Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Friday predicted a Senate vote on the DREAM Act will be held next week.

"Sen. Reid is going to call it," Durbin told The Hill shortly after the chamber adjourned at 3:30 p.m. Friday. Two procedural votes are scheduled for Saturday morning on competing plans to address the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
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Harry Reid wants a vote to pay back the Latinos who supported him in the last election.

If there is not a tax rate deal and START has been voted upon, Republicans will simply filibuster.

Democrats hoping to move forward with legislation other than tax cuts shouldn't look to centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to break the logjam.

Collins said again on Friday that, while she would vote with Democrats to end the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, she wouldn't do so until a debate over tax cuts has been resolved.

"Once the tax issue is resolved, I have made it clear that if the Majority Leader brings the Defense Authorization bill to the floor with sufficient time allowed for debate and amendments, I would vote to proceed to the bill," she said in a statement.

The statement is a sign that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (Ky.) Republican conference hasn't fractured in its insistence that the expiring tax cuts be dealt with prior to action on any other legislative business.

++++++++
Another sign that the votes scheduled for tomorrow will fail and are really just Kabuki Theater

Mr. Kyl later softened his public stance somewhat. In an interview on Fox News on Thursday night, he said that if Democrats cut a relatively quick deal with Republicans over extending Bush-era tax cuts and dispense with some other priorities for the lame-duck session, “then there might be time” to vote on the treaty. Still, he also held out the prospect of pushing it to the next Senate, with more Republicans, suggesting an agreement to bring it to a vote in early March.
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But, conservatives like Sen. Jim DeMint may filibuster anyway.

Nine Republicans must join 58 Dems to pass the treaty

On Thursday, the California High Speed Rail Authority board unanimously approved the 65-mile "train to nowhere" that would link two tiny towns at a cost of $4.15 billion, all because the state didn't want to lose $2 billion in federal stimulus funds.

The rail line would connect two central California towns, Borden and Corcoran, with a combined population of 25,000. But that's merely an estimate from Democratic Rep. Dennis Cardoza, an opponent of the plan. In reality, the San Jose Mercury News notes, Borden "is an unincorporated community for which the U.S. Census Bureau doesn't even keep official population estimates."

The line is supposed to be the first part of an ambitious $43 billion project aimed at linking San Francisco and Anaheim, but the decision to start in such a low population density area even had members of the rail authority scratching their heads earlier this week.
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Big Government strikes California again.

President Barack Obama's bipartisan deficit commission failed to reach consensus on a far-reaching, tough-medicine deficit-cutting plan, falling three votes short of a 14-vote goal that might have pressured congressional leaders to vote on the sweeping bipartisan proposal as a package to bring down the massive federal debt.

With all three House Republicans voting no and Democratic lawmakers split, the 11-7 vote on the plan – which would cut $3.9 trillion from the debt over nine years through a combination of tax increases, entitlement cuts and a proposal to raise the retirement age past 65 – meant it is unlikely to get a vote on the floor of either the House or Senate.
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And, the report will probably not be heard of again.

We mock economists for using the adverb “unexpectedly” in response to almost every bit of bad news over the past two years, but today’s news that unemployment is back up to 9.8 percent seems genuinely surprising. About a half-hour after this morning’s numbers were released, one CNBC anchor closed a segment, “After the break, we’ll have your e-mails about signs of economic recovery,” the he paused and chuckled, motioning to the unseen teleprompter. “Yeah, that was written before 8:30.”

One of the economists made a compelling case that as the “discouraged workers” start looking for work again, the official size of the workforce will increase, and we’ll see the unemployment rate go above 10 percent sometime this winter.
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Not good news for the holidays

Control of the House of Representatives after the 2012 elections will still belong to the Republicans. IF Barack Obama stages a political comeback (which is certianly within the realm of possibility), Democrats will start the presidential coattails drumbeat. However, there are two compelling tables in this post underscoring that the House outcome will dance to the beat of a different drummer.

These two factors will end up having a snowball effect, costing Democrats in retirements, candidate recruitment, and fundraising – all of which will further debilitate their comeback efforts.

