But so far right-wingers claiming that Clinton somehow faked her concussion have gone virtually unchallenged on Fox News and right-wing sites like Newsbusters and the Daily Caller. Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton have gotten into the act. Even after reports that Clinton also suffered a dangerous blood clot between her brain and skull, Bolton not only failed to apologize, he suggested that she was dodging Benghazi questions in order to protect her 2016 chances.

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The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party’s power resides in Republican primaries, where conservative purists wreaked considerable havoc in the past two election cycles. This included, famously, McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, where the minority leader’s protégé was crushed in a 2010 GOP Senate primary by Rand Paul. Now McConnell has to worry about suffering a similar fate in two years, especially if his handling of the current fiscal impasse evokes cries of treason from the base. How could this square with claims of fading clout for the Tea Party?

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Anthony Everitt's Rise of Rome is fascinating history and a great read. It tells the story of ancient Rome, from its founding (circa 750 BCE) to the fall of the Roman Republic (circa 45 BCE).

When read together, striking parallels emerge -- between our failings and the failings that destroyed the Roman Republic. As with Rome just before the Republic's fall, America has seen:

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The first ran for 16 years, from early 1992, when her husband survived a wave of scandals and emerged as the Democratic nominee for president, and early 2008, when Hillary fell hopelessly behind Barack Obama in their delegate race. For all of that time, Hillary and Bill were the faces of their party and, consequently, faced a relentless, daily, over-the-top assault from the GOP. The precise nature of the attacks differed, but broadly speaking, the Clintons were treated by the right exactly how Barack Obama has been for the past four years.

Which is no coincidence, because the turning point in the right’s relationship with Bill and Hillary came at the precise moment when it became clear there’d be no Clinton restoration in ’08. Suddenly, there was no day-to-day incentive for conservatives to portray them as The Worst Thing Ever To Happen To American Politics. But there was real incentive for the right to begin giving Obama the Clinton treatment, which it's been doing ever since. In the revised right-wing narrative, Bill and Hillary became symbols of a bygone era of Democratic pragmatism and cooperation – “good” Democrats whose legacy Obama was routinely tarnishing with his radical partisan warfare.

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From Quinn's Twitter feed:

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Scorsese has the full support of the 42nd president, who said, “I look forward to sharing my perspective on my years as President, and my work in the years since, with HBO’s audience.”

This will be Scorsese’s fourth collaboration with HBO, including a documentary about American author Fran Lebowitz ("Public Speaking") and the Emmy-winning "George Harrison: Living in the Material World." He also serves as executive producer for the network's "Boardwalk Empire."

h/t The Wrap, Deadline

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To understand what Feinstein and other gun control advocates are up against, it’s worth recapping the history of the assault weapons ban, which was first enacted in 1994 and expired without congressional action in 2004. Since then, there has been intermittent talk of trying to bring it back, generally in the wake of mass shootings like the one in Connecticut last Friday. But in the eight years since it lapsed, neither the House nor the Senate has ever voted on restoring the ban, and even though President Obama says he supports doing so, he’s not made it a legislative priority.

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When then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, he revoked inmate access to federal Pell grants. In 1995, New York Governor George Pataki followed suit, eliminating Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) funding for prisoners in the state.

For Kathy Boudin, at the time an inmate of the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, it seemed like college programs “disappeared overnight.”

“When college was removed, instead of having a line of people walking to school, we had people sitting up in the day rooms playing cards, playing dominoes, getting in fights,” said Boudin, now the director of the Columbia University School of Social Work’s Criminal Justice Initiative.

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It can be hard to remember now, but well into the 1990s, national Democrats proudly associated themselves with gun control, championing laws that restricted access to deadly weapons. Under Clinton, the Brady Bill, which mandated a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handgun, was passed, and so was a ban on assault weapons. The 1996 Democratic Convention that nominated Clinton for a second term featured Jim and Sarah Brady as primetime speakers.

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“I believe this will lead to a recession next year,” Newt Gingrich said. “This is the Democrat machine’s recession. And each one of them will be held personally accountable.”

He still hasn’t come to terms with how wrong he was, and neither has his party. Nearly 20 years after Gingrich uttered those words, the debate in Washington carries echoes of that ’93 fight, with Barack Obama and congressional Democrats demanding a return to the Clinton rates for the top two percent of income-earners and with Republicans, who have not provided a single vote for a tax increase in all of the intervening years, doing their best to resist.

