Reuters:

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A Kenyan man bit a python who wrapped him in its coils and hauled him up a tree in a struggle that lasted hours, local media said Wednesday.

Farm manager Ben Nyaumbe was working at the weekend when the serpent, apparently hunting for livestock, struck in the Malindi area of Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast.

“I stepped on a spongy thing on the ground and suddenly my leg was entangled with the body of a huge python,” he told the Daily Nation newspaper.

When the snake coiled itself round his upper body, Nyaumbe resorted to desperate measures: “I had to bite it.”

Pollster:

DailyKos.com (D) / Research 2000
4/6-8/09; 600 likely voters, 4% margin of error
Mode: Live Telephone Interviews

Virginia

2009 Governor - Democratic Primary
Moran 24, McAuliffe 19, Deeds 16

2009 Governor - General Election
McDonnell 37, Moran 36
McDonnell 40, Moran 33
McDonnell 38, Deeds 31

Rasmussen:

Democrats, by a two-to-one margin, say that the U.S. has been arrogant and dismissive of Europe. Republicans, by a three-to-one margin, disagree. So do most voters not affiliated with either major party. However, while 51% of unaffiliated reject the notion that the United States has been arrogant, 32% say it’s true.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Democrats say the U.S. relationship with Europe is Very Important. That view is shared by 44% of Republicans and 43% of unaffiliateds.

By an 8-to-1 margin, Republicans say it would be better for Europe to become more like the United States. Democrats agree, but by a much more modest 45% to 29% margin. As for those not affiliated with either major party, 46% say Europe should be more like the United States while 27% hold the opposite view.

Democrats overwhelmingly believe relations with Europe will improve over the next year while a plurality of Republicans expect the opposite. Forty-two percent (42%) of unaffiliateds expect the relationship to improve while 23% expect it to get worse.

Politico:

The heavy coverage of mass shootings in Binghamton, N.Y., North Carolina and Washington state and the cop killings in Pittsburgh may have little effect on the nation’s appetite for new gun laws.

A Gallup Poll out this morning shows support for a ban on private handgun ownership at an all time low, with 29 percent of respondents saying they support such a law. It’s the smallest percentage since Gallup started asking this question 50 years ago. Interestingly, gun control advocacy hit its all time high in 1959, according to this poll. It’s important to note that the poll was taken before the massacre in Binghamton, but other mass shootings have been in the news for a few weeks.

Macleans:

What’s my line on legalized polygamy? Oh, I pretty much said it all back in 2004, in a column for Ezra Levant’s Western Standard. Headline: “It’s Closer Than They Think.”

Well, a mere half-decade down the slippery slope and here we are, with the marrying kind of Bountiful, B.C., headed for the Supreme Court of Canada. Five years ago, proponents of same-sex marriage went into full you-cannot-be-serious eye-rolling mode when naysayers warned that polygamy would be next. As I wrote in that Western Standard piece:

“Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.”

The Times Online:

The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.

Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.

AP:

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A Wisconsin man has acknowledged that he illegally cast an absentee ballot for Barack Obama in his wife’s name to fulfill her dying wish.

Stephen Wroblewski (roe-BLESS-key) of Milwaukee said Wednesday he plans to plead guilty to voter fraud to end the embarrassing episode.

He says he contacted prosecutors the day after the fall election after learning that the ballot he cast for his wife was being challenged.

AP:

DALLAS (AP) - Nikolas Colton Evans had talked about how much he wanted to have a child, but the 21-year-old died after he was punched and hit his head on the ground in a fight. That would have been the end of it, if it weren’t for his determined mother, a court order and a urologist.

Missy Evans has harvested her dead son’s sperm and hopes to find a surrogate and one day raise her son’s child. It’s a decision that ethicists say raises troubling questions; one called the potential offspring a “replacement child.”

Evans isn’t concerned about what others might think. She says she is only doing what her son would have wanted.

“He would love me so much for doing this,” she said.

WSJ:

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council stalemate over North Korea’s rocket launch is turning into an early test of the Obama administration’s U.N.-focused multilateralism.

