Reps. Tom McClintock (R-CA) and Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) made the comments at a discussion panel at the Cato Institute on Thursday.

Going into Iraq "was a mistake because I thought we had to finish the job in Afghanistan," Rohrbacher told the panel, echoing a popular Democratic talking point at the time.

"In retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake," Rohrbacher said. "Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood … all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”

Asked by panel moderator Grover Norquist what percentage of Republican congressmen agree with that view, McClintock said, “I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”

McClintock added that he believed the Bush administration also made a mistake in the way it entered the Afghanistan war. "I think virtually everyone would agree going into Afghanistan the way we did was a mistake," he said.

It's worthwhile noting that McClintock and Rohrbacher were speaking at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning conservative think tank. Libertarians have famously stood apart from their conservative brethren in opposing the Iraq war and other foreign wars.

The Republicans' remarks came a day before former national security adviser and state secretary Condoleezza Rice voiced regret at the bloody aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But she said the Bush administration had in the end "got it right" in the country.

Rice was unrepentant about the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

"I would many times over liberate Iraq again from Saddam Hussein. I think he's a danger to the Middle East," she said in a speech at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, when asked what she thought she had got wrong.

"We should have worked with the tribes. We should have worked with the provinces. We should have smaller projects than the large ones that we had." Nonetheless, she insisted, the administration had "finally got it right" in 2006, the year before a new "surge" strategy was employed to bring down levels of unrest.

-- With AFP

The following video was uploaded to YouTube by the Cato Institute.

The Republican primary race for California's secretary of state is turning unusual -- to put it mildly.

The Orange County registrar has confirmed that Orly Taitz -- the de facto leader of the "birther" movement trying to prove President Obama wasn't born in the United States -- has qualified to run for secretary of state. And her main opponent is a man who has only ever voted once.

Taitz' move appears to be related to her campaign to have Obama disqualified as president. Secretaries of state are responsible for elections.

Taitz, who has filed and so far lost numerous lawsuits challenging Obama's eligibility for the presidency, told WorldNetDaily that if elected, she will use her office to pursue an investigation of Obama's citizenship.

Taitz has criticized the current secretary of state, Debra Bowen, for not investigating Obama's citizenship, reports the OC Register.

But Obama isn't the only politician Taitz is challenging on the grounds of eligibility. She is using the same tactic against her Republican primary opponent for secretary of state, Damon Dunn. Taitz filed a criminal complaint against Dunn, claiming he is ineligible to run in the GOP primary because he hasn't been registered as a Republican long enough.

Taitz asserted that Dunn "is really a Democrat trying to fraudulently run on a Republican ticket in order to prevent a Bona fide [sic] Republican from running against a Democrat."

An investigation by Spencer Kornhaber at OC Weekly into her claims concluded they were "false."

Kornhaber can't help but notice that both Obama and Dunn are black. "Orly Taitz seems to have a thing for raising questions about black politicians' eligibility for office," he quips.

And Dunn himself is also no stranger to controversy. It emerged last fall that the former NFL receiver had only ever voted once.

"Dunn, who has never run for public office and aims to become the state's chief elections official, said he voted for the first - and only - time in his life in May 2009," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Dunn is contrite about his shortcomings. He told the Chronicle he grew up in poverty in a Texas trailer park, where voting was not a priority.

"No one in my family voted," he said. "I was not involved in the process ... I have seen how my errors have cost me."

Earlier this week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a $20,000 fine slapped on Taitz by a federal judge in Georgia last year, who described one of her lawsuits challenging Obama's eligibility as "frivolous."

The California bar has now begun to investigate the possibility of disciplinary action against Taitz. According to Talking Points Memo, "When Clay Land, the judge in the Georgia case, imposed the fine on Taitz in October, he also directed that a copy of his scathing 43-page order be sent to the California bar 'for whatever use it deems appropriate.'"

Disciplinary actions can range from private reproval to disbarment if a lawyer is considered to have a "history of misconduct" or to have engaged in a "serious violation."

"Mandela had to spend years in prison, fighting corruption in the government," Taitz told Talking Points Memo in an email. "Responding to an inquiry from the bar is not that bad in comparison."

And, in a sign that at least Obama's home state is getting tired of "birtherism," Hawaii is debating legislation that would allow it to stop responding to requests for Obama's birth certificate. Officials say they still receive 10 to 20 such requests per week.

