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January 23, 2012 | | STIMULUS According to hundreds of pages of previously unreleased White House memos obtained by The New Yorker, President Obama had been warned in 2008 about the size of the deficit if he enacted his campaign promises. A 57-page document (read it in full here) written by Larry Summers, then the incoming director of the National Economic Council, urged the president to scale back on spending: “If your campaign promises were enacted … the deficit would rise by another $100 billion annually. The consequence would be the largest run-up in the debt since World War II.” To be fair, the deficit would also come from many pieces of legislation left over by President Bush—including funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—that Obama would have to sign. IN NEWSWEEK Are Obama-doubters right? Daily Beast columnist David Frum thinks so. In a thorough response to Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek piece, who’s been making a splash for saying that the president’s detractors are “dumb,” Frum says that Sullivan was only rebutting the most unfair, intemperate, and flat-out crazy of the critics. On the eve of the State of the Union address, Frum writes that you don’t have to “succumb to ideological fever or paranoid fantasy to see that the Obama administration is dragging America to the wrong future.” BUG The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the police do not have the right to place a GPS monitoring device on a suspect’s car without a probable-cause warrant from a judge. The decision was unanimous in that matter. “We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’ ” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. The case was concerning suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones, whose car the Washington, D.C., police tracked for a month using GPS. The justices threw out the life sentence against Jones. BRINKSMANSHIP Two Iranian lawmakers are vowing that the country will shut off the Strait of Hormuz if the international community limits the sale of Iranian oil—which is exactly what the European Union did Monday. The EU has agreed on an oil embargo against Tehran as part of sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, which means that new contracts on Iranian crude will be banned and existing ones will run out in July. Lawmaker Mohammad Ismail Kowsari, the deputy head of Iran’s national security committee, said the strait “would definitely be closed if the sale of Iranian oil is violated in any way.” “In case of threat, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is one of Iran’s rights,” Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, another senior lawmaker, said. The U.S. has repeatedly said it would not tolerate the blocking of the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil flows—Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called the move a “red line.” TRAGEDY Ten days after the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground, rescue workers found two more bodies in the wreckage. The remains of two women were recovered from the vessel’s Internet café. The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, has been arrested for his role in the tragedy. Meanwhile, Italian officials say there may have been several unregistered passengers aboard the ship, making it hard to say exactly how many people are still missing. The captain, in a leaked interrogation, is now claiming he piloted the ship near the shore under orders from the company as part of a publicity stunt—what he calls a “recurring practice.” Costa Cruises has denied all allegations. | | 
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