Fleischman said he came away from an interview with Fiorina thinking they agreed on many issues, such as opposition to abortion and the growing role of the federal government. Fiorina opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is endangered. Her campaign says Fiorina believes marriage is between a man and a woman but also supports domestic partnerships.

"I don't think there's any way Carly Fiorina out-conservatives Chuck DeVore, but I don't think that's her goal," Fleischman said. "The real question is: Is Carly Fiorina a conservative? And based on my sit-downs with her so far, I think she probably is."

The primary battles plaguing the Republican Party are good for the GOP, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) asserted Tuesday.

Palin said during an appearance on the conservative Rush Limbaugh show that the primary battles have made the party stronger.

She praised the GOP for its willingness to "not hesitate duking it out within the party," examples of which most recently played out in New York's 23rd congressional district.

After her victory in 1992, Boxer drew mediocre, under-funded opponents in 1998 and 2004. I have heard Willie Brown frequently describe Boxer as the luckiest politician in the Golden State for this reason.

But Fiorina is neither mediocre nor poor.
She earned tens of millions of dollars during her tenure as CEO of HP, and she left her post with a hefty severance package totaling more than $20 million. So, she has the ability to pop substantial money into her own drive.

What’s more, her advocacy for McCain built ties to national Republicans, corporate elites and Washington insiders whose imprimatur brings credibility and big money.

There’s more.

Fiorina is no stranger to bare knuckled fights. Her cardinal sin at HP was to antagonize the families of revered founders William Hewlett and David Packard by engineering the purchase of Compaq Computer Corporation.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) pledged on Tuesday morning to defeat healthcare reform legislation if his abortion amendment is taken out, saying 10 to 20 anti-abortion-rights Democrats would vote against a bill with weaker language.

"They’re not going to take it out," Stupak said on "Fox and Friends," referring to Senate Democrats. "If they do, healthcare will not move forward."

Stupak's amendment prohibits any insurance plan on a potential healthcare exchange from accepting federal subsidies if it covers abortion. Pro-abortion-rights lawmakers say that language is too broad and would drastically reduce access to abortion.

Former US President Jimmy Carter said he was pressed by his advisers to attack Iran during the hostage crisis there more than 30 years ago but resisted because he feared 20,000 Iranians could have died.
Islamist militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and seized its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

Carter said Monday that one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely.
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Poor choice Jimmy that ushered in the era of Ronald Reagan

Is Chuck DeVore, the Tea Party candidate in the California Senate race, a birther? In an interview with Dave Weigel, he seemed to hint at Yes.

* But then his spokesman quickly walked it back.

Earlier today, there was quite a maelstrom based on California Senate candidate Chuck Devore's interview with Dave Weigel.

In the interview, DeVore didn't endorse the Birther movement, but didn't exactly repudiate it, either.

“The president is doing himself no favors by spending millions of dollars to block the release of documents surrounding his birth certificate. As long as the president keeps fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of such things, people are going to remain skeptical.”

Since then, the DeVore team has been scrambling, first sending an unequivocal affirmation of the POTUS' citizenship via its spokesman; then from DeVore himself.

Now SC Sen Jim DeMint takes to The Corner this afternoon to pen a post in support of DeVore, whom he's endorsed.

The post doesn't make any mention of today's kerfuffle, but the timing is interesting.

Chuck DeVore, a California state Assemblyman running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California, is working to defuse comments that seemingly made him out to be a birther-sympathizer.

"The president is doing himself no favors by spending millions of dollars to block the release of documents surrounding his birth certificate," DeVore said to Dave Weigel. "As long as the president keeps fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of such things, people are going to remain skeptical."

Sarah Palin's new book, which was purchased by ABC News at a Washington-area bookstore on Monday, maintains that she wasn't motivated "alone" by an ambition to seek higher office when she stepped down as governor of Alaska.

She suggests, however, that her resignation has left her in a strong position to run for president by touting comments to CNN by a well-known Republican strategist who thinks Palin's move was "brilliant."

"One of the only commentators who called it right was Mary Matalin, who noted that my strategy would disarm my opponents and free me up to travel and raise money and awareness for worthy causes," writes Palin.

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.
There's one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Late Monday, officials with the Recovery Board created to track the stimulus spending, said the mistakes in crediting nonexistent congressional districts were caused by human error.

