The AP analyzes Chicago's defeat in terms of top ten GOP talking points about Obama. Too overexposed, just a celebrity, etc.

The Hardin, MT, economic development official involved in bringing the American Police Force outfit to town is scrambling to reassure the local citizenry:

People who would believe that the State of Montana, or any town in Montana, would allow, much less invite, a private paramilitary security force to take over police duties, JUST DO NOT KNOW MONTANANS. Montana has more firearms, per capita, than virtually any other state in America. Gun control in Montana is best described as 'Being Able To Hit Your Target." Even many of our women practice gun control in Montana. Montana has more women who have concealed weapons permits, and know which is the business end, than most states have men who have them. Montanans don't post this type of misinformation on the internet, we post pictures of things we kill.

Conservatives revel in Chicago's Olympic defeat.

Just before an arson expert was supposed to give important testimony to a Texas board investigating the state's handling of a case that may have led to the execution of an innocent man, Gov. Rick Perry stepped in and removed three members of the board and appointed a new chairperson, who cancelled the scheduled testimony. Zack Roth reports.

I wonder if right-wingers would be less stoked if Chicago were part of America.

Chicago out in first round in Olympic picking.

Good for Obama, for trying to get the Olympics for the USA and for his home town. But I have to say I'm not terribly surprised if the Olympic big-wigs were not crazy about being big-footed by the American president. Maybe it had nothing to do with it at all. Apparently South America has never hosted the Olympics, making Rio a logical choice.

(I think I may go insane if I hear one more cable news yakker say they're "shocked" and "stunned." I mean, 9/11 it ain't, right? I think we'll recover.)

Late Update: Chuck Todd is saying that as recently as a few weeks ago, the White House had been resisting pressure from Chicago friends and supporters who were pushing for Obama to make a big push for Chicago.

Later Update: We're now living in the post-Chicago Olympics rejection era.

Even Later Update: TPM Reader JC doesn't agree ...

Despite your reaction it is pretty shocking given that Chicago and Rio were the frontrunners and the most recent guesses suggested Chicago had eeked out a bit of a lead.

Madrid has hardly been in the conversation.

And what's up with your "big-footed" comment? Heads of state were there from all the finalists.

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It turns out that setting up a paramilitary porn website with all sorts of dubious claims and offers of outlandish services can get you in some trouble. Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock has opened an investigation into whether APF may be violating Montana's Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act by making up all sorts of crap on its website.

McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt: A Palin presidency would be "catastrophic."

Late Update: Here's the video of the Schmidt's comment. Seeing the entirety of his comment, I think it's incorrect to say that he called a Palin presidency "catastrophic" but that her nomination would lead to Republican defeat in 2012, which would be a "catastrophic" result.

President Obama had a brief meeting with Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal aboard Air Force One before leaving Copenhagen this morning. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

In case you missed it, on his show last night David Letterman unexpectedly revealed the arrest yesterday of a blackmailer for attempting to extort $2 million from Dave with threats of exposing his history of affairs with female staffers on the show -- affairs Letterman cops to. Watch.

Back on again? After Sen. Kerry's attempt to stop him, Sen. DeMint's trip to Honduras to give moral support to the leaders of the recent coup plot appears to be back on.

Be Still! ...

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We show you ... in pictures: Joe Biden is on the loose!

Pawlenty on Cash-for-Clunkers: "There's a joke out now that says the main value of the Cash for Clunkers program may be that we'll get a lot of cars with Obama stickers off the road."

TPM Reader JS checks in from New Jersey ...

I claim no expertise on this race but for being a Jersey voter. However, my guess is that Daggett is not doing Corzine as much good as you think he is. Most Daggett votes are coming from Corzine, which I think you observe. Christie is the kind of candidate that Republicans can get behind (wingnutty enough, but not insane), so I don't think that many Daggett votes are coming from him. If Daggett weren't in the race, there would be a run on clothespins to wear in the voting booth, and Corzine would win.

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TPM Reader BL is skeptical ...

Is Sacha Baron Cohen doing another movie?

