Rep. Peter King will hold hearings on “the radicalization” of American Muslims when he gets his gavel for the House’s homeland-security committee. Framing the question that way predetermines its outcome: millions of Americans will be presumptively guilty of drifting into fellow-traveling with al-Qaeda. But King is right that even a statistically miniscule rise in homegrown terrorism deserves thorough analysis. The question is how real King will allow his hearings to get.

Before the DADT repeal vote on Saturday, the Senate will take up the DREAM Act. Both votes came up as a House amendment to a Senate amendment to a bill, so they only require one cloture vote, a motion to concur. If they invoke cloture with 60 votes, they would only need a simple majority after that, and Harry Reid will fill the amendment tree on the measures, so if something passes, it would look identical to what the House passed. With Senators Bennett and Lugar in the bag, a unified caucus would mean 60 votes. But given the nature of how the vote is being brought up, I think the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that it fails tomorrow.

If the president issues a public veto threat in order to keep a major promise, that has popular support, the President is almost always going to win in the end.

Bob Corker, speaking softly to Olivier Knox, casually says that the START treaty won’t pass if Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or the DREAM Act get a vote tomorrow.

I can feel my greens shooting already.

The AP has a story on Mitchell and Jessen’s torture defense. The lead of the story describes how CIA protected the torturers both by paying all of their defense costs — up to $5 million — as well as paying it directly out of CIA funds. This and some rather interesting sub-narrative suggest there was some regret or recognition that the torture program wasn’t such a good idea.

Cummings has the potential to be a worthy adversary to Darrell Issa. But the way in which the leadership went about this was pretty ham-fisted.

Congratulations to the Republican Party, who, for the second straight year, have won PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year Award” — once again for making shit up about health insurance reform.

Women members of Congress contribute significantly to the DCCC’s coffers. But they don’t appear to be getting much for their money.

This was the trade made in the Senate last night; the Dems will get legislative repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a couple judges, and probably the new START Treaty, and the Republicans will get the chance to massively cut spending early in the 112th Congress.