U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden make use of the White House putting green.

Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

I felt a twinge of envy when I heard that my pal Tom Friedman had played golf with the president for five hours one September Sunday.

Tom learned a lot about Barack Obama’s positions on weighty issues and sporty ones. (This president doesn’t cheat and he does expect bets to be paid off.) My natural impulse was to shrug it off. Men have always craved private realms — the golf club, men’s club, garage, workshop, shed; a place to get away from the chatter and clatter of women and kids. (In Obama’s case, he may desire a testosterone break from his estrogen nest — a wife, two daughters and a mother-in-law.)

Gordon Thorburn, the British author of the book “Men and Sheds,” explained that the word shed derived from the Anglo-Saxon “scead,” or shade. It was, in a metaphorical sense, obscure, an “intellectual pantry” or “spiritual home” where a man could reflect and dawdle with tools and toys.

But I don’t kid myself that the presidential playing fields are merely about play. After Tom’s golf outing, Politico ran the headline: “Friedman jumps to the front of the influence list.”

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Alexander Mooney
CNN Ticker Producer

Former President George W. Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker Monday night, telling a Fort Worth, Texas crowd it's futile to waste energy chasing popularity.

"It's so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting, it's not real," Bush said at a "Get Motivated!" business seminar, a multi-city event its organizers describe as an "energizing, action-packed, star-studded, fun-filled, spectacular stage show."

The president himself saw wild popularity swings during his eight years in the White House, garnering nearly a 90 percent approval rating in the months following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and exiting office with only the support of 31 percent of Americans, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll.

The former president was greeted enthusiastically by the 11,000 attendees of the event, according to the Fort Worth Telegram, and he spoke casually for about 20 minutes.

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President Bush, left, ducks a shoe as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki tries to protect him.

Elise Labott
CNN State Department Producer

"Certainly from our standpoint this gives us a sense of momentum when the United States has accolades tossed its way rather than shoes."

That's the take of Hillary Clinton's State Department on President Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, according to her spokesman, Assistant Secretary PJ Crowley.

Crowley was referring to an incident last December, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during his final visit to Iraq during his administration.

Muntader Zaidi, who worked for the Iraqi television station Al Baghdadiya, hurled both his shoes at Bush and called him a "dog," during a press conference with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, narrowly missing the president as he ducked.

The show-throwing, considered one of the highest insults in the Middle East, illustrated the deep anger toward the United States over its invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Crowley's comments suggested recognition by the Obama administration that the Nobel Prize was as much an indictment on the Bush administration as it was an effort to praise President Obama's outreach to improve the US image around the world.

Echoing comments by the White House, Crowley said the award was not just an "affirmation" of the Obama administration's foreign policy strategy of engagement, but also on its robust foreign policy agenda, which includes non-proliferation, dealing with Iran and North Korea and Middle East peace.

"There is an opportunity here," Crowley said. "The tone has changed but obviously we recognize that while the tone in the world has changed, the challenges remain they are very significant.

This "call to action," Crowley said, will fall primarily on the shoulders Secretary Clinton and the State Department "to advance the president's agenda and confront the challenges of the 21st century."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal says the U.S. will fail in Afghanistan without more troops.

Gloria Borger
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Sometimes, even in Washington, there's no way around a central truth: that in governing, there are moments when real, tough decisions must be made. No waffling. None of the usual "on the one hand, on the other hand." No hiding behind the votes cast by others.

There is one vote, and it belongs to the president.

It was that way with George W. Bush in December 2006, when, after conferring for three months with his generals and his Cabinet - not to mention the advice offered by the pooh-bahs in the Iraq Study Group - he decided on a surge strategy in Iraq. It was not a plan highly touted by many of his advisers, but by January, Bush told the nation "America will change our strategy ... [and] this will require increasing American force levels."

As it turns out, the surge worked.

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President Obama addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.

World Public Opinion.org

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of Iranians finds that six in 10 favor restoration of diplomatic relations between their country and the United States, a stance that is directly at odds with the position the Iranian government has held for three decades. A similar number favor direct talks.

However, Iranians do not appear to share the international infatuation with Barack Obama. Only 16 percent say that have confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs. This is lower than any of the 20 countries polled by WPO on this question in the spring. Despite his recent speech in Cairo, where Obama stressed that he respects Islam, only a quarter of Iranians are convinced he does. And three in four (77%) continue to have an unfavorable view of the United States government.

"While the majority of Iranian people are ready to do business with Obama, they show little trust in him," says Steven Kull, director of WPO.

At the same time, there are some signs of softening. Trust in Obama is three times higher than the 6 percent of Iranians who expressed confidence in George W. Bush in a 2008 WPO poll. Unfavorable views of the United States government are down 8 points from the 85 percent unfavorable views in 2008 (WPO).