Germany's finance minister says his government is considering sending spies to London and New York to monitor the activities of currency speculators.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the German Parliament on Tuesday that he may have to send spies to the world's two most important financial centers "to set up surveillance of who is getting together with whom for which kinds of speculative processes, and where,” according to a report at Bloomberg.

The move comes in the wake of Greece's debt crisis. Many European politicians and analysts blamed the crisis on currency speculation and credit default swaps, which they say caused the cost of servicing Greece's debt to jump this year, forcing the country into severe spending cuts that have led to a wave of protests and riots across the country. Greece's debt crisis, in turn, has caused the euro to plummet in value.

"A market frenzy in recent weeks saw traders make bets worth billions of dollars against the euro and on the chances of Greece not repaying its massive debts. Those market worries have undermined the currency," AP reported last week.

Schaeuble's remarks come after news reports last month that Spain had ordered its intelligence service to investigate “whether attacks by investors and the aggressiveness of some Anglo-Saxon media are being driven by market forces and challenges facing the Spanish economy, or whether there is something more behind this campaign,” in the words of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero.

The trend reflects a growing sense in European politics that many financial activities being pursued by large international banks and investors are harmful to national economies, and perhaps should be outlawed.

But the US government is resisting this sort of rhetoric. Europe and the United States have been embroiled in an increasingly bitter fight over how much to rein in the financial sector after the collapse of 2008. European finance ministers have called for restricting currency speculation, credit default swaps as well as hedge funds, which often bet against currencies. But the US contingent, led by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, has been resisting calls for such dramatic moves.

Yet even in the US, the bets placed against the euro have raised some alarm. The New York Times notes that "the Justice Department’s antitrust division is said to be examining whether at least four hedge funds colluded on a bet against the euro last month."

TIME TO TORTURE CURRENCY SPECULATORS?

Economist Vanessa Rossi told Bloomberg that Germany's intelligence agency could use the same tools used in fighting terrorist funding and money laundering to go after currency speculators.

“Within continental Europe there are those that do think that financial speculators are sort of terrorists,” she said. “In their lexicon it is economic terrorism, so they may view this as more serious than the US or UK.”

At times, that view has taken extreme forms. Earlier this month, Luxembourg's finance minister, who heads the European Union's group of finance ministers, said financial markets were "blackmailing" the euro zone with their bets, and metaphorically threatened currency traders with torture.

“We have the instruments of torture in the basement,” he said, “and we’ll show them when it’s necessary."

The plan to send spies to London and Wall Street is "sinister and silly,” Philip Whyte of the Centre for European Reform told Bloomberg. He added that the idea reflects “a longstanding paranoia about the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.”

To the average visitor, the two towns appear to be one. In fact, the towns are so integrated that the border runs right through a public library -- a convenient venue for extradition hearings.

For years Canadian visitors to Derby Line often didn't notice the little US Customs booth on the side of the town's main street -- and ended up getting a dressing-down from a border guard when they inadvertently entered the United States.

But for the residents of Derby Line, crossing back and forth between the US and Canada unfettered had been no big deal for years.

But last year, gates went up at the major crossings in the town, "as part of added security measures," reports WCAX. And now, at least one resident of Derby Line has been arrested for doing what he had been doing for years -- crossing into Canada for a bite to eat.

Derby Line village trustee Buzz Roy was recently arrested and fined $500 for crossing the street by foot to grab a pizza on the Canadian side.

Roy says he's been crossing the border in his home town for years without a problem, but one Saturday night last month, when he crossed the street into Canada, a Vermont state trooper noticed him, and notified the border patrol. They arrested Roy for crossing the border illegally.

"Steam was coming out of my ears from the treatment by the state cop. I felt that he had been misinformed about my ability to enter the country on Church Street. I've done it my entire life many many many times," Roy told WPTZ in Burlington.

Upset at what they see as the criminalization of normal behavior in their town, local residents have started a "Free Roy" campaign to draw attention to the arrest, handing out buttons to visitors, WPTZ reports.

"They steal your civil rights one at a time until they're all gone. It's time to take a stand," Roy said.

WCAX reports that a new federal initiative to increase security at the border has seen "an influx of law enforcement officers" whose presence will likely forever change the twin border towns.

Trained officers from sheriff's departments, State Police and local police departments are paid overtime to assist with security along the border as part of Operation Stone Garden.

The $60 million federally funded program started two years ago as a way to better secure the border.

Border Patrol agents argue the program has led to dozens of arrests. They hope people in these border communities will come to embrace the enhanced security, but acknowledge folks like Buzzy Roy may never be convinced.

