Democrats Considering Health Care-Immigration Deal To Overcome Key Sticking Point  —  Lawmakers who want to extend health coverage to illegal immigrants will not block the passage of the final health care reform bill so long as the White House offers a substantive promise to start pushing comprehensive immigration legislation this year.

50-41!  —  Scott Rasmussen just told my pals at Fox 25 that the current margin in the US Senate race is Coakley 50, Brown 41.  This is wayyyyy to close for a Massachusetts Democrat.  —  A Republican win in Massachusetts is still a longshot, but these numbers are in the range of the possible.

MI5 told US about Detroit bomber's terror links ‘a year ago’  —  Britain told American intelligence agents more than a year ago that the Detroit bomber had links to extremists, according to Downing Street.  —  The prime minister's spokesman indicated that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was named …

Dozens of Names Shifted to No-Fly List  —  The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database to watch lists that are more closely monitored in an effort to plug security holes revealed by the Christmas Day airline-bombing attempt.

New scanners break child porn laws  —  The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.  —  Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines …

Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work  —  Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.  —  There were other important death penalty developments last year …

Personal Bankruptcy Filings Rising Fast  —  The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses.  —  And more people are filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others.

How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market  —  Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.  —  It is a pointless distinction to most consumers …

Behind Afghan Bombing, an Agent With Many Loyalties  —  ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. officers and a Jordanian spy last week was a double agent who was taken onto the base in Afghanistan because the Americans hoped he might be able to deliver top members …

Grayson: Satan should write foreword to Cheney book  —  The Prince of Darkness himself might be best-suited to write the foreword to former Vice President Dick Cheney's forthcoming book, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) suggested Monday.  —  Grayson, during an appearance on MSNBC …

Quist: Defeating liberals a bigger battle than defeating terrorism  —  Allen Quist, a Republican who is seeking to defeat Rep. Tim Walz in southern Minnesota's First Congressional District, told attendees of the Wabasha County Republicans Christmas Party in mid-December that beating the …

‘N-Word’ Sign Dogs Would-Be Tea Party Leader  —  Dale Robertson, a Tea Party activist who operates TeaParty.org, is getting stung for an old photo — taken at the Feb. 27, 2009 Tea Party in Houston — in which he holds a sign reading “Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.”

New US flight checks ‘discriminate against Nigeria’  —  Buzz up!  —  ABUJA (AFP) - Nigeria, home of the failed US plane bomber, Monday branded new security measures for passengers flying to the United States unfair and said they amounted to discrimination against its 150 million people.

GOP Chief: Republicans ‘Screwed Up’ After Reagan  —  WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele offers a simple explanation for why the GOP all too often lost touch with typical Americans since the Ronald Reagan era: “We screwed up,” he claims in a new book offering a blueprint for the party's resurgence.

Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for 2010)  —  Please support my work!  —  Back in March, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project …

Revisionaries  —  How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids' textbooks.  —  Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas.  When he greeted me at the door one evening last October …

Freed Guantánamo inmates are heading for Yemen to join al-Qaeda fight  —  At least a dozen former Guantánamo Bay inmates have rejoined al-Qaeda to fight in Yemen, The Times has learnt, amid growing concern over the ability of the country's Government to accept almost 100 more former inmates from the detention centre.

Who Is the Enemy?  — By: Victor Davis Hanson  —  I don't think anyone knows quite what this administration's anti-terrorism policy is.  Last August, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, lambasted the Bush administration, citing “the inflammatory rhetoric, hyperbole and intellectual narrowness …

Hell Freezes Over: Rush Limbaugh Loves Union Hospitals and Socialized Medicine  —  Over the past year of Obama's presidency, conservative blowhard Rush Limbaugh has routinely mocked, distorted and even invented various health insurance reform proposals before Congress.

What Spitzer, Sanford, Ensign and Edwards Could Learn From John Profumo  —  In politics, a new year inevitably brings tidings of hope and dreams of regeneration to those who have embarrassingly stumbled along the corridors of power.  If only the change in calendar also carried with it a dollop of self-awareness.

Brit Hume's off message: Have faith, Tiger Woods, as long is it's Christianity  —  In “North by Northwest,” cold and heartless bureaucrats in Washington realize they may have inadvertently sent a frivolous but innocent advertising man to his death, and one of them says, “It's so horribly sad — why do I feel like laughing?”

BeautifulPeople.com axes holiday weight gain members  —  Dating and social network site BeautifulPeople.com has axed some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight.  —  The members were singled out after posting pictures of themselves that reportedly showed they had put on pounds over the holiday period.

RGA Smashes Fundraising Records  —  The Republican Governors Association announced today that it raised a record $30 million dollars in 2009 and carried forward more than $25 million into 2010.  —  “We raised more, saved more, and won more than DGA in 2009 and that's a good forecast of what's …

The man behind RedState.com shakes up the Republican Party  —  Erick Erickson, 34, has emerged as one of the leading new voices for Republican activists through his blog, RedState.com.  —  Times]  —  MACON, Ga. — Between pecks at his laptop, Macon City Council member Erick Erickson ticked off some of his goals for the new year: