The Corner's Mark Krikorian has the next best thing to "substantial evidence": He has secondhand anecdotal evidence from a guy on a panel at his anti-immigration think tank:

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First of all we are concerned particularly about areas down on the border where there is substantial evidence that some of these fires are caused by people who have crossed our border illegally. They have set fires because they want to signal others; they have set fires to keep warm; and they have set fires in order to divert law enforcement agents and agencies from them. So the answer to that part of the problem is: get a secure border.

McCain did not detail the "substantial evidence" for his claim, so I inquired about it with his spokeswoman, Brooke Buchanan. She told me in an email Sunday that the senator "was given the information by a Forest Service official during his visit to the Wallow fire damaged area on Saturday." (That fire, in the eastern part of Arizona and New Mexico, has burned more than half a million acres.)

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Now comes presidential candidate and "enhanced interrogation" supporter Rick Santorum arguing on Hugh Hewitt's radio show that McCain simply "doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works." Yes, he's talking about the same John McCain who, in his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was interrogated during a program of beatings and torture.

Here's Santorum:

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The question has been addressed frequently in the past week and a half, by everyone from John Yoo to Glenn Greenwald. The latest public figure to express his opinion on the matter is Arizona Senator John McCain.

In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, McCain pushed back powerfully against those on the right, such as former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who suggest that information obtained through torture helped American forces to pinpoint bin Laden.

McCain writes:

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Well, OK, technically the venerable National Journal's annual rankings produced an eight-way tie for the honor, but John McCain can still claim a piece of the crown (along with Jim DeMint, Mike Crapo, Saxby Chambliss, John Cornyn, John Thune, Jim Risch and John Barrasso).

In a way, of course, this was inevitable. McCain's transformation from every Democrat's favorite Republican to reflexively anti-Obama ideologue has been well-chronicled. Some have argued that McCain is simply returning to his ideological roots; he was elected to Congress as a Goldwater conservative and actually voted against the Martin Luther King holiday in 1983, after all. Others have noted that he faced an imperative to move sharply to the right in order to survive J.D. Hayworth's primary challenge this past summer.

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The Arizona Republican tells CBS's "The Early Show" that U.S. officials have correctly called for an orderly transition away from President Hosni Mubarak. McCain said the situation in Egypt is "fraught with danger" and said he worries about "the influence of extremist organizations."

The Republican, who met with Obama at the White House Wednesday, said nevertheless that Washington must push for free elections, even if they result in lifting Islamist elements. McCain said that American officials also have to be concerned about "the threat of a repeat of the election in Gaza," where Hamas, considered a terrorist organization, emerged with newfound powers.

Interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America," McCain said "the time has come" for Mubarak to work out a transition of power that "has the army, pro-democracy elements and others in a transition government."

"The best opportunity for a pro-democracy government and not a radical, Islamic government is an open, transparent process," the senator said. "This virus spreading through the Middle East proves the human yearnings, and probably the only place you won't see the demonstrations is Iraq."

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"O" is an anonymous political novel about Barack Obama running for reelection in 2012. The book is a dramatic, insider's account of how the people who run presidential campaigns find Arianna Huffington annoying.

Speaking of annoying, this "news" was sort of broken by Mark Halperin, though Salter has not confirmed it. (And why would he? The book has not been well-reviewed.)

There were some clues. Mark Salter fancies himself a literary type. He ghost-wrote John McCain's various books. "O's" opponent in the book is an honorable military type with no glaring and obvious personal flaws. (It is sort of McCain plus Romney, I guess. I have only skimmed it.) A Democrat might've written a book more critical of the way the Republican Party runs campaigns.

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Supporters say the Senate vote repealing the 17-year-old policy known as "don't ask, don't tell" signals a historic civil rights milestone.

Detractors insist it could weaken the armed forces.

In New York City's Times Square, 28-year-old public health researcher Cassandra Melnikow (MEHL'-nih-koh) is praising the repeal and says, "It's about time."

