Let me save you five minutes and boil down Bob Shrum's latest screed: Pelosi told truth, Leon Panetta now a big fat liar.

Two poll tidbits on Nancy Pelosi out today: A Rasmussen poll says 43% say the CIA may in fact have lied to Pelosi but 41% say its not likely.  CNN is also out with a poll showing Pelosi's approval rating at just 39% with 48% disapproving of the job she's doing as Speaker.

President Barack Obama gave Iran a half-year.

Obama said Monday that he would know "whether or not these discussions [with Iran] are starting to yield significant benefits" by the end of the year. In a White House press conference held by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, capping a 90-minute meeting today, Obama told reporters that he was against an artificial timeline but effectively created one. Obama offered a period from June, after Iran's domestic elections, to year's end "to see serious movement on the part of Iranians."

"We're not going to have talks forever," Obama said.

It appears neither head of state got exactly what he wanted from the talks. But both men earned rhetorical nuances that spoke volumes.

Netanyahu said he would “immediately” begin engaging the Palestinians in the peace process. That pledge was a gesture toward Obama as much as the Palestinians. The president needs to show Arab states and Iran that he is demanding concessions from the Israelis. For Netanyahu, Obama's use of a time frame for talks with Iran was a significant diplomatic achievement.

Obama also said he was not excluding a “range of steps” against Iran, noting sanctions as the worst-case scenario. Netanyahu would have liked that range to include the delicate mention of the use of force, couched as a last resort.

Obama, as expected, did not get the magic three words--two-state solution--from Netanyahu. But Netanyahu's pledge to begin the peace process was hardly a given heading into the day's negotiations.

“We don't want to govern the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said.

Obama said that the two men "talked about restarting serious negotiations on issues of Israel and the Palestinians," noted the "special relationship"--language the British and Israelis treasure--between the United States and Israel, but also reiterated Israel's commitment to the 2003 international "road map" for peace that obligated Israel to cease settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.

"Settlements have to be stopped," Obama said.

The president said Palestinians "are going to have to do a better job of providing the kinds of security assurances" that Israel requires, that Arab states must be "bolder" in their efforts toward peace and that Israel must "take some difficult steps as well."

For his part, Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel will have to make concessions to the Palestinians but those concessions are subject to Palestinians recognizing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Netanyahu also hinted at his overarching view that any peace accord should incorporate the regional Arab states.

But the long-range news surrounds Iran.

Netanyahu, as I wrote about this morning, believes Israel can only hold off strikes for months, not years. Obama requires time to see whether his olive branch towards Iran bears, well, olives. Yet Obama's recognition that diplomatic progress must occur this year was tantamount to affirmation of Israel's concern, that the threat of a nuclear Iran requires immediate resolution.

Any military strike on Iran is complex, to understate the point. Israel would have to know where to hit and strike hard enough to make the hit count. Netanyahu believes that, absent diplomatic progress by the United States, he may have to risk the repercussions of a military strike. Those repercussions could include a regional war. And Netanyahu, having lost power once by losing the favor of an American president, hardly wants to repeat his mistake. But Netanyahu views Iran in dire terms. At some point, Netanyahu indicates, time for talk runs out.

Meanwhile, as Obama implies, Netanyahu could take significant steps toward the Palestinians--on settlements in particular. That would considerably aid Obama's outreach to Iran and the Arab world. But today's meeting exhibited that for Israel, and especially for its new conservative leader, the issue of Iran is a world unto itself.

So it comes back to time and talk. For diplomacy to have its chance, Netanyahu has said he would withhold any confrontation this year. Obama seemed to move toward Netanyahu with the same implied timetable, while not speaking in the forceful terms the Israelis desire.

In time, the White House may come to regret Obama's statement that he expects diplomatic gains by the close of 2009. The president of the United States just limited himself to six months to significantly pull Iran away from the brink of nuclearization. That's a timeline and, if Obama holds Iran to it, a serious timeline at that.

Dick Morris's piece insisting that Obama health proposal would force some new hideous level of rationing onto the American medical system is curious. It appears the same week as a study in Health Affairs showing that Medicare beneficiaries are far happier with their government-run health plan than are under-65 workers covered by employer insurance.

And being elderly, people in Medicare need many more medical services. According to the Health Affairs article, Medicare beneficiaries were twice as likely to rate their health care “fair or poor” as were the workers.  They were more than three times as likely to have multiple chronic conditions.

Yet only 32 percent of the Medicare beneficiaries reported a negative experience in getting their medical bills paid by insurance, compared with 44 percent of those with employer coverage. And 61 percent of Medicare beneficiaries said they received “excellent or very good” quality of care in the past year, against just under half of those in employer-based plans.