Crazy coat of arms. Over the top paramilitary photographs and dubious services. Mercedes with police decals on them. All in the heart of Black Helicopter conspiracy country and on the heals [of] collective wing nut seizure following Obama's election. This is just too over the top to be real.

Michael Hilton

As you know, we've been chronicling the story of Hardin, MT and American Police Force. And you've got to sympathize with the town leaders trying to support a decent-sized but unused prison facilitiy on a tax base of like 3500 people. They only went in with Hilton after they lost out on getting the Gitmo prisoners. So you could say they're kind of desperate. But with all the news coming out about APF chief Michael Hilton's lengthy criminal record and fraud and theft convictions, we've been trying to get in touch with the folks who gave him the contract to find out what was up and whether they're reconsidering the deal.

TPM's Zack Roth just got a hold of Hardin development official Al Peterson, who's still looking on the bright side. Yes, Hilton has a long criminal history, said Peterson. But that was before he got sober.

"He was an alcoholic, and everybody knows that. Did he do some not-the-best choices in his personal and professional life when he was not sober? Absolutely. He made some very unwise decisions."

Read the rest of the story here.

Montana town that contracted with American Police Force seeks to reassure citizens: "There are no commandos in the streets."

Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and US Attorney Chris Christie

Yesterday I mentioned a new Q-poll showing that while Jon Corzine is still doing awful (seldom getting over 40%), Chris Christie is falling fast enough that that could be enough for Corzine to win. Specifically, Christie probably can only win because of Corzine's unpopularity. Because Christie is now almost as unpopular as Corzine. But third-party candidate Chris Daggett is acting as a safety valve for anti-Corzinism. And that's pulling Christie down into Corzine territory.

Now it seems that Q-poll was no outlier. Monmouth is out with a new sounding this morning showing an almost identical result.

Read more »

As often seems to happen in these cases, the American Police Force website appears to be in the process of being taken down. But fear not, we saved the whole thing. And you can see all the best pages here in the TPM Document Collection.

You can see American Police Force is rooted in the proud tradition of American policing by the silhouetted commander next to the Serbian coat of arms.

Job opportunities at APF? Check out this page.

As noted earlier, APF provides cheating spouse surveillance services. This page has a good picture of what your cheating spouse and paramour will look like as they're hauled off with hands over their heads by a hooded commando with a machine gun.

Good times.

Never thought Big Bird would go birther on us. But then I've been surprised before.

US Attorney firing scandal alum, Sara Taylor, signs on with Tim Pawlenty prez campaign.

The Secret Service is writing off the Facebook poll on whether Obama should be killed as a dumb prank by a juvenile who will not be prosecuted.

Meet Becky Shay, 20-year vet reporter for the Billings Gazette who was covering the American Police Force story until Thursday night, when she abruptly resigned to sign on to be APF's new Director of Public Relations.

Back a few years ago when I was doing a lot of reporting on security companies working in Iraq, I was always amused, surprised, sometimes forced to laugh out loud at how often it seemed that the security company was just a shell offering to do any number of things they'd never done before but would be happy to figure out how to do if you gave them a contract. And when we were poking around in the background of American Police Force, the gonzo security outfit which took over that prison up in Montana, it seemed like pretty much the same story. Only to an almost infinitely more comical degree.

Among the services? Surveilling your cheating spouse, security for convoys in Iraq, rescuing kidnapping victims. And if rescuing kidnapping victims ain't your bag, APF will also kidnap people and hold them for ransom for you. (This latter part may actually just be a matter of sloppy writing. But with APF, who knows. They want to serve your needs; whatever they might be.) Sort of like working either the management or labor side of Labor Law. Similarly, they'll either provide protection from WMDs or provide you with WMDs. Whichever side you want to play. Also, "covert pregnancy testing."

It goes on and on. Rachel Slajda has the story.

Yesterday we told you about the creepily named American Police Force, the mysterious security company which had secured a ten year contract to run an unused but super-expensive prison in tiny Hardin, Montana but refused to say what they were going to do with it and proceeded to swagger around town like Solider of Fortune pin-ups.

There were conspiracy theories aplenty and a lot of legitimate suspicion that APF was a cover or proxy for some bigger and more well-known security outfit that didn't want to reveal its name.

