Huckabee needs oral bypass surgery STAT!

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who just hired a joint press secretary with fellow loon Rep Michele Bachmann (R-MN), did in fact justify the actions of Joseph Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing one.

Not yet in the showers, Jim Bunning throws Mitch McConnell a little chin music.

Rather than spending billions of your tax dollars on the war, tell politicians how they could take just a little of that and have a big impact in your community and return the “Peace Dividend.”

Consider the timeline here. Lincoln leaks to Politico that her bill will take on the big bad banks. This is a day after her primary opponent launches a campaign to tie Lincoln to those very banks. Everyone goes off of Politico, without having seen actual language, that the Lincoln bill is tough. Chris Van Hollen starts blabbing to the world that derivatives trading will be a partisan wedge issue. All of a sudden. And the context is that national Democrats and the White House have backed Lincoln against Bill Halter.

The New York Times/CBS News poll that focused on the opinions of self-identified tea party members paints an interesting picture of people who choose the label. We know they are very white, basically 86% of the them in the pool were white non-Hispanics. As a group, they tend to be financially better off and have a high level of education compared to the general public. They are also, as a group, much older than the rest of the voting population, and are more likely to attend church and call themselves “born again” (39% among tea party members, compared with 28% among the general population).

Back in 2002, the Bush administration gave the phone and cable companies what they wanted and classified broadband outside the normal regulatory framework for two-way communications networks like phones. Fast forward to 2009, when the FCC came down on Comcast for blocking legal traffic on their networks. An appeals court overtuned the lawsuit, basically saying the FCC has no legal standing to regulate the Internet. Which, on its face, is crazy.

All the FCC needs to do to be able to regulate the Internet again is simply reverse Bush’s mistake. And indeed, an earlier Supreme Court ruling on Bush’s original move confirms this – the Court essentially said the FCC is allowed to reclassify services.

To reclassify, the FCC needs to hold a vote of its five member board. And the votes are there – Obama appointee Chairman Genachowski has been a strong supporter of net neutrality and its assumed the other two Democratic chairman would vote with him.

So, will the Chairman and FCC do it? So far, we don’t know.

Despite a huge public relations push to praise the new detention facility that has replaced the old Bagram prison, the legacy of torture and murder at Bagram and the nearby Afghan Pol-e-Charki facility will be hard to overcome.

Tax rates are at a historically low level not because the burden has been taken completely off the poor and the middle class, people. It’s because taxes have been ridiculously low for the wealthy since the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, and nothing has been done to promote greater equality by rolling back those cuts.

Here’s one of the more curious details about yesterday’s surprise news that Steven Kappes was leaving the CIA.

Best as I can tell, the White House has not yet issued a statement about his retirement (at least not via the White House press list). Not even in a week when one of the key issues for which Kappes gets some credit, the elimination of loose nukes (in Kappes case, in connection with Libya), was much in the news.