Al Armendariz was by all accounts a well-liked and effective official in a key region of the country for the Environmental Protection Agency.

But when America’s climate-change-denier-in-chief Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) decided to make a big deal about a two year old video of Armendariz that had, up to that point, been considered totally innocuous, the right-wing outrage machine spun into action. Armendariz resigned in a matter of days.

Here’s how it happened.

As you’ve probably noticed, at the end of last week the skybox links at the top of every TPM page were replaced by a curated selection of poll averages from PollTracker, TPM’s proprietary poll aggregating and trending application.

We did this for two reasons. Read More

This paragraph from Jon Meacham’s piece on the fight over the bin Laden ad captures quite a lot … Read More

For the last twenty years or so, Republican presidential campaigns have used the British tabloid press to pitch their hit pieces that couldn’t get placed in the more professional US press. (Yes, it’s a pretty sad commentary on journalism in the UK but that’s where foreign intelligence services usually plant or pay in their disinformation campaigns too.) You can see here the first efforts of the folks around the Romney campaign to push what amounts to a ‘Navy Seals for Truth’ pitch to defend the former Massachusetts Governor. (The piece is being pushed on Drudge, which has worked closely with the Romney camp all through the primaries. Read More

Some great pics of Joe Biden in the age of mile-wide lapels and double-knit polyester.

Senate Democrats zero in on Republicans’ vulnerability among women voters by pushing Paycheck Fairness Act.

When I think of nanotube applications, things like space elevators come to mind. But MIT has come up with a much more mundane albeit practical use for nanotubes.

One World Trade Center today became the tallest building in New York. Take a look.

The Romney campaign is calling President Obama “feckless” on the bin Laden raid. As TPM Reader TC just put it, maybe ‘reckless’, maybe ‘obvious’. But pretty hard to see how he can qualify as ‘feckless’ on this count.

At a press availability with a foreign head of government no less, President Obama just pressed reporters to look back at Mitt Romney’s earlier statements about not prioritizing hunting down Osama bin Laden and not invading Pakistani sovereign territory to do it.

On what this back and forth is all about, see this post from earlier this morning.

Also note Obama’s actual words — “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it” — another smack at Romney’s vulnerability as a perceived flip-flopper or political weathervane, and I suspect how the Chicago team plans to box Romney in.