Sarah Palin may be mum about her presidential ambitions, but the former GOP vice presidential candidate is opening up about her campaign experiences and has some harsh words for President Obama.
In an interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters, Palin, whose book, "Going Rogue: An American Life," lands on bookshelves Tuesday, said she would give the president a mere four for his job performance on a scale of one to 10.

"There are a lot of decisions being made that I — and probably the majority of Americans — are not impressed with right now," said Palin, the former governor of Alaska. "I think our economy is not being put on the right track, because we're strayed too far from, fundamentally, from free enterprise principles that built our country. And I question, too, some of the dithering, and, hesitation, with some of our national security questions that have got to be answered for our country."

Gov. David Paterson openly criticized the White House on Monday, saying he thought it was a terrible idea to move alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists to New York for trial.

"This is not a decision that I would have made. I think terrorism isn't just attack, it's anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country," he said.

Paterson's comments break with Democrats, who generally support the President's decision.

Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman has "unconceded" in New York's special House election after reports that the vote margin between him and Rep. Bill Owens (D) has narrowed.

Hoffman conceded the race on Election Night after learning he trailed Owens by 5,335 votes. But the Syracuse Post-Standard reported last week that the margin had shrunk to 3,026 votes after recanvassing.

Social-networking site Twitter plans to end a service that links prominent message posters with new users, a service that was criticized in California because of perceived unfairness toward GOP gubernatorial candidates.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Monday the San Francisco-based company will overhaul its "suggested users" list, which links Twitter users with a pool of about 500 celebrities, sports figures and politicians they might want to follow.

"That list will be going away," Stone said at a conference in Malaysia. "In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."

Nobody denies that Chuck DeVore is a hard-working candidate. His bid to replace Barbara Boxer as senator is centered on tirelessly driving up and down the state building grassroots support. But he’s also working hard—maybe too hard—at painting his primary opponent, former Hewlett Packard chief Carly Fiorina, as a liberal “Scozzafava” Republican. Being loose with her record simply to score cheap political points threatens to damage his credibility in the long term.

It’s not that DeVore doesn’t have a case to make—he owns the more conservative resume—it’s that in his zeal to cast Fiorina as a moderate he takes artistic license with the facts.

A statement from former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani concerning today's news that Guantanamo Bay detainees will face trial here in New York:

Returning some of the Guantanamo detainees to New York City for trial, specifically Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has now brought us full circle — we have regressed to a pre-9/11 mentality with respect to Islamic extremist terrorism. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should be treated like the war criminal he is and tried in a military court. He is not just another murderer, or even a mass murderer. He murdered as part of a declared war against us — America.

This is the same mistake we made with the 1993 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center. We treated them like domestic criminals, when in fact they were terrorists. In the dangerous world we live in today, a nation unable to identify and properly define its enemies is a nation in danger.

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.

The president's plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House.
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Yeah, right!

Virginia Democratic Sen. James Webb has just released a statement disagreeing with the president's decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists in civilian courts in the United States:

I have never disputed the constitutional authority of the President to convene Article III courts in cases of international terrorism. However, I remain very concerned about the wisdom of doing so. Those who have committed acts of international terrorism are enemy combatants, just as certainly as the Japanese pilots who killed thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor. It will be disruptive, costly, and potentially counterproductive to try them as criminals in our civilian courts.
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Read all of Webb's statement

I don't typically watch Oprah. But I won't miss Monday's interview with Sarah Palin. The appearance is supposed to be about Ms. Palin's new memoir, but a lot more will be riding on the encounter than book sales.

After last year's brutal presidential campaign, Ms. Palin is now reintroducing herself to the American public. Nothing less than her future in American politics—and a possible run for the White House in 2012—hangs in the balance.

Ms. Palin has two problems. The first is that she's become one of the most polarizing figures in the country. The second is that voters continue to worry about her qualifications for the presidency, a concern that her abrupt resignation from office last July intensified.
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Absolutely yes. Palin can make a comeback. It may take some time and 2012 may be too soon. But, watch out for 2016 and beyond.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.
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Read all of this piece

U.S. prosecutors plan criminal trials for five men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and military tribunals for five others held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, self-described mastermind of the attacks, and four others will be tried in New York federal court. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday he expects to order prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the five cases.

Five other detainees held at the prison, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried in revamped military commissions, the Justice Department announced.
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I mean how stupid is this? How many terrorist bomb threats will there now be in New York City as a result?

Eric Holder, the Attorney General is as big a moron as he is a crook.