Speaking to the a committee meeting of the Elko County Republican Party, while promoting her book “Right Angle: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim the Constitution," Angle added: "If you believe in representative government, then you have to be willing to be one of those representatives. And I’m willing.”

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“For several months now, my wife and I have engaged in serious reflection about our family, Alaska, and the state of our nation,” Miller wrote in an email to supporters, Roll Call reports. “After consultation with our political advisers, trusted friends, and many of our 2010 volunteers, we have decided to test the waters for a 2014 US Senate run.”

He continued on his website, referencing his 2010 run: "Though I was labeled an 'extremist' by the likes of Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich for telling the truth, both of our sitting senators now routinely engage in such “extremist” rhetoric with respect to federal overreach, government spending, and entitlement reform. Yet they are still unwilling to tackle the tough issues."

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So what are you to do if, say, you spent years working as a hedge fund attorney, and all your friends and colleagues are in the finance industry, but you really, really want to get elected to something in a liberal city as a Democrat? If you're Reshma Saujani, you just pretend you never had anything to do with Wall Street and hope no one digs too deep.

Saujani is running for New York City public advocate. New York's public advocate, one of only three city-wide elected offices, is sort of like the city's "ombudsman." The advocate's job is essentially to annoy the mayor as much as possible, and then run for that office. The advocate is expected, to put it broadly, to look out for "the little guy," against the city's bureaucracy and police department and so on. The job, thus far, has always gone to liberal, populist figures; Democrats have held the post since it was created in 1994, even as the city repeatedly elected Republican mayors.

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The RSLC's report was called "How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013," and outlines how the group used $30 million to target Democratic-held state legislature races in 2010, in blue states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In the midterms that year, Republicans went from controlling 14 state legislatures across the country to controlling 25.

By pumping money into the relatively small-time races, the RSLC pushed in Republican legislators who in turn influenced the redistricting process in their states, which gave Republicans an edge in a number of congressional races in the 2012 elections.

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Every politician's memoir, especially if written while the author is still in office, is a series of self-serving half-truths. There's really not much benefit to total and complete honesty, and most politicians are convinced enough of their own righteousness that they probably don't even think of their omissions and distortions as dishonest. So, everyone Haley trashes in her book says she is lying. That is not that surprising!

Among the points of contention:

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The demonstrations also frame a fundamental contradiction – a profound source of strength that has been transformed into a disabling weakness.

They deserve enormous credit for drawing a global spotlight to the perpetrators of that crisis: a sinister cabal of financial scamsters and right-wing politicians, backed by the dubiously “grass-roots” electorate of the Tea Party. What almost no one, on the right or left alike, wants to talk about is that the cabal was empowered by the very people who are now denouncing it.

Progressives, out of a mixture of political correctness and embarrassment, carefully avoid the subject. The Republicans are delighted at the silence, because it masks what should be fatal weaknesses in their own position.

It may not be pleasant to hear, but a massive Democratic voter cop-out in last year’s elections is what put the reactionary right in the driver’s seat, creating the disastrous logjam in Congress, and bringing to a dead halt the hyperactive first two years of the Obama administration.

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Rove has no great love for Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, but his raison d'etre is getting Republicans elected and viciously smearing Democrats, so he's charging ahead without waiting for the party to settle on one of those jokers. American Crossroads, Rove's shadow-RNC is launching ad campaigns targeted at President Obama's campaign stops, accusing him of wanting to raise everyone's taxes. ("The message is somewhat misleading," ABC News says, but because "Karl Rove lies" is a "dog bites man" story, they don't devote much ink to it.)

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The National Federation of Independent Business is generally treated in the press as the official practically apolitical voice of American small business (and the press treats the word of "small business" with almost as much reverence as that of military generals) but it is, in fact, a conservative lobbying organization that has spent decades fighting for anti-labor, anti-environmental and anti-consumer policies, all in the name of protecting our cherished "independent businesses."

