The GOP-controlled House takes up two Libya resolutions midday today. Susan Crabtree on what to expect.

Newly elected Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has some serious splainin’ to do. After spending nearly $9 million of his own money to get elected in November, Johnson received $10 million in “deferred compensation” from his company.

That’s seems kind of fishy on its own. But it gets better — or worse, if you’re Johnson and his lawyers. Read More

You must see this chart. Debt crisis? If Congress simply does nothing, the deficit disappears on its own by the middle of this decade. Look at the chart.

Private prisons use big bucks to sell politicians on the joys of mass incarceration.

A fun parlor game. Who’s the least popular newly elected Republican in the country? Have your answer? Now look at the graph. Bonus if you can guess which newly elected Republican governor has had the most rapid fall since November.

Gingrich tells reporters his campaign is not as dead as it seems.

Pataki says he may need to get into the presidential race if no strong candidate emerges.

Glenn Beck to visit Auschwitz, figure out, “how did this happen.”

Not a moment too soon since he seems to need a lot of education about just what happened. “Poland, I didn’t know this when I first started doing my research.” Beck said, “Poland rose up, a lot of Poles rose up, to try to help the Jews but they had nothing left. They had no arms.”

I mentioned a few days ago that we’re going to be setting up a special section at TPM to cover the crackdown on voting in advance of the 2012 election cycle, a hugely important but generally undercovered story going into next year’s election. All across the country states are passing restrictive polling place ID laws. But Gov. Beverly Perdue (D-NC) has just vetoed one of these bills in North Carolina.

(ed.note: Special thanks to TPM Reader ML for the heads up.)

Whatever else you can say about Jose Antonio Vargas’s New York Times confessional, he’s ended the public silence about a shameful, critically important and deeply human subject that affects us all but too few people have been willing to discuss: the comically self-important blowhards who apparently serve as top executives at our great newspapers.