So who runs APF? Good news! A convicted thief and sometime real estate swindler with about a dozen aliases from Orange County, California.

Sarah Palin's contribution to American letters is already at No. 3 on Amazon's bestseller list based on pre-orders alone. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Follow us on Twitter at @tpmmedia. Tweets on our best pieces, questions answered, updates on new stuff we're planning.

Does the RNC sponsor Newsmax? So says Newsmax.

Fmr. Speaker New Gingrich (R-GA)

You probably remember how earlier this month Newt Gingrich somehow managed to have his 527 Group award its "Entrepreneur of the Year" award to porn exec Allison Vivas and invite her to an "intimate event" with Newt himself. Vivas was game. But Gingrich's group soon rescinded the award.

Today we learned there's been another misunderstanding. Gingrich's outfit, American Solutions for Winning the Future, gave a new "Entrepreneur of the Year" award to Dawn Rizos, owner of The Lodge, which the Dallas Morning News calls "one of the best-known gentlemen's clubs in Dallas."

Alas, again, the offer has been rescinded. But TPM's Ben Frumin got a chance to talk to Rizos to get her take on getting the Newt jilt.

Our update on the latest Finance Committee public option manuevering.

For my part, I'm holding out for mandatory gun ownership for young men with high testerone levels and/or histories of aggressive or inappropriate behavior. But that's just me. I'm hardcore. Arizona's at least making some progress: legalizing guns in bars, as of today.

NRA's Western Region Director J.P. Nelson notes that "if a person starts drinking and gets in a shootout and kills someone, of course they're subject to criminal prosecution."

Michael Steele sends out fundraising pitch comparing President Obama's "fanaticism" to Stalin and Kim Jong Il.

Rep. Alan Grayson delivered a speech last night in which he made some really over the top comments -- namely that the Republican plan for health care is a) don't get sick and b) if you do get sick, die quickly. I'm not going to defend that. But is this really a controversy when half the Republican elected offiicials in the country have been saying for the last couple months, as a statement of purported fact, that the Democrats want to institute 'death panels' that will euthanize or deny care to people who can't justify their lives on utilitarian grounds?

Really?

And what reporters are stupid enough not to point this out?

This is truly one of the more bizarre stories I've seen in a while.

A shadowy security company, which seems to have no history and which no one seems to know much about, has secured a contract to take over a jail in the small town of Hardin, Montana.

Only the jail has no inmates and the company -- American Police Force (you can see their oddly Balkan crest in the pic to the left) -- won't say what it is they plan to do with it. And then there's the stuff that's been freaking out the locals. As Justin Elliott puts it in our post, "residents of Hardin, MT, were alarmed last week when executives from the firm, American Police Force, showed up in the town, which does not have its own police department, with Mercedes SUVs bearing "City Of Hardin Police Department" decals."

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Was John L. Perry, the guy plumping for a military coup in his latest column, just an 'unpaid blogger' at Newsmax? Try, decade-long weekly columnist and former senior editor of the site. More here on Perry's long history with the site.

Why is Obama still smiling? Take a look at the last month's worth of polling data.

Gov. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and US Attorney Chris Christie

As you know, Jon Corzine has had an awfully steep hill to climb for reelection this year in New Jersey. And the worst number for him is that nothing that has happened over the last few months has allowed him to make any real progress above 40% in the polls. And for an incumbent, that's t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e.

But Chris Christie's increasing unpopularity along with surging independent candidate Chris Daggett might make that enough to win.

The new Q poll out today has it Christie 43%, Corzine 39% and Daggett 12%.

Not great for Corzine, to put it mildly. But if Quinnipiac has the trend line right, when you figure in any Democrats inherent advantages in New Jersey, Corzine's still in this race.

Another way to look at this is that all Christie, a pretty staunch conservative for the Northeast, has going for him is Corzine's entrenched unpopularity. But Daggett seems to be functioning as an escape valve for a decent amount of that anti-Corzinism, letting a lot of the air out of Christie's bubble, as it were, thus keeping the race somewhat in play.

Reid cancels October recess to keep senate at work on health care reform.

