The Daily Show gets to the bottom of the mystery “missile” off the California coast. Watch.
It’s worth paying very close attention to the Minnesota governor’s race recount. As you’ll recall in the 2008 Senate recount, a significant part of the Republican motivation for dragging out the legal process wasn’t just to try to secure a victory for Norm Coleman but to deny Al Franken the Senate seat for as long as possible — and thus deny Democrats the cherished 60th vote in the Senate.
This time around any delay in Democrat Mark Dayton taking office means Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty gets to hang around with all the powers of the office and — for the first time — a Republican majority statehouse. But Republicans wouldn’t play dirty pool, right? Ahem … Read More
Bachman shut down in quest to enter House leadership on Tea Party’s coattails.
Incoming Chief of Staff to Tea Party Rep.-elect Allen West calls Speaker Pelosi “garbage.”
One of the legislative priorities for Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who’s vying to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee is defending the “traditional, incandescent light bulb” against government regulators who want to replace it with “the little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones.”
Ezra Klein, on the Bowles-Simpson proposal:
The co-chairmen have some interesting policy ideas for how to balance the budget, but as of yet, they’ve not made any discernible progress on the political deadlock preventing us from balancing the budget. And it’s the deadlock, not the policy questions, that they were asked to solve.
The White House issued the following statement regarding the Bowles/Simpson plan: Read More
More on why Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles felt compelled to release their proposed deficit reduction plan today.
A big question for 2012 is whether President Obama will continue to resist creation of outside groups on the left to rival American Crossroads and similar big-spending attack groups on the right. There have been signals that Obama is softening. Now David Brock is actively pitching the creation of such a group on the left, Greg Sargent reports.