As the five men charged in the gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman on New Delhi bus face murder charges, a politician in northeast India accused of rape was stripped and beaten by a crowd of women.

Bikram Singh Brahma is a member of the Congress Party in Assam and president of a district Congress committee in the state. He was arrested Thursday in the rape of a woman in Chirang, a district in Assam. As the New York Times reports:

“A case has been registered against him under I.P.C. 376 by the lady’s husband,” G. P. Singh, the zonal inspector general of police, said in a telephone interview, referring to the section of the Indian penal code that applies to rape.

Mr. Brahma attacked the woman Wednesday night while he was staying at her family’s house, Mr. Singh said on Thursday. “He was staying at their house, and under what circumstances will be the subject matter of the investigation,” he added.

Local television stations released a video of a group of women tearing off Mr. Brahma’s shirt and hitting him on the face and stomach.

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While there’s no guarantee that "Rodham" will be made (and while its existence isn’t exactly new — Slate reported on Young Il Kim’s screenplay last month), the Politico brief is evidence of a level of public interest in Secretary Clinton that's high even by the usual standard.

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This would be the same Christie who, in September 2012, headlined a fundraiser for Iowa congressman Steve King, who is not just one of the craziest members of the GOP crazy wing, but who also announced a month later that he probably wouldn't vote for relief money for Sandy victims for the same reason he refused to vote for federal aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina: Because he was pretty sure people spent the relief money on "Gucci bags and massage parlors." This is a man Christie wanted to win reelection, in order to help Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives, so that they could continue ignoring the priorities and desperate needs of liberal, urban coastal states like New Jersey.

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Austerity

It's coming. Congress will obsess over crafting a long-term deficit deal no matter what happens with the tax rates and the sequester. In all likelihood, we'll get regressive budget cuts at all levels of government, plus, for good measure, tax hikes not just on the rich but on working people. The well-funded "Fix the Debt" monsters will still demand massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Republicans are justifiably confident that they can use the debt ceiling to force more spending cuts less than a month from now. If all of this sinks the still-sluggish economic recovery, that'll be just one more sign that we need to cut more, and "tighten our belts." Plus the debt ceiling fight might just crash the world economy anyway.

Congress Isn't Going to Do Anything

As historically unproductive as the 112th Congress was, there's not much reason to expect more from the 113th. The Senate has gotten marginally more liberal and the House has gotten marginally less Republican, but the basic makeup of both is the same. It's still the case that House Republicans have no incentive to compromise on anything, while Senate Democrats live to compromise.

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Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines says her doctors discovered the clot during a follow-up exam Sunday. Reines says Clinton is being treated with anti-coagulants.

Clinton was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital so doctors can monitor the medication over the next 48 hours.

Reines says doctors will continue to assess Clinton's condition, "including other issues associated with her concussion."

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I think, though, that regardless of how completely lost the Republican party is -- and they are well and truly lost, and not currently "negotiating" with anything resembling a coherent plan or unified voice -- they will emerge from the current mess unscathed.

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My first four flights were all involuntary, products of the dictatorship that state and federal law grants parents over their offspring. So I had no recourse when Mom and Dad planned a family trip to Georgia in the summer of 1989. I was 9 years old and already suffering from a raging case of aerophobia. The proximate source of this affliction was the horrific tragedy of Pan Am Flight 103, which had exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, a few months earlier. The news reports had gripped me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it must have been like for the passengers – sitting there comfortably, maybe talking, maybe sleeping, maybe watching a movie, and then in a micro-second a quick crack of noise followed instantly by … an eternity of nothingness. None of them ever saw it coming, or had any chance to do anything about it. The only way they could have saved themselves that day would have been by staying off that flight.

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Instead the feds are either looking to have a judge declare the state regulations invalid, or are out to browbeat states into recriminalizing the demon weed by withholding federal money. (A similar strategy got the drinking age raised to 21 in every state, though it required legislation.)

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Because of this No Money Rule, then, nobody should be surprised that there was almost no mention in any of the media of the real news behind Jim DeMint's announcement that he is leaving the U.S. Senate to head the Heritage Foundation. And that real news is this: His announcement is perhaps 2012's most biting message yet about the supremacy of money in American politics. Yes, even in a year whose presidential race was utterly dominated by super PAC special interest cash, nothing tells the story of where the true authority in politics lies than a sitting senator leaving a top post in the national government to lead a corporate-funded think tank.

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"An outrage is what we have here,"

Said McCain, leading Fox News  to cheer.

The Benghazi 'collusion'?

Was merely delusion,

Designed as a Susan Rice smear.

Mike Moulton
Gainesville, Fla.

Obama’s new hashtag is meant,

2 help middle class taxpayers vent,

Via tweets 2 demand,

That their tax hike is banned:

#My2k’s needed 4 rent.

Madeleine Begun Kane
http://www.madkane.com
Bayside, Queens, N.Y.

The sad lesson of General Petraeus,

Is not that our heroes betray us;

But the ugly glare of publicity,

Along with our share of complicity,

Does more than our sins can to slay us.

James W. Moore
Montreal

Send your entries to limericks@salon.com. The deadline is 5 p.m. ET on Sunday. Please include your name and hometown. Good luck!

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As you may recall, we calibrate our state colors by taking into account not just presidential election results, but also senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial elections. We give each equal weight and generate a color from pure blue (see Massachusetts) to pure red (see Kansas). This gives a far more nuanced picture of how each state votes, and not just what they decide every four years.

Click the image below to see how the map changed as a result of the 2012 election. You may want to keep an eye on North Carolina and Virginia.

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Among those expressing an interest: Chicago aldermen, a former NFL linebacker and a defense attorney who represented R&B singer R. Kelly and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

But as the field of would-be successors grows to a dozen or more names — one of whom may be another member of the Jackson family — party leaders and political analysts say a stampede of candidates could pose risks for the Democratic stronghold. Spread the field of candidates too thin, they say, and it becomes easier for a more conservative candidate — or anyone else party leaders don’t want — to pull off a win.

The possibility so worried Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush, a close friend of the Jacksons, that within hours of the resignation he had these words for anyone thinking of running: “Cool your jets.”

“My fear is that there is going to be so many wannabes blinded by ambition ... that we could find a tea party (candidate winning),” he said during a news conference. “That would be a travesty.”

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If you actually want to engage your right-wing relatives -- and let me be clear, you really should not do this, you are going to ruin Thanksgiving -- it's best to come prepared. Below, you'll find a series of talking points designed to address some of the most popular current trending topics in the alternate conservative media world. (You'll find last year's guide here.)

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One of my next assignments was to write a policy paper justifying a forthcoming bill from the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a belligerent reactionary from North Carolina. When I met with the senator’s staff, I was told to wait because Helms wasn’t sure what he was going to put in the bill. After I failed to turn in the policy brief on time, I received an official reprimand from my supervisor, which I treasured until I lost it during a move. The reprimand said, in effect, that at Heritage we write policy papers first and add the facts later.

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I would be proud to have my name in the acknowledgments of Ms. Parke’s novel. But given that it is printed inside a book bearing Glenn Beck’s name, the work I did is now deeply at odds with who I am as an editor. "Agenda 21" is going out into the world on Tuesday, Nov. 20, as something decidedly different from the novel I edited. Yes, the story is the same. So are the concepts, the characters and the writing. But the name in the byline — that changes the book’s intent. It changes everything.

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"The Assembly will pick a leader, and the Senate will pick a leader. And I have no intention of getting involved in either situation," Cuomo said at a press conference last week, while underscoring that he thought Democrats learned a lesson the last time they were in control of the Senate. "I think they learned the hard way. The Democrats were in power. The Democrats then lost power because of the dysfunction and I think they learned that lesson the hard way."

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Given that background, it’s almost surprising that it’s taken Stone this long to tackle a straightforward nonfiction project like his Showtime miniseries “The Untold History of the United States,” which tries to counter the jingoistic mythmaking and obligatory “American exceptionalism” of most public discourse about 20th-century history. That phrase refers to a creed that still holds sway (or so polls suggest) among a large proportion of the U.S. population, although it hasn’t been taken seriously by historians for many years: The idea that America has a special and even sacred role to play in world history, and cannot be compared to other nations driven by the grubby realities of politics and economics.

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I guess it’s not going to work out. I guess this is goodbye.

For 20 months now, since a few days after the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl and Gov. Scott Walker moved to crush public unions in Wisconsin and the protests began at the state capitol building in Madison, we have argued nearly every day of the week. We have argued late at night, in our underwear, with you full of Evan Williams and me full of French red wine. We have argued during your son’s football games. We have argued when my daughters have been playing Monopoly with me. We have argued at the mall, at the grocery store, out for dinner, out for a stroll with the dog, at work, at ballgames, at weddings, at funerals, in the sunshine, in the rain, in the snow, in sight of the beautiful summertime dew that clings to the grass here in Wisconsin, way early in the morning, even during that long drought in July and in August when rain was as scarce as good will toward people whose political views are not the same as our own. We never stopped, Rick.  We never surrendered.

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