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Redistricting due to the census is the most important development.of the 2010 elections

Sarah Palin raised $469,000 between Oct. 13 and Nov. 22 bringing her total for the year to over $3 million, Tim Crawford, SarahPAC's treasurer, told TIME exclusively. Crawford attributed the surge of funds to energy surrounding the midterm elections, Palin's endorsements and her TLC reality show “Sarah Palin's Alaska.” Her second book, America By Heart, came out Nov. 23.

The PAC spent $64,000 buying advance copies of her books, “just as we did last year” with her first book, Going Rogue, Crawford said. “They're a great fundraising tool for us.” Palin is in the midst of a two-week cross-country book tour.

Overall the PAC spent $581,000 between Oct. 13 and Nov. 22. A larger percentage than normal was spent on contributions to political candidates, $244,000, as Palin tried to help her 81-endosed candidates over the Nov. 2 finish line. Fifty-five of them won.
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Major League fundraising as she gears up for a run?

Walking may put the brakes on cognitive decline in healthy older people as well as those with cognitive impairment, a new study finds.

The ongoing study, which spans 20 years, also quantified how much walking is necessary to keep brain volume up. Researchers followed 426 older adults for a number of years to see if there were changes in brain volume. Among the participants 299 were healthy, and 127 had cognitive impairments, including 83 with mild cognitive impairment, and 44 with Alzheimer's disease.

The more people moved, the higher their brain volume, a marker for brain health. That link held after adjusting for factors such as age, gender, body mass index and education. People who met the requirements for activity also scored better on a mental exam.

For healthy adults, walking at least 72 blocks a week (about six miles) to preserve brain volume and slow the risk of cognitive decline. Cognitively impaired adults needed to walk at least 58 city blocks a week (about five miles)

Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, "should resign." Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange's organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like "the fall guy" in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. "I don't think it would make much of a difference either way," Assange said. "But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that."

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Well, she won't but she and Obama look weak and have been damaged politically

In May 2009, rumors surfaced that President Obama was planning to leave several European countries exposed to Russian ambition if Russia would agree to help keep nukes out of Iran.

Rumors confirmed: according to the Wikileaks cables, Obama proposed a trade — he would cancel the Polish missile shield if Russia would support sanctions for Iran.

The whistle blowing web site, publishing diplomatic cables and other documents via The New York Times, the Guardian (UK) and other media outlets, show that George Bush’s anti-missile shield plan to station 10 interceptor rockets in Poland not far from the Kaliningrad (Russia) border and a radar system in the Czech Republic was seen as an obstacle by Washington in getting tougher sanctions against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The diplomatic cables show that the US believes that Iran has already received missiles from North Korea which could threaten western Europe.
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Read it all

But while at least three justices seemingly endorsed a lower court's order to cut California's prison population, three others raised alarms. State officials have said the lower court's order would require reducing the overall prison population by between 38,000 and 46,000. "If I were a citizen of California, I would be concerned about the release of 40,000 prisoners," Justice Samuel Alito stated. Alito further pressed attorney Donald Specter, of the Berkeley-based Prison Law Office, to acknowledge that the overall recidivism rate for California prisoners currently released on parole is 70 percent. "Seven, zero," Justice Antonin Scalia reiterated, driving the point home.

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Well, you cannot let them out but how about deporting the illegal aliens or make the feds pay for them?

In less than two months, members of the Republican National Committee will convene at National Harbor, just outside Washington, and select a chairman to lead the organization over the next two years.

With the midterm elections over, the race is already generating a phenomenal amount of chatter. That includes a former staffer and potential rival's criticism of the incumbent, Michael Steele.

But often lost in all this discussion is a focus on what really matters — the personal and professional qualifications a prospective chairman must have to do the job effectively. Speculation abounds as to whether Steele will run for re-election; to date, however, he has not announced his intention to do so.
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Read it all

Public Policy Polling (D)
11/19-21/10; 400 "typical" Republican primary voters, 4.9% margin of error
Mode: Automated phone
PPP release

National

2012 President: Republican Primary
21% Palin
19% Gingrich
18% Romney
16% Huckabee
5% Paul
5% Pawlenty
3% Thune
2% Daniels
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Still early but Sarah Palin is the front runner

The DREAM Act can best be described as giving conditional lawful permanent resident status to those illegal aliens who entered the U.S. before the age of 16, have been in the country for at least five years and agree to attend college/serve in the military. An additional provision, often overlooked, would grant illegal aliens in-state tuition rates at public universities.

