Mike Duncan, chairman of American Crossroads, told The Washington Times that his group and American Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies plan to plow more than $49 million of it into 11 Senate races in anticipation that the Republican Party is within reach of a Senate majority.

And, in an inversion of the usual image of “coattails” descending from the top of the ticket to a party’s candidates for lower offices, he says a number of Senate seats are in play because of the strength of strong House candidates in the respective states.

“People thought it wasn’t possible, but Republicans now have a good chance of winning control of the Senate – in part because we have a good chance of taking the House,” he said.

The groups are basing their optimism about taking back the Senate partly on a poll conducted by the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which tested 1,300 likely voters across 13 states, rendering a state-by-state sample size that’s so small, it makes the results effectively meaningless.

Nonetheless, Duncan argues the poll shows Republican candidates leading by an average of 8 points in Republican-held Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio, and ahead by 7 points in Democrat-held Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington. Of those thirteen Senate battleground states, American Crossroads pledges to spend money in eleven of them — candidates in Delaware and Indiana look like they’re on their own.

More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government’s many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers’ public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), for example, sought more than $50 million for two projects in his state, the Times found. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) also blasted the stimulus bill as wasteful, yet two days before voting against it, Bennett “privately forwarded to [USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack] a list of projects seeking stimulus money,” the Times notes.

“I believe the addition of federal funds to these projects would maximize the stimulative effect of these projects on the local economy,” he [Bennett] wrote.

Still another vocal stimulus opponent, Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-S.C.), was also busy lobbying for pork, the Times discovered, even as he was accusing the Democrats of promoting the “same old, tired big spending agenda.” A Wilson spokeswoman defended the discrepancy, telling the Times that the lawmaker “opposed the stimulus as a ‘misguided spending bill,’ but once it passed, he wanted to make sure South Carolina residents ‘receive their share of the pie.’”

Some government watchdogs had a different take.

“It’s not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Update: Brian Faughnan, a conservative blogger who’d been writing and editing much of the site’s content, informs me that he’s been let go. His e-mail:

I have been terminated here at the Times. And while I have not received official notification, I believe it is safe to assume the site has been canceled.

The evidence is a letter from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the congressman who’s made a hobby out of sensational letters and reports on low-wattage scandals. And Issa’s letter only says that “there was speculation in the press that former Chief of Staff to the First Lady Jackie Norris may have influenced the President’s action because she left the White House to become a senior advisor at [the Corporation for National and Community Service] around the time of Mr. Walpin’s removal.” Where did that speculation come from? It came from a Michelle Malkin column.

The Obama administration is now saying the same thing.

Today, it assured reporters in a background briefing with administration officials that although the U.S. government will continue to send terror suspects to foreign countries for interrogation — what has notoriously become known as “rendition” — it will seek assurances from those countries that their interrogators won’t torture the suspects.

Of course, the Bush administration said it sought and received those same assurances. After all, it’s long been illegal, both under U.S. and international law, to send detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. So what’s different now?

“The State Department will play a larger role to ensure that those assurances are credible,” said one senior administration official during the background briefing. (Why the briefing was on background and not for attribution to particular administration officials isn’t clear.)

So, asked Eli Lake of The Washington Times, will the United States simply stop sending suspects to countries that are known to torture suspects, such as Egypt or Syria?

No, the administration is not willing to go that far, a senior administration official said.  However, “we will ensure that we have the appropriate assurances in place that gives us strong confidence that the individuals in question will not be tortured.”

The Obama administration is now saying that, unlike the Bush administration before it, it will seek to verify that suspects aren’t being tortured. According to a paper released by the Justice Department today, the task force recommended that “agencies obtaining assurances from foreign countries insist on a monitoring mechanism, or otherwise establish a monitoring mechanism, to ensure consistent, private access to the individual who has been transferred, with minimal advance notice to the detaining government.”

