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I don’t know if this is wishful thinking or solid intelligence work. But Josh Partlow at The Washington Post has a spectacular story today from Kabul about

Politicians should be charging lobbyists more for favorable legislation. Swine flu’s pretty bad, but at least it’s not another Senate page

An upcoming Senate vote could be crucial to the implementation of the EPA’s Florida water quality rules, and much of the pressure rests on the shoulders of Sen. Bill Nelson.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said she’s ordering an independent investigation into the controversial firing of prosecutors who were going after foreclosure mills. Prospective Allen West challenger Patrick Murphy raised more money than any other congressional challenger , and his haul includes donations from fellow former Republican Charlie Crist. Anti-immigration laws prove counter-productive, harmful — Miami Herald editorial

The Family Research Council, a religious-right outfit some watchdog organizations have called an anti-gay hate group , has recently become quite vocal in its opposition to government spending and has called for drastic cuts to social programs. But a survey by The American Independent shows that FRC’s state-based affiliates, called family policy councils, have raked in nearly $6 million in state and federal funds over the last five years to work on their own social programming goals.

Though it doesn’t mean he’ll actually get to go anywhere, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in a decision filed on Monday granted the petition for habeas

From an MSNBC interview today with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who’s slamming the Obama administration for its recent release of Bush-era memos justifying

Benefits stopped coming to LuAnn Greer two weeks ago. She’s cut her expenses to the bare minimum, but doesn’t know when she’ll see another unemployment check.

U.S.

The news that President-elect Barack Obama may pick his national finance chair, Penny Pritzker, for secretary of commerce raises a couple of

Ever wonder why loan modifications haven’t become the silver bullet that would solve the foreclosure crisis? Via Patrick.net, USA Today explains in simple terms

Rep. Justin Amash held a townhall meeting sponsored by a Tea Party group on Saturday sponsored by a Tea Party group, but a group of senior citizens and two reporters — including this one — were denied entry to the event

William Jacobson, a professor/blogger who’d been highly critical of the push for a poll in Massachusetts, embraces the new Rasmussen poll that shows Republican

Retired Adm. Dennis Blair is up before the Senate intelligence committee for his confirmation as director of national intelligence, the head of the 16-agency

Via Patrick Appel at Andrew Sullivan’s place, defense theorist Thomas P.M. Barnett, or perhaps his colleague Sean Meade (it’s unclear who wrote this, exactly)

At the site of the almost three-week long Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Minneapolis, Hennepin County security made a strange discovery Monday: a box filled with rocks and labeled “riot equipment.” Organizers with Occupy Minnesota deny that any protesters were connected to the box, saying it was the action of a “provocateur.” “It seems like the motivation is either to make us look bad, or he doesn’t seem to be entirely like he knows exactly what he’s doing,” Occupy Minnesota spokesperson April Lukes-Streich told the Minnesota Independent. ”We’ve informed the Sheriff’s Department that we know they’re not part of our group, so far they haven’t reacted much to that, and we will be keeping an eye out and we absolutely don’t condone that kind of behavior.” Occupy Minnesota organizers stressed that the movement has been non-violent since its inception. A spokesperson from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department sent out a press release with photos of the box Monday night: ”The Sheriff’s Office is investigating.

More from that PPP poll: That high number of North Carolinians who say Obama wasn’t born in the United States is largely built on white voters. Thirty percent

I spent a good deal of time today at the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Hold Their Feet to the Fire drive, an annual event where immigration

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As the Michigan House prepares for a possible vote today on the controversial anti-bullying bill that passed the Senate last week, legislators are reacting to the analysis of that bill by a prominent First Amendment scholar published earlier this week. In that analysis, Douglas Laycock , the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia Law School and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the First Amendment, said the legislation was poorly drafted and did little to address bullying