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Bobby Ghosh
TIME

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush Administration might have had a tense weekend. After months of delay and controversy, the Obama Administration is expected on Monday to declassify the 2004 CIA inspector general's report into the agency's interrogation program. Cheney, the most prominent of several Bush-era officials who have vociferously defended the program, faces either vindication or more vilification.

Over the past two days news reports have quoted unnamed officials as saying the IG's findings include instances where CIA interrogators used power drills and even a gun to threaten a detainee; on another occasion, as first reported by Newsweek, they allegedly staged a mock execution. If true, these tactics would go well beyond the coercive techniques permitted by the Bush Administration's legal counsel.

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Ex-Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge says he was pushed to raise the terror alert before the 2004 election.

CNN

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge says he successfully countered an effort by senior Bush administration officials to raise the nation's terror alert level in the days before the 2004 presidential vote.

"An election-eve drama was being played out at the highest levels of our government" after Osama bin Laden released a pre-election message critical of President George W. Bush, writes Ridge in his new book, "The Test of Our Times."

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strongly advocated raising the security threat level to "orange," even though Ridge believed a threatening message "should not be the sole reason to elevate the threat level."

The former Pennsylvania governor also writes that he saw no reason for the move, which he now calls a bad idea, because additional security precautions had already been taken in advance of the election.

"We certainly didn't believe the tape alone warranted action, and we weren't seeing any additional intelligence that justified it. In fact, we were incredulous," Ridge said of the push. "... I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?' "

The idea that an attack might take place had been discussed, he says. "But at this point there was nothing to indicate a specific threat and no reason to cause undue public alarm. ... It also seemed possible to me and to others around the table that something could be afoot other than simple concern about the country's safety."

In the end, the threat level was not raised.

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Former Bush official Karl Rove was questioned in May about the U.S. attorney firings.

Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer

The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then- Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight reelection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias's dismissal earlier than previously known.

The disclosures mark the end of a 2 1/2 year investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, which sued to gain access to Bush White House documents in a dispute that struck at the heart of a president's executive power. House members have reserved the right to hold a public hearing at which Rove, Miers, and other aides could appear this fall.

House Judiciary Chairman John M. Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) on Tuesday characterized the role of Bush White House figures in the firing episode as improper and inappropriate.

"Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing US Attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse trading and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the US Attorney corps - that of US Attorney Iglesias - because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections," Conyers said. "When Mr. Iglesias said his firing was a 'political fragging,' he was right."

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Former President Clinton receives flowers from a girl Tuesday upon landing in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Roland S. Martin
CNN Contributor

Much has been made of the involvement of former President Bill Clinton in the freeing of two Current TV journalists held in North Korea and facing 12 years of hard labor.

But considering that American taxpayers continue to pay for their office space, security detail and other perks of the office of a former president, why not put Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush to work for the good of the country?

There seems to be a tradition in this country of former presidents spending their time giving speeches, raising money for their presidential libraries, writing their memoirs and staying out of the way of the current occupant of the White House.

I get that. You had your shot and you want the new person to have their day in the sun and do it that way. Yet letting that experience and solid relationships go to waste makes no sense to me.

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Asia Lindsay
AC360° Intern

Zambia's president was talking up his country’s economy at an outdoor press conference when a monkey sitting in a tree above urinated on him, mid-sentence.

President Rupiah Banda, whose controversial inauguration in 2008 provoked small-scale riots, called the press conference to speak about recent riots that have erupted throughout the country due to a deepening global recession and its effect on the price of copper, Zambia's principal export.

"You have urinated on my jacket!" he shouted back at the monkey.

“I will give this monkey for lunch to Mr. Sata,” he joked, referring to his political rival, Michael Sata.

Banda took control of Zambia in 2008 after the former president, Levy Mwanawasa, suffered a stroke.

Since his inauguration, he has focused on improving the economy and reducing taxes on food and fuel to “help Zambia to become a middle income country by 2030."

Zambia’s ruling party has already put Banda forth as a candidate for the 2011 presidential elections, despite widespread claims that his 2008 victory was fraudulent. Banda beat Sata by 2 percent, though Sata had led in the polls.

Strange incidents involving presidents and press conferences are not unprecedented, of course. At a 2008 press conference in Iraq, former U.S. President George W. Bush ducked to avoid a shoe thrown by an angry Iraqi journalist.

Bush was unphased by the incident, despite it being a grave insult in Arabic culture, saying later, “If you want the facts, it's a size 10 shoe that he threw”.

In the department of strange liquids landing on politicians, in March 2009 British Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson had a cup of green custard thrown in his face by political activist Leila Deen at a summit on low carbon industrial strategies in London.

Deen is a member of the environmental group ‘Plane Stupid’ and threw the custard in protest of the third runway at Heathrow Airport. She described the incident as a “last resort.”