That sounds like an improvement, though having to provide any advance notice to the detaining government is problematic. The policy still, to some extent, allows the U.S. government to trust foreign officials who promise they won’t torture a terror suspect, even if they are officials of a country that is known by the United States to torture terror suspects.

The State Department may play a larger role than it did before, but the new interagency process is ultimately under the control of the president’s National Security Council. That’s better then keeping it a purely CIA function, as it was before. But it still raises the question of why the United States plans to send terror suspects to foreign countries known to torture them, and just how vigorous — and how long-lasting — U.S. monitoring will really be.

But the President’s speech seemed primarily aimed at stopping torture abroad, which is presumably why he’s called on the State Department to get involved. But what about torture committed by our own government?

I know some are still debating which techniques constitute “torture” — such as in this scolding piece from The Washington Times — but because the Convention Against Torture, which the president was commemorating, prohibits torture AND cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as I’ve noted before, at this point we can put that debate aside. There’s little question that the sort of techniques engaged in by U.S. government officials — whether partial drowning, “walling,” weeks of sleep and food deprivation or locking detainees inside a tiny box with what were believed to be deadly insects is, at the very least, cruel and degrading.

It’s odd, therefore, as Marcy points out, to see the president — who vowed on his third day in office to end torture — refusing to prosecute those who engaged in acts that clearly violate the anti-torture convention he commemorated on Friday.

As Marcy put it: “Mr. President, the agency that must take the lead in stopping torture is the Department of Justice. The effective policies for stopping torture you’re looking for? They start with prosecuting torture.”

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Mr. Obama’s revelation of his “inner Muslim” in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA … Kenya simply routed Kansas.

The president only had 42 white predecessors, not 43 — Grover Cleveland served twice — but you don’t worry about such things when you’re trying to expose the grave Kenyan threat to our culture.

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From the video, after Picket asks Ayers a few times about what the president thinks of his new book:

WASHINGTON TIMES: I’m just curious whether or not your publisher has sent a copy to President Obama.

AYERS: Have you gotten any feedback on your writings from the president? (Laughter)

WASHINGTON TIMES: Considering you may have had a collaboration with “Dreams of (sic) My Father.”

AYERS: I never had a collaboration. No.

WASHINGTON TIMES: No?

AYERS: That’s a myth.

The idea that Ayers wrote Obama’s first memoir was popularized by conservative author Jack Cashill on the conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, one of the hubs of the discredited theory that Obama was not born in Hawaii. Cashill’s investigation is a funny read, full of “proof” like Obama’s use of a nautical metaphor and asides such “in Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more lethal weapon to use against the ‘marauding monster’ called America than any pipe bomb he could have ever built.” The most traction this has gotten in the mainstream conservative press was an October blog post by National Review contributer Andy McCarthy, in which he credited Cashill for raising “significant questions about whether Obama is the rara avis he’s portrayed to be.”

For The Washington Times, these are still “significant questions.”

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We used figures for overall “approval” ratings for former President George W. Bush – 62 percent – and compared them to the ratings of “excellent” or “good” for Mr. Obama, which combined were 56 percent. However, when asked the same question – approve or disapprove – for Mr. Obama for the same three days of his first term, April 20-22, his rating actually was 65 percent, thus putting him above rather than below Mr. Bush.

It’s a nice gesture, but The Times still got a Drudge link and a media meme out of the deal.

The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

But that’s not what Gallup says.

Its April 24 poll has 56 percent saying the president is doing an “excellent or good job,” which is different than the generic approval number they used for previous presidents. Gallup’s separate current approval number for Obama is 65 percent. And The Times mysteriously lists the early events of the Clinton presidency while leaving out the huge poll boost Reagan got after surviving a March 30, 1981 assassination attempt. Reagan’s Gallup approval rating before the attack was only 59 percent, which the firm reported as historically low; at the 100 day mark, it was 67 percent. The Times doesn’t do any favors to its great reporters like Eli Lake by publishing this garbage.