There is a big reason why the DREAM Act was a campaign promise for Reid, the same reason the White House recently hosted high-level meetings with members of the Hispanic caucus regarding the bill and has expressed so much interest in passing it: The act would be an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens inside the United States. This is something the White House and Reid have been desperately seeking through a comprehensive immigration bill, but has yet to gain traction in Congress.
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Just Say NO to the DREAM Act

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that Congress can’t afford to wait to pass the DREAM Act, even as immigration allies acknowledge there’s little hope of getting the bill done in the lame-duck session.

In his second conference call with reporters in 12 days, Duncan reiterated that the legislation is not an issue of politics or ideology but rather fairness and economic necessity. The DREAM Act would provide a path to citizenship for tens of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military for at least two years. Critics still dismiss the proposal as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
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Just say NO to illegal alien amnesty

The Senate just rejected a two year ban on earmarks by a 39-56 vote. While the vote largely went down party lines, eightseven Republicans voted against the ban and seven Democrats voted for it.

Here are the Republicans voting no:

Bob Bennett (R-UT) – defeated for reelection, Appropriations Committee
Thad Cochran (R-MS) – Ranking Member, Appropriations Committee
Susan Collins (R-ME) – Appropriations Committee
James Inhofe (R-OK)
Richard Lugar (R-IN)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) – Appropriations Committee
Richard Shelby (R-AL) – Appropriations Committee
George Voinovich (R-OH) – retiring, Appropriations Committee

Here are the Democrats voting yes:

Evan Bayh (D-IN) – retiring
Michael Bennet (D-CO) – freshman
Russ Feingold (D-WI) – defeated for reelection
Claire McCaskill (D-MO) – freshman, up for reelection in 2012
Bill Nelson (D-FL) – up for reelection in 2012
Mark Udall (D-CO) – freshman
Mark Warner (D-VA) – freshman
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Primary

The U.S. believes Russia has moved short-range tactical nuclear warheads to facilities near North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies as recently as this spring, U.S. officials say, adding to questions in Congress about Russian compliance with long-standing pledges ahead of a possible vote on a new arms-control treaty.

U.S. officials say the movement of warheads to facilities bordering NATO allies appeared to run counter to pledges made by Moscow starting in 1991 to pull tactical nuclear weapons back from frontier posts and to reduce their numbers. The U.S. has long voiced concerns about Russia's lack of transparency when it comes to its arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, believed to be many times the number possessed by the U.S.
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The START Treaty needs to be debated starting in the next Congress.

Latino leaders in Nevada and around the country are floating the idea of breaking traditional ties with the Democratic Party and creating a grass-roots independent movement tentatively called the Tequila Party. According to Delen Goldberg at the Las Vegas Sun, the leaders want to pressure the Democratic Party to deliver on Latinos' priorities much in the same way the tea party has done with the GOP over the past few years.

Robert de Posada, the former GOP operative behind this fall's controversial "Don't Vote" ads aimed at Latinos in Nevada and California, tells The Lookout that he has heard "rumblings" of this movement among national Latino leaders
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Is that because the Latinos are "drunk" for power? Political power that is….

The problem with the Latinos is their number of voters in order to exert power are only in California and somewhat in Nevada and New Mexico. Florida's Cuban population are in the GOP.

Congress agreed Monday to a one-month delay in Medicare payment cuts to doctors, giving a short-term reprieve to a looming crisis over treatment of the nation's elderly.

The House, in approving by voice vote the bill passed by the Senate earlier this month, postponed a 23 percent cut in doctors' pay scheduled to take effect Dec. 1. That gives lawmakers a month to come up with a longer-term plan to overhaul a system that in recent years has bedeviled Congress, angered doctors and jeopardized health care for 46 million elderly and disabled.

"This bill is a stopgap measure to make sure that seniors and military families can continue to see their doctors during December while we work on the solution for the next year," said Rep. Frank Pallone, R-N.J., chairman of the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee.

