John Murtha, fresh from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, said in a Politico interview he is unable to find a clear answer on what is an “achievable victory.” He said that he is “still very nervous about this whole thing” and that “if you had 10 years, it might work; if you had five, you could make a difference. But you don't have that long.”

Murtha spoke to congressional reporting dean David Rogers on the eve of President Obama's Af-Pak address.

Murtha, like so many, appears to be wrestling with the litany of imperfect options. A Pennsylvania Democrat, Murtha chairs the House subcommittee that writes the defense budget. He has long held a weighty voice on national security matters and, as Rogers notes, is a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was the first Vietnam War veteran elected to the House (Murtha began his military career as a young Marine in the Korean War).

Murtha voted for the Iraq War authorization. But by late 2005, Murtha came to believe the war in Iraq could not be won militarily. He has not reached the same conclusion with Afghanistan. But in his words to Rogers, one senses Murtha's ambivalence:

All these generals understand it can't be won militarily. The more people you kill, the more enemies you make.

On Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, Murtha said:

He's trying to switch from killing people to winning their hearts and minds. It's almost as simple as that. He laid it out. He gave the best explanation he could of how it would work if you have the time, but I don't think he has the time.

A Mitchell Research & Communications poll (600 LVs, 11/17-19, 22-24, +/- 4%) shows Attorney General Mike Cox (R) with a slim lead in the GOP gubernatorial primary in 2010, but a sizeable advantage in the open-seat race against Lt. Gov. John Cherry (D), the likely Democratic nominee. Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) is not seeking a third term in the state hardest hit by the economic downturn.

Republican Primary Election Matchup
Cox 27 (-3 vs. last poll, 9/17)
Hoekstra 24 (+1)
Bouchard 12 (+1)
George 3 (+1)
Snyder 3 (+1)
Und 30 (-2)

Democratic Primary Election Matchup
Cherry 49 (+1)
Dillon 8 (-6)

General Election Matchup
Cox 47 (+2)
Cherry 31 (-1)

Cox has a 47 percent favorable rating vs. 21 percent unfavorable. Cherry, despite being the state's lieutenant governor for seven years, has a lower name ID than the Republican frontrunner.

“That takes the attention off Senator Reid. You have a splitting of the resources and I believe that hurts the Republican cause.” - Scandal plagued Republican Senator John Ensign's rationale for not resigning.

What's the difference between a car and a golf ball? Tiger can drive a ball 400 yards.

More Tiger Woods jokes here.

Jeremy Clarkson pens a delicious riff on the pros and cons of the Internet:

Which is why I have been examining the argument carefully and I've decided that the biggest issue in all of this is the internet. It's a monster. An invisible machine over which mankind has absolutely no control. We can't even turn it off.

Let us start by listing the good things it has achieved. Well, er, it is now possible to find out where James Garner was born without going to the library and order your Sunday lunch without going to the shops. And there are some jolly funny things on YouTube.

But now let's look at some of the bad things. Well, your children are being bullied mercilessly on Facebook and there is no one you can contact to have the bullying stopped, your husband is spending most of his evenings baring his private parts to some Ukrainian girl, your wife has rekindled a childhood romance, the twin towers have been knocked down, Stephen Fry has been driven to the edge of another breakdown, you have to spend half your day answering pointless emails, there is unimaginable cruelty in almost every blog, where the rules of defamation seem not to apply, and James Garner was not born, as suggested on one site, in Chicago.

It gets worse. Only a few weeks ago my colleague James May scuttled off into a Romanian wood to have a pee, the event was captured on a phone and now it's on the internet. And there is absolutely nothing he can do to have it taken off. These are just the minor issues, the annoyances. The big problem is just round the corner: the bankrupting of everyone in the world of film, art, literature, news and music.

Read it all.

Not good:

Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old man wanted for questioning in the killing of four Lakewood police officers Sunday morning, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health.

His criminal history includes at least five felony convictions in Arkansas and at least eight felony charges in Washington. That record also stands out for the number of times Clemmons has been released from custody despite questions about the danger he posed.

Mike Huckabee, while governor of Arkansas, granted clemency to Clemmons nine years ago, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.