The residents of Derby Line don't appear particularly concerned about security threats from Canada. Village trustee Keith Beadle told the Burlington Free Press that the new security measures have "irked just about everybody in town."

"For people in the village it feels like they’re living in some kind of quasi-police state, with police cars everywhere and people watching you. It’s not something we’re used to,” Beadle said. “Operation Stone Garden is a waste of time and especially of money."

Health insurance companies have become notorious for dropping coverage of clients with pre-existing conditions or those whose health problems become costly. But rarely has an insurer been accused of systematically targeting an entire class of people suffering from a particular condition.

But that is exactly what Assurant Health stands accused of, after recently released court documents reportedly show the company used complex computer algorithms to single out HIV patients and deny them health coverage.

Government regulators call the company's behavior "unprecedented."

A report from Reuters news service states that recently released court documents from a 2004 lawsuit by an HIV-positive college student reveal that Assurant, at the time known as Fortis, "had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV."

Reuters reports:

A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.

The news comes as the long-running health care reform debate edges closer to resolution. President Barack Obama, who has been campaigning in Washington and around the country to pass a health care reform package, has recently taken to strongly criticizing health insurers.

Writing in the New York Times, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that Fortis' policy on HIV highlights the crucial issues at stake in the health care reform debate.

The crucial thing to understand is that depending on how a few Democrats vote sometime soon, stories like this will either cease happening — or continue, and get much worse. The proposed health care reform would end discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, and therefore end the threat of rescission as well.

The court case that revealed the insurer's HIV policy involves Jerome Mitchell, who as a 17-year-old college student in 2002 contracted the HIV virus, and was soon informed by Fortis that his policy had been canceled. He sued, and in 2004 won a $15-million judgment that was later reduced to $10 million.

The court documents involved in his lawsuit against Fortis were sealed by a judge, but Reuters obtained several opinions from appellate judges overseeing the insurer's appeal of the verdict.

"We find ample support in the record that Fortis' conduct was reprehensible," wrote South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal, as quoted at Reuters. "Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell's life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety."

Michael G. Nettles, a state circuit judge for the 12th Judicial District of South Carolina, wrote that Fortis "gambled" with Mitchell's life.

"The court finds that Fortis wrongfully elevated its concerns for maximizing profits over the rights and interest of its customer," the judge wrote in his decision.

On Feb. 17, 2007, New Jersey state troopers arrived at McGacken's home, responding to an anonymous 911 call complaining of screams coming from McGacken's home. McGacken explained the noise was a bout of loud sex; his girlfriend appeared at the front door and corroborated his claim.

But officers searched his home anyway, and found enough marijuana -- including potted plants -- to put him away for 10 years on charges of producing a controlled substance.

Appealing the conviction, McGacken argued that, once police knew the noise was consensual sex, they no longer had reason to search his home.

But the appellate panel at the Superior Court of New Jersey disagreed. On Monday, they dismissed McGacken's appeal, stating that "the potential for harm was too severe for the police to accept an explanation for loud screaming that could have been a cover-up of its true source."

The ruling stated in part:

The police are not required to accept the explanation that a person answering the door gives for a distress call. While loud sex may have been a plausible source of screaming, that explanation was not so reliable that the police acted unreasonably in investigating further....

Moreover, by first questioning defendant and his girlfriend, the troopers discounted the possibility that someone may have made a false report of screaming. Defendant did not deny that screaming had occurred in his residence. His admission made it unnecessary for the police to seek corroboration to establish the reliability of the anonymous 911 call.

"The screaming, confirmed by the police to have occurred, gave [the police] an objectively reasonable basis to believe that a limited investigation was necessary to determine whether anyone else was in the home and in need of aid," explains the NJ Family Issues blog. "While loud sex may have been a plausible source of screaming, that explanation was not so reliable that the police acted unreasonably in investigating further."

Law.com reports that McGacken initially took few steps to prevent the police from entering his home. When he was asked for identification, he went upstairs to retrieve it and "did not object when a trooper followed him."

On the second floor, the trooper smelled raw marijuana and saw McGacken use his foot to push a tray under a couch. Asked what was on the tray, McGacken admitted it was marijuana. In the bedroom, the trooper saw bagged and loose marijuana as well as growing plants. Arrested, McGacken consented to a search of his home, resulting in the seizure of 12.5 ounces of loose and bagged marijuana, 15 plants and marijuana-related equipment and paraphernalia.

McGacken is serving a 10-year sentence with no possibility of parole for 39 months.

At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Petraeus told lawmakers that "the time has come to consider a change to 'Don't ask, don't tell.'"

