The persons running the Republican Party of Minnesota wanted to show they really weren’t a bunch of sexist slobs by having The First Female Senate Majority Leader, yet when she and a male staffer were found to be doing the horizontal bop, she and only she is the one who loses her job — just as typically happens when a male boss in private industry is caught in an affair with a female subordinate.

As many of you know, KarenM recently donated a kidney to her son-in-law Jimmy. Of course there’s a lot that went into getting them into the OR, but we’ll start with some tales from the surgery. What a beautiful gift.

Kermit The Frog — Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, set to video by AnimeSnatcher.

The new Pew poll found that this is one of the most disliked Congresses in modern history, but it seems most of the blame for Congress’s dysfunction is being placed on the Republican Party. On a whole host of questions about which party is better at different things, the American people have turned sharply against the GOP since the midterm election.

I don’t think Godwin’s Law applies if it’s an actual Nazi image.

The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.

I’m not referring to the “doomsday” predicted by Leon Panetta should military spending be scaled back to the obscenely inflated levels of 2007. I’m talking about the complete failure to keep the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we might not. Practices that were avoided, outsourced, or kept secret when Bill Clinton was president were directly engaged in on such a scale under president George W. Bush that they became common knowledge. Under President Obama they are becoming formal law and acceptable policy.

With so many atrocious things happening in Congress — and necessary things not happening — it may seem odd to focus on a relatively minor provision in the omnibus spending bill that defunds a small program at the Department of Energy.

But the dim bulbs in the House and their Tea Party followers deserve attention for insisting on a measure that will raise your monthly utility bills, enrich coal and gas companies and increase global pollution. You have to be exceptionally stupid to accomplish all that.

The House Judiciary Committee abruptly adjourned today without completing work on the Stop Online Piracy Act, an unexpected twist in the high stakes battle between Hollywood content providers and leading Internet companies.

Republicans hate public employees. But they hate retired public employees even more. And they hate most the public employees who are still on the job while they take a public employee pension at the same time. So how will this newest revelation, of Rick Perry’s double-dipping, convince the GOP base voters that Rick Perry should rise back to the top of the primary polls again?

In case you were wondering whether Nevada’s indictment of a couple Lender Processing Services employees on robo-signing charges would be the end of the fraud prosecutions, with a Lynndie England-like prosecution of the low-level grunts and not the higher-ups, you can wonder no more. Today, Nevada’s Attorney General, Catherine Cortez Masto, filed suit against LPS itself for document fraud.