Comparisons between Davis and just about every popular female television character of the last few years have sprung up across the Internet -- most commonly, to Emilia Clarke's Daenerys Targaryen from "Game of Thrones," Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope from "Parks and Recreation," and Connie Britton's Tami Taylor from "Friday Night Lights."

The last one makes sense, sort of -- Davis and Taylor both are Texan women with teased heads of blond hair. It was little wonder that fans of "Friday Night Lights" started comparing the two even as the filibuster was going on.

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Another NBC News story on precisely the same topic comes away with a similar conclusion: "progressives are ready to give her another shot."

Progressives are basically fine with Hillary Clinton taking the 2016 nomination. There! Settled.

And why shouldn't they be? As Markos Moulitsas puts it, “The fact that she makes 2016 uninteresting makes that attractive." Yeah, that's about all you need, too. She would win. And you know who's a good nominee to go with, in general, in politics? The one who would win the election. Progressives overall might prefer, say, an Elizabeth Warren or Martin O'Malley for the nominee, but they likely won't run if Hillary Clinton runs, so whatever.

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Her cheeky Twitter debut told me two almost contradictory things: Hillary Clinton is having an enormously good time with this phase in her life, and she’s planning on running for president.

Obviously a winning campaign will be way harder than launching her Twitter presence, but let’s give her credit for a bold first step. Still, I was thrilled by Clinton’s sure-footed Twitter move – and then I was kind of horrified by how thrilled I was, particularly as I saw a comparable giddiness among liberals and the media (and no, they’re not the same thing.)

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Showing a thoroughly cheeky feel for exactly who her crowd here is, Ms. Clinton showed up on Twitter -- mere weeks after her husband Bill got on board -- Monday afternoon. The former president quickly welcomed her with a lighthearted query, "Does @Twitter have a family share plan?" He then said, "Great to be here with @HillaryClinton & @ChelseaClinton. Looking forward to #tweetsfromhillary." Chelsea, meanwhile, chimed in with an adorable "Welcome Mom!"

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I thought at the time that Rice deserved an apology from Republicans who savaged her, once the truth about the talking points came out, but of course one never came. (Sen. Lindsey Graham countered by saying she "deserved to be subpoenaed" instead.) Now she’s gotten the next best thing: a promotion to National Security Adviser, once Tom Donilon leaves the job in July. The position needs no confirmation by the Senate, so Rice’s GOP critics have nothing to say about her new role.

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Hillary Clinton's untitled new memoir, to be released June 1, 2014, now has its own Amazon page where fans of the former Secretary of State can preorder the book at a steep discount from the hardcover list price of $40. The Simon and Schuster tome, listed as "New Memoir," is 320 pages and features what may be placeholder art (the same photograph Clinton uses on her official Web page) on its cover. As of right now, the book is ranked #196,490 among hardcovers on Amazon. It is likely to rise over the course of the next year.

Here's the synopsis provided on Amazon:

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"Those of us who have had the briefings, seen the videos, know there was no protest involved," Ryan said. "To suggest afterwards that this was the result of a spontaneous protest, we now know is not the case. So the burden of proof here is on the administration's side. Why did they continue to push this kind of a story when they knew nearly immediately afterwards that that was not the case?"

Host Chris Wallace asked Ryan if he thinks the White House "purposely misled" the American people to help win the election. "I don't know the answer to that question," Ryan replied. "Rather make a conclusion before an investigation has been completed, we just need to investigate this for the sake of good government."

As The Huffington Post points out, this is a slightly different approach from the one Ryan has been taking:

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But on April 22, in the tiny village of Dongshigu in the eastern Shandong province, something happened that would eclipse the visit. Chen Guangcheng, a blind dissident lawyer-activist, managed to scale a high wall to escape the building where he had been under house arrest for two years. Chen broke his foot in the process, yet over the next several days, with the help of other activists, he managed to make his way four hundred miles to Beijing, where he was taken into the U.S. embassy. On April 27, when he was inside the embassy, a YouTube video was posted in which Chen informed Premier Wen Jiabao that he had escaped and demanding punishment for the local officials who had detained him.

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The version of the emails initially sent out last Friday purported to show that the State Department and the White House gave input into the talking points issued by the CIA following the attacks on the U.S. consulate. But on Wednesday the White House released 100 pages of emails that contradict this conclusion.

CBS News reports:

On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation."

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department.

It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation."

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But CNN’s Jake Tapper reveals that Rhodes’ email didn’t mention the State Department, and doesn’t even seem to implicitly reference it. The email as published by Karl differs significantly from the original obtained by Tapper.

