Ron Paul argues for earmarks

Incidentally, some avid Paul supporters, who rallied to his cause during the presidential campaign, are hoping to draft his son Rand to run for the Senate from Kentucky next year. Rand Paul, a Bowling Green eye surgeon named for libertarian icon Ayn Rand, is considering a run if GOP Sen. Jim Bunning retires, as many Kentucky Republicans hope he will. .

Like father, like son: "We both believe in limited government," Rand Paul said.

--

Biden rallies the NATO troops

Vice President Joe Biden has become the go-to guy of the Obama administration, called on to handle every problem from middle-class prosperity to oversight of the government's mega-billion-dollar economic recovery plan.

Quite a contrast to Vice President Dick Cheney, who spent his eight years in office commissioning legal briefs that reasserted the executive branch's power over many aspects of our lives. As the Washington Post's op-ed columnist Jim Hoagland put it, "Joe the Glad-Handing Mechanic has replaced Dick the Secretive Influencer. Sunny, visible and verbose have chased gloomy, occult and clipped from the office."

On Tuesday, Biden's role was to assure NATO allies that after eight years of the brushoff from Washington, the Obama administration wants to rejoin the team. With the White House already committing 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 that President Bush already sent there, Biden told the 26-member European alliance that it was not too late to rescue the onetime Taliban stronghold where intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden plotted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks:

"The deteriorating situation in the region poses a security threat not just to the United States but to every single nation around this table. . . . I want to make it clear to you, from the perspective of the average United States citizen, an attack, a terrorist attack in Europe is viewed as an attack on us. That is not hyperbole -- that is not hyperbole -- because we understand and we view it as an attack on the West. And we view it as a gateway to further attacks on the United States."

After three hours of talks with Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Biden told reporters in Brussels that options include direct talks with so-called moderate elements of the Taliban, those involved in the insurgency only for the money.

Biden cautioned that such an outreach would have to come not from Washington but from Kabul.

"Whatever is initiated will have to be ultimately initiated by the Afghan government, and will have to be such that it would not undermine a legitimate Afghan government. But I do think it is worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state."

As he told the allies, "We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost."

--

Read Top of The Ticket, The Times' blog on national politics, at latimes.com/ticket.