Legend and myth was important to ancient Roman society. They practiced augury, such as reading the way birds fly, then attributing bad situations to unhappy gods. In reality, their government (a republic, no less) was run by a few elites who made bad decisions. Americans tend to be similar in buying into myths, while a real culprit of our stagnant democracy is right before our eyes. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but too many of us are focused on distractions -- like blaming Citizens United v. FEC for everything wrong with politics -- while political insiders rig the game.

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Today, however, the boundaries between rational political discourse and raving madness have been erased. The extremist peddlers of nightmare scenarios who were once thought to be charmingly eccentric at 1am are now advising elected representatives of the people to initiate investigations and draft bills addressing these non-existent threats. Here are just a few of the urban legends that are circulating in the halls of state and federal legislative bodies courtesy of the whack job broadcasting set.

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The issue is that Republicans won't sign on to McCarthy -- or any EPA administrator -- until she agrees to force the EPA to submit everything they do to a very "business-friendly" (time- and money-intensive) analysis. Here's how Politico explains it:

Republican leaders were unmoved, though, saying the Obama administration deserves blame for the impasse by refusing to fully answer questions that GOP nominees have posed about McCarthy and EPA. They include questions about the “underlying data used to justify EPA’s job-killing regulations,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

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The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has it figured out:

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Yes, underperforming for a Republican in a heavily Republican district, in a special election, is definitely proof that Sanford was a superior candidate, and not merely that he had an R by his name. If anything, Sanford's victory proves that candidates matter only in terms of ideology, not biography. In a very conservative district, the Republican candidate will win, even if he's a weird creep with a humiliating past.

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The Washington Post reports:

Mitt Romney won this district by 18 points last fall, but Sanford’s personal history made the seat competitive. Democrats poured money into the race while national Republicans abandoned their candidate, giving Colbert Busch a 5-to-1 advantage in outside spending.

Those ads, and Colbert Busch herself, made an issue out of Sanford’s 2009 disappearance to be with his Argentinean mistress, which led to an ethics investigation into his travel.

In spite of that cash and a trespassing complaint filed by Sanford’s ex-wife in the 48 hours before the election, he was gaining momentum. Throughout the race he tied Colbert Busch to national Democrats and emphasized his own fiscal conservatism, an ultimately successful strategy.

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The question is how much longer he'll be able to straddle.

Weiner's professional political life began in 1991, when he ran his maiden race for City Council. As Steve Kornacki detailed for Salon, he won a long-shot bid as a 27-year-old, in part by anonymously sending mailers linking his opponent to African-American figures (namely, Mayor David Dinkins and Jesse Jackson) unpopular in his white district. Appealing to the white ethnic constituency, he cultivated an identity in office as an outer-borough moderate, focusing on issues like graffiti, airport regulations and fire alarm boxes.

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I am guessing that over the next few days a lot of Americans are going to hear about these delays, or be personally inconvenienced by them, and think to themselves, wait, the sequester thing is still happening? Well, yes, it is, because so far it hasn't been that bad, for certain Americans. Other Americans, though, have been aware of the cuts since they went into effect.

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Pryor’s problem, he explains to Salon, is that he’s having trouble finding ammunition and firearms for his officers, thanks to a national shortage. The cause? A run on supply from gun lovers afraid that Congress or state legislatures will impose new gun control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

“Everyone is thinking, they’re going to stop manufacturing, or they’re going to be taxing and all this, so it’s just this mentality of, let’s all buy up everything now just in case. And it hurts us,” Pryor said. “This is ridiculous. This shouldn’t be happening to law enforcement.”

But he’s hardly alone. Rommel Dionisio, a New York-based firearms industry analyst at Wedbush Inc., confirms the trend is a national phenomenon. “Most certainly, ammunition is in very tight supply in addition to firearms,” thanks to “consumer fears of possible bans,” he told Salon in an email.

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So Barack Obama did his "charm offensive" -- he spoke, in real life, to Republican members of Congress -- and everyone agreed that it didn't count because he didn't mean it. Reaching out to people in order to attempt to persuade them to support a policy goal only counts if you sincerely want to speak to those people, everyone knows that.

The problem isn't actually that Barack Obama was insufficiently charming. The problem is much more simple: He is campaigning for policies Republicans don't support. Barack Obama wants to cut the deficit. Republicans don't care about the deficit. Barack Obama wants to cut the deficit by raising more revenue and cutting social insurance programs. Republicans hate taxes and don't actually want to cut social insurance programs for old people. So, "charm" is not really the problem.

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Later today, he’ll meet with House Republicans for the first time in two years in what is sure to be a tense summit. But his meeting yesterday with Senate Democrats had its own antagonism, according to reports, as liberal Democrats hammered the president over his offer to cut social safety net entitlement programs

The Hill’s Alex Bolton and Justin Sink report that while Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, warned the president that he couldn’t count on their support for Social Security cuts, “Obama stood firm.”

