News Roundup, 02/28/08: Bloomberg Pulls A Gore

It's not quite Al Gore, but it's still news: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has formally announced that he won't be running for president.

There had been a lot of conjecture about Bloomberg covertly rolling out a third-party campaign, possibly under the Unity '08 banner, but he's always been insistent that he was not planning on running. Turns out he wasn't kidding. Like I said, this wasn't quite the level of media hype that Al Gore would get when he'd say he wasn't planning on running and news outlets would report that, well, he still might be, even after he out-and-out mocked that sort of media hype when he won his Oscar, but it has felt pretty close at times.

In other campaign news, it looks like Senator McCain's starting to get snippy with Senator Obama. McCain took a quote from Obama out of context to try to imply that he didn't know that al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq. Obama fired back pretty quickly with the clarification to the quote: "There was no such thing as al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq." Ouch. Hey, McCain, if you could keep lobbing us softballs like that, we'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Other election coverage yesterday included an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the Texas primary race, and some footage from a rally by Bill Clinton in Dallas on Tuesday. And Chris Bell gives us a little history about the split primary/caucus system in Texas and some of its intricacies.

The federal virtual fence program hit, uh, a fence yesterday, as the GAO declared that technical and planning problems with the pilot program meant that the project would be significantly delayed, and wouldn't look much of anything like it does right now. The assessment seems to be that the program was rushed into existence and execution without proper logistical consideration or involvement from the border security agents that would actually be using it. I'd love to say that comes as a surprise.

And finally today, Josh would like you to know that your chances of being on the government's terror watch list are about as good as your matching three out of six in the Mega Millions lottery — about one in 300, roughly. I couldn't help but get the funny feeling that the chances of a guy named, say, "George Nassar" being on there may be substantially higher. But hey — what am I saying? Why would the government base the list on such shallow criteria as a person's last name? That would be, well, downright silly. Right?