Huckabee has already released a statement distancing himself from Clemmons, but that will only do so much.

Anytime a president or a governor uses their power to grant a pardon, commutation or clemency, they risk the political fallout and bear at least some responsibility should the individual they set free end up committing more crimes.

The issue of pardoning criminals swirled lightly around Huckabee during the 2008 race with the case of Wayne Dumond. Now, the case of Maurice Clemmons wil assuredly hang heavy over Huckabee should he decide to run again.

The Washington Post reports on a subtle but substantial effort by the Obama administration to diminish lobbyists' outsized hold on U.S. policy. The Post reports:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels … The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don't have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

The lobbyists are not banned from joining committees. They are “encouraged” not to participate. But that policy shift may amount to a de facto prohibition. The Post reports that several Cabinet secretaries have already decided to follow the recommendation.

Committee members are generally unpaid. But a committee position offers lobbyists an opportunity to skew recommendations toward their client's interest rather than the nation's or overall industry's best interests. Consequently, lobbyists' presence on the panels undermines the core objective of the advisory committees.

In this morning's Washington Post, Joel Achenbach picks up on the "All Head and No Gut" theme that David Paul Kuhn wrote about yesterday.

One quote in particular struck me from Achenbach's piece:

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. "They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn't happen," he says. "People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that."

Where did "people" get the idea of comparing Obama to Lincoln? Could it be because Obama chose a place intimately associated with Lincoln - the Old Statehouse in Springfield, Illinois - from which to launch his bid for the White House? Or was it because Obama invoked similarities between their resumes on the stump throughout the 2008 campaign; or because he consistently made references to building a "Team of Rivals" cabinet like Lincoln; or because Obama chose, as part of his inaugural festivities, to retrace Lincoln's route to the Capitol via train, culminating in a star-studded pre-inaugural party staged at - surprise, surprise - the foot of the Lincoln memorial; or because Obama chose to be sworn in using the same Bible as Lincoln?

With all due respect to Professor Wilentz, no one has traded more on the Lincoln-Obama comparison more than Obama himself. So to the extent Obama is suffering from being unable to live up to expectations brought on by that comparison, it is a self-inflicted wound.

President Obama will attend the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen on December 9, Reuters first reported.

It has been unclear for months whether Obama would attend the global summit. He is without climate change legislation. And since summer the prospects for cap-and-trade's passage have dramatically dwindled.

The New York Times reported Monday that the Obama administration will propose short-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the conference. As the Times notes, from a political standpoint, the proposed targets are partly an effort to win the global blame game.

Inevitably, any failure to attain an international agreement will fall heavily on the United States. But some concrete U.S. proposals will help offset American culpability.

China recently surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the primary gas linked to climate change, almost a decade before experts once predicted. The U.S. remains the largest per capita emitter, as China readily notes, and the second largest emitter overall.

Naturally, Obama was hesitant to appear in Denmark without legislation or any concrete proposals. The House has passed its version of the climate change bill. But Senate passage deserves long odds.

To the discredit of the Democratic leadership and Obama, the prolonged health care debate has had significant collateral damage in Congress. And there is no more significant legislative casualty than the climate change bill.

Energy reform was always going to be the more difficult push. But today there is little patience among moderate Democrats to swallow another bitter pill. The economy and jobs will dominate next year's legislative agenda. This White House has leaked to reporters that Obama intends to seize next January's State of the Union address as a pivot point from health care to the economy. Almost any bill next year will be framed as a jobs bill, as Democrats are attempting to do with cap-and-trade.

In the near term, however, this president had to keep his eye on cap-and-trade's impact on the international stage. Obama's absence from Copenhagen would have only further undermined the conference and his effort—which is thus far more symbolism than substance—to reengage the international community.

Obama's nonattendance would have also provided some bad political theater. Obama traveled to Copenhagen earlier this year in a failed eleventh hour bid to help his native Chicago win the Olympics. One can envision the embarrassing comparison had Obama not flown to Copenhagen for, let's say, a more substantial world affair.

On the same day Politico knocks the White House for it's addiction to, and at times questionable use of the word "unprecedented" the Daily Telegraph reports:

[British Defense Secretary Bob] Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising the US President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban.

Oy.