Russ Feingold may be well-positioned to return to the US Senate if he chooses, now that Herb Kohl has retired. A normal politician in that position would not make waves with any party leaders, or take up principled causes where both parties have failed. Feingold is not that normal politician. The Hill reports that he publicly shamed several Democrats in an email to supporters of his new organization, Progressives United. But they don’t make clear what the fuss is about.

If you want to know about the impact of spending caps, just travel to Colorado.

The President has been completely disengaged on the budget battle in Congress, preferring to let them battle it out while he jets around the country and says “win the future” a lot. And some members of Congress are sick of it. Now, part of this is Congress wanting to share the blame with the White House for whatever comes out. But the other part is a recognition that the caucus is rootless and without direction, and only a party leader can come in and impose that. The fact that Obama set Joe Biden to the task of working out a compromise, only to have Biden leave for Europe for a week, is testimony to the fact that there’s something wrong with this lack of engagement. When Joe Manchin, who I think got to the Senate three days ago, is calling you out for a failure of leadership, there’s a problem of engagement.

The big story in Texas this week was loss of electricity and the need for “rolling blackouts” in major urban areas and other load centers, which affected natural gas supplies into Northern New Mexico. What does it tell us?

With nearly a full two years until the next election, the idea that Democrats are pre-ordained to lose at least four Senate seats, costing them their majority, is already gaining broad traction with both Democratic senators like Claire McCaskill and writers like Ed Kilgore. The dynamics of the 2012 Senate elections don’t favor Democrats inherently: they are defending 23 seats while Republicans defend only ten. However, there is no reason to believe the majority is lost so far out from the election. The relative number of each party’s seats that is to be contested is less important than the national political climate.

TSA chief John Pistole went for the big lie yesterday in his testimony before the Transportation and Commerce Committee. . . .

After Alan Grayson released an ad calling his opponent “Taliban Dan,” there was a lot of silly hand-wringing on the left about how misleading and unfair it was. Same thing’s happening again with a Jack Conway attack ad on Rand Paul.

Missouri voters passed Proposition C, seeking to exempt Missourians from the individual mandate of the health insurance reform recently passed, and also the employer mandate. But if Missouri wants to nullify a federal law — what a quaint, pre-civil war notion — they’re going to have to defend it in court.

Fortunately, Missouri has plenty of money in the state coffers to waste it on a frivolous lawsuit.

Or, you know, not.

It’s summer in an election year, and that’s the time for the deficit peacocks to come out of hibernation and strut their feathers, letting everyone know that they care – very much! – about deficits. This is a bipartisan phenomenon. On one side of the aisle, Republicans want to freeze discretionary spending, borrowing an idea from the other side of the aisle, from Claire McCaskill (D-MO). She at least tried to sound reasonably sane, but the impact of her preferred policy would be pretty negative.

Graft in Afghanistan is not limited to the Afghan government. Military contracts written by ISAF are subject to such poor oversight that US companies are pocketing the proceeds without paying Afghan subcontractors, while ISAF stands by idly claiming the Afghan subcontractors have no recourse since they don’t have the resources to hire attorneys in the US.