But the four-star general qualified his statement, arguing that any change to the policy "should be done in a thoughtful and deliberative manner that should include the conduct of the review that [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates has directed."

Petraeus also said any change to the policy should "consider the views in the force on a change in the policy [that] would include an assessment on the likely effects on recruiting, retention, morale and cohesion and would include an identification of what policies might be needed in the event of a change."

The general's declaration will likely be praised by gay-rights advocates, but his insistence on Sec. Gates' review of the policy, expected to take all year, further suggests that a repeal of the controversial "Don't ask, don't tell" policy likely will not come this year.

That could frustrate some progressives who had been hoping the 17-year-old policy, which has seen at least an estimated 11,000 men and women in uniform ejected from the military over their sexual orientation, would come to an end this year.

On Monday, US House Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), head of the gay contingent on Capitol Hill, called on the administration to repeal the policy this year. And, as John Aravosis reported on AmericaBlog, Human Rights Campaign, the group leading the charge against DADT, has been pushing for a repeal of the law in 2010 since President Obama took office.

But Petraeus' support of a review indicates that the US military leadership is lining up behind President Obama's position, re-iterated in his State of the Union address, that the policy should end.

In February, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced his support for a repeal of the policy, saying ending DADT is "the right thing to do."

As The Hill notes, Petraeus was evasive about his position on DADT as recently as a few weeks ago, when he didn't answer a question on Meet the Press about the subject. That led some observers to speculate he would oppose the repeal in Tuesday's testimony.

Earlier this month, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) introduced legislation repealing the military's ban on gays serving openly.

The following video was posted to YouTube by ThinkProgress.

In a question-and-answer session, audio of which was obtained by the Virginia blog Not Larry Sabato, Cuccinelli outlines a strategy for how Obama's citizenship can be challenged in the courts.

(Audio follows below.)

"What can we do about Obama and the birth certificate thing?" an unidentified questioner asks.

"It'll get tested in my view when he signs a law and someone is convicted of violating it, and one of their defenses will be it's not a law if someone qualified to be president isn't signing it," Cuccinelli is heard saying.

"Is that something you can do as attorney general, can you ... do that or something?" the questioner asks.

"Well, only if there's a conflict where we're suing the federal government for a law they've passed," Cuccinelli replies. "So it's possible."

Cuccinelli then mentions that, in order to challenge the president's birth certificate, someone will have to step up with "proof" the president was not born in Hawaii in 1961, as his birth certificate states.

"Someone's going to have to come forward with nailed-down testimony that he was born in Place B, wherever that is. The speculation is Kenya," Cuccinelli said. "And that doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility."

It's unclear at what event Cuccinelli was speaking in that recording. The Not Larry Sabato blog says it is their "understanding" the tape was recorded when Cucinelli was attorney general-elect, before he took office in January of this year. But the blog won't release details, saying it would compromise the identity of the person who provided the tape on condition of anonymity.

Since taking office, Cuccinelli has made headlines by following a socially conservative path that some observers say strays from the path he and his Republican allies had promised voters in recent elections.

Earlier this month, Cuccinelli sent a letter to the state's public universities and colleges telling them that they can't protect gay students from discrimination in their anti-discrimination policies, because Virginia as a whole doesn't have such a policy.

Gov. Bob McDonnell had initially refused to extend an eight-year-old executive decree protection gays. But a few days after Cuccinelli's letter, perhaps stung by criticism, McDonnell announced he would not take action against schools that don't rescind their protections for gay students. And in a surprising turnaround, the governor extended anti-discrimination policies to gay state workers.

Last month, Cuccinelli joined the state of Texas and the US Chamber of Commerce in taking the EPA to court over its classification of carbon dioxide as a health threat, a move that has been harshly criticized by environmental advocates. Cuccinelli has also declared that he supports an effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood in Virginia.

The following audio was posted to YouTube by the Not Larry Sabato blog, March 15, 2010.

"Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II," Howell Raines wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post.

"Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals," Raines continued.

His words drew a sharp rebuke from a Fox News spokesperson who called it "ironic" that Raines would attack Fox's journalistic credibility, given he resigned as the Times' executive editor in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.

"We find it ironic that Howell is dispensing advice to other journalists after he nearly single-handedly destroyed the journalistic credibility of the New York Times," the unidentified Fox staffer told TVNewser.

Not all reaction to Raines' opinion piece was negative. Eric Boehlert at MediaMatters lauded the piece and argued Raines "didn't go far enough."

