was on the call and files this report.
From the new Times/CBS poll out this evening …
“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?”
Favor 65%
Oppose 26%
Interestingly, according to the poll, support for a public option has jumped 5 points since late August and opposition to it has dropped 8 points.
I’d been noticing over time that the distribution of browser usage in our audience suggested some real growth in the number of our readers who use Macs. But I hadn’t looked at the operating system statistics for a while. So I was still pretty surprised to see that just under 30% of our audience uses Macs. To be precise, in September, 29.43% of the visits to TPM were from Macs; 65.72% were from Windows operation systems. (Also interesting: the 3rd highest, far, far back at 2.36% is the iPhone operating system.) Read More
Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post:
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
Obama will make a statement on the revelation of a secret underground Iranian nuclear facility.
Late Update: More on the announcement by Obama, France’s Sarkozy and Britain’s Brown here.