In effect, Wyden would put a hold on the legislation, forcing a series of time-consuming votes to get Protect IP passed. Republicans do this routinely. But with so much on the calendar and not much time to get it all done, this could at least block the bill for the rest of the year.

What’s particularly remarkable is that Pexton is admitting (albeit wanting it kept secret) what any honest observer knows to be true: that there is a very high likelihood — I’d say absolute certainty — that Rubin would have been fired had she promoted a post like this about Jews and Israelis rather than Arabs and Palestinians.

There’s a deep undercurrent here that people don’t really want to talk about. But it’s there. The lives of children are entrusted to the all-American tradition of athletics, and the controls on keeping predators out of that tradition are obviously lax.

Gingrich has been slowly but steadily moving up in the national polls over the past several weeks since Rick Perry’s support collapsed, but this is the first major national poll to finally put him in what I would consider a top tier status. Gingrich’s campaign has been mostly under the radar so far, but now that his poll numbers are up enough, he should start facing increased scrutiny, and there is a lot of Gingrich’s career to scrutinize.

First Democrat running the Pentagon in 15 years, folks.

With the small fry measures in the American Jobs Act almost out of the way, the debate turns to the largest measures in the bill, particularly the payroll tax cut. While this is another example of a tax expenditure, at least this one goes to the working poor as well as everyone else, and it generally acts as a 2% wage increase in paychecks, which for the worker making the median income means $1,000 a year. There are valid concerns about how this impacts the Social Security Trust Fund, but the consensus take is that a fragile economy cannot afford to pull back on this boost to discretionary income, which will have an impact on consumer spending and the broader economy.

Sam Stein reports that the Obama Administration plans to make a federal case out of this over the next month.

That’s right, a guy who pocketed $300,000 to shill for Freddie & Fannie, ran up a six-figure tab at Tiffany, and who’s been part of the Washington establishment for 32 years — this is the guy Teabaggers want to put in the White House.

I’m here at Foley Square in NYC. People have gathered for a Veteran’s Day rally with Joan Baez and other musical artists. Besides the music there will be a focus on veteran’s issues.

The economy’s problem is that there is no source of demand to replace the consumption driven by housing bubble wealth that has now disappeared or the housing construction that resulted from hugely inflated bubble prices. We would be in pretty much the same situation today even if there had been no financial crisis.

The goal of environmentalists is not solely to re-route the pipeline; it’s to stop it. Clearly putting the tar sands pipeline over sensitive environmental areas is unwise, but the bigger problem here is extracting the tar sands out of the earth, which requires a tremendous amount of energy in its own right, and distributing it across the globe for others to burn.