Health care payment formulas for military service members and veterans are tied to Medicare.
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It will be continued again in another 30 days or there will be mo physicians left

Irons said that while the deficit commission proposal would bring spending down to 21 percent of gross domestic product, the liberal groups plan would bring it down to only to 25 percent by 2020, while raising revenue to 21.7 percent of GDP.

To get spending down, the liberal plan would cut defense spending by $960 billion over 10 years.

Regarding long-term entitlement programs, Anrig pointed out that the groups estimate significant savings in cost due to the Obama healthcare reform bill in later years.

“We reject arbitrary caps on Medicare or Medicaid spending,” he said.

To make Social Security solvent, the liberal groups' plan would raise taxes but would not reduce benefits.

To raise revenue, the groups propose a carbon cap-and-trade scheme or carbon tax, a surcharge on millionaires, closing foreign tax loopholes, and limiting the value of tax deductions for higher earners.
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Yeah this left wing plan will really help Obama and America – NOT.

Even amoebas learn by trial and error, but some economists and politicians do not. The Obama administration's budget projections claim that raising taxes on the top 2% of taxpayers, those individuals earning more than $200,000 and couples earning $250,000 or more, will increase revenues to the U.S. Treasury. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. None of the personal income tax or capital gains tax increases enacted in the post-World War II period has raised the projected tax revenues.

Over the past six decades, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have averaged just under 19% regardless of the top marginal personal income tax rate. The top marginal rate has been as high as 92% (1952-53) and as low as 28% (1988-90). This observation was first reported in an op-ed I wrote for this newspaper in March 1993. A wit later dubbed this "Hauser's Law."
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Read it all

According to the Washington Post, Democrats are continuing to push for an increase in marginal rates, but only on the very rich.

A faction of congressional Democrats is making a push to persuade President Obama to consider a compromise on tax policy that would leave only the nation’s 315,000 richest households facing higher taxes in January.

That’s because these Democrats still think they will be able to raise more revenue by letting marginal rates go up. But that ignores the fact that the federal government has never been able to get much more than 19 percent of GDP in tax revenues, no matter how high the top marginal tax rate goes.
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Look at the chart

The New York Times is participating in the dissemination of the stolen State Department cables that have been made available to it in one way or another via WikiLeaks. My friend Steve Hayward recalls that only last year the New York Times ostentatiously declined to publish or post any of the Climategate emails because they had been illegally obtained. Surely readers will recall Times reporter Andrew Revkin's inspiring statement of principle: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won't be posted here."
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And, the New York Times sell their wares in America?

Journalistic whores in every sense.

Sarah Palin might think she could get elected President in 2012, but few Americans agree. Only 28% of voters in the country think that Palin is capable of defeating Barack Obama while 60% think she is not and 12% aren't sure.

What might be most troubling for Palin within those numbers is that less than half of Republicans think she's capable of beating Obama- 48% think she would be able to, 37% think she would not be able to, and 15% have no opinion. Republicans continue overwhelmingly to like Palin- 67% have a favorable opinion of her- but a pretty large number of them have serious electability concerns about her.

Many GOP voters who admire Palin may be left having to decide whether it's more important to them to defeat Barack Obama or to help advance her political career and that may prove to be too high a hurdle for her to overcome.
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As I have said all along, her candidacy epends upon the economy and Obama's poll numbers after the first of the year

“It is more the view of reality rather than policy” that the treaty will not be ratified in the next month, Kyl said, arguing that if Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) provided him with three weeks to debate the treaty, it could be finished. “He has made it clear he has a different agenda in mind,” Kyl said, pointing to Reid’s decision to pursue other legislation during the lame duck, including a repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay service members and the DREAM Act immigration bill.

“Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate, can bring up the START treaty any time he wants to. But he has a different agenda,” Kyl
said.
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Of course, Harry Reid can call up the START Treaty anytime he wants but he wants pay back to the Latinos who supplied him with his re-election in November.

A 2009 American government cable released Sunday by the WikiLeaks website quotes Defense Minister Ehud Barak as telling visiting American officials that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage."
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And, what message does this send to Iran?

They are free to develop their nuclear weapon capability because Obama has not acted.

251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.
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And, it happened under Obama and Hillary Clinton – fancy that

Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show.

Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity.
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Why do you think even Obama now supports missile defense after years of denial?

Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.

