Newt Gingrich solicits donations to his campaign to help him defend the Ryan Medicare Phase Out plan.

Mitt Romney pulled a prank on the Obama campaign last night. But I confess I’m not even sure I get it. On a campaign stop in Chicago, Romney had deep dish pizza and then had the leftovers sent to Obama campaign headquarters.

Late Update: We’ve gotten comment from the Romney campaign. And they say, no prank. From Romney Communications Director Gail Gitcho: “Yes – it was sent. No prank – just a nice gesture since we were just a few blocks away from their HQ yesterday and had extra pizza.”

A federal district judge in Virginia has found the campaign finance laws barring corporations from contributing to candidates to be unconstitutional. This is just a trial court judge, so the immediate implications are limited, but the basis for his decision is that last year’s ruling by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case dictates this outcome, an argument many conservatives have been making for some time and that campaign finance advocates feared was the logical conclusion of CU. So this sets the stage for the Supreme Court to possibly revisit the issue.

Public polling, the NY-26 outcome, and other objective indicators make it clear Republicans have boxed themselves into a political corner with their plan to end Medicare. It’s a big problem for them politically, and there’s no easy way out, especially since virtually every Republican in Congress is now on the record, with a vote, that they favor gutting Medicare.

So how are they gonna get out of this jam? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) just made it clear in a briefing with reporters on the Hill: They’re going to hold the government’s debt limit as hostage in order to back their way out of this political tight spot. Read More

TPM Reader MH isn’t too worried:

Meh. Republicans can play the game theory madman role all they want at this point. But everybody knows the hostage has a get out of jail free card. The Republican fund raising base, the real Republican base – not the abortion fanatics, the christianists or the bigots – will never allow them to voluntarily turn the economy over like a cop car in a riot.

No, the Chamber of Commerce crowd will have the final say in this question, and they’ll only extend the leash to the GOP as long as no real economic damage will accrue. As soon as they see the potential for revenue losses, it will end, not with a default, but with a whimper…

Despite their recent protestations to the contrary, Republicans have had Medicare in their crosshairs for years. This year just happens to be one of the few times they’ve been so brazen about it that the public has started to clue in. A quick look back at the last two decades of Republican efforts to gut Medicare.

Tim Pawlenty’s first week officially on the Presidential merry-go-round: Read More

Though there are many customary ways to observe Memorial Day, I’ve often struggled to figure out a way to do justice to the holiday. But this weekend I had an experience that gave me some guidance. I went to my 20th college reunion. And as I guess is often the case the celebrants of the 25th reunion were given pride of place in the alumni parade. They processed with all the mix of hijinks, nostalgia and loud university memorabilia you’d imagine. But what fixed my attention were the placards with the faces of their classmates who died before reaching their 25th — university face book photos, black and white and grainy, frozen in time late in their teenage years. Dead but remembered. Read More

I was in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill this morning when I glanced up and saw this chyron on CNN: Read More

Sarah Palin was just a sidecar to the big annual Memorial Day weekend motorcycle ride on Washington held by the group Rolling Thunder.

Dedicated to the “full accountability for Prisoners Of War (POW) and Missing In Action (MIA) of all wars,” Rolling Thunder was formed in the late ’80s during the peak of the Vietnam POW/MIA myth-making. Pics from this year’s gathering: