Senator Joe Biden is in Pakistan as part of a team monitoring the parliamentary elections which are taking place there today, and he has a simple recommendation to Congress and the Bush administration: if the vote in Pakistan is rigged, we should cut off military funding.

The Houston Chronicle's Douglas MacKinnon argues that neither Governor Rick Perry or Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison are likely choices for McCain's running mate.

Mike Huckabee, from time to time, plays Boston's "More Than A Feeling" at campaign events. Boston's lead singer and songwriter, Tom Scholz, would really like him to quit it. It figures: all this talk about change and the future in Democratic politics while Republican arguments are largely about who can reclaim Reagan's mantle, and Reagan was the GOP King Of The Eighties; and here, on a really slow news weekend, a big story is about something from 1976 and Huckabee's failure to appropriate that for himself.

This is a bummer. The Times executive editor Bill Keller has announced that newsroom staff will be reduced by 100, out of a little more than 1000 employees total. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the reductions will be made first “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” according to Keffer. So I guess that's at least better than dropping the axe and kicking out 100 of your close and personals.

Joe Jaworski has a really sharp ad ready to roll out on Tuesday for the start of early primary voting. Video after the jump.

The Houston Chronicle's Rick Casey presents a few interesting scenarios for Texas on March 4th. Among them: someone could win the popular vote but because of senate district breakdown, lose on delegates. For campaign professionals, the mind must quail at the possibilities.

Rather than just hinting at it between comments about miracles and squirrels, Mike Huckabee is now painting Texas as a battleground from which he will launch himself into the middle of a brokered Republican convention. It was apparently not enough for Huckabee to self-identify with conservatives; now he has taken up the flaming sword and pledged to carry it all the way home, possibly dampening talk of a third party candidate in the process.

John McCain, newly minted presumptive Republican nominee for President, decides that maybe he isn't really opposed to torture after all and votes against banning it.

Think conservatives are all ready to line up behind McCain? it certainly seems that way, but not everyone is buying it: the push for a third party conservative candidate lives on.

The rumor is that Mitt Romney will endorse McCain a little later today and release his delegates, ostensibly to line up behind the senator from Arizona. And in this business, a rumor like that means that it is definitely going to happen.