No one is more alarmed about the federal government’s conspiracy to buy up all the nation’s bullets than Stephen Colbert.

Illinois GOP Chair Pat Brady created a furor earlier this year when he came out in support for gay marriage. And there was a serious effort to remove him from office – one that seemed to have failed. Not the Chicago Tribune is reporting that Brady plans to resign tomorrow.

As we’ve been reporting for a few weeks, now that Senate Dems have passed a budget, Republicans have suddenly lost their enthusiasm for hallowed official processes and are resisting Democratic efforts to return to “regular order” and debate the differences between the House and Senate budgets in an at least somewhat transparent way. Even by Capitol Hill standards it’s rare for parties to reveal this kind of procedural hypocrisy so abruptly.

There are a few reasons for that. Part of it is just that the GOP budget is a political loser and Republicans don’t want to give Dems the opportunity to relitigate damaging election year debates over how much the rich should pay in taxes, what should happen to Medicare and so on. Republicans are also seemingly trying to slow walk the budget process so that it lines up with the much harder deadline of increasing the debt limit.

Which brings us to the Senate floor Monday. Read More

Having done about four hours of updates here, I’m starting a new thread. The latest is that police have arrested three brothers tied to the abduction and captivity of the three women rescued in Cleveland tonight.

Three women, abducted as teenagers, 9, 10 and 11 years ago from a single neighborhood in Cleveland have been found, apparently in good physical health, only a couple miles from the scene of the original abductions. Read More

I’m not sure if the folks at the conservative Heritage Foundation realized their propagandistic new study on the budgetary effects of immigration reform would invite so much derision from experts on the right, but that’s what it’s getting.

This is why they call wedge issues wedge issues, but for me the real fun part is the revealed opportunism on both sides of the wedge. Read More

Last night I flagged this bizarre and disturbing shoot-out video out of Ohio where a guy in a routine traffic stop got out of his car with an AK-47 and proceeded to unload on the police cruiser. (They were wounded; he was killed.) One of our readers noticed that what appears to be a course manual for one of the courses taught by Tactical Response CEO James Yeager was recovered in the shooter’s car. This afternoon Yeager posted a video — apparently in response to my post? — denying that Gilkerson had ever been a student or customer and claiming that the manual was actually a bootleg of his work. Watch.

Top Air Force Officer in charge of preventing sexual assault arrested for sexual battery. From the police report: “drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks.”

Top Air Force Officer in charge of preventing sexual assault arrested for sexual battery.

Obama firing range dummies that got booted from the NRA convention. But all hope is not lost because they did show up in two recent Discovery Channel reality shows.