According to ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Rhodes weighed in after State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who expressed concerns about the way the talking points might hurt “my building's leadership.” ABC quotes Rhodes saying:

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“Remember when she said, ‘well who cares how this happened,’ in a rather emotional way?” McCain asked guest host Martha Raddatz. “A lot of people care.” It’s too bad Raddatz didn’t tell the senator that no, she didn’t remember that – because Clinton never said it.

Remarkably, I’ve seen no one follow up on McCain’s misstatement today either. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.) Instead, reporters are breathlessly parsing each new GOP charge on Benghazi (while also decrying the very real abuse of the IRS overscrutinizing the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.) The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s,” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

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Gates, who was appointed by George W. Bush and kept on during President Obama's first term, continued that he wouldn't have "approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances."

"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," Gates added. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."

Watch:

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Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, planned on Monday to seek depositions from retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen. Issa, who is leading Republicans' investigations into the attacks on a State Department consulate last September, said he wants to know with whom the pair spoke to reach their conclusion that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton did not direct the response to the pair of nighttime attacks in Libya.

"This is a failure, it needs to be investigated. Our committee can investigate. Now, Ambassador Pickering, his people and he refused to come before our committee," Issa said Sunday.

Pickering, sitting next to Issa during an appearance on one Sunday show, disputed the chairman's account and said that he was willing to testify before the committee.

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But this weekend on NPR's "All Things Considered," the latest stop on his celebratory media tour, Salter was asked by host Arun Rath about his women characters -- and he gave what might be as bizarre an answer as has any male writer these days, suddenly faced with direct questions about literature and gender that they might not have been asked before.

Here's the transcript:

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So was Chris Christie's lap band surgery; it’s obvious what that means. Joe Biden tells Rolling Stone he spends four to five hours a day with President Obama -- we all know why. The attempted rehabilitation of George W. Bush was all about the presidential ambitions of his brother Jeb. Sen. Marco Rubio’s immigration reform proposals are covered almost exclusively in terms of what they mean for his 2016 chances, not for U.S. immigration policy. And the White House schemes of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, instead of being a laughable footnote in stories about his radicalism, are instead headline news everywhere.

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Hillary Clinton has just made her first public appearances since resigning as Secretary of State, and I am enthusiastic about her presumed candidacy; it’s making me dream of Iowa. I long to go there to work on electing the first woman president.

I watched Barack Obama there last November at the final stop of his final campaign, just before midnight on the chilly evening before election day in Des Moines, the crowd of 20,000 strong doing call and response along with our president. “Fired up!” “Ready to go!”

This is not post-racial America, despite what some would try and have us believe. This is still racist that-nigger-messed-up-the-country America and I am crying from true joy to think that 20,000 mostly white folks are out there in Iowa — in Iowa! — for our president. For Barack Obama. For a black man. A black man! (I don’t believe that Iowans are any more likely to be racist than the rest of us, but the heartland of America is not the first place that jumps to mind when I think of racial progress.)

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How seriously should Americans take Issa’s hearing and claims?

For almost four years, I worked in close proximity to him, first on the Democratic staff of the Oversight Committee (when he was ranking member) and then as legislative director for a senior member of the committee, when he was chairman. Here’s what I learned: If Darrell Issa says something – based on the record, his statements and my personal observations of him up-close – there is a strong likelihood it will be baseless and easily disproven.

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Those are the accusations the #BENGHAZI coalition has been making since shortly after the attack: that the Obama administration intentionally allowed the attack on the U.S. consulate to happen, or did not do as much as it could have to stop the attack once it started, because it did not want to admit that it did not successfully destroy terrorism itself in its first term; and that after the attack, the administration intentionally and repeatedly lied about the attackers and their motivation (the "they didn't say 'terrorism'" argument), and then engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up of the fact that the attack had been terrorism.

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Revolutions tend to occur in waves, triggered by the aftermath of wars, like the world wars, or by revolutions in leading countries, like the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the last generation, there have been four regional waves of revolution. With the end of the Cold War, communist regimes were swept from power from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, surviving only in a few countries including China, North Korea and Cuba. Unable to justify themselves with the pretense of fighting communism, military dictatorships were swept away in Latin America. Then the Arab Spring triggered a wave of populist if not necessarily democratic revolutions against autocracies in North Africa and the Middle East.

Are we seeing a new wave of revolutionary politics in the heartland of the industrial West? Although governments are not being violently overthrown in Europe, political systems are being destabilized by the rise of anti-system movements opposed to the major establishment parties. In Greece, the leftist Syriza party and the far-right Golden Dawn have sapped power from the political center. The most recent Italian election was dominated by anti-system candidates, including Silvio Berlusconi and the comedian Beppe Grillo.

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