Joe Weisenthal: “A number of folks in the media seem to get that there’s something reckless about the Default Caucus of the GOP, but since they strive so hard for balance, they have to attack Obama for something too, and so they usually point to his lack of spending cuts.”

Sahil Kapur has the latest on where things stand.

“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.”

Answer after the jump. Read More

Sen.-elect Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who just got elected with bigtime NRA support, comes out against more guns in schools proposal.

According to The Hill, Speaker Boehner has told members of his caucus that he’s done negotiating with President Obama. From the perspective of Boehner and House Republicans this process has amounted to nothing more than Boehner and the members he represents being taken again and again to the cleaners. Read More

David Wasserman, undisputed popular votemeister, has just updated his national House popular vote number with the certification of final results from New York State. And the Democrats now has a non-trivial lead of 1.362 million votes. 49.15% to 48.03%.

That’s not only a measure of effective gerrymandering. There’s also the concentration of Democratic votes in large urban districts. And the simple fact that, like in the presidential race, different areas are contested in very uneven ways.

With all that said, though, significantly more people voted for Democratic representatives than Republican ones.

A new study by scientists at Caltech estimates that the Milky Way contains at least 100 billion planets.

Christie blames “the toxic internal politics of the House majority” for failure on Sandy aid.

Still trying to figure out what happened yesterday with the Fiscal Cliff? Wonder how President Obama is going to handle the new debt ceiling hostage crisis? Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Alter will be taking your questions in a TPMPrime Live Chat at 4 PM eastern today. Get your questions in now.

I’ve mentioned versions of this in different posts over the last week. But with the ‘cliff’ notionally behind us, I wanted to hit the point again. Everything that happened over the last few days leaves us exactly where we were, which is that everything now comes down to a fight over the debt-ceiling — and now without the cudgel of the automatic end of the Bush tax cuts. Read More