Top Items:
Greg Sargent / The Plum Line:
Internal Memo To Top Dem Donors Warns Mass Senate Race Is “Very Tight,” “Urgent” — In a sign of serious worry about the increasingly tense battle for Ted Kennedy's seat, the Democratic National Committee and the Martha Coakley campaign have blasted a private memo to top national Dem donors …
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FiveThirtyEight, Washington Post, Another Black Conservative, Hotline On Call, Michelle Malkin, Boston Globe, Hot Air, Power Line, Gateway Pundit, NO QUARTER, TPMDC, Ben Smith's Blog, Boston Herald, Democratic Strategist, The Corner on National …, Scorecard's Blog, Weekly Standard, The Other McCain, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, The Fix, National Review Online and Riehl World View
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Michael Graham / The Natural Truth:
Coakley Campaign Attacks Tea Party “Devil” — Martha Coakley's left-wing allies have been attacking and insulting tea party attendees and town hall participants for months. Now the Coakley campaign has jumped on the “teabagger” bandwagon. Her campaign just sent out a press release attacking Scott Brown …
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Hot Air
The Official Google Blog:
A new approach to China — Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.
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The Atlantic Politics Channel, TechCrunch, The Moderate Voice, Coop's Corner, Beyond Binary, AmSpecBlog, James Fallows, Guardian, ReadWriteWeb, New York Times, Engadget, Globe and Mail, Financial Times, Mashable!, Telegraph, Clusterstock, BBC, Mediaite, Raw Story, The Peking Duck, Threat Level, Gawker, The Corner on National … and AMERICAblog News
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Bill Carter / Media Decoder:
Conan O'Brien Says He Won't Host ‘Tonight Show’ After Leno — Conan O'Brien released a statement Tuesday saying that he no longer wanted to be the host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC if it appeared at 12:05 a.m. — Mr. O'Brien's brief run as host at 11:35 p.m. is to be cut short next month …
Discussion:
Mashable!, Concurring Opinions, The Moderate Voice, Liberal Values, The Huffington Post, Mediaite, New York Times and Taylor Marsh
Michael Isikoff / Newsweek Blogs:
Chuck Norris Hunts for Obama's ‘Secret Vault’ as Interpol Conspiracy Theories Get Wilder — The conspiracy theories about President Obama's executive order on Interpol are getting wilder by the day. — Invoking no less an authority than Glenn Beck, movie tough guy (and political activist) …
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WorldNetDaily:
Obama's secret vault — On Glenn Beck's Jan. 7 show, Beck was rightly puzzled regarding the exact purpose of President Obama's Dec. 16 signing of an executive order “designating Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) as a public international organization entitled to enjoy certain privileges, exemptions and immunities.”
New York Times:
Powerful Quake Rocks Haitian Capital — SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — A fierce earthquake struck Haiti late Tuesday afternoon, causing widespread damage around the capital, leveling countless shantytown dwellings and bringing even more suffering to a nation that was already the hemisphere's poorest and most disaster-prone.
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CNN:
‘Catastrophic’ earthquake slams Haiti — Editor's note: Watch continuing coverage of the earthquake in Haiti on CNN. — (CNN) — A major earthquake struck southern Haiti on Tuesday, knocking down buildings and power lines and inflicting what its ambassador to the United States called …
Peter H. Stone / Under The Influence:
Health Insurers Funded Chamber Attack Ads — Just as dealings with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats soured last summer, six of the nation's biggest health insurers began quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying …
Discussion:
The Politico, The Atlantic Politics Channel, Firedoglake, Think Progress, Prescriptions and Washington Post
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Eric Zimmermann / The Hill:
Palin blasts critics in Fox debut: ‘A bunch of b.s.’ — Sarah Palin hit back today at reports that she was uninformed and unprepared on the 2008 campaign trail. — In her debut as a Fox News contributor, Palin told Bill O'Reilly that anecdotes about her reported in a new book and repeated …
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The Rothenberg / The Rothenberg Political Report:
NV Sen Moved to Lean Takeover, Dems Still have Edge in MA Sen — New polling confirms that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) is mired near 40% in general election ballot tests against all potential opponents, even those voters know nothing about. It will be extremely difficult …
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John Fund / Wall Street Journal:
Harry Reid's Swansong — Will Harry Reid retire at the end of this year? — Printer — Friendly — In the end, I don't believe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will run for re-election. Whether or not the health care bill he muscled through the Senate becomes law, the 70-year-old will bow out of his race for a fifth term.