A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton's name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.
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Will Obama throw Hillary Clinton under the bus on this?

"His majority coalition is not there," says Republican pollster David Winston. "What he put together, at least in the way he put it together, just isn't there."

Start with voters who call themselves independents. Obama won 52 percent of them in 2008; now, according to Gallup, he is at 42 percent. Obama's party as a whole fared even worse among independents in the midterms, losing them to Republicans by 19 points. If Obama does anywhere near that badly in 2012, he'll lose.

Next, women. In 2008, Obama won 56 percent of female voters. Today, he's at 49 percent. If that number doesn't improve, he'll be in deep trouble. (Obama is also down with men, from 49 percent in 2008 to 44 percent now.)

Even younger voters, a key part of Obama's coalition, are peeling away. In '08, Obama won 66 percent of voters 18-29 years of age. Now, he's at 58 percent.
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Obama has six months to turn unemployment around or he is a one term President

Doctors across the country describe similar decisions, complaining that they've been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying, privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of penny-pinching by Congress.

And that's not even taking into account a long-postponed rate-setting method that is on track to slash Medicare's payment rates to doctors by 23 percent Dec. 1. Known as the Sustainable Growth Rate and adopted by Congress in 1997, it was intended to keep Medicare spending on doctors in line with the economy's overall growth rate. But after the SGR formula led to a 4.8 percent cut in doctors' pay rates in 2002, Congress has chosen to put off the ever steeper cuts called for by the formula ever since.
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And, ObamaCare will NOT make it any easier for older patients

The American economy grew faster in the third quarter this year than previously estimated, but that bit of encouraging news was overshadowed by a grim new forecast from the Federal Reserve that predicted unemployment would remain at about 9% next year and stay high for years to come.

The pessimistic long-term outlook underscored the possibility that the United States — after years of good times that cast a rosy glow over the American dream and raised personal expectations for the future — may now be headed for a grayer, more financially constricted decade or more.
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If unemployment stays above 9 %, Obama is toast in 2012

On Glenn Beck's show earlier today, Sarah Palin accidentally said North Korea when she meant South Korea:

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? […]

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

Some of Palin's usual antagonists are going nuts over this slip of the tongue, but they don't point out that she correctly identified North Korea as our enemy literally 8 seconds before the mix-up: "We're not having a lot of faith the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do."
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Typical of the LEFT

If the 2012 presidential election were held today, President Barack Obama would have his work cut out for him. 48% of registered voters nationwide report they plan to definitely vote against Mr. Obama while 36% say they will definitely vote for him. 16% are undecided.
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Let's wait and see what his numbers are in 6 months

The haters rested easy and the world was safe again for televised dance competitions Tuesday as Bristol Palin finished third on "Dancing With the Stars," heading off dire predictions by the likes of Joy Behar and bajillions of hysterical online commenters about what might happen if Sarah Palin's daughter dared to succeed.

Best quote: "Going out there and winning this would mean a lot. It would be like a big middle finger out there to all the people out there who hate my mom and hate me."
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Congrats Bristol!

HarperCollins settled a lawsuit Tuesday night with Gawker Media over the site's publication of leaked images from Sarah Palin's new book, "America by Heart."

Gawker posted the Palin excerpts on Friday and even mocked the author's displeasure at having parts of the book online four days before it hit shelves. HarperCollins quickly swung back with a lawsuit, claiming copyright infringement. And by Saturday afternoon, a Manhattan judge had ordered Gawker to pull the pages pending a Nov. 30 hearing.

But before that hearing could take place, the two sides reached a settlement.
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Glad they filed suit against Gawker who are left wing nutters

Dumb liberal op-ed pieces are legion, and generally we let them pass in silence. But this one by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post is such a howler that it deserves comment. Cohen's theme is that Sarah Palin is ignorant; the evidence is her criticism of Michelle Obama's famous observation, in connection with her husband's Presidential nomination, that "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country…."
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Read it all – about the anti-Palin rants

Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller assesses the chances that Democrats will sneak through the "DREAM Act" partial immigration amnesty in the waning days of the lame duck Congress. As feared, the conclusion is murky, given the criss-crossing array of potentially soft Republicans and potentially tough Democrats in the Senate. But a) a "proprietary vote simulation and prediction engine" called WhipCast gives DREAM a 33% chance of passage; b) Microsoft and other tech companies are pushing for it; and c) even more worrisome, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell's spokesman gives a shockingly nonchalant answer when asked if stopping DREAM is a priority:

“I don’t have a whip count on it. … Our priority is making sure no one gets a tax hike and funding the government while reducing spending.”