"As Raines notes in his column ... today's Obama-era Fox News has shredded any semblance of professional, modern day American journalism. It long ago cut the chord with that tradition," Boehlert writes. "And yet last fall, the tsk-tsking chattering class agreed that it was the White House that was way out of line when it fact-checked Fox News."

Blogger Marcy Wheeler at FireDogLake is less generous to Raines, pointing out that he was "the editor who oversaw Judy Miller’s Iraq War propaganda." Times reporter Judith Miller became the focus of controversy over her reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the US invasion -- reports that would later turn out to be false.

Miller was again in the spotlight in 2005, when she spent three months in jail for refusing to reveal to a court who provided her CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity in what would become the Plame affair.

"I’ll admit that when I first suggested that Judy Miller was not engaging in journalism when Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame to her, I wished that other journalists would have the courage to acknowledge that what she was doing was not journalism. It would have been nice, then, to have a column like this, calling on journalists to expose disinformation in the guise of journalism," Wheeler writes. "But really. Does Howell Raines have no sense of irony?"

That "sense of irony" reached as far as a column by Mark Kellner at the journalism Web site Poynter. Kellner wrote that Raines' piece "redefines chutzpah" in its casting of Fox News as irresponsible, while ignoring the Times' own perceived transgressions.

"Where was the NYTimes in (ahem) exposing the exploits of Messers. Spitzer, Paterson Jnr., Massa, Frank, Dodd and Kennedy(s)? Not at the head of the parade," Kellner writes. "If Mr. Raines wishes to engage in fantasy, that's his privilege. But it's a shame that the Washington Post chose to inflict it on the rest of us."

In his column, Raines asserts that commerce is behind the trend towards Fox-style journalism.

Why has our profession, through its general silence -- or only spasmodic protest -- helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC.

Ailes [once said] that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist -- audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d'etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation's political discourse.

Raines resigned as executive editor of the Times in 2003, after reporter Jayson Blair was discovered to have fabricated numerous stories he had written. The Times' management had hoped Raines' resignation would restore the paper's credibility following the scandal.

Marcelas Owens of Seattle lost his mother in 2006 after the 27-year-old woman was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a condition that can lead to heart failure if left untreated. Due to missed work, Tiffany Owens lost her job, and with it her health insurance. Not long after, she died of her disorder.

Owens appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference flanked by the Democratic leadership on Thursday, the day after he turned 11 years old.

"I don't want any other kids to go through the pain that our family has gone through," Owens said. "My grandma and I want Barack Obama and Congress and everybody to come together and to help get the health care bill passed."

The image of an 11-year-old boy with a sad story championing the health reform effort appeared to be too much for some conservative commentators, with columnist Michelle Malkin accusing the Democrats of "wielding the human kiddie shield as its last-stand defense for Demcare."

Malkin wrote, "Have you noticed something about the audiences that President Obama has cherry-picked to cheer his government health care takeover roadshow? They're getting younger and younger."

She added that if President Obama didn't end his public appearances on health care soon, "he'll be peddling Democratic reconciliation tactics on 'Dora the Explorer' and 'SpongeBob SquarePants'."

Malkin used that expression, "human kiddie shield," before, when President Obama answered an 11-year-old girls' question at a health care town hall in New Hampshire last August. "Look for Dems to play the kiddie human shield card to the hilt," she wrote.

Tim Graham at NewsBusters reported that Owens "has an entire family of liberal activists," and castigated the news media for not focusing more on his family's connections to Seattle activist groups.

Criticizing CBS' and MSNBC's coverage, Graham wrote that "what neither network shared with the viewer is how Marcelas has become a constant talking point for his home-state Democrat Sen. Patty Murray, and how he is a spokesman for a liberal lobby, the Washington Community Action Network."

The Seattle Times reports that Owens' mother "had been active with Washington Community Action Network, a Seattle-based consumer advocacy organization."

Also writing at NewsBusters, Matthew Balan criticized CNN correspondent Jim Acosta for calling Owens a "brave young man."

Arthur Delaney at the Huffington Post notes that the controversy over Owens follows a pattern that has played out before. In 2007, 12-year-old Graeme Smith became the target of muckraking when he urged President George W. Bush not to veto an expansion of children's health benefits.

Marcelas Owens appears to be holding up well under the political pressure, saying he has "no bad comments" about people who oppose health care reform.

"Their opinion is their opinion and they can say what they want about me," Delaney quoted Owens. "And I'll just keep turning around and doing what I'm doing."