This just in from the Anchorage Daily News: The elections division still has over 10,000 ballots left to count today and thousands more through next week, but the latest numbers show Mark Begich leading Sen. Ted Stevens 125,019 to 125,016. The new numbers, reflecting nearly 43,000 absentee ballots counted today, are from all over the [...]

Roll Call reports that Joe Biden has asked brainy, all-around Washington insider Ron Klain to be his chief of staff–a move that would have Klain in the same White House role that he played for former Vice President Al Gore. Klain’s ties to Biden, however, go back in even further. In the late 1980s and [...]

Adding on to Karen’s post below, this is a terrific profile by Ezra Unrelated Klein of one of the most important, but least known members of the Senate, Max Baucus. Why is Baucus so important? Because his Senate Finance Committee has the last word on getting a health care plan through the Senate. As Karen [...]

With the exception of what we’re hearing from a few people like Jonathan Cohn, the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom of the Washington pundit class is that health care reform is a non-starter next year. The assumption taking hold is that Barack Obama simply can’t afford to tackle it; he can’t afford the money, and he [...]

Are conservatives really so blind to Gov. Sarah Palin’s true liabilities that they believe this is the reason she was mauled in the press? How appalling. Could it be, instead, that in her first interviews as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, Palin revealed herself to be less knowledgeable about national and international affairs than your average congressional intern? [...]

As happens every four years in Washington, the city is fixated on the parlor game of guessing cabinet appointments. But if you want to gauge the direction of the Obama Administration, pay closer attention to who the President-elect chooses to staff his White House. New Presidents often begin by thinking that they can delegate policymaking [...]

TIME’s Mark Thompson has a great piece up today about the latest outrage in the long sad rip off of taxpayers that bureaucrats like to call “federal procurement.” The maiden voyage of the taxpayer’s newest nearly $2 billion warship stalled for two days in August. That’s when the stern gate of the USS San Antonio [...]