Anyone out there been at any of Eric Cantor’s ‘Help Us Find a Message’ Listening Tour events?

Arlen Specter says he’s cool with losing his senate seniority for the remainder of this Congress. I’m curious though whether that was really the deal Specter had or thought he had. In next year’s election, one of Specter’s biggest sells will be the clout his senate seniority brings him. If he has no assurance he’s going to have that, that will be a major liability for him. It certainly sounds to me like the Dems put him on a fairly effective form of probation.

Marriage equality becomes law in Maine.

After claiming that President Obama had played hardball with them in the Chrysler bankruptcy negotiations, a group of hedge funds asked a judge to keep their identities anonymous because their safety was endangered by “jerkhoff” and other anonymous commenters on the WaPo website.

One key point is worth making about Maine’s decision to make full marriage equality the law in their state. As far as I know, this is the first state to make gay marriage legal without any court case triggering the legislation. As far as I know, in each of the other states, either directly or indirectly, it was a court decision that got the ball rolling.

Our ‘March of Marriage Equality’ slide show has now been updated with today’s developments in Maine.

Harry Reid tells Andrea Mitchell: Arlen will be with us when we need him!

Is ‘Jerkhoff‘ German for Jerkoff?

Many conservatives believe Western Europe is becoming a Muslim region.

This whole whisper campaign against Supreme Court prospect Sonia Sotomayer has been very strange. It hadn’t really been on my radar until I was channel-surfing last night and stumbled across a sketch on Letterman’s show portraying her as the stereotypical hot-blooded Latina. Since when do prospective Supreme Court nominees get this kind of treatment before being nominated? So Brian Beutler took a look for us and finds a whisper campaign that so far is marked by a paucity of on-the-record sources and very little concrete evidence of her alleged poor judicial temperament. Makes you wonder who has the knives out for her and why.