As you’ve probably heard, there’s a growing furor about the decision of a suburban New York newspaper to publish a database of the names and addresses of registered gun owners in two New York counties (Rockland and Westchester) just north of New York City. The data is already in the public domain. You or I could have accessed it a week ago. But it’s a little different to have it in a fingertips-ready web 2.0 form. Read More

Some fascinating findings from Pew’s on-going number crunching of the 2012 election. African-Americans, for the first time ever, may have voted at higher rates than American whites. Read More

Just to keep you up to date, Scott Brown’s announcement of an imminent offer from the White House to Senate Republicans seems to have been mainly in Scott Brown’s imagination … or perhaps better to say a significant over-interpretation of communication between the White House and the Senate GOP. Or perhaps it’s real but he wasn’t supposed to say anything?

CNN earlier also reported this based on two unnamed sources. And they appear to be sticking to their story. But over the last few minutes basically all the key players in the mix have shot down the Brown report.

Maybe something’s happening. But for now it looks like Brown jumped the gun.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) says he opposes legislation that would allow teachers to bring concealed weapons into schools.

And before you write in, I was born in Missouri.

As we noted last night, John Boehner has now abdicated his responsibility to do anything to negotiate some solution to the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ problem. He now says the Senate has to act first. And only then will the House review the Senate’s proposal. So what’s going on? The only reasonable explanation is that he’s unwilling to act until he’s reelected as Speaker, as Harry Reid just said.

Earlier today I asked whether Dick Armey and the unidentified guy carrying the gun broke DC firearms law during the now-fabled FreedomWorks coup. Well, we’ve been working the story through the course of the day and here’s what we’ve come up with.

The upshot is that if a civilian had done what’s described in the Post story, it would pretty likely be a violation of DC’s very strict gun laws. With some very circumscribed exceptions, you just can’t go around DC with a handgun, concealed or not. Unless you’re a member of law enforcement. Read More

House GOP leaders say Senate has to act on fiscal cliff before they do.

For the life of me I do not understand this. The upshot of the ‘Plan B’ debacle is that John Boehner can’t even deliver Republican votes for his bill, let alone Republican votes for a compromise between Boehner and President Obama. So Boehner simply can’t get anything done. And thus now we have to look to the Senate to break the impasse. Read More

Check out some amazing photos from the year in deep space exploration.

Monday morning’s ambush on firefighters in Webster, N.Y. might be the worst — or at least most bizarre — violence to happen in the nation in the days following the Newtown, Conn. school massacre. Now come to find out the New York shooter used the same make and caliber of rifle as the gunman in Connecticut: a Bushmaster semi-automatic .223. We published the history of that rifle last week.