Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Pakistan: “Senior police officials said on Friday that a suicide attack that killed more than 80 cadets from a government paramilitary force was most likely retaliation for an army offensive in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and not for the death of Osama bin Laden, as the Pakistani Taliban claimed.”
* Libya: “Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi taunted his opponents in an audio recording aired on state television Friday, proving he is alive after NATO airstrikes on his compound and saying he is staying in a place ‘where you can’t reach me.’”
* OBL: “A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday. The pornography recovered in bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.”
* It’s not Mitchell’s fault his efforts weren’t more fruitful: “President Obama’s chief envoy to the Middle East, former Senator George J. Mitchell Jr., is leaving that post after two mostly futile years pressing Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, administration officials said on Friday.”
* Along the Mississippi: “Flood the farms to save the cities. That’s the trade-off staring at the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana this week as a historically high Mississippi River rolls south, flooding towns in Mississippi on Wednesday, prompting evacuations farther south, and threatening the heavily industrialized petrochemical corridor running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and beyond.”
* Just what the nation didn’t need: another “show us your papers” state: “Despite protests outside his office and boycott threats, Georgia’s governor signed into law Friday one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration measures enacted by an individual state.”
* When President Obama called George W. Bush to tell him about bin Laden’s demise, the former president was attending a meeting of hedge fund managers in Las Vegas, eating a souffle.
* Adam Serwer: “A Liberal’s Guide To Why Killing Bin Laden Was Legal.” As it turns out, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is thinking along the same lines.
* How are House Republicans paying for the legal defense of DOMA? No one seems to know.
* Putting down a liberal marker: “Millionaires would be hit with a 3 percent surtax under a draft Senate Democratic budget. A Senate aide told The Hill on Wednesday that the draft 2012 budget proposal presented at Tuesday’s Democratic policy lunch called for a 3 percent surtax on income above $1 million a year.”
* In his presidential campaign kick-off comments, Newt Gingrich made a series of claims. Nearly all of them were demonstrably false, and most were examples of Gingrich claiming credit for President Clinton’s successes.
* Stop looking at Fox News as a news outlet and start looking at it as a social movement organization.
* Did you hear that al Qaeda didn’t consider Vice President Biden worth targeting for assassination? Well, it’s a bogus story.
* An update on the Deficit-Reduction Panel’s plan to end the in-school interest subsidy on graduate student loans.
* A high school sophomore in New Jersey has challenged Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to a debate on civics and the U.S. Constitution. No word on whether the right-wing lawmaker will accept, but if she does, I’d bet on the kid.
Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
