Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says that his threats to filibuster financial reform have helped get substantive negotiations back on track.

The Georgia state legislature, on top of the latest threats, is holding hearings on a bill to ban implanting people with microchips — as one rumor suggested the Health Care Reform bill mandated.

But the good folks who run the Judiciary Committee seemed to have gotten a bit more than they reckoned with when one of their hearing witnesses claimed that she had already been implanted with a microchip.

And not just any microchip, but one the Pentagon had implanted in her “vaginal-rectum area”, apparently to track her movements.

Presumably part of the Stimulus Bill.

There were two big gun-rights rallies yesterday in Washington, admirably timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The one on the Mall was at least made up of law abiding citizens; at another, in a national park just on the other side of the Potomac, attendees were encouraged to attend heavily armed. That “Restore The Constitution” event turned out to be so nuts that even the fringe-ish ‘Oath Keepers’ group decided not to participate.

You can see scenes from both events in today’s TPM Slideshow.

Grab your popcorn.

National Republicans try their best to game out when to bag on Charlie Crist.

John McCain, whose campaign was rescued by Crist in Florida in 2008, just preemptively put out a statement pledging that he won’t support Crist if he goes independent.

When not the client but the attorney declines to answer a question on the advice of his “good friend” Roger Stone.

That’s what happened when birther Army doctor Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin and his lawyer appeared this morning on Gordon Liddy’s radio show to discuss their plans to use court martial discovery proceedings to finally get the truth about Obama’s birth certificate.

Some of the shrewdest analysts of American finance have argued that financial panic of 2008 was less a matter of lax regulation or reckless bets than a broader crisis of political economy — one in which the financial sector had simply become too large to fill its proper role in the larger economy and its power, relatedly, too great in Washington to be restrained within healthy bounds.

Along those lines, I sometimes think that a cultural anthropologist might be better prepared to analyze what’s happening today between the White House and Goldman Sachs than a political analyst or financial commentator. Read More

Dems apparently have no Plan B if the Senate Republicans get their act together and filibuster Financial Reform.

Eric Cantor just endorsed Marco Rubio. But with Charlie Crist bouncing on the diving board and about to dive out of the GOP, I have to imagine there’s a lot of figuring among national GOPers. No one wants to be the last to renounce Crist — not just endorse Rubio but give a ‘Crist be gone!’ statement — and it won’t count for much once he’s already left the party. So is there a prize to the truly bold 2012 presidential contender who tells Crist to just leave the GOP now?

As we did with Health Care Reform, we’re watching every last development on the financial reform front in our TPM Financial Reform Wire. Check it out here or see it just below the feature story in the news section.

See a nugget we missed? Let us know with an email to our tips line — see the link at the upper right hand of the site.

The DNC rewinds to the John McCain’s “fundamentals of the economy are sound” line for its new commercial attacking the GOP on financial reform.

Another interesting question: did the Dems have any plan in place for what they’d do if Mitch McConnell got all the Republicans together to oppose reform? Don’t be shocked by the answer, which we’ll have for you shortly.