In Zambia, President Banda took the monkey’s misstep with good grace, later laughing with journalists saying that, “perhaps these [monkey urine spots] are blessings.”

If so, there could be more such blessings. Plenty of animals live near the State House, including antelopes and birds.

AC360°

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are in Toronto for a private audience at the Metro Convention Centre.

The former presidents, both 62, will spent 90 minutes discussing global and domestic challenges facing Canada and the U-S.

The event was private but we followed their conversation through Twitter updates. Take a look at some of the commentary:

@CBCNewsDesk: #Bush and #Clinton went for laughs in opening remarks, getting serious now with Afghanistan, Cuba, Darfur and Rwanda – KR #bcpto

@CBCNewsDesk: #Clinton defends #Bush on Darfur and "agonizing process" of building intl consensus, compares it to Bosnia – AD #bcpto

@CBCNewsDesk: On same sex: Bush doesn't agree with repeal of defence of marriage act, agreed with #Clinton's don't ask don't tell – AD #bcpto

See more Twitter updates at #bcpto

In a Michigan speech, Bush spoke out about his administration's efforts to combat terrorism.

Peter Hamby
CNN Political Producer

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney's assertion that their enhanced interrogation program was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented future terrorist attacks.

In his largest domestic speech since leaving the White House in January, Bush told an audience in southwestern Michigan that after the September 11 attacks, "I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you."

Although he did not specifically allude to the high-profile debate over President Obama's decision to halt the use harsh interrogation techniques, and without referencing Cheney by name, Bush spoke in broad strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

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After 100 days, Obama’s shiny-new dream for our cities is looking more like a bureaucratic nightmare.

Dayo Olopade
The Root

In November 2008, less than one week after winning the votes of city dwellers by a margin of 28 points, President-elect Barack Obama announced he would reward them by creating the first-ever “White House Office of Urban Policy.” Like other new aspects of Obama’s executive branch, appointing a city czar was intended to fast-track communications among city governments, federal agencies and the White House. With great fanfare, Obama dispatched his friend and fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett to tell America that he was making good on his campaign pledge to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution.”

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Torture Is a Breach Of International Law

Mark J. McKeon
The Washington Post

On Sept. 11, 2001, when the twin towers were hit, I was sitting in a meeting in The Hague discussing what should be included in an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia. I was an American lawyer serving as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and there was no doubt that Milosevic should be indicted for his responsibility for the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners. As the head of state at the time those crimes were committed, Milosevic bore ultimate responsibility for what happened under his watch.

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Earl Hutchinson
The Huffington Post

President Obama will get the ritual grade for his first 100 days in office on April 29. His first days will be compared to FDR's first 100 days. And to a lesser extent JFK's first 100 days. But comparing him to these two presidents is not a fair comparison. FDR faced the worst economic crisis in American history. JFK faced no immediate foreign or domestic crisis. President Obama falls somewhere in between the two.

The better comparison is with his predecessor President Bush. He is the president whose towering White House failures helped pave the way for Obama's win. And there's some eerie similarities in the way Bush handled his first 100 days and the way Obama is handling his.

Bush got the same intense look in his first 100 days as President Obama will get in his; and for good reason. Bush's win was deeply tainted but also historic. Millions thought then and now that he bagged the White House through fraud, deceit, manipulation, and a huge helping hand from a politically compliant High Court. Obama's win was historic and tinged with racial and ideological fears.
Though the Bush legacy is truly dreadful, it wasn't that way at the start. He got the same first 100 days pass from voters that Obama and every other president has gotten. His April 2001 poll numbers topped sixty percent. This matches Obama's April numbers. A Washington Post/ABC Poll even gave Bush high marks on his handling of the economy.

Bush did what every other new president did during his first hundred days. He used the early public goodwill to make politically favorable appointments, ink executive orders and shove through Congress programs that likely would draw fire later on, clamp a vise like grip on executive power, and cast an eye on cementing his historic legacy. Obama has done the same.

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President Obama met with CIA workers and Director Leon Panetta, left, in Virginia on Monday.

Robert Zimmerman
AC360° Contributor and CNN Political Analyst

After thoughtful deliberation, President Obama released memos from the Bush administration revealing brutal CIA interrogation tactics. These memos, authored by leading officials in the Bush Department of Justice, made every attempt to create a legal rational to engage in nothing less than torture. Despite the use of bureaucratic language to justify their intent, there is no question these memos were an exercise to excuse tactics like "stress positions" that were employed by the Nazis in World War II or water boarding used by the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh Cambodia. In fact, these memos have the temerity to actually point out that other countries that behaved in a similar fashion, like Indonesia, were engaging in torture.

