Karen Tumulty

With Sunday’s elections, conservatives are suddenly … discovering … they … love France.

Ana, please cut Sally Quinn some slack. It can be very hard to see when you are wearing a gas mask.

As expected and feared, Florida has indeed moved up its primary date. What’s next? I’m rooting for the political tourism schedule: Iowa caucuses in time for the State Fair; a New Hampshire primary that takes in the fall leaves; New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas.

Speaking of Florida, check out Tim Padgett’s profile of the Governor in the new …

How many direct or indirect mentions of Ronald Reagan?

I’ll take: 46.

UPDATE: We’ll take the New York Times tally here of 20. (I kept track the first half-hour, but then “The Office” came on, and I started switching back and forth.) That means most of us totally blew it, and CFaller96 walks away the winner. Zippy wins major style …

By way of The Hill and TPMmuckraker, former Deputy AG James Comey confirms that there were, indeed, some underperforming U.S. Attorneys. But they weren’t, with one exception, the ones who got fired.

Yesterday, many of our commenters here at Swampland seemed skeptical of the sources who told me that the Democratic leadership in Congress was ready to jettison the deadlines from the Iraq war funding bill:

From Lister:

Are these staffers sending out a trial balloon here? Are they trying to diminish expectations, so their bosses can do

…

I’ve agreed to “moderate” this debate.

President Bush’s veto of the $124 billion Iraq spending bill puts the congressional Republicans in a spot where they haven’t been since last year: They actually matter. While Democrats have yet to decide precisely what they plan to do, the sense I’m getting from talking to leadership sources is that, in the face of the reality that they …

Many of our commenters have been asking (okay, demanding) that we respond to it. And I’ve been agonizing over the cost/benefit of doing that, considering how it is certain to generate a blogswarm. There’s a lot of anger out there at the media in general, and because we have opened up this blog to comments, we feel the brunt of it, aimed …

Over at National Journal, Murray Waas has this indicating that AG Alberto Gonzales had delegated “to two of his top aides — who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice …

From elsewhere on TIME.com, here’s the excerpt and here’s Michael Duffy’s interview.

As if it weren’t daunting enough that so many other big states moving their presidential primaries up to February 5, Florida is considering stepping on South Carolina by holding its on January 29. As Adam Smith reports in the St. Petersburg Times, the national parties are threatening to punish Florida by taking away some of its delegates …

He has a resume that trumps every other candidate in the 2008 Democratic field: Governor, U.N. Ambassador, Congressman, cabinet secretary. He has rescued hostages and negotiated with some of the toughest characters on the planet. So it seemed fair to ask: Why isn’t New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson doing any better in the …