Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham have restarted talks on a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Schumer and Graham first teamed up on the matter in 2009, but Graham split off shortly thereafter, when Harry Reid wanted to prioritize the bill. He thought this undermined a separate piece of bipartisan legislation on climate change, and so he dropped his support of both efforts. This bit of history shows how tenuous working with Graham can be.

But it’s a new year, and the hissy fits have been subdued, and Graham is on the case.

The conspiracy theory about the Obama Administration forcing the Bureau of Labor Statistics into deliberately fixing the September jobs report has found its purchase in the most likely of places: the House Republican caucus. Darrell Issa, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox Business Network this morning that he would open an investigation into the derivation of the numbers in the jobs report.

Responding to a hissy fit ginned up by a random Weekly Standard writer, and carried along by Fox News, Democrats just changed their platform a day after they adopted it, adding language saying that “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel,” and adding a reference to God.

Whether Herman Cain is actually reassessing his campaign or not, he’s done on the Presidential stage. And the data show that the biggest beneficiary of this is Newt liberal-hater Gingrich.

Elizabeth Warren has had a good launch to her Massachusetts Senate campaign. She generated a lot of energy in the state with her announcement tour and a viral video (below the fold) on class warfare admired by liberals throughout the country.  That was quickly followed by fabulous early polling, showing her slightly ahead of Scott [...]

In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement’s public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide.

The impending Kochtopus gathering seems quite robust; and the cast of characters involved certainly makes one take notice.

Public workers have the small amount of leverage they have because they can collectively bargain. Other industries that have no such protections are getting screwed on a daily basis – but right-wing ideologues who want to extend that leverage for management across all businesses blame the greedy union bosses because they don’t want to see actual retirement security spread to the masses.

Generally, I think Americans are pretty forgiving, perhaps to a fault, and one misstatement of fact among many will not necessarily sway their opinion of a politician. But a consistent record of exaggerations, misstatements and outright lies can take their toll, and a tipping point hits, where the individual basically turns into an untrustworthy buffoon. This was used expertly by the conservative noise machine against Al Gore, with an ebullient media playing along, even though the so-called “exaggerations” weren’t actually exaggerations at all (see: everything Bob Somerby’s ever written).

Tax rates are at a historically low level not because the burden has been taken completely off the poor and the middle class, people. It’s because taxes have been ridiculously low for the wealthy since the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, and nothing has been done to promote greater equality by rolling back those cuts.