LIGHTNING ROUND: OPPOSITION PARTY FAIL.

• President Obama's expansion of same-sex benefits to federal workers seems less like his coming around on the issue of gay rights and more like conceding something to get critics off his back. And for all the speculation that Obama doesn't want to insert himself into the culture wars or repeat Bill Clinton's mistakes, his track record implies that he's just not that interested in the issue.
• While it's good that there is renewed focus in Congress on investigating the extent of the NSA's domestic surveillance program, detailed in this New York Times story, I hope that members of Congress learn the lesson that granting the federal government this kind of power is never a good idea while the country (and Congress, apparently) is in a state of cowed fear. Both Sens. Feinstein and Coburn of the Intelligence Committee are disputing the report.
  
• It shouldn't surprise us that congressional Republicans are trusted about as much as insurance companies to reform health care. After all, they're criticizing the Dems' legislation for things like promoting exercise and pushing for CBO analysis of the HELP committee's incomplete bill so they could later attack it. But most tellingly, Republicans are still obsessing over not being invited to the ABC sit-down with Obama even as the House GOP releases their own plan that lacks any details or cost estimates.
  
• If you'll recall, one of the early competing narratives explaining the Iranian election results was that Western journalists were only seeing the side of the country that was urban and upscale, completely missing the copious support for Ahmadinejad in rural parts of the country. It turns out that theory doesn't hold up under scrutiny. It's still possible that Ahmadinejad won, but not with a huge margin explained by a wellspring of rural support.
• It's amusing that conservatives really think they have Paul Krugman on the ropes for digging up a quote from a 2002 column that appears to have him calling for a housing bubble. The only problem is, if you actually bother to read the column -- go ahead, it's only 707 words -- it's clear that Krugman is analyzing the impact of such a bubble, not calling for one. And from that point of view, the piece is quite prescient.
• Remainders: The war supplemental narrowly passes in Congress; the administration hypes a new climate change report; a sex scandal becomes the press' new shiny toy; and Obama predicts 10 percent unemployment.

--Mori Dinauer