Susan Collins is on MSNBC right now trying to justify her earlier criticisms of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s interrogation after new information has emerged suggesting that putting him through the Court system has actually revealed quite good intelligence. Now she’s upset that the right intelligence officials weren’t consulted. She’s truly an embarrassment.

Can’t we at least get a senator who’s on top of the latest demagoguery on this issue to dish out the bamboozlement?

So you don’t watch Fox News, you say? Consider making an exception for Jon Stewart’s appearances on The O’Reilly Factor tonight and tomorrow night.

There’s been a lot of talk about whether Adm. Mullen’s support of repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ may put Republicans in a tough spot in sustaining their opposition. As mores and attitudes have changed over the last seventeen years, Republicans have increasingly deferred the issue to the nation’s senior officers rather than addressing the issue of anti-gay discrimination directly. Today on MSNBC Orrin Hatch suggested he may now be open to repeal himself.

It definitely wasn’t a full-throated endorsement. He floated the idea that DADT’s repeal might be a prelude to asking for ‘special rights’ for gays in the US military. But the gist of his remarks seemed pretty clear. He was unwilling to say he opposed it.

CBS has been taking a lot of heat for accepting an anti-abortion Superbowl ad starring Heisman Winner Tim Tebow and paid for by Focus on the Family, while rejecting in recent years ads with left-leaning messages. We rundown the latest developments here, but this protest video by the so-called “Raging Grannies of South Florida,” part of a campaign against CBS by the Women’s Media Center, is pretty darn funny: Read More

Harold Ford (for the Dems) and Michael Steele (for the GOP) to debate America’s future tomorrow night.

Late Update: Eeesh. It seems like they’re making a habit of this.

I’m figuring that Andrew Young isn’t looking for a future in the political operative business.

Jon Stewart on O’Reilly’s show: a heavyweight bout where the fighters spend most of their time feinting and feeling each other out. Watch.

Daniel Pipes is always devising new and ingenious rationales for why bombing Iran is good for America, but his latest brain-child is counter-intuitive, since Pipes is the last person who’d want Obama to succeed: The President must bomb Iran to save his presidency.

House Republicans don’t have an official budget yet. But they have what amounts to a first draft. The official budget will be released in March or April and will be authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee in consultation with the other Republicans on the Committee. But Ryan has released a budget he’d like. And it’s actually fairly detailed. And if you read it, which we have, you start to wonder why Democrats aren’t making a bigger deal out of it.

What’s in it? A few interesting things.

First, it calls for big cuts in Social Security benefits for everyone currently under 55 years of age. On top of the cuts it also calls for privatizing Social Security. Read More

It turns out the winner of the Democrats’ lieutenant Governor’s primary in Illinois has a pretty nasty assault rap for attacking his girlfriend back in 2005. According to police reports he slammed her head against a wall and left “mild abrasions from [a] knife wound” on her neck and “minor scars on her hand from her trying to defend herself against the arrestee swinging the knife at her.”

The charges were eventually dropped because the victim didn’t show up on a court date.

From a political perspective, also not helpful for Cohen is that his girlfriend at the time was a prostitute, though he says he thought she just worked at a massage parlor.