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February 16, 2012 | | THIN ICE After months of wrangling, Congressional negotiators clinched a deal on a $150 billion plan that will extend a payroll-tax holiday for 10 months and unemployment benefits through the end of the year. But House Speaker John Boehner is already facing a revolt from the conservatives in his party, who are furious that some of the deal's costs won't be offset elsewhere. The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy on the GOP's latest leadership crisis. NEGOTIATIONS Afghan President Hamid Karzai says his government is in direct talks with the Taliban, along with the United States. "There have been contacts between the U.S. government and the Taliban, there have been contacts between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and there have been some contacts that we have made, all of us together, including the Taliban," he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. It's somewhat surprising that the Taliban would talk directly with the Afghan government: since they were ousted in 2001, the Taliban has insisted they are the real Afghan government and have refused to talk with the "puppet government," though they've been open to talks with the U.S. Karzai also said that the majority of Taliban fighters are "definitively willing to seek peace." TAXES He's no Mitt Romney when it comes to income, but presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been doing OK lately. The former senator from Pennsylvania released four years—more than any other candidate—of tax returns, covering 2007 to 2010. The Santorums filed jointly, bringing in an adjusted gross income of about $659,000 in 2007, $952,000 in 2008, $1.1 million in 2009, and about $923,000 in 2010. They also paid their share of taxes, forking over between $167,000 and $310,000 per year. ABC News' Michael Falcone did a "back of the envelope" calculation: in 2010 Santorum paid a 28.4 percent rate, compared with 13.9 percent for Romney. Diplomacy It looks like Jay Carney was right to call Bashar al-Assad's promised referendum "laughable." A day after the Syrian president promised reform, his troops launched an attack on the cities of Deraa, Hama, and Homs in an attempt to crush the 11-month-old uprising. Meanwhile, France says it is negotiating a new U.N. resolution with Russia that would create humanitarian corridors to bring aid to civilians. China, the other country along with Russia that vetoed the last resolution, ran an editorial in the state-run newspaper, People's Daily, saying that the U.S. wanted to install a friendly government in Syria to oppose Iran, and that meddling in the Middle East would cause fuel prices to skyrocket. NEW THEORY Following the arrests of three Iranians in Tuesday's bombings in downtown Bangkok, Thailand's police chief has said the suspects were planning to attack Israeli diplomats, bolstering Israel's claims that the group was part of an Iranian-backed terror network. He also confirmed that the explosive found at the blast site on Tuesday—a homemade "sticky" bomb—matched the devices planted on Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia the day before. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the violence, Iran responded by saying the allegations were baseless and blamed Israel for spreading conspiracy theories in an attempt to sour Iran's relationship with Thailand.
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