I take that as a "no."
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DeMint et al will KILL the Dream Act…….

The Democrats are total morons for not finding their own hot mama before the Republicans did so first, or maybe I should have left off the qualifiers and called it straight: the Democrats are just plain morons, at least where women are concerned. The right wing, for whatever weird reason, has been much more receptive to outrageous and attractive female commentators who are varying degrees of insane or inane, but in any case are given a platform on Fox News and at their conservative confabs. Look at how great life has been for Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham and the assorted lesser lights. But there are no Democratic blondes, no riot grrrls on the progressive side of politics, no fun and fabulous women in the liberal scene who could pave the way for a Palin
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Read it all.

The LEFT is insufferable

Cabinet secretaries, top congressional leaders and an exclusive group of senior U.S. officials are exempt from toughened new airport screening procedures when they fly commercially with government-approved federal security details.

Aviation security officials would not name those who can skip the controversial screening, but other officials said those VIPs range from top officials like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and FBI Director Robert Mueller to congressional leaders like incoming House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who avoided security before a recent flight from Washington's Reagan National Airport.

The heightened new security procedures by the Transportation Security Administration, which involve either a scan by a full-body detector or an intimate personal pat-down, have spurred passenger outrage in the lead-up to the Thanksgiving holiday airport crush.
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Uh No…..

The Washington Post boasts some of the top liberal bloggers, such as Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. Now the paper's bringing a conservative into the blog stable.

The Post has hired Jennifer Rubin, previously with Commentary magazine, to launch a new blog next month that "will provide critical news coverage and commentary, with an exacting eye on conservative policy-making and Republican campaigns, pundits and politicians," according to a memo obtained by The Cutline.

David Weigel wrote a blog on the conservative movement until June, when private emails surfaced in which he was harshly critical of some leaders on the right. He resigned over the flap.

But Weigel, now at Slate, didn't write his blog from a conservative perspective as Rubin is expected to do–even if some readers, and Post managers, thought he would be doing so. Another difference: Weigel was on the national staff, whereas Rubin and Sargent fall on the opinion side of the paper.
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A good edition

The Harris County Tea Party near the Alabama border campaigned far and wide in this month's midterm elections. Donations were mailed to tea-party candidates in Nevada and Alaska. There were multiple overnight bus trips to rallies in Washington, D.C.

The next stop, however, is closer to home: the local school board.

"Don't get me wrong, we're still going to engage in Washington, but now we're going after what is here locally. Our focus is turning to our community," said Kathy Ropte, the group's founder, over cola at a Blimpie sub shop, a popular local tea-party meeting spot off the town square. Aware that education consumes a big chunk of local property taxes, group members are combing through the salaries of every county school employee from the superintendent down.
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And, will increase their membership in gearing up to replace Obama in 2012.

A San Francisco community college student awaiting deportation to his native Peru won a temporary reprieve Friday when U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation halting immigration enforcement proceedings against him.

Steve Li, 20, had been due to be separated from his parents and sent back to Peru last Monday, but federal immigration officials pushed back the deportation at Feinstein's request while the California Democrat prepared the private relief measure that would allow him to remain in the U.S.
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Wonder when Feinstein or Boxer will save Meg Whitman's illegal alien maid, Nicky Diaz?

If Sarah Palin does run for president next year, at least one high profile journalist will be forbidden access to the former Alaska governor.

Speaking to Fox New's Sean Hannity in an interview to air Monday, Palin said she wants nothing to do with Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor who's line of questioning facilitated one of the most memorable political foibles of the 2008 presidential campaign.

"As for doing an interview, though, with a reporter who already has such a bias against whatever it is that I would come out and say? Why waste my time? No," Palin told Hannity of Couric, according to excerpts obtained by Time's Mark Halperin.
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Yeah ti was a set up and then Couric received a USC journalism award for tripping up Palin.

