Nascar News

Kim Jong Il has named his youngest son, Kim Jong Un as his heir. Writing for The Washington Post, Blaine Harden reports that the younger Kim is a great fan of former basketball player Michael Jordan and action movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Like father, like son, I suppose. Kim Jong Il is known to be a movie buff himself, the Imelda Marcos of DVDs with a collection reportedly numbering some 20,000 films.

The implications of this news for U.S. policy are fairly obvious. President Obama, a fellow baller, should name Michael Jordan head of the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks. The Belgians, led by Van Damme, should take Russia?"s place in the negotiations. And if we can convince the Chinese to appoint Jackie Chan as their representative, the Kim clan will be positively giddy. We?"ll call it a ?Scelebrity surge,? and in their rush to get autographs and photographs with the stars, the Kims will quickly agree to whatever MJ asks for.

Could this really be any less effective than the six-party talks have been? Wooing Kim with Hollywood, I think, has real promise. And with celebrities leading the way, the American delegation might actually voice some real concern for human rights in North Korea. Wouldn?"t that be something?

Michael Mazza is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

Howard Kurtz previews a two-part prime-time series -- Inside the Obama White House -- airing on NBC tomorrow and Wednesday "that so far has produced 150 hours of tape.

Said host Brian Williams: "There's stuff we've never seen of how the White House operates. We were pretty stunned at how much we were able to record and how natural events seemed to be."

Crowley talks to a member of the group:

A reader writes:

My wife and I are/were staunch choice advocates; we'd both done our

share of marching on Washington for the cause. Actually enduring the

process gave us a much more nuanced opinion about abortion.

For us, it was Trisomy 21 -- Down Syndrome. The test came after my

wife awoke one night in a pool of blood screaming and thinking she'd

suffered a miscarriage. After she ran to the toilet, it fell upon me

to call her doctor and then scoop out the remains--that actually

turned out to be huge clots--and take them to the doctor the next day.

The geneticist said that because of all the bleeding and other

complications there was almost no chance the fetus would make it to 20

weeks let alone full term.

My wife says one of my finest moments as

her husband came when I somehow made her laugh while she awaited the

abortion. My wife doesn't talk about her feelings of the abortion and

the "failed" pregnancy. But we've been together for more than a decade

and I know she will always be crushed by it. I know we made the right

decision for us but it still hurts badly. This was the son we would

never have.