Right after he appeared with Bachmann at a 4 o’clock afternoon campaign stop in Indianola, state senator Kent Sorenson, Bachmann’s Iowa campaign chair, defects to the Ron Paul campaign.

This is fantastically good news for Ron Paul. Fan-tas-ti-cally good news.

Los Angeles county sheriff is suffering through the worst performance record in the country outside of noted racist Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona. First, Sheriff Lee Baca had to endure credible allegations of mistreatment of prisoners in county lockups. Now, he has a new scandal on his hands.

A group of Iowaninions, frustrated with the current occupants of the Republican Clown Car (2012 or bust!), are making a pitch for a new candidate to save them from the socialist who will shove government healthcare down everyone’s throats (we’re speaking, of course, about Mitt Romney) so they have purchased radio time on many of Iowa’s radio stations to urge Ioweens to vote “rogue.”

Concerned about a nonexistent threat to the integrity of the caucuses, the Iowa Republican Party will move their ballot-counting operation to an “undisclosed location.” Meanwhile, the same Republicans who spent all year fretting about voter fraud, and who are shrouding their vote tabulation activities in secrecy, do not require a photo ID to vote in the caucuses they run.

The biggest foreign policy development of 2011 was the development of the new American way of war, the unaccountable, secret, shadow operation being undertaken throughout the world in the name of fighting terrorism.

Not much change to our list of full time encampments this week. We go to 65 encampments as Occupy Bellingham faces an 11:30 am PT eviction today and moves to the “threatened with eviction” list, but since the rash of raids on the 23rd, there hasn’t been much action. (Homeland Security must be giving staff the week off for the holidays.) Details follow.

The Iranian threat to close off the Strait of Hormuz would have implications across the board. 15 million barrels of oil pass through it every day. This, incidentally, is the entire acknowledged purpose of the US military presence in the Middle East: to ensure safe shipping for hydrocarbon tankers.

Why is the White House asking to raise the debt limit now? In the text of the Budget Control Act of 2011, aka the debt limit deal, you see that Title III sets up the “Debt Limit Disapproval Process.” This sets the rules for when the President needs to ask for an increase in the debt limit, and the Rube Goldberg-like process for how Congress can “disapprove” of it without really stopping it.

The Washington Post used a front page, above the fold article, to complain that Congress and President Obama had not done as much as it would have liked to reduce the deficit. What the Post failed to reports is that many people around Washington and across the country applauded this failure as a great victory.

The latest poll out of Iowa shows Ron Paul hanging on to a tenuous lead, with Mitt Romney close behind and Newt Gingrich further back. This has led every candidate in the race, and especially their anonymous SuperPACs, to train their guns on Paul, shifting the negative advertising away from Gingrich and toward the Texas Congressman. Citizens United!