One of the big questions coming into the new Congress was how would the existing GOP power structure in the House assimilate the big tea party freshmen class.

Brian Beutler reports for us on some very important developments over the last couple of days that don’t bode well for Speaker Boehner, who is trying to hold his caucus together by satisfying the tea party desire for spending cuts without embracing a politically ruinous budget that would make a government shutdown look like child’s play.

A touching moment on the usually loveless Hardball just now, with Chris Matthews effusing to a certain guest, “Josh Marshall, I’m falling in love with you.”

Video after the jump: Read More

I think we can nominate Rep. David M. Rivera (R-FL) as freshman rep most likely to become ex-rep before he gets a chance to become a sophomore rep.

How is Citizens United looking after one year? Left and Right compare notes at a symposium in DC.

It started as the bizarro headline of the day, from The Daily Caller: “First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign could be causing more pedestrian deaths.”

But as we looked into it, the underlying story turned out to exceedingly weak, the main source says she was misquoted, and there’s no data to suggest that encouraging people to be more active puts them more at risk of being hit by cars.

What we’re left with may be another example of humans’ often irrational calculations of risk. It’s enough to make a statistician pull her hair out.

It sounds like that bomb that was found along the route of that Martin Luther King day parade route on Monday was more serious than it first appeared.

A big bloc of conservative House Republicans is rolling out its proposed spending cuts today. You’ve got the usual targets — NEA, CPB, NEH — but the big knife comes in the form of capping non-defense spending at 2006 levels.

If you wondered throughout the 2010 campaign what the GOP’s proposed spending cuts would look like, now you can see just how draconian they are.

FBI rolls up more than 100 alleged mafia figures in what the bureau calls its largest mob bust ever.

When my colleague David published the letter from TPM Reader BW taking us to task for our coverage of Sarah Palin I knew he was poking a hornet’s nest. And your emails confirmed my assumption. I thought David put it pretty much right in his response. But I thought I should weigh in as well on this point. Read More