As noted earlier, Newsmax appears to have taken down its article endorsing a potential military coup as the only way to solve the "Obama problem". But here's the full text of the article as it originally appeared.

As noted previously, the article not only endorsed the idea but seemed to suggest that top military brass were also planning or actively considering such an option.

Late Update: Newsmax is now distancing itself from Perry's column and they've sent us a statement to that effect.

Later Update: Let me just add a little more on this. As you can see, the angle Newsmax is taking on this is to suggest that Perry doesn't really have anything to do with them, that he's just an "unpaid blogger." Now I think we all understand that there are many sites -- Kos, Redstate, even TPM -- where readers are allowed to set up their own blogs or diaries and write their own stuff. These are essentially discussion areas. And it's a cheap shot when someone finds some nutty diary on Kos and says DailyKos published such and such. Newsmax is claiming that that's what's happening here. But we've taken a close look. And I think it's clear that that is not true. Perry has written a weekly column for the site going back to at least 1999. And he's prominently listed on the bio page of all Newsmax columnists, along with Dick Morris, Dr. Laura, Grover Norquist, Lanny Davis, Michael Reagan, Rep. Ernest Istook, etc. (You can see the page we're referring to here; scroll down and look for the red arrow on the left.) We'll have more for you on this shortly.

It seems that article advocating a military coup against President Obama was too much even for Newsmax. The article appears to have been taken down this morning. We'll be following up on this shortly.

Maureen Dowd explaining to Bill Safire what a thong is.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will unveil a draft of its climate-change bill today. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

The son of the census worker found dead in Kentucky: "My dad was a good man. No person on this planet is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill himself a year or so later."

We're hiring. Details here.

A new Newsmax column advocates a military coup to unseat Obama or usher in a period of "shared responsibility" between military government and a ceremonial Obama presidency. "A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible."

The author, John L. Perry, claims not to be 'advocating', only describing what he says is already being considered and is the best option available. But give it a read and you be the judge.

And just so we're totally clear, no, I'm not expecting any military coups. This is just one more nugget to add to the backdrop list of incitement now coming from the right.

Ooo boy. You know it's going to be good when one campaign has some big website meltdown and accuses the other campaign of website sabotage. Today it's incumbent Texas Gov. Rick Perry accusing his political opponents (he doesn't say Kay Bailey Hutchison directly, but certainly seems to be implying it) of being responsible for making his website crash during a live video webcast.

The eventual denouement is almost always a few weeks later when the police find it was some server configuration error or simple overload. It happened memorably and humiliatingly to Joe Lieberman back in 2006. Though he's still in the senate, so I guess he had the last laugh.

Meet the ghostwriter behind "Sarah Palin."

A friend posted a photo of this sculpture on Facebook this morning. The installation is by Chen Wen Ling and is part of his solo exhibit, "Emergency Exit," at the Joy Gallery in Beijing (click on photo for larger version):

Read more »

"Your Medicare benefits have been reduced by Congress due to increases in your Deductibles and 'Part A' Co-Insurance payment. Now, Medicare pays less of your health care cost and you are responsible for the unpaid balance."

That's the beginning of the official looking mailer TPM Reader Donna Price, 66, of Battle Ground, Washington received in the mail yesterday.

Find out who's behind this latest effort to bamboozle the nation's seniors.

Schumer on Finance Committee Vote ...

"To come up only two votes shy in the Finance Committee, the most difficult terrain for this proposal in the whole Congress, makes us increasingly optimistic that we can pass a bill with a good public option in the end. We had more votes at the end of the day than we did at the beginning, and many members who aren't yet for a public option are still approaching us to seek out areas of agreement."

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) is revising his weekend claim that President Obama is an "enemy of humanity." His spokesperson Bethany Haley now says he actually believes Obama is only an enemy of "unborn humanity" and should have been more clear.

What's more annoying than Wolf Blitzer's inability to grasp why it's a bad idea to allow all insurance companies to all compete across state lines? (Answer: it makes it virtually impossible to regulate insurers at all.) Sen. Rockefeller's inability to give a straightforward answer to the question.

Bonus complaint: Who can tell Wolf that the UK's insurance system is very different from the French one?

