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March 13, 2012 | | DESPERATE Republicans received welcome news Monday in the form of The Washington Post poll that showed Obama’s numbers sinking in response rising gas prices. As polls open in the next presidential primaries down South, The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky on why the party is contemplating economic sabotage—not just on gas prices, but on jobs and the budget, too. The economy is their only hope for taking back the White House. Afghanistan There may be no “rush for the exits,” as President Obama said yesterday, but the administration is weighing changes to its Afghanistan withdrawal strategy, according to The New York Times. The plan was to end combat operations by the end of 2014, but with the recent Quran-burning scandal and last weekend’s massacre of Afghan civilians, the administration is debating whether to accelerate the process. Meanwhile thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Afghanistan to protest Sunday’s massacre, and militants attacked an Afghan government delegation visiting the massacre site. Details about the suspect are trickling out: he is believed to be a sergeant, from the Lewis-McChord base near Seattle, which has a high rate of suicide and assault, and had suffered a traumatic brain injury during one of his three tours in Iraq. NOT OVER YET, MITT With math on his side, Rick Santorum is in the Republican presidential-nomination race for the long haul. Though Santorum’s campaign has prodded Mitt Romney for claiming that the delegate numbers game is on his side, a memo from a Santorum strategist outlines how the former senator can grab the nomination—using a model of the delegates he needs to win. With Mississippi and Alabama’s primaries on Tuesday—which Romney is favored to walk away with—Santorum’s camp thinks he can win even if he loses both states. Santorum’s positives: momentum, the potential of a drawn-out campaign, the possibility of gaining Newt Gingrich’s delegates and unbound delegates, and a brokered convention. Unfortunately for Rick, if Mitt has a strong April, the race is probably over. HACKED Rupert Murdoch’s flame-haired former deputy Rebekah Brooks is back in jail, part of a police sweep that took in five others in an investigation into phone hacking at News Corp. Brooks’s husband, Charlie, was also taken in. The arrests constitute the biggest haul since the beginning of the investigation; police say that several addresses related to the arrests were also searched. Brooks was editor of News of the World and then CEO of News International, Murdoch’s newspaper arm, until she resigned in July. She was arrested and bailed out last summer. Atrocity The forces of Bashar al-Assad have reached a new low, if a report from Human Rights Watch is true. The group says it has multiple accounts of land mines on Syria’s border with Lebanon and Turkey, along routes used by refugees to escape the violence. In the report, a former Syrian Army deminer says he removed 300 mines along a route to Turkey in March, and a 15-year-old boy says he lost a leg to a mine in Baba Amr. The United Nations is set to meet for a second day in Turkey, after the first day failed to reach any conclusions. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked the security council to condemn Syria's “horrific campaign of violence,” but Russia and China continue to oppose any resolution. | | 
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