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That's what she told the crowd assembled at Women's National Republican Club in New York, where she was apparently booked to speak at the same time that she was booked to be interviewed on cable news by that guy from "The Apprentice." The New York Observer was there:

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During the ensuing general election campaign, a video from 1999 emerged in which O'Donnell told Bill Maher that she "dabbled" in witchcraft in her youth. The Tea Party candidate, fearing that this might alientate her Christian support base, quickly released a video in which she stated, "I'm not a witch." The comment invited a wealth of media mockery (and an SNL spoof -- see below).

In her new memoir, "Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again," O'Donnell expresses regret over the video. According to the AP, she writes, "It was a wrong-headed move, made for all the wrong reasons, but it was mine." O'Donnell also blames an insistent media consultant for pushing the idea.

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"Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years: Islam-bashing wins votes," wrote journalist Michael Scott Moore in the wake of the 2010 election. His assumption was shared by many then and is still widely accepted today.

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Hah, I am just kidding. We all know it's because of lobbyists and the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is sort of a Match.com for state lawmakers and the nation's worst industry lobbies. The Center for Media and Democracy's ALEC Exposed project has a handy list of the hundreds of bills ALEC pushes in every state in the union, on subjects ranging from school vouchers to gutting environmental regulations to opposition to the National Popular Vote Compact. (Yeah, that one I don't even get.)

Here's how the ALEC process works: GOP state legislators go to fancy conferences where they sit down with lobbyists and right-wing activists and draft right-wing legislation together. They return home and introduce it without mentioning the source. The lobbies then throw some cash at the legislators working to advance their agenda. Then, these days, the bill passes, and everyone else gets around to getting outraged about it, long after their outrage would do much good. Repeat.

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In his speech, Mr. Bloomberg said state lawmakers have a clear choice: "Do you want to be remembered as a leader on civil rights? Or an obstructionist?"

"On matters of freedom and equality, history has not remembered obstructionists kindly," the mayor said. "Not on abolition. Not on abortion. Not on women's suffrage. Not on workers' rights. Not on civil rights. And it will be no different on marriage rights."

Here's the situation in Albany right now: Marriage equality has passed the Democratic-led state Assembly, as it has multiple times in the past. It's stalled in the Senate, which, as always, is deadlocked. Tempers are flaring. Equality advocates now accuse Republicans of deliberately delaying in order to kill the issue without a vote.

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As Sanders and Franken explain: If we make sure old folks have money for and access to adequate nutrition, fewer of them will need to be hospitalized or placed in nursing homes. Because Medicare would pay a lot more money for hospitalization or nursing home care than it would cost to make sure these old folks don't go hungry to begin with, this program is cost-effective in addition to being humane.

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Lawmakers over the last several weeks have enacted the largest tax increase in Connecticut history and approved the nation's first law to mandate paid sick leave for some workers. They voted to extend protections for transgender people, to charge in-state college tuition rates to illegal immigrants, to extend an early-release program for prisoners and to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Republicans, fearful that recalls will soon allow Democrats to take majority control of the state Senate, are racing to push through their own priorities.

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Paul is mostly good on civil liberties -- he was one of the few senators to oppose the extension of the Patriot Act -- but he is also kind of dumb, and he often makes dumb arguments, especially when speaking extemporaneously. And that is how, on Sean Hannity's radio show last Friday, Rand Paul announced his support for the deportation of Tea Partiers:

The transcript (emphasis ThinkProgress's):

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McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay's brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He's a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible "governing" on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells' memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

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The DMs are not that outrageous or shocking, because we already all know that Palin and her inner-circle are paranoid and petty. It's news that they hate Mitt Romney? The fact that Palin's operation is an unprofessional cult of personality is public knowledge. But they're still entertaining for anyone fascinated by Palin and her camp.

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Trump's is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It's not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

"Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn't have realized that your entirely pointless search for the "long-form" birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book's publication.

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So considering his history of smugly saying stupid things, no one should be surprised that Sen. Paul said this:

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