This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” if it ever was. Rather, as the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote, we have a government “of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%.”

With all three candidates financially viable, how will the race shake out? The presence of Davis makes it harder to claim that this is a referendum on Medicare privatization. However, I do think you can say what Josh Kraushaar says, that this has refocused attention on the actual desires of Republicans, which are broadly unpopular.

Republicans look terrified to actually go through with the shutdown given the focus on women’s health and choice. The question then becomes: who’s forcing the issue?

In his song “American Tune,” Paul Simon dreamed of “the Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea.” I wonder if it will find a more fitting home in the Nile Delta?

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

Welcome to the next decade, when we finally get the report telling us what we knew back in 2007 when this investigation started, that Rove politicized the government.

Remember the entire point of Karl Rove’s plot to fire a bunch of U.S. Attorneys and replace them with partisan hacks? It was to advance the political career of the new USAs — including New Jersey’s Chris Christie, and now Arkansas’ Tim Griffin.

During the summer of 2006, when Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean were engaged in a strenuous fight over the future direction of the Democratic Party, I stumbled upon a very astute op-ed in the New York Times by an emerging politician scientist, Daniel Galvin, entitled “How to Grow a Democratic Majority.”

It was only a matter of time before some celebrity’s Naked Airport Machine scan was saved by TSA and uh sent to the media, in this case me. Guess which star is below the fold!

Democrats in Congress were prepared to absorb defeats last night. But there were some surprise losers who shared the honors with them. . . .