Last night's debate in Arizona between John McCain and J.D. Hayworth, their first, turned out to be a bit of slugfest, even though McCain is crushing Hayworth in the polls. A sample, from McCain: "Congressman Hayworth is a pretty persuasive guy. After he was voted out by his constituents he became a lobbyist, then after that a talk show host, and then after that an infomercial host." Eric Kleefeld burned the midnight oil and has our report.

Look over the Republican game plan for November and it's hard to tell, absent any outside reference points, whether it's from 1980, 1990, 2000, or 2010.

David Vitter chortling over Rachel Maddow's lesbianism.

More on Boehner's genius plan to bring the federal government to its knees.

John Boehner's brilliant idea to essentially shut down government for a year emerged after he chaired a roundtable of business and trade group lobbyists this morning.

The top 5 Republicans who have rebelled against the Tea Party movement.

I wonder when the New York Times is going to change its rating of the Connecticut Senate race from "Tossup." I know it's an open seat, but the latest poll out today has Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ahead by 17 points.

That's a tall order, especially in an election year. But Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) today is publicly proposing a moratorium on any new regulations by the federal government for one year. Yeah, that's right. The promulgation of any new government regulation would be stopped for a year, except emergencies like the BP spill.

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I'm not sure it's sunk in yet within the political class (outside of economists) how horrible the prospects are for bringing the unemployment rate back to pre-Great Recession levels any time soon. And by soon, I don't mean November 2010. We're talking more like November 2015 or November 2020.

Here's a chart from the Brookings Institution (via Ezra) that gives you some idea of the mammoth hill the economy has to climb to generate enough jobs to take up the slack in the labor market:

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The special interest "caucuses" on Capitol Hill are one of DC's particularly insidery and cocooned phenomenon, so there's no small irony in Rep. Michele Bachmann taking the supposedly grassroots, spontaneous, and defiantly outsidery tea party movement and creating a Tea Party caucus.

State Rep. Tom Emmer, the guy expected to be the Republican Party nominee for governor in Minnesota, has two past DUI convictions, which in and of itself isn't necessarily politically crippling since they happened 10 years apart and the most recent one was almost 20 years ago. But as recently as last year Emmer was proposing laws in the legislature trying to weaken the state's drunk driving laws and to seal old DUI convictions (although, in fairness, not his own).

The AP is reporting that West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) will appoint his former counsel Carte Goodwin to fill the Senate seat left empty by Robert Byrd's death.

Tea Party Express spox: NAACP is racist because word "colored" is in its name.

The latest poll of the Nevada Senate race gives Harry Reid a 7-point lead over Sharron Angle. That's a 10-point swing since early June. On the TPM PollTracker chart, you can see the gains Reid has made across the board since Angle won the GOP nomination.

A magnitude 3.6 in the Maryland suburbs just after 5 a.m. this morning.

I slept through it. Anyone feel it?

TPM Reader AC checks in:

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Some new details about the sexual assault allegation against Al Gore -- and about his accuser.

The minor league baseball team in Charleston, S.C., plans to hand out Statue of Liberty figurines at Saturday's game -- with surprise Democratic Senate nominee Alvin Greene's face on them.

Late Update: It's worse than I thought. The team is simply taping a photo of Greene to a "Mr. Lady Liberty" statuette, and they've provided a photo of this "promotion" to New York magazine. Bill Veeck would be proud.

The "I Can't Believe I Got Taken In" Update: I feel like I've been had! According to the AP, the president of the team, known as the RiverDogs, which is a Class A affiliate of the New York Yankees, is none other than Mike Veeck, Bill's son. For those of you not sports fans or marketing gurus, Bill was a baseball executive famous for his promotional stunts: "All I ever said is that you can draw more people with a losing team, plus bread and circuses, than with a losing team and a long, still silence." A Veeck strikes again.

I hate to jinx it, but BP has announced that they've closed the valves on the new cap installed on the Deepwater Horizon well and that, for the first time since the blowout in April, oil is not flowing from the well into the Gulf of Mexico.

We take a look at the delicate balancing act that Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has to pull off to win re-election and the five issues where his vote matters most.