Belated Reaction?

" 'There was one problem. It was not true,' McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Monday. 'I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself.' "

Now he tells us?

Don't miss the Huckaboom:

"Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, buoyed by strong support from Christian conservatives, has surged past three of his better-known presidential rivals and is now challenging former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for the lead in the Iowa Republican caucuses, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll."

It's Romney 28, Huckabee 24, Thompson 15 and Rudy 13.

Hillary and Obama are starting to drop the euphemisms in ripping each other. Obama:

" 'I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia. If you don't understand these cultures then it's very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions.' "

Clinton: " 'Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face. I think we need a president with more experience than that.' "

Obama's campaign: " 'Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and travelled to many countries as well, but along with Hillary Clinton, they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran.' "

Obama, meanwhile, tries some candor on the trail:

" 'I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof-off in high school as my mom reminded me. You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.' "

Maybe this helps him with the formerly-young-and-irresponsible vote.

You might have thought Mormons would be one group pretty solidly for Mitt. But there is a problem, as Josh Patashnik reports in the New Republic:

"Mitt Romney has a well-earned reputation as a flip-flopper. But it's one thing to flip-flop on your politics, and quite another to flip-flop on your faith. So it came as something of a surprise when, during an interview earlier this year with George Stephanopoulos, the presidential candidate disputed the suggestion that Christ would someday return to the United States rather than the Middle East. Mormons, he said, believe 'that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem . . . It's the same as the other Christian tradition.'

"This was both technically correct and completely misleading: The church's position is that, while Christ will indeed appear at the Mount of Olives, he will also build a new Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri, which will serve as the seat of his 1,000-year reign on Earth. Romney had conveniently neglected to mention this part of his church's doctrine.

"Needless to say, his fellow Mormons were none too pleased. 'Brother Romney is playing a little bit of a political game with his answer,' one church official told Lee Benson of the Deseret Morning News--in a column noting that Romney's comment had 'caused more than a few members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints . . . to scratch their heads as if to say, "What the flip?' '' Callers to a Utah talk-radio show lambasted the candidate for misrepresenting church teachings. And the Mormon blogosphere--known as the Bloggernacle--buzzed with discussion of the quote. One post on the blog Mormon Mentality condemned Romney for being 'evasive,' while another complained, 'If he were so proud to be a Mormon, he should tell the truth.' "

Some early Obama fans are losing hope, among them Josh Marshall:

"I think Hillary is much, much less likely to suffer a Dean-like implosion than Dean did. But the truth is that Obama really isn't that far behind and Hillary's lead isn't nearly as prohibitive as the conventional wisdom suggests.

"My disappointment with Obama's campaign to date is that it's really, ironically, been pretty old politics to me. And I mean that in this sense. Going back several cycles, you've often had some version of the Gore v. Bradley campaign in 2000. One candidate who's the establishment party figure and another who talks about new stuff and change and principle and generally whets the appetites of the party's cerebral types but then never quite delivers with anything specific and gets crushed by the well-oiled campaign of the establishment candidate. I've seen different versions of this in Mondale/Hart, Clinton/Tsongas, Gore/Bradley. And the same result every time.

"The reason it seemed like it might be different this time is that Obama was raising the kind of money that would allow him to match Hillary dollar for dollar in ads, foot soldiers and infrastructure. But so far I haven't seen a case made for Obama over Hillary behind the fact that it'd be cooler to have him as president than her -- a point I concede, but one I doubt is sufficient to get him the nomination.

"And the truth is that however we got to this point, he needs to take the initiative and change the dynamic of the race. Or else the conclusion we're headed toward looks pretty clear."

Finally, I'm always fascinated by the inspiration for songwriters, so I immediately clicked on this:

"Neil Diamond held onto the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President Kennedy's daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit 'Sweet Caroline.' "