Six days after U.S. President Barack Obama called for swift punishment of North Korea, the Security Council hasn’t acted.

While Japan is pressing for a quick response, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice has tried to downplay expectations of immediate progress.

China and Russia have resisted a draft Security Council resolution, put forth by the U.S. and Japan, that would at a minimum enforce military and financial sanctions imposed on North Korea after its underground nuclear weapons test in October 2006.

The sanctions were never fully implemented in deference to six-party talks among Russia, China, the U.S., Japan and the two Koreas to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program.

The AP:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Google Inc.’s chief executive told newspaper publishers Tuesday that they should continue to rely on advertising but seek new ways to reach readers.

Without providing specific recipes, Eric Schmidt laid out a few possibilities, including a site for medicine similar to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which lets users collectively contribute and edit entries. He urged publishers to focus on mobile technology and the development of new platforms for delivering news.

Schmidt said there’s still room for subscription and pay-by-the-piece journalism but he emphasized advertising, the source of 98 percent of Google’s revenue, thanks to its success matching ads with a user’s search terms and other keywords.

The Fix:

Former Pennsylvania Rep. Pat Toomey made his primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter official today, accusing the incumbent of being “complicit” in an effort by President Barack Obama and Congress to steer the country far to the ideological left.

“This is the most liberal president in the history of the Republic at a time when a liberal Congress is pursuing an agenda to take America way left on economic policy,” said Toomey in an interview this afternoon with the Fix. “We need someone who is going to stand up and fight back.”

Toomey cited the “lurch to the left” by the Obama Administration as well as Specter’s vote in support of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan as the main motivators in pushing him into the Senate race. (He had also been actively mulling a run for the open governor’s seat in 2010.)

Politics Nation:

Former Delegate Brian Moran leads his two Democratic primary opponents, according to a new Daily Kos/Research2000 poll. Moran leads with 24%, followed by Terry McAuliffe with 19% and Creigh Deeds with 16%.

McAuliffe is the only one of the three Democrats whom more voters hold an unfavorable (36%) opinion of than favorable (35%). Moran has a 36%/33% fav/unfav rating, and Deeds is at 34%/30%.

Moran also performs the best against Republican candidate Bob McDonnell, who resigned as state attorney general to run for governor.

McDonnell 37 - Moran 36 - Und 27
McDonnell 40 - McAuliffe 33 - Und 27
McDonnell 38 - Deeds 31 - Und 31

Weekly Standard:

Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, named after the founder of the American Birth Control League, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood in the 1940s. (more…)

HT RCP:

Politico:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) knocked Obama via Twitter Friday, criticizing the president …

… for his response the hostage situation involving pirates off the coast of Somalia.

“The correct answer to piracy is to destroy it not negotiate with it Seals can retake the lifeboat Track every boat leaving Somalia,” Gingrich tweeted.

“Under no circumstance should any boat carrying hostages be allowed to reach Somalia pirates are ‘outside the law’ and a threat to everyone,” he added.

Thebigmoney.com:

Smoot-Hawley. The words alone are enough to evoke your stifling high-school economics class. The 1930 trade-decimating bill is the most infamous case study showing that protectionism-the use of tariffs, quotas, and other measures to shield domestic companies from foreign competition-is bad for everyone: Consumers pay more, productivity suffers, and the global economy slows.

Yet there it was, all the same, tucked into Page 189 of the 407-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (PDF), signed by President Obama on Feb. 17-a reminder that old habits die hard. Section 1605, the now-infamous “buy American” clause: “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by the Act may be used for a project … unless all of the iron, steel, and manufactured goods used in the project are produced in the United States.”

Politico:

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) touted his fiscally conservative record as senator and as former governor of Indiana to explain his opposition to President Barack Obama’s budget on “Fox News Sunday.”

Bayh, a leading contender to be Obama’s running mate last year, was one of only two Democrats to vote against the president’s budget. He also has formed a 15-member group of centrist Senate Democrats called the Moderate Dems Working Group.