The Senate Finance Committee has moved on to debating Chuck Schumer's public option amendment. If Rockefeller's version of public option was a stout, Schumer's is an IPA. You can follow our coverage here.

Late Update: And Schumer amendment goes down 13-10.

Betsy McCaughey strikes the health care debate once more.

Slideshow: Obama's September.

The Senate Finance Committee rejected by a vote of 15-8 an amendment to the Baucus bill from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) that would have added a robust public option provision.

Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Tom Carper (D-DE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) joined with all the committee's Republicans in defeating the amendment.

We interrupt this public option coverage to bring you week #2 of Tom Delay on Dancing With the Stars, featuring Tom doing the tango until a wince-inducing final move. Watch.

Brian Beutler is liveblogging the afternoon session of the Senate Finance Committee debate on public option.

In a sense Jerry Brown never really left California politics, except for a relatively brief period in the mid-1980s. The turning point came with Brown's 1982 senate defeat at the hands of Pete Wilson, after which he appeared for many years to be someone with more political past than future. But it was only a short six years later that he was back as state party chairman. After another four years he was running for president again and half a dozen years later he was elected Mayor of Oakland.

Nonetheless, for those of us who grew up or lived in California in the 1970s it's a little stunning that Brown appears to be the Democrat best positioned to win the governorship again in 2010. Although the election is 14 months away (and that's several lifetimes in politics), by most conventional measures he's now the frontrunner to reclaim at 72 the governor's office he first held at 36.

The latest data shows him beating each of the possible Republican contenders.

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV): The U.S. health care system would beat out European health care if it were treating Europeans rather than Americans, who get in car accidents and shoot each other and stuff like that.

For the true health reform/public option mavens among you, Brian Beutler is doing live updates of the Finance Committee mark-up and debate and votes on the public option amendments in this post.

Leno and Maher read the forbidden electronic missives of Mark Foley and Mark Sanford. Watch.

Anything less than a superduper majority of 65 votes for health care reform in the Senate will not be legitimate, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) tells voters back home.

For the record, Nelson first won election in 2000 with just 51% of the vote and won re-election in 2006 just shy of his new superduper legitimacy standard, with 64%.

Rachel Maddow picks up on the birther infomerical we first reported on last week. Watch.

(And if you missed our highlight reel of said infomercial, you missed a classic.)

Ready for a new election year? It's almost upon us. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

There's been a lot of talk recently about whether the Drudge Report -- such an undeniable link-driving powerhouse for most of the last decade -- has lost its edge and relevance. And I've wondered whether this is why the site (not sure who's actually running it on a day to day basis now) has gone in so heavily for racist appeals over the last few months, particularly ones linking President Obama to black nationalism and violence committed by African-Americans.

Tonight's example comes after a day of press reports about the Obamas visiting Europe to press Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympics ...

I'm fascinated to see what kind of book "Sarah Palin" can turn around in 4 months.

Marina Zenovich

With Roman Polanski and his past making another unexpected appearance in headlines across the world I wanted to call (or remind) everyone's attention to the masterful 2008 documentary about his case: "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" by Marina Zenovich The link is to a review in Newsweek. And here's the entry at IMDB. I saw it because it had a run on HBO.

Read more »

Robert Reich says Tuesday is a big day for the Public Option.

Glenn Beck was honored on Saturday by the mayor of his hometown with the keys to the city -- a move not everyone in Mt. Vernon, WA, was happy with. We have the pics:

Sen. Paul Kirk (D-MA) does support a public option, his office confirms to TPMDC. Not a big surprise considering he was appointed to replace Ted Kennedy, but a good marker to have mailed down.

We may have some real live voter fraud -- not just a product of inflated GOP fantasies -- in a local election in upstate New York.

Gary Kreep

Like a political paleoanthropologist, Justin Elliott has traced the emergence of the modern teabagger back to the mid-1970s. Peering through the evolutionary mists, we see a simpler variant of the species, fending off disco and trying to survive the liberalism of Gerald Ford. The proto-teabagger would evolve into an anti-Obama birther, adapting new tools -- like the informercial -- to propagate the species.