Huge budget shortfalls are prompting a handful of states to begin discussing a once-unthinkable scenario: dropping out of the Medicaid insurance program for the poor.

Elected and appointed officials in nearly a half-dozen states, including Washington, Texas and South Carolina, have publicly thrown out the idea. Wyoming and Nevada this year produced detailed studies of what would happen should they withdraw from the program. Wyoming found that Medicaid accounts for 63% of the state's nursing-home revenue.

The idea of abandoning Medicaid as a solution is so extreme that even proponents don't expect any state will follow through, but officials are floating the discussions because dire budgetary pressures have forced them to at least look at even the most drastic options.
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And, now who thinks ObamaCare will work?

Right!

Nobody

A new poll shows President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in a statistical dead heat for the White House.

The Republican edges Obama by one percentage point, 45-44 percent, in a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters released Monday. Among other top GOP contenders, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee trails Obama 46-44 percent and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is behind by eight points, 48 percent – 40 percent.

The poll suggests a clear frontrunner has yet to emerge from the GOP field. Palin, Romney and Huckabee, the three leading challengers in the poll, only receive 19 percent, 18 percent and 17 percent support, respectively, from Republican voters.
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If the economy does not measurably improve within 6 months, no matter who the Republicans nominate will beat Obama

A newly discovered exchange of e-mails led the House ethics committee on Friday to delay its trial of Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat accused of helping steer bailout money to a bank in which her husband owned shares.
The e-mails are between Mikael Moore, Ms. Waters’s chief of staff, and members of the House Financial Services Committee, on which Ms. Waters serves. The e-mails show that Mr. Moore was actively engaged in discussing with committee members details of a bank bailout bill apparently after Ms. Waters agreed to refrain from advocating on the bank’s behalf. The bailout bill had provisions that ultimately benefited OneUnited, a minority-owned bank in which her husband, Sidney Williams, owned about $350,000 in shares.
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Read it all

The London Guardian published a story today titled: “Sarah Palin drops 2012 presidency hint with staff visit to Iowa“. The article included the following paragraph:

Some of her staff now appear to be putting the pieces in place in case Palin does decide to run. One of the aides, who only eats kosher food, told a local rabbi he was looking into longer term arrangements in Iowa.

“He was looking to be able to accommodate the needs of those coming down looking to set up shop here for campaigning in the coming years,” said Yossi Jacobson of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Des Moines

This paragraph is factually incorrect.
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For now……

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, one of three 2012 GOP presidential prospects in Iowa this month, said Sunday the next one on the schedule, Sarah Palin, would be a strong contender, should she decide to run.

“No question, she will be a very, very strong presence and force, if she gets in,” Huckabee told reporters in Des Moines Sunday. “You know, she may run away with it. And that’s one of those things everyone needs to be prepared for.”

“If I get in, I prefer she not and that she endorse me,” Huckabee then joked.
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If Sarah Palin runs, she will be the GOP nominee against Obama

Also, when faced with frivolous, baseless ethics charges made by political operatives, which was costing her state millions of dollars and her staff thousands of hours to refute, kudos to Palin for having done the right thing. That’s right, she resigned. And it wasn’t to preserve her political future. It was to ensure that the Governor’s office could get back to what was important – the day-to-day work of protecting Alaska and its citizens.
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They’re the leading contenders for now for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they’re the best liked of 14 top party players among likely GOP primary voters.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of those voters finds that 82% have a favorable opinion of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, while just 17% view her unfavorably. That includes 50% with a Very Favorable opinion and eight percent (8%) with a Very Unfavorable one.
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Sarah Palin's nomination is hers to lose.

Sarah Palin has dropped another hint of her intention to run for the White House in 2012, dispatching aides to scope out office space in Iowa, the first stop in the presidential race.

The "will she, won't she?" speculation about Palin in 2012 has become a Washington parlour game – as well as generating free publicity for her new book, which goes on sale this week.

In the course of making arrangements for that tour, two aides organising Palin's visit to Des Moines on 27 November told locals they were looking into office space and other logistical needs for the coming year, the Guardian has learned.
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Making preparations yes.

I believe Sarah Palin will announce on or immediately after Ronald Reagan's 100 birthday celebration next February 6th