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. Read More

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: Read More

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).