In the wake of news that Sen. Lindsey Graham is threatening to block the nominations of Hagel and Brennan, there’s a whole new conspiracy theory bubbling up on the right. From ground zero of Obama era conspiracy theories comes the conspiracy theory to top them all: that CIA nominee John Brennan is himself a Muslim. Read More

Let’s just say it: Marco Rubio is the Wes Clark of 2013. Only with many fewer accomplishments. Read More

Nicole Wallace on Marco Rubio: “He’s everything we need and more. He’s modern. He knows who Tupac is. He is on social media.” Read More

This is one photo from the on-going search for fugitive ex-cop Chris Dorner. It was taken in Riverside on February 7th, as the search headed into San Bernardino County and the mountains around Big Bear. But if you look at the police officer in this picture carrying some sort of military grade rifle his car identifies him as from the Upland, California police department, which happens to be the town I grew up in from 6 to 16. No big comment. Just bracing to see.

TPM Reader LF has a less flattering take on the Governor across the river …

I think that Chris Christie can be related to another Republican politician whose presidential ambitions, once seen as highly realistic, faded because his personality became too apparent–Rudy Giuliani.

Like Christie, Giuliani was a bombastic executive who rose to prominence as a tough-as-nails prosecutor in bare-knuckles US Attorneys’ offices. They both tended to “wear their emotions on their sleeve” as you very generously put it. Or put another way, Christie and Giuliani are both assholes.

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We all know Chris Christie is a bit of a hothead. I mean, it’s a bit like saying a hothead is a bit of a hothead. It’s not observation but truism. Republicans love him or loved him for it. And Democrats started to too because his blow ups don’t all follow ideology. There was this time back in 2011 when he flipped out at a reporter for questioning whether a Muslim-American judge he’d appointed to the bench might be a security risk or sympathetic to al Qaeda. Read More

Senate Democrats spent the latter part of the week building consensus amongst themselves on a plan to pay down the sequester that includes a mix of spending cuts and new taxes. Early reports from Democratic aides suggest they want to sub out a year’s worth of sequester cuts by reducing Medicare provider payments, defense spending, and farm subsidies; and increasing revenues from wealthy individuals and businesses in one of any number of politically advantageous ways. On their own, these measures would reduce deficits by about $120 billion over 10 years — about one tenth of the full sequester.

Once this plan is set in stone, Republicans will reject it out of hand for including revenues. Until then, they will continue to advance the peculiar claim that only they have a plan to avoid the sequester (to replace it with spending cuts, largely to social programs for the poor) and that Democrats do not.

Let’s examine that claim. Read More

The manhunt continues in the snow-covered mountains east of Los Angeles for the ex-LAPD officer suspected of going on a shooting rampage this week. Photos from the multiple crime scenes ranging from LA to San Diego to Big Bear.

TPM Reader JB (a former GOP staffer if I remember right) doesn’t think either side of the current GOP struggle has reckoned with the first decade of this century …

I don’t think I rely on analysis dripping with the smugness and self-satisfaction your correspondent NS displays.

Instead, let’s eschew the pop psychology jargon and look at the public record. Both the Tea Party types and the big GOP donors represented by Karl Rove were fully on board with just about everything the Bush administration said or did. For all their zeal now, the only major policy issue on which Republicans now aligned with the Tea Party ever clashed with Bush was immigration reform — for which Bush himself, remember, didn’t actually fight that hard.

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It probably didn’t surprise anyone that Chris Christie called out the former White House doctor who publicly said his obesity might cause him to die in office. But apparently Christie called Dr. Connie Mariano at home and chewed her out over the phone about her observations.