John Ashcroft DOJ Chief of Staff and current business partner David Ayres apparently plans to take the fifth at the trial of accused Team Abramoff operative Kevin Ring.

Barack Obama definitely the first black man to get attacked by the right for telling kids to study hard and stay in school.

Because of the state’s size and statewide standards, Texas’s choice of school books is often adopted by state’s and school districts around the country. And the state is about to adopt a policy only to adopt textbooks which teach students to “identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.”

An earlier proposal to de-emphasize the American founding fathers in favor of biblical precepts didn’t make the cut. But a new emphasis on the teachings of Newt Gingrich may be coming to a high school near you.

Rep. Bachmann (R-MN): Dems are after me because they fear I’ll become president.

Charlie Cook is out with another ominous political analysis/forecast for the Democrats, particularly when it comes to continued Democratic control of the House. The key issue for Cook is Obama’s dramatic decline in support among political independents over the course of the summer. By Cook’s reading, the economic bite of the recession only really kicked in in the early months of Obama’s term and smacked right up against Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda. But the part of Cook’s analysis that jumped out at me was the last part of this graf … Read More

Earlier today we reported about NJ Gov. candidate Chris Christie’s latest traffic incident in which he mentioned being US Attorney and didn’t get a ticket.

We wanted to get more information on the accident — since the initial reports suggested a high degree of negligence (i.e., driving the wrong way on a one-way street) and didn’t go into specifics on the motorcyclist’s injuries. So we sent Eric Kleefeld down to the police station in Elizabeth. And I just got off the phone with Eric after he took an initial look at the police report. Read More

Video: Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) talks down a gaggle of Tea Partiers at state fair.

Can you be the heckler at your own health care town hall? Sounds like a zen koan. But Michael Steele gave it a try.

As noted earlier, we sent Eric Kleefeld down to the Elizabeth, New Jersey police department headquarters to get the police report on gubernatorial Chris Christie’s wrong-way collision with a motorcyclist back in 2002. And here’s Eric’s write-up on the report.

But just a few moments ago, another big development surfaced — an apparent lie about the accident Christie was caught in by New Jersey public television station NJN. Read More

NJ Gov. candidate Chris Christie, when asked for comment about the 2002 accident in which he hit a motorcyclist while driving the wrong way on a one way street.

“First of all, the motorcycle hit me. He was injured at the scene, he was taken to the hospital but I understand that he’s fine now.”

In case you missed it, here’s Eric Kleefeld’s post on the police report. And here’s the account of Christie denying the victim filed a lawsuit before a reporter for NJN found a record of the lawsuit at the county courthouse.