“I’ve been a fiscal conservative throughout my career. It’s nothing personal to the president, ” Bayh said. “In the short run, I agree with the president. We do need to stimulate the economy. The government needs to step in… In the long run, I think the deficits and the debt are too high. We need to get those under control. So that was the reason for my vote there.”

Club for Growth:

From Bloomberg:

[A]bout one-quarter of the House and Senate members who retired or lost elections last year have found new jobs with lobbying firms, where business is booming as Obama pushes for multitrillion-dollar changes in federal banking, health care, energy and military procurement policies.

Hot Air:

Over in the Greenroom, Cold Warrior wonders whether The One would issue similar demands for a speech delivered at, oh, say, the D.C. Islamic Center. Good point, although given the persistence of the smear about him being a closet Muslim, I’m guessing that no speeches in any Islamic fora (at least domestically) are in the offing anytime soon. CNS has photos of the “IHS” on the Georgetown pediment both before and after it was covered up; the inscription seems sufficiently high off the ground that he wouldn’t have to worry about it appearing in-frame in video taken of the speech, which makes me wonder what this is really about. Maybe they figured jihadis would use photos of him beneath the “IHS” symbol for propaganda about how he’s a Crusader leading the war of the cross against the poor, misunderstood mujahedeen?

Laura Bush didn’t ask for the symbol to be covered when she spoke there three years ago. Not sure if that’s analogous or not.

American Spectator:

When all of these factors are put together, the 2003 BlueCross BlueShield study determined that 8.2 million Americans are actually without coverage for the long haul, because they are too poor to purchase health care but earn too much to qualify for government assistance. Even being without insurance still doesn’t mean they won’t have access to care, because federal law forbids hospitals from denying treatment to patients who show up at the emergency rooms. (more…)

Cato:

I count both Ramesh Ponnuru and Ezra Klein as friends.  (I’m so post-partisan.)  Why, oh why must they force me to choose between them??

Ponnuru had an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times where he reaffirmed his membership in the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.  Klein responded in a way that’s sure to satisfy his base, but I think he left the reality-based community wanting.  Are you ready for the fisk?

Klein suggests that if “80+ percent of Americans . . . think the system needs fundamental changes or a complete rebuild,” then 80+ percent of Americans must support universal coverage.  Hmmm, bit of a stretch.  In fact, I can recall one poll where nearly one-third of likely Democratic primary voters rejected universal coverage.

The Star:

TOPEKA | Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback acknowledges that abortion opponents are upset with him for not opposing Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination as U.S. secretary of health and human services.

But he told the Topeka Capital-Journal for a story published Friday that “there’s a practicality” to his decision.

Politico:

It’s not Kim Jong-Il, but at least one foreign leader is heeding Barack Obama’s call for “a world without nuclear weapons.”

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Der Spiegel that “These weapons are militarily obsolete today,” and called for the remaining handful of U.S. warheads stored at the Bundeswehr air base to be “removed from Germany.”

While Germany once held many such nuclear weapons, most were removed when the Cold War ended, and America now has less than 100 nuclear missiles stored throughout Europe.

The call sets Steinmeier, the center-left Social Democratic Party’s candidate for chancellor, against current Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, who backs continuing to store the U.S. warheads.

Redstate:

I was looking for quotes from this highly enjoyable Vanity Fair article (via AoSHQ & And Still I Persist) that would illustrate the haplessness of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (”He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatsoever of region or ethnicity in his speech” was a good example*) - or at least complement the vicious, yet accurate analysis that the picture above represents - but these two paragraphs blew me away completely. Particularly the second one:

Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as C.F.O. When she took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com**, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

If you felt any sorrow for the New York Times‘ travails, stop right now. Never mind that it’s a liberal-leaning paper that doesn’t want to admit it (the first part of that is no big deal, the second part of it is); never mind that it’s being run as essentially a vanity press (on an epic scale not seen elsewhere, to be sure); never even mind that the publisher’s so self-evidently a schlub that not even Vanity Fair could hide it. All of these things are survivable.

Weekly Standard:

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley gets creative. Wow.