* Hank Paulson carries the budget flag up to the hill, and by the end of the day is looking for an ATM to fully fund every program. [WP]
* President Bush has a sense of Morissettian irony over the Senate’s support of Gen. David Petraeus while opposing the surge. [WP]
* Luckily, Robert Gates has a back-up to the back-up plan. [LAT]
* Thanks to Walnuts, Ill Hill, and Barry Hussein the ‘08 election will likely cost over a billion dollars. [WP]
* MPAA uses actor from West Philadelphia to illustrate their blue-collar base. Patrick Leahy really liked The Queen. [NYT]
* Military wants civilian agencies to “step up” and “get ‘r done” in Iraq. [NYT]
* Which six states want to expand death penalty powers? Exactly the ones you think. [USAT]

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

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