TIME Staff

• Fundamentals of the presidential race: It’s close, but saying too much more than that is playoff prediction in preseason.
• Deb Fischer wins Nebraska’s GOP Senate primary after the Tea Party and Establishment guys massacre each other.
• Greece just keeps getting scarier.
• Tom Coburn on the fiscal cliff.

• NYT/CBS poll finds Romney narrowly ahead, leading Obama among independents and women, despite an uptick in economic optimism.
• The public detects the whiff of politics in the President’s gay marriage flip.
• JPMorgan: a case of regression to the mean.

• Heads roll at JPMorgan, and it may get worse.
• For the uninitiated: the best explainer of the $2 billion loss.
• It’s worth revisiting this account of Romney’s financial regulation platform, or lack thereof, from early May.
• Painting in broad strokes, there’s a case that Hedge-gate hurts Obama.

• Elizabeth Warren’s minority status to-do gets a longer paper trail.
• Obama’s evolution marks shifting Democratic coalition.
• Joe Biden says sorry for gay marriage thing.

• The cynic’s view on Obama’s personal affirmation of gay marriage that leaves policy unchallenged in the states.
• His decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act may have been enough to challenge state bans, or at least signal the courts.
• Obama says it’s not a federal issue, but that’s not really true.

• How Lugar lost, what it all means.
• North Carolina bars all legal recognition of same-sex couples in landslide referendum.
• Frenzied, pony-tailed inmate wins 40% against Obama in West Virginia’s presidential primary.

• On an unusually busy election day for May, Dick Lugar heads toward defeat in Indiana, Scott Walker gets his recall opponent in Wisconsin and North Carolina prepares to vote down gay marriage.
• Rick Santorum takes the political equivalent of the walk of shame, endorsing Mitt Romney at the very end of a long, late-night e-mail to

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• Francois Hollande will take change of France and Greece is in disarray after European voters punish austerity.
• This man named Angus could swing the Senate.
• Joe Biden’s views on gay marriage evolve a little faster than Obama might like.

• The U.S. added just 115,000 jobs in April, but BLS revises two prior months up. Unemployment dips to 8.1% thanks to a contracting labor force, now at its lowest participation rate since 1981.
• The State Department gets a new deal with China to bring activist Chen Guangcheng and his family back to the U.S.
• Pimco’s Mohamed El-Erian

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• The presidential race tightens in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
• Romney’s yeoman work awaits in Ohio.
• Obama is outperforming popularity trends, possibly because of  Bush-blame and personal appeal.

• Very bad news for Dick Lugar as his allies pull TV buys.
• Gingrich is ready to endorse Romney.
• That doesn’t mean his bitter primary performance can’t be used against the prohibitive nominee.
• An explanation for Richard Grenell’s resignation.

• The Seals could hurt Obama in the end.
• James Fallows growls at Romney’s “even Jimmy Carter” line.
• A new task for Obama field workers this cycle: accounting for voter ID laws.

• The specter of a spring stall emerges from Friday’s growth report.
• Recession is part of the story, but health care inflation is slowing.
• Apple shows that there are many ways for corporations to duck taxes.