Wall Street Journal:
Tax on Investment Income Is Weighed — Health-Bill Negotiators Consider Extending Medicare Levy as They Face Pressure to Ease Proposed Hit on Generous Insurance Plans — WASHINGTON — House and Senate negotiators are considering applying for the first time the Medicare payroll tax …
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John McCormack / Weekly Standard:
Video: Someone With the Coakley Campaign Pushes Me into a Metal Railing — Coakley won't say if she thinks there are terrorists in Afghanistan. — Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley attended a fundraiser at the Capitol Hill restaurant Sonoma tonight.
Ben Pershing / Washington Post:
House to vote on Obama's first veto — On Dec. 30, President Obama quietly issued his first veto. On Wednesday, the House will vote on whether to override that veto. Except Obama didn't really oppose the bill he vetoed, and the House doesn't really want to override it. — Confused?
Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEight:
Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans — Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage.
CNN:
CNN Poll: Americans split on success of Obama presidency — Washington (CNN) - Americans are giving Barack Obama a split decision on his first year in office, according to a new national poll. — Forty-eight percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday …
Discussion:
Top of the Ticket, Hot Air, The Swamp, Moonbattery, The Page, The Plum Line, Commentary and Washington Monthly
The Corner on National Review Online:
Coates Speaks as Best He Can — By: NRO Staff — It's not news that Christopher Coates, the former chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, was relieved of his post on January 5 and “transferred” to South Carolina for an 18-month assignment with the U.S. attorney's office.
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Commentary
The Politico:
Obama to address House GOP — President Barack Obama will address House Republicans next week at their annual retreat in Baltimore, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton said Tuesday afternoon. — It's a show of bi-partisanship after a year rife with tumult in the relationship between …
David Brooks / New York Times:
The Tel Aviv Cluster — Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates. — Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population …
Greg Sargent / The Plum Line:
Poll: More Think Health Care Reform Isn't Ambitious Enough — Could Obama's dip to new lows on health care be driven partly by the fact that the reform proposal isn't ambitious enough? — The internals of the new CBS poll suggest that this could be the case: They show that more people …
Discussion:
The Reaction, Wonk Room, Open Left, Daily Kos, ourfuture.org/blogs_chrono/* and Ezra Klein
Gavin Lee / BBC:
Strange reunion — Why would a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard track down two of his former captives - two British men - and agree to fly to London to meet them? — “You look different without a cap.” — “You look different without the jump suits.” — With those words, an extraordinary reunion gets under way.
Marc Ambinder / The Atlantic Politics Channel:
“Halperin/Heilemann Deep Background” And The Sourcing Talmud — Peeling back the curtain a bit, I've had more than a few discussions with trusted sources over the past day or so about whether certain information imparted to me is on “deep background” — meaning, to me, that it can be published …
Dennis Kraniak / MyFox Detroit:
Unruly Passengers Disrupt Northwest Flight 243 — ((Watch the video to get passenger reaction from Fox 2's Simon Shaykhet.)) — The source says four men from Saudi Arabai were saying something in Arabic that alarmed four on-board Federal Air Marshals. The Marshals speak Arabic.
Peter Hamby / CNN:
Palin to address alcohol industry event in Las Vegas — Washington (CNN) - Las Vegas and alcohol probably aren't the first two things that come to mind at the mention of Sarah Palin, but the former vice presidential candidate is about to change that. — At least that's according to Craig Wolf …
John Cassidy / The New Republic:
Hedging America — How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities — (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 390 pp., $28 — One tried-and-true way to start off a course in elementary economics is to call the students' attention to a common object, such as the spiral notebooks in which they are presumably busy taking notes.
Dustin Lance Black / The Huffington Post:
We Cannot Wait — Almost 32 years ago, in San Francisco's City Hall, having just defeated anti-gay proposition 6, Supervisor Harvey Milk stood in his office debating what the next step in the gay and lesbian movement should be. Per usual, he found himself in a heated debate with the other …