I've never heard of Howard Huntsman, but Newsweek spends four pages on the former Republican Governor of Utah who Obama made Ambassador to China. He's back in DC and apparently contemplating a run for the GOP nomination.

He's a moderate, who believes the GOP needs to attract younger voters by hitting on three issues: immigration, gay rights and the environment.

Like Mitt Romney, he's a Mormon, which ordinarily would prompt concerns about whether they would be competing for the same supporters and donors. Huntsman doesn't have to worry about that.

Huntsman wouldn’t have much trouble financing the first leg of a presidential campaign on his own: his father, whose company invented the “clamshell” container for McDonald’s to package its Big Macs, is a billionaire.

[More...]

In November, Breckenridge voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative decriminalizing >adult possession of small amounts of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. It went into effect today.

Breckenridge is the first town in the country to decriminalize drug paraphernalia, and the second to allow recreational marijuana use (Denver is the first.) Since under state law, possession of up to an ounce of pot or drug parahphernalia carries a $100.00 fine and is classified as a petty offense, it can leave you with a criminal record. So the change in Breckenridge is a welcome one, and not that trivial.

It remains to be seen whether Breckenridge becomes the "Amsterdam of the Rockies", or takes business away from neighboring Frisco, Silverthorne and Dillon, which serve the same ski areas, or results in an uptick in arrests for related activity.

"Skiing while stoned" is still illegal under other laws. As is buying, selling and growing marijuana and smoking or displaying it in public.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown today announced a global summit on aid to Yemen to assist the country in eliminating the increasing number of radical extremists and al Qaida members who have moved there, in hopes of making it their next safe haven.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend.

Mr Brown will spend the next few days attempting to persuade Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, and other Gulf states to join forces with Britain and the US.

Brussels has expressed strong support for the initiative. The Prime Minister hopes that, between them, they can provide enough aid to offer Yemenis an alternative to radical Islam ....Mr Brown said yesterday: “The international community must not deny Yemen the support it needs to tackle extremism.”

This is welcome news. [More...]

Happy New Year! New Year's Day means college football. 5 games on tap today. Here are my selections:

The Outback Bowl features Auburn from the SEC versus Northwestern from the Big Ten. I am tempted to take Northwestern with the 8.5 points, given that this is clearly a down year for the SEC. But I think Auburn has the better players and should be able to cover. I like Auburn (-8.5).

Bobby Bowden's last game is the highlight of the Gator Bowl. FSU faces West Virginia, which is a 3 point favorite. Sentiment rules the day. I like the Noles (+3). More . . .

At 6:00 p.m. last night, Chief Justice John Roberts released the 2009 Report on the Federal Judiciary. The number of criminal cases filed reached its highest level since 1932:

Criminal case filings (including transfers) rose 8% to 76,655, and the number of defendants climbed 6% to 97,982, surpassing the previous record for the number of defendants, 92,714, set in 2003. The number of criminal cases reached its highest level since 1932, the year before ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed prohibition. In that year, 92,174 criminal cases were filed.

The number of marijuana cases increased while the number of other drug, firearms and explosives cases declined. Immigration cases increased big-time: [More...]

We wish everyone a happy and safe New Year's Eve.

As we usher in a new decade, if you had a magic wand, what would you fix first?

If you're going out, have a glass of champagne for us. If you're staying in and will be online, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

There's so much anonymous source material being touted in news articles, it's difficult to ascertain who's got the details right.

ABC News now has a different version of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father's reasons for contacting authorities regarding his son. Now, it's an alarming last phone call he made to his father.

ABC News' sources said that during Abdulmutallab's final call, he told his father the call would be his last contact with the family. He said that the people he was with in Yemen were about to destroy his SIM card, rendering his phone unusable.

And, the father went to Nigerian intelligence authorities who promptly took him to the CIA. [More...]

Update: 1/1/10: More confirmation here.

As I speculated here, new reports show the suicide bomber who killed 8 CIA agents yesterday at a U.S. intelligence post in Afghanistan, was a person being groomed to be an informant. He had been invited onto the base, and although he had never been there before, he wasn't searched. As to why he was invited on to the base:

An experienced Central Intelligence Agency debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose was to gain intelligence, the official said.

Among the seven CIA officials killed was the female base chief, a mother of three. While some reports say the attack happened in the gym, others says it happened as he was getting out of a car. Maybe she walked up to the car to greet the would-be informant and he blew himself up as he was getting out.

The Taliban, which has taken credit for the attack, says the bomber was posing as an Afghan officer. So the CIA thought they had flipped the guy, but he was playing them. This story is still developing.

The question seems to be, has American born Muslim cleric Al Awlaki gone from inspirational to operational?

ABC News reports he confirmed by phone to a reporter today that he is alive and the Yemeni strike last week missed him and his house. The WSJ has more on Al Awlaki who is emerging as a key figure in the investigation.

The Washington Post reports Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, Yemen's deputy prime minister for defense and security affairs, also says Al Awlaki is alive and that he may have met with Abdulmutallab at a house in Shabwa in Southern Yemen. The school he attended in August and September may have been a cover.[More...]

Voting ends today in the Third Annual ABA Jornal Blawg 100. If you can spare a few moments to vote for us, we'd really appreciate it. They've removed the vote counter so there's no way to know if we are still in the lead.

The A-team at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime—Jeralyn Merritt of Denver, T. Christopher Kelly of Madison, Wis., and Armando Llorens of San Juan, Puerto Rico—take a shamelessly liberal view of crime and justice news and issues.

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As Jeralyn wrote about earlier, the evidence is beginning to point to a serious intelligence failure regarding the latest attempted terror attack. Remember the smoking gun delivered to President Bush in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing?

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

Apparently, there was something similar, though never delivered to the President, overlooked by our intelligence agencies:

TPM touts (as does Kevin Drum, more to follow I am sure) this Spencer Ackerman piece as explaining "the potential trade-offs involved if you want the government to (over)react to every potential threat." I am loathe to draw conclusions without really knowing the facts, but even accepting the facts Ackerman assumes as true, his post reads like rather lame excuse making to me. Ackerman writes:

[I]s it really fair to point the finger at the intelligence community here? Abdulmutallab’s father told embassy officials in Abuja that he didn’t know where his son was, but might be in Yemen.

Um, yes it seems fair to me. Is it a usual occurrence that a father comes to the U.S. government reporting that his son has been radicalized and he suspects that his son is now with Al Qaida elements in Yemen? This seems highly UNUSUAL to me and should have raised a red flag regarding Abdulmutallab. More . . .