8:43 PM: Can we elect the disembodied head of Ronald Reagan as President? #PresidentHeadroom #bad80sreferences
Late Update: TPM Reader BS correctly fails me on this ’80s reference. I’d forgotten that in fact Garry Trudeau already made the Ronald Reagan-Max Headroom connection, morphing them into the Doonesbury character Ron Headrest.
8:46 PM: Herman Cain is going to make me pay more for beer?
8:48 PM: Charlie Rose: “We know about China. We know about India.” Yes, yes we do.
8:50 PM: Mitt a hawk on China?
8:52 PM: Perry’s plan for economic recovery: Drill, baby, drill.
8:54 PM: Rick Santorum outhawks Mitt: “I want to go to war with China.” He seemed to be referring to an economic war, not a military one. But still.
8:56 PM: Barney Frank slams Newt over threat to put him in jail.
8:21 PM: That first foray into the economic crisis was about as shallow and ineffectual a discussion of how to achieve economic recovery as I’ve seen so far in this campaign. But they’ve already moved on to … prostate cancer exams. Really.
8:24 PM: Hard to believe Democrats are training their oppo research sights on Herman Cain. But Cain’s polling too well to ignore him any longer.
8:29 PM: Here goes Mitt being reasonable again. He’s not willing to say the financial bailout was a catastrophic mistake that ended America as we know it.
8:30 PM: Waiting for Mitt to get in some jabs at the surging Cain. Nothing yet.
8:31 PM: Newt: I’d jail Greece, too.
8:33 PM: While they take a break, a Ron Paul retrospective.
Pressed by Charlie Rose for his specific plan for economic recovery, Rick Perry parried: “Mitt’s had six years to be working on a plan. I’ve had about eight weeks.”
7:51 PM: In a twist of timing, the Senate will finish voting on President Obama’s jobs bill sometime toward the end of tonight’s debate. The vote is being left open to allow Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) to return to DC from New Hampshire, the site of tonight’s debate. The bill is not close to getting the 60 votes necessary to advance, but Shaheen will give Democrats a symbolic 51st vote in favor.
7:57 PM: Tonight’s debate is sponsored by Bloomberg TV and the Washington Post. It’s taking place at Dartmouth, where Mitt Romney’s well-worn jab at the “Harvard faculty lounge” gets a different kind of applause.
8:00 PM: Bloomberg has 40,000 junior staffers fact-checking this debate.
8:01 PM: Can we just skip tonight and fast forward to SNL’s parody of Charlie Rose?
8:03 PM: Debate kicks off with the conventional wisdom that Washington is afflicted by “bipartisan dysfunction.” Sigh.
8:05 PM: Asked what he would do to end paralysis in Washington, Herman Cain said he’d call 911 999.
8:06 PM: Rick Perry: Every job at Dartmouth is a direct result of my Texas miracle. Only kinda joking.
8:08 PM: Karen Tumulty is a solid DC journalist. A good follow on Twitter.
8:10 PM: Michele Bachmann: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to blame for everything since the Norman invasion.
8:12 PM: Did Newt just threaten to jail Chris Dodd and Barney Frank for the financial crisis?
8:15 PM: Newt Gingrich comes out with guns blazing tonight: “If you wanna put people in jail, I’ll second what Michele said. You ought to start with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.”
GOP presidential debate coverage here at and TPM Livewire at 8 p.m. ET. See you soon.
FBI to bring Lockheed Martin’s facial recognition technology to law enforcement nationwide in 2014.
With Herman Cain rocketing in the polls, could the Cain-Romney bromance officially end tonight?
The numerical logic is strong. But I actually wonder if Mitt’s going to go down that path. In some ways, Cain could be useful to Romney. I don’t think anyone thinks Herman Cain is going to be the Republican nominee. So he’s a much more convenient person for the right-wing of the party to get all jazzed up about than Rick Perry, who definitely could be the nominee.
Curious what you think.
Listening to Mitt right now at the Christie endorsement press conference he is not shying away from this weekends Mormonism ‘controversy’. Really going in for the kill, sticking the issue to Perry, not waiting for others to do it. Got the lay up from Christie.
As you’ve likely heard, the US government is reporting this afternoon that it has broken up a plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to Washington and to attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. Our reporter is at the press conference which is underway at this moment — so we’ll be reporting more shortly.
Here are the two keys though: Listening to the press conference the Justice Department is pushing very hard on the claim of Iranian government complicity. AG Holder spoke of “factions of the Iranian government” being involved. Needless to say, the claim that Iran would try to mount a violent attack in the US capital and trying to assassinate allied foreign ambassadors would have vast and dramatic international implications, to put it mildly. And no doubt — as I listen to the discussion at the press conference — the DOJ officials are pushing the Iranian government role very hard.
Second, the claim is that agents working on behalf or in league with the Iranian government allegedly approached Mexican drug cartels for assistance carrying out the assassination/attack. Given the controversy over the US-Mexican border, the idea that Mexican drug cartels might be involved in such an attack is sure to shoot that controversy to the moon as well.
Our initial read of the court documents suggests that FBI and DEA agents were involved from the first. We’ll bring you more shortly. It sounds at this point that the plot was aspirational until US government agents became involved and worked with the alleged conspirators to move it toward operational. Read More