Over at Politico, Mike Allen, the master aggregator, has a treasure trove of good stuff on his Playbook blog.
Here’s part of today’s lineup:
 * “No Carter Echo for Obama as Gasoline Cost May Ease for Campaign,” by Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch: “On the New York Mercantile Exchange, gasoline for September delivery settled yesterday at 4.1 percent below the June contract, Bloomberg data show. ‘I believe prices will stabilize and that $4 a gallon will be an outlier rather than an average during driving season,’ Tom Kloza, chief analyst with the Oil Price Information Service, said.
* Jonathan Allen in “The Huddle”: “Bin Laden had cash totaling 500 euros and two telephone numbers sewn into his clothing when he was killed — sure signs that he was prepared to flee his compound at a moment’s notice — top U.S. intelligence officials told members of Congress at a classified briefing in the Capitol Monday. … (CIA Director Leon) Panetta told lawmakers about the items found in bin Laden’s clothing in response to a question about why he wasn’t guarded by more security personnel at his relatively luxurious home in a military town north of Islamabad. The answer, according to one source: Bin Laden believed “his network was strong enough he’d get a heads-up’ before any U.S. strike against him.”
Btw: 500 euros is just $742, Politico’s Mike Allen added, enough for the bus — guess Osama would have trouble boarding most planes.
 
* The Navy SEALs were prepared for an Osama bin Laden who was wearing a suicide vest, or was in booby-trapped room, or was hidden in a safe room, or had an escape tunnel. So even though those conditions fortunately didn’t materialize, the idea of taking him alive was always zero to remote, and remote was lost in the couch. If Bin Laden didn’t greet the choppers with a white sheet, he was assumed to be resisting. Officials can boil the outcome down to: “He resisted, and he was killed.” The special forces had to shoot their way up to the third floor, although Bin Laden himself didn’t have a gun. He didn’t need it. He was given no time for a blaze of glory or final words. The idea was to “eliminate this threat.” Our guys weren’t going to pause to say, “Are you sure you don’t want to consider surrendering, Mr. Bin Laden?”
(I would say the potentially deadly difficulties for which the commandos prepared – and many other bloody scenarios – puts to rest the silly, snide remarks by some conservative commentators that a raid, rather than a bombing, was a no-brainer.)

 
Back to Politico’s Mike Allen:

* If we’d lost a bunch of guys and retreated without Bin Laden, President Obama would have looked like Jimmy Carter. Instead, his gutsy call addressed a fundamental question about him that had been risen afresh just the week before: Can he be tough and decisive, and lead from ahead instead of behind? Don’t listen to the loudmouths who say this makes him politically invincible. This is a 50-50 country, and he got 53% in his 2008 landslide. So the 2012 race is likely to be exciting, and could well turn on a couple of key states. But Obama has made it much more difficult to make a competence case against him. The Financial Times overstated the headline on a (Page 1 story) yesterday, “Obama gains bulletproof credentials.” But the piece was dead on: “Obama erased a corrosive strain of criticism that has shadowed him from the day he declared himself a candidate for president in 2007 – that he was not up to the job of commander-in-chief. … Mr. Obama has a compelling new narrative.”
* L.A. Times, Page 1: “A turning point for a generation: Bin Laden’s slaying removes a cloud over those born after 1980.”
* L.A. Times second front page: The Dalai Lama spoke at USC’s Galen Center on Tuesday. Asked about the killing of Osama bin Laden, he suggested that the U.S.’ action was justified: ‘Forgiveness doesn’t mean forget what happened.'”
(It’s also worth noting that Politico delves into the ongoing story about whether the U.S. should release a photo of Bin Laden’s corpse to quiet the doubters and conspiracy theorists. The White House is going back and forth on that one, apparently weighing the prospects of showing a “gruesome” pic of Bin Laden’s face after he was shot in the head, or releasing a photo from the burial at sea.
Over at NBC, Richard Engel, the best Middle East reporter in the TV business, offers this caution: In talking to numerous people on the Arab street, Engel reported this morning that most Muslims are more upset about the burial at sea than the fact that Bin Laden was killed. As is becoming clear, the Pentagon’s assumption that a burial at sea was acceptable was based on a rudimentary understanding of Islam. Apparently, such a burial is very rare and undertaken only in trying circumstances.
Engel’s conclusion: the Muslim world can handle a bloody photo of Bin Laden’s face, but a photo from the burial ceremony aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, presumably with Bin Laden’s corpse inside a body bag, could be inflammatory and highly counterproductive.)