While President Obama deserves great credit for releasing these memos in the face of strong opposition within his administration and with minimal deletions in the documents, he has not ended the debate. On the contrary; he has started it. The questions that need to be addressed focus on whether the release of these memos compromise our ability to combat terrorists. We also have a right to know what, if any, measures should be taken to hold those who authored these memos, as well as those who attempted their legal justification, accountable. In short, the answers to those questions reflect the core values and the guiding principles that define the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress' commitment to transparency and accountability.

Vice President Cheney and his colleagues in the Bush administration have claimed that America has been compromised in its battle against terrorists. The same cast of characters who misled us into the war in Iraq, ignored the threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, lied to us about our progress in the Iraq, deceived us about the cost of the war and did not properly protect our soldiers in battle or care for them when they returned are expecting to be regarded credibly in this debate.

On numerous occasions national intelligence officials in the Bush administration testified before Congress that they could not say whether the United States was creating or capturing more terrorists through the war in Iraq and our government's tactics. That seems to sum up the success of their strategies. The record and conduct of the Bush administration over the past eight years sacrifices the credibility of those individuals in this discussion. Someone should read them their Miranda rights before they comment further.

That leads to the next question: Should the individuals who devised these tactics and authorized them be held responsible? Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff, stated that the Obama administration opposes any effort to prosecute those in the Justice Department who drafted the legal memos in question. The White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have not even shown any interest in supporting Senator Patrick Leahy's proposal for an independent commission of inquiry, which would offer immunity in return for candid testimony. Congressman John Conyers, Senator Carl Levin and Senator Dianne Feinstein have also called for investigating aspects of these abuses.

However, we should establish the facts before making a decision about whether to prosecute. Our nation will not be paralyzed by documenting the facts and demanding accountability from individuals such as Jay S. Bybee, Steven G. Bradbury and John Yoo, the lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who are at the center of composing these memos. Jay Bybee now has a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge. If he is impeached, the republic will survive. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and more senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, also played a critical role in the decisions around those heinous acts and have much to answer for as well – not just to the American people, but especially to those who served in our military in the war against Al Qaeda.

The history of our nation has taught us that our strength comes from our respect for our system of justice and trust in the principles set forth in our Constitution. The need for the Democratic leadership to support a congressional investigation is not about partisanship it is about preserving the very values that distinguish our country and defines its greatness in the eyes of the world.

Editor’s Note: Robert Zimmerman has been a volunteer for the Democratic National Committee member since 2000. He is a partner at Zimmerman/Edelson Inc., a marketing, advertising and public relations firm based in New York which does not represent the DNC.

Andrew J. Bacevich
Special to CNN

At every stop during his recent trips abroad, President Obama went out of his way to assure observers that he is the un-Bush: a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, with both his feet firmly planted in the reality-based world.

To yesterday's untouchables, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, the cordial Obama offers smiles and handshakes. Although all to the good, this falls well short of being good enough.

Pragmatism devoid of principle provides an inadequate basis for coherent strategy. At the end of the day, there is no avoiding what the elder George Bush once called "the vision thing": a conception of how the world works, where it is headed and the role the United States should play in getting it there.

Obama's sympathetic nod to "soft power" and willingness to listen rather than preach do not qualify as that vision. Nor does his pledge to engage the Islamic world in respectful dialogue while working toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. They are at best markers that may suggest the outlines of something larger.

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The Obama administration declassified and released torture documents.

Michael Hayden and Michael B. Mukasey
The Wall Street Journal

The Obama administration has declassified and released opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) given in 2005 and earlier that analyze the legality of interrogation techniques authorized for use by the CIA. Those techniques were applied only when expressly permitted by the director, and are described in these opinions in detail, along with their limits and the safeguards applied to them.

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

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Ed Rollins
CNN Contributor

A president makes many decisions, but none is more important than those he makes as commander in chief. Committing young men and women to war zones where their lives are at risk is a decision that can't be easily reversed, and the consequences can be fatal.

The second type of difficult decision a president faces is setting the rules of engagement; allowing American troops to do their job even if that means taking the life of the enemy.

Ronald Reagan, a president I served, was beloved by the American military. He rebuilt a military crippled by the nightmare of Vietnam. After the humiliating evacuation from that costly war, we had planes that couldn't fly and ships that couldn't sail due to missing parts and deferred maintenance.

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Ralph J. Begleiter
Special to CNN

The reversal of two decades of policy on images of returning war casualties is an important and welcome milestone for the American people.

The Pentagon's decision announced Thursday allowing media coverage of coffins of war victims returning to Dover Air Force Base - if families agree - restores to its rightful, honorable place the immense value of the sacrifice American troops make on behalf of their nation. It allows the American people to honor the dignified and respectful return of war casualties to home soil for the last time.

Although no one should have a veto over the nation's ability to pay respects to its fallen troops, I believe most families will decide that their sons and daughters deserve to be recognized publicly for their sacrifice.

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