“Most of the conversation I caught was on Social Security,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said of the closed-door meeting. Obama has proposed shaving benefits by changing the way inflation is calculated in Social Security cost of living adjustments to the so-called chained or superlative CPI.

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Here's what we already knew about Paul Ryan's budget, before he released it: It would be so vague as to be basically impossible to score, it would involve a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans, it would effectively dismantle Medicare in a few years, and it won't ever become law. So, today brought us I think four hundred charts, illustrating those points, in dozens of blog posts, admittedly mostly by Ezra Klein and his Wonk-Servants but also in just about every other liberal opinion organ with a budget or econ "wonk" on staff. Here is Slate's Matt Yglesias explaining that Ryan's plan to balance the budget is "lower taxes on the rich, higher taxes on the middle class, less program spending for the poor and the working class." That was also his plan last year, and the year before!

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And yet … the Senate still holds a place in the mythology of American democracy that the House of Representatives never has. Reporters and pundits who hate modern filibusters look longingly at the fictional Jimmy Stewart filibuster in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and are quick with praise whenever serious debates break out on the Senate floor.

The Senate does have some advantages over the modern House, but that it has potential to be a better debating society isn’t one of them, or at least not an important one. So I won’t be celebrating Rand Paul’s day-long speech this week as an example of what filibusters should look like.

Instead, I’ll celebrate it for something a little different: Paul was trying to use the leverage that chamber rules give individual senators and small groups of senators.

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The president's plan to stump for his party’s congressional candidates in 2014 is a good idea. While some measures have managed to get passed, he's mostly suffered through the first two months of his second term – and far more of his first – frustrated by Republican filibusters, fake crises, fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, sequesters, and reflexive opposition (to say nothing of a potential government shutdown later this month).

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There are two big categories of customer: One is comprised of individual consumers. The other is government.

We tend to think of the government as a direct employer — of teachers, fire fighters, civil servants.

But government is also a major customer of the private sector. It buys school supplies, pharmaceuticals, military equipment, computers. It hires private companies to build roads and bridges, dredge ports, manage data.

One out of every five Americans works for a company whose customer is the government.

Here’s the problem: Both categories of customer are buying less.

Individual consumers are buying less because they have less take-home pay. Their wages are dropping (the median wage is 8 percent below what it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation). And their taxes have gone up. The expiration of the Social Security payroll tax cut will shrink the typical paycheck by more than $1,000 this year.

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If Congress doesn’t act in the next week, automatic across-the-board 5-13 percent spending cuts will make the food system less safe, set back scientific research for a generation, and kick poor kids out of school, homeless people out of shelters, and firefighters off their trucks. Not to mention what sequestration will do to jobs, the economy, national security and adorable zoo animals. The hype is real. It is bad. At least 5-13 percent of the sky is falling.

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We’re sure you're firmly in that 36 percent, but even political junkies may not know exactly what the cuts will do to everyday Americans. With just two weeks to go before the sequester goes into effect, negotiations are being put on the front burner, with President Obama leading a press conference this morning to demand action.

Here’s everything you need to know about what the sequester will do it if it's allowed to happen.

First of all, what is the sequester?

A package of $1.2 billion in spending cuts created by the Budget Control Act of 2011, scheduled to go into effect on March 1 . The cuts were meant to act like a loaded gun that Congress put to its own head in order to incentivize themselves to work together on a better deficit reduction program. They failed, and the cuts were triggered on Jan. 1, but Congress pushed back the deadline by a few months when it raised the debt ceiling on New Year's Eve.

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In an effort to standardize pharmacies' procedures for filling prescriptions for birth control, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) have reintroduced the “Access to Birth Control (ABC) Act." It's the same bill the politicians tried to get through previous legislative sessions, but these two are clearly Charlie-Brown-and-the-football types, and are optimistically giving it another shot.

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State of the Union addresses from newly reelected second-term presidents are full of grand plans that never amount to anything, like George W. Bush's Social Security privatization and Harry Truman's sad, doomed "Fair Deal." Truman proposed a huge package of economic reforms and programs, from the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act to a universal healthcare program -- and Congress shot every single piece of it down. America was saved, once again, from becoming a pleasant European-style social democracy.

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While passage this year could be a longshot, lawmakers from both parties have been quietly working on several bills, the first of which Democratic Reps. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Jared Polis of Colorado plan to introduce Tuesday, Blumenauer told The Associated Press.

Polis' measure would regulate marijuana the way the federal government handles alcohol: In states that legalize pot, growers would have to obtain a federal permit. Oversight of marijuana would be removed from the Drug Enforcement Administration and given to the newly renamed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Marijuana and Firearms, and it would remain illegal to bring marijuana from a state where it's legal to one where it isn't.

The bill is based on a legalization measure previously pushed by former Reps. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Ron Paul of Texas.

Blumenauer's bill would create a federal marijuana excise tax of 50 percent on the "first sale" of marijuana — typically, from a grower to a processor or retailer. It also would tax pot producers or importers $1,000 annually and other marijuana businesses $500.

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