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Although it is still early, Mitt Romney, who has 16 grandchildren, is leading among the patriarchs of America's dynastic political families, in part due to the present childlessness of George P. Bush and Chelsea Clinton, whose presence in articles on this subject is an apparent journalistic convention. Starting families now could give the hypothetical grandchildren of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton a head start on the theoretical grandchildren of Barack Obama, whose daughters are years away from having children if they decide to procreate at all.

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Her point is that Norquist’s visibility and reputation dramatically exceeds his actual political clout. It’s understandable how this has happened. Republicans have evolved over the past three decades into a staunchly anti-tax party, and Norquist is a colorful and endlessly quotable symbol of this absolutism – one who happens to live and work in close proximity to much of the national political press corps. So he gets an awful lot of face time on television and it can sometimes seem as if he and his anti-tax pledge are the reason no Republican member of Congress has voted for a tax hike in over two decades.

But, as Tim Noah wrote last week, Norquist’s actual power in Washington and within the GOP is illusory. In terms of stature and public prominence, he’s been a major beneficiary of the party’s opposition to tax increases – but he hasn’t been the driving force behind it. The real story of the GOP’s modern evolution on taxes played out in several stages, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

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As Jonathan Bernstein pointed out recently, jockeying by would-be Democratic candidates actually began well before Election Day, and party leaders, activists and interest groups are already seeking to define the terms of the 2016 debate within the party. And now that Mitt Romney has gone down to defeat, thereby assuring that the GOP’s ’16 nomination will be open too, a similar process is playing out on the Republican side. These early days of a presidential election cycle are generally known as the “invisible primary,” although in today’s media landscape, it’s easier than ever to see who’s up to what.

In the modern era of presidential politics – that is, since the power to nominate candidates was taken away from convention power-brokers and given to primary voters – this process has tended to be more predictable on the Republican side, with a “next in line” candidate emerging from one election as the clear favorite for the next nomination and then going on to win it.

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Deficit reduction leads us in the opposite direction — away from jobs and growth. The reason the “fiscal cliff” is dangerous (and, yes, I know – it’s not really a “cliff” but more like a hill) is because it’s too much deficit reduction, too quickly. It would suck too much demand out of the economy.

But more jobs and growth will help reduce the deficit. With more jobs and faster growth, the deficit will shrink as a proportion of the overall economy. Recall the 1990s when the Clinton administration balanced the budget ahead of the schedule it had set with Congress because of faster job growth than anyone expected — bringing in more tax revenues than anyone had forecast. Europe offers the same lesson in reverse: Their deficits are ballooning because their austerity policies have caused their economies to sink.

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Yes, it was a prepared speech. And yes, the same morons who found it distasteful earlier this week when the president got choked up are even unhappier now that this – and I'm quoting a Chicago Tribune commenter here – "frickin' crybaby" is staying put in the White House. But plenty of others – like apparently every human being on my Twitter feed right now – saw that video as an affirmation of exactly whom we were voting for on Tuesday. It's a video of a leader with a heart.

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As powerful as that money is, though, there's also a second, equally corrosive form of payoff — the kind that awaits campaign staff and outgoing government officials if and when they enter the world of influence peddling. This more secret form of influence, which will quietly shape the post-election period, tends to generate far less outrage than ho-hum rationalizations. For this reason, you almost never hear about it — that is, until the last few weeks, when a series of coincidental revelations provided a rare look at how this dark money really works.

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It hasn't worked. Cannabis is now used by millions of people in the United States, and has been for decades. It is culturally accepted, the stuff of knowing TV sitcom references and sophomoric press puns. Police chiefs say that they have better things to do than bust people for smoking pot (even though they somehow still manage to arrest more than 850,000 a year). Even the commander-in-chief commanded his very own stoner crew, the Choom Gang, in his younger days, while his two immediate predecessors either issued artful non-denials of youthful use (George W. Bush) or famously tried to have it both ways by ridiculously claiming to have toked but not inhaled (Bill Clinton).

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The Obama campaign provided a who's-who of 181 actors, musicians, authors, athletes, mayors, and more that fit any and all demographic groups in the president's target zone. All are being deployed to carry his message to television and radio in the waning days of the campaign.

The list includes some of Hollywood's big names — Samuel L. Jackson, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson.

Celebrity sells. It remains to be seen if voters buy.

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