The Tea Party Teens  —  The United States opens this decade in a sour mood.  First, Americans are anxious about the future.  Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.  Only 27 percent feel confident …

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 …

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.

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.

Health debate resumes with WH meet  —  The health care debate resumes in earnest on Tuesday after more than a week of quiet following Senate passage of its landmark bill on Christmas Eve.  —  The four relevant House chairmen will meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team …

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 …

White House Spokeswoman Says Different Bertha Lewis on Visitor's Log  —  UPDATE: According to Politico's Ben Smith, the Bertha Lewis who went to the White House is not ACORN's CEO but another woman named “Bertha Lewis.”  I contacted Smith to tell him that Big Government would offer a correction if the …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

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.