Obama's Farrakhan Test  —  Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.  Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor.

A Very Serious Blog Post  —  It seems that nothing gets conservatives off nearly so much as writing obviously unserious books with patently offensive titles, designed in every way to not be taken seriously, and then get huffy when people make fun of them without having given their precious works the deep consideration they deserve.

Driving Mr. Romney  —  I FIRST met Mitt Romney at a Lincoln Day dinner in 1994, during the earliest days of his failed Senate race against Ted Kennedy.  The next weekend, I was helping him to collect the signatures he needed to get on the ballot for the Republican primary.

3 front-runners are competing in a dead heat  —  ANJEANETTE DAMON  —  Democratic front-runners are heading into Saturday's Nevada caucus locked in a tight three-way race and must try to win over voters who value change over experience, according to a new Reno Gazette-Journal poll.

Richard Baker to leave Congress Feb. 7  —  By Bill Walsh  —  WASHINGTON - The dean of Louisiana's congressional delegation, Rep. Richard Baker, has decided to step down from Congress after 22 years to take a job in the private sector representing investors he has spent a career regulating.

Mike Huckabee Really Is a Piece of Work  —  From Michigan: … Governor, I didn't have silver spoons or boarding schools or a verb summer, but I know enough to thank God for the job creators, the natural economic stimulators, capitalism.  Is this the Republican primary of a John Edwards rally?

The Kucinich court decision and “judicial activism”  —  (updated below)  —  MSNBC is televising a debate tonight between the Democratic presidential candidates in Nevada.  It originally invited Dennis Kucinich to participate because Kucinich met the objective criteria the network created for inclusion.

DICK MORRIS IS RIGHT ABOUT THIS  —  Dick Morris isn't often right, but he is today.  —  John Edwards has done a great service to this primary campaign—heck, on both sides—with his powerful and passionate message about inequality: economic as well as political inequality, and how the two are fundamentally linked.

Politics and Misogyny  —  With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's win in New Hampshire, gender issues are suddenly in the news.  Where has everybody been?  —  If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it's the dark persistence of misogyny in America.

POLL: A New Low in Approval Starts Bush's Final Year  —  Just two in 10 say they are getting ahead financially  —  Beset by growing economic concerns on top of the long unpopular war in Iraq, President Bush starts the last year of his presidency with the worst approval rating of his career.

Hillary Clinton likens White House to prison  —  Not that it's going to diminish her ambition to live there again, but Hillary Clinton says she views the White House as something of a prison.  —  She also thinks that when she gets there, she'll have to have some kind of national contest …

Iraq Forever  —  Can't say it's much of a surprise that despite all the Friedman Units and talk of victory and how Iraq won't really play in the 2008 campaign that four years after the 2008 campaign there'll be the 2012 campaign.  And four years after that comes the 2016 campaign.

Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say  —  ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy …

Pelosi pushes gourmet menu  —  The processed cheese has been replaced with brie.  The Jell-O has made way for raspberry kiwi tarts and mini-lemon blueberry trifles.  Meatloaf has moved over for mahi mahi and buns have been shunted aside in favor of baguettes.