In the kind of writing frenzy that befits a careful student of history like Sarah Palin, she's finished her memoir -- Going Rogue: An American Life -- in just four months and it'll be in stores in November.

A Republican candidate for state office in South Carolina threw a "machine gun social" fundraiser Saturday where an AK-47 was given away with 10-minutes of weapons training "so you don't shoot a right-wing radical by mistake."

New details emerged over the weekend about the death of that census worker in Kentucky, and they're not pretty -- but they also don't shed light on whether his death was related to his work on the census.

Rangel dings Obama for trying to nudge Paterson out of the governor's race.

Facebook poll 'asks' whether Obama should be assassinated.

Just so we're clear, to the best of my knowledge, anyone can put something like this up. It doesn't mean Facebook as a company is in any way involved or sanctions it. And presumably it will come down quickly. But it's more a sign of the times. As David just put it in one of our editorial chats, sort of the graffiti on the virtual wall of our times.

Sort of sad that the president has to have conversations like this ...

"One of the [G20] leaders, I won't mention who it was, he comes up to me and ... he says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.' He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everyone has health care and they're putting a Hitler moustache on you. That doesn't make sense to me, explain that to me,'" Obama said. "He didn't understand."

See the video here.

We'll be talking about this more over the course of the week. But if you look at various polling data, it seems there's a pretty decent chance that Congressional Republicans got well ahead of themselves in their collective August freak-out. A number of polls have shown that over the course of August -- well in advance of the president's relaunch of his health care push -- opposition to reform peaked and support began to rebound. What's more, the president's approval rating -- and particularly his approval on health care reform -- has started to rise. And in what could be a critical development, the latest polls are showing a growing number of Americans beginning to credit the President's stimulus package with helping to revive the economy.

After going a few rounds with that federal judge down in Georgia, Orly Taitz is asking to withdraw as counsel for the former client who already denounced her to the court so that she can break her attorney-client privilege.

Accused billionaire Ponzi schemer Sir Allen Stanford is back in jail after being treated at a hospital for injuries sustained in a prison fight with another inmate.

The former President compares the toxic opposition to Obama to what he himself faced in the 1990s. Watch.

As key milepost in the health care reform effort: The Senate Finance Committee will take up amendments to add a public option to the Baucus bill. That and the day's other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Key moments from today's Sunday shows from TPMLiveWire.

You may have seen that there's a new meme afoot in the news world which has it that the mainstream media either ignores or is insufficiently 'in touch' with the right wing noise machine of Fox, Drudge, Glenn Beck, etc. What's notable however is that the idea seems to be emanating from the folks at Politico whose founders' theory of the media is that its narratives are largely defined by Matt Drudge and who used Drudge as the key vector to build their national audience. I'm not sure how these two facts compute.

Bill Safire dead at 79.

If you're on Twitter, definitely follow me at twitter.com/joshtpm. I keep you updated on the best offerings of the day from our news blog as well as give updates on new stuff we have coming from TPM -- new features, hires, stories we're going to start digging in on, etc.

I'd also strongly encourage you to follow the main TPMmedia twitter feed which we've just relaunched -- ditching the old extremely lame RSS-based system and placing under new bona-fide homo sapiens management.

We noticed overnight that Sen. Stabenow (D-MI) is now raising money (for the DSCC) from her exchange/smackdown with Sen. Kyl over maternity care. And it occurred to me that while we could certainly find many of examples of this over the past few years by one definition or another, the pattern of piggybacking a fundraising campaign on top of a viral video or meme has suddenly come of age. The two boffo fundraising efforts tied to Rep. Joe Wilson's 'you lie!' outburst were perhaps the breakthrough examples.

Again, I know it's not entirely new. But it does seem to me that the viral news nugget pathways have sufficiently matured and the rapid fire one-off fundraising technology has been perfected enough that the whole thing has somehow come into its own.

Am I on to something here or all wet?

Sen. Kyl says the time for talking to Iran and for "carrots" is over "because time is not on our side." It's regime change from here on out.

Meanwhile, it is reassuring to see Sec Def Gates state the obvious, which is that there is no military option that does more than buy time.

After all, what would turn the tide in the direction of the moderates and reformers more than a major aerial bombing campaign against Iran?