Yesterday I told you we wanted to put together a critical, bottom-line run-down of just what was and wasn’t know in advance about Xmas Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. In other words, just what did the various arms of the US Intelligence Community know in advance. Because there’s a lot of contradictory and ambiguous information out and stories that were published and then retracted but are still circulating through the news- and chat-osphere. We asked for your help. And here’s what we’ve come up with. Point by point, what are the specific things credible news organizations have reported were known. How are they sourced and what are they still standing by.

Really a must-read. Take a look.

Now we’ve got another set of polls about the Connecticut Senate race with Richard Blumenthal taking the place of Chris Dodd. This time from Rasmussen. And even Rasmussen shows Blumenthal crushing the two major GOP candidates.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is not running for Governor of Colorado.

Tea Partiers can relax. The troll emailer who tried to invade their mailing list apparently wasn’t even Rachel Maddow after all. That’s what real Rachel Maddow tells us.

Last night I noted that Richard Blumenthal’s decision to run for Chris Dodd’s seat in Connecticut had at least marginally improved Joe Lieberman’s chances of getting reelected in 2012. But now we have another sign of just how unpopular Lieberman is post-Health Care Reform antics. Joe was already really unpopular among Connecticut Democrats. His approval among state Dems is now down to 14%. And his overall approval in the state is 25% in the state overall with 67% disapproval.

That’s much, much more unpopular than Joe was even a couple months ago.

“Tea Party Nation” braces for invasion of “liberal trolls”. “We banned [Rachel Maddow] 7 minutes after she joined,” group tells Tea Party loyalists.

National Security Adviser James Jones warns that Americans will feel “a certain shock” from today’s upcoming report on the Flight 253 attempted bombing. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Whatever else you can say about the ‘Yes Men’ political hoaxster group, they’ve got this uncanny ability to get the targets of the pranks to go completely nuts and wildly overreact. In this new case, the ‘Yes Men’ spoofed/imitated a Canadian government website. And the Canadian government created a sort of international case in response, pulling in law enforcement and other counterpart agencies across Europe to force the site offline. And in the process, once Germany and Denmark had been pulled into the hunt, they managed to zap thousands of other websites in the process.

Today we’re going to get the first official read out of the White House on just what happened and what went wrong on the intel front with the Xmas Bomber. But another point I’ve wanted to get to the bottom of is whether there’s really anything to the claims that some former Gitmo inmates were involved in planning the attack. So I had Justin Elliott look at everything we know and separate the facts from the Sunday show hullabaloo. Take a look at his report. It’s an excellent primer for making sense of this part of the debate.

Later today we’re going to have another write up, putting together all that was allegedly known in advance about Abdulmutallab. To help us put that post together, click here.

In addition to the big ticket races you’re hearing about, one of the big stories of 2010 is going to be the “tea party primaries,” the series of GOP primaries around the country in which Tea Party candidates are either challenging GOP incumbents or going up against the anointed (and usually more moderate) challenger to the sitting Democrat. Here are three ‘tea party primaries’ we’re currently watching.