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Political pop quiz: What could be more important in this race than that combative, buzz-driving VP debate? Well, the new job loss figures are in. For the

It would be premature to label Colorado’s Fourth District one of the nation’s swing districts, but that could change as a result of the 2012 election season. A court will decide the new outline of the district next month but the district is undergoing a more profound transition. It is becoming the thing Iowa is supposed to be: A moderately conservative middle-American political testing ground, where unaffiliated independents make up roughly a third of the voters, where the aging still-mostly-white population is increasingly ethnically mixed and where high-tech and R&D industries are replacing manufacturing and farming as the main drivers of the economy.

In a few moments, the Senate will hold a procedural vote setting the stage for final passage of legislation extending unemployment insurance benefits. Leading

James Blunt might have prevented World War III. Facebook kills Gmail (maybe) with a new email service. John McCain finds a new reason to oppose repealing

Ah, Alberto Gonzales. After the then-Attorney General presented a slippery account to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2007 of, among other subjects, the

The Arkansas governor-cum-TV host’s poem Fancy Nancy gets at how rote the Republican calls for the Speaker of the House to step down are becoming. Huckabee

This one is barometrically significant more than anything else. Marc Lynch has a good rundown of an admittedly obscure tempest: a frequently mistaken

During a joint press conference with German Chancellor Andrea Merkel on Tuesday, President Obama suggested that he would like to explore with Congressional leaders the possibility of extending unemployment benefits again. Some of the steps that we took during the lame duck session, the payroll tax, the extension of unemployment insurance, the investment in — or the tax breaks for business investment in plants and equipment — all those things have helped. And one of the things that I’m going to be interested in exploring with the members of both parties in Congress is how do we continue some of these policies to make sure that we get this recovery up and running in a robust way.

Hoping to bring cramdown legislation back onto Congress’ radar, a House Judiciary subpanel met this afternoon to re-examine whether bankruptcy judges should

Iraq’s presidency council has now signed the U.S-Iraq basing accord known as the Status of Forces Agreement, meaning it’s official now. The terminus phase of

So says Yochi Dreazen of The Wall Street Journal: President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his

It was bound to happen eventually. Fox 29 Philadelphia has the scoop: Fox 29 News spotted Tuesday a member of the New Black Panther Party standing outside of a

So it looks so far like the Republican House members who voted down the bailout bill are going to come in for some criticism because they based their opposition

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) -- who apparently woke up this morning and said to himself, Today, I’m going to make some news -- told reporters

Quality preschool, including easy accessibility to it, is key for any state’s quest to reform education and be a frontrunner in the classroom, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a Monday morning keynote on the first day of the Iowa Education Summit , and Iowa is no exception. “A commitment to free public preschool will pay off for Iowa,” Duncan said, amid applause.

Results from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday show that so far, President Obama has the edge over his GOP counterparts in the next presidential

Christine O’Donnell, a longtime conservative activist who took on the thankless task of challenging Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) in 2008, is running against Rep.

GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner (right), in a 2009 photo (Pic by Meredith Geddings, via myfloridahouse.gov) GOP Senate hopeful Adam Hasner called Occupy Wall Street supporters all over the country “anarchists,” “extremists” and “thugs” in an email to supporters today.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), the self-described (sort of) freedom fighter against the Democratic majority, is rolling out the latest of his hard-right economic

When Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) switched parties, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform told me that it could have been worse; Specter was still blocking

Andrew Ackerman at the Wall Street Journal parses the jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and finds that a full one million Americans exhausted their jobless benefits in the past year. About 8.2 million idled workers were receiving unemployment benefits as of the week ended April 9, the Labor Department said in its weekly jobless claims report.

Following up on Aaron Wiener’s post about GOP Sen. Gordon Smith’s defeat in Oregon by his Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley: As I wrote in August, Smith, a