But Kris Mineau (MEE'-noh) of the conservative Massachusetts Family Institute says Congress is "gambling with our national security over political correctness."

The measure now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

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Obama says that policy undermines U.S. national security and violates "the very ideals" that members of the armed services risk their lives to defend.

A final Senate vote is set for 3 p.m. Saturday after a test vote in the morning set the stage to send the measure to Obama to sign.

The president says ending the ban will mean that "thousands of patriotic Americans" won't be forced to leave the military "despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay."

He also says many thousands more won't be "asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love."

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The 63-33 test vote all but guarantees the legislation will pass the Senate, possibly by day's end, and reach the president's desk before the new year.

The House had passed an identical version of the bill, 250-174, earlier this week.

Repeal would mean that, for the first time in American history, gays would be openly accepted by the military and could acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of being kicked out.

More than 13,500 service members have been dismissed under the 1993 law.

Rounding up a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate was a historic victory for President Barack Obama, who made repeal of the 17-year-old policy a campaign promise in 2008. It also was a political triumph for congressional Democrats who struggled in the final hours of the postelection session to overcome GOP objections on several legislative priorities before Republicans regain control of the House in January.

"As Barry Goldwater said, 'You don't have to be straight to shoot straight,'" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., referring to the late GOP senator from Arizona.

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That's it. The Senate can't address a fundamental inequity, because the markets are down.

"I will not agree to have this bill go forward, and neither will, I believe, 41 of my colleagues, either, because our economy is in the tank," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee and the leading opponent of an immediate repeal.

For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said, he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he's got.

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"I'd hope that he'd take counsel with his wife and reconsider and realize that it's a new day," Alice Hoagland told Salon Thursday from her home in Los Gatos, California. Hoagland's 31-year-old son, Mark Bingham, was one of the passengers believed to have stormed the cockpit on United Airlines flight 93, which hijackers were apparently hoping to fly into the U.S. Capitol. Instead, it crashed in Southwest Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard.

Bingham, a public relations executive and rugby enthusiast, had supported McCain's presidential 2000 campaign and kept a picture of himself with the senator displayed in his San Francisco office. Shortly after 9/11, a fatigued McCain made the trip to Berkeley to attend Bingham's memorial service, where he delivered a tearful eulogy that garnered headlines and praise from the gay community.

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Sen. McCain doesn't want gay people to be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. He doesn't want this mostly because Barack Obama does want this, but that is not a very "honorable" reason, so McCain has been making up various new new reasons to oppose the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" for months now, developing new justifications each time his "concerns" are addressed.

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Of course, the idea of polling the troops before deciding whether to end a discriminatory policy is slightly at odds with the ideal of civilian leadership of the armed forces, as Gates also pointed out in a section of his statement today that will probably be ignored in favor of endless discussion of poll survey results:

As was made clear at the time, and is worth repeating today, this outreach was not a matter of taking a poll of the military to determine whether the law should be changed. The very idea of asking the force to, in effect, vote on such a matter is antithetical to our system of government and would have been without precedent in the long history of our civilian-led military. The President of the United States, the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, made his position on this matter clear -- a position I support. Our job, as the civilian and military leadership of the Department of Defense, was to determine how best to prepare for such a change should the Congress change the law.

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McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was not suggesting military action against the North. He said the Chinese, the North's closest ally, should rein in its neighbor, and he accused Beijing of failing to play a responsible role in either the Korean peninsula, where tensions are high because of a recent attack by the North, or the world stage.

"The key to this, obviously, is China," McCain said on "State of the Union" on CNN. "And, unfortunately, China is not behaving as a responsible world power. It cannot be in China's long-term interest to see a renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula."

The Arizona Republican added: "They could bring the North Korean economy to its knees if they wanted to. And I cannot believe that the Chinese should, in a mature fashion, not find it in their interest to restrain North Korea. So far, they are not."

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