Yet Morris melodramatically warns that the “ax” of government-run health care “will fall on the oldest and the sickest among us.” Well, tell that to the oldest and sickest Americans.

www.fromaharrop.com

I've been totally out of the loop all weekend, so the news that Maureen Dowd lifted a passage from Josh Marshall - which she says came word for word somehow via a friend - is a bit shocking.

Michael Calderone reports Josh Marshall was contacted but "wished not to comment."  I wonder if he'd be equally as bashful if Charles Krauthammer (or some other conservative pundit Marshall frequently ridicules as deceitful and dishonest) had appropriated his work in a similar fashion.

"If it's 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout. That's just the truth." - former McCain (and curren Huntsman) strategist John Weaver, to Byron York in this morning's Washington Examiner.

The appointment of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to be Ambassador to China is being hailed as a politically  savvy move by Barack Obama, removing a potentially significant rival in 2012.  That was my first reaction as well, but as I think about it some more, I'm not certain that's the case, at least not in the obvious sense.

If Huntsman were at all serious about running for President in 2012, I'm not sure why he'd accept.  Ambassador to China is an important post, but it isn't exactly Secretary of State, and Huntsman has no party loyalty duty to accept it.  What I would read into this is that Huntsman was never particularly serious about running for President in the first place.  The politically savvy move was the Huntsman boomlet started by Plouffe.

As for Al Giordano's thesis that the potential Romney defeat in the 2012 GOP primary threatens to alienate Mormon voters from the GOP, I suppose it is possible, but the first Romney defeat didn't exactly cause Mormon voters to abandon the GOP.

GOP insiders want Dick Cheney to step off the stage.

A majority of Washington Republican insiders believe Cheney's new media visibility has “hurt the Republican Party,” according to a new poll.

Fully 57 percent of the Republican political players are displeased with Cheney's media tour since he left office. One third of influential Republicans stood with Cheney in the poll, stating that Cheney has “helped” the Republican Party since he moved out of the vice presidential residence and into, so it sometimes seems, television and radio studios nationwide.

The poll, not surprisingly, found that 92 percent of Democratic insiders believe Cheney has “hurt” the GOP in the era of Barack Obama.

The confidential poll is the National Journal Group's weekly effort to take the pulse of Washington insiders.

Cheney's Republican backers ranged from the fulsome, “he is the only GOP figure who has put Obama on the political defensive” to the lackluster, “the VP is not our best messenger, but defending the Bush administration on the war on terror has benefited the party.”

The Republican insiders who want Cheney to leave the limelight were more effusive.  Here are four of the more vociferous variety:

- "He seems determined to vindicate his decisions and policies even if it damages the GOP's recovery. And it has."

- "There is nothing Dick Cheney can say or do to help the Republican Party today. The best thing he can do is disappear for the next 10 years."

- "Let's face it: The guy doesn't know anything about winning elections outside of Wyoming."

- "Cheney represents the grumpy intolerance that has come to characterize the GOP. Get off the stage!"

Read more about the National Journal poll here.

The Obama administration and its defenders have dined for quite a while on blaming the Bush administration for the sundry problems plaguing the U.S. and the world. This is not the place to parse each criticism, but I do think things like this report from the National Security Network need better context. They write:

During the eight years of the Bush administration, unnecessary saber-rattling, coupled with a refusal to talk to Iran, did nothing to make America more secure. Indeed, Iran made enormous advances both in nuclear technology and regional prestige.

It's important to recognize that there is very little chance the Obama administration is going to have any more success at convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear program than the Bush administration did. That's not because they're not approaching the problem more constructively, but because the nature of the problem is such that it may not be amenable to "solving" at a cost that would be acceptable to most Americans.

And the irony here is that by relentlessly criticizing the Bush administration for "failing" to stop Iran's decades-old pursuit of a nuclear capability, they're just setting the Obama administration up for failure. Because what happens if the administration's diplomatic outreach fails, as it likely will given the importance the Iranian regime places in its nuclear program? Then the administration will be forced to either stand down or take military action - an outcome few of the president's backers would likely support.

It's not wise for President Obama to concede a nuclear Iran while there is still time for further diplomacy. But if the president's supporters want to change the "politics of national security" it seems to me that it would be far more productive to take this bit of advice from Richard Haass and start "defining success down." Barring some dramatic breakthrough or a military strike from Israel, Iran is going to become a nuclear power. If the administration's supporters believe containment is preferable to war, they should start saying so now.

(Cross posted at RCW's The Compass.)

Secretary of State Robin Carnhan (D) leads two potential Republican opponents, Rep. Roy Blunt and former Treasurer Sarah Steelman, in a new Democracy Corps survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (April 28-30, 800 LV, MoE +/- 3.5%).

Carnahan 53
Blunt 44

Carnahan 54
Steelman 42