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Right now the House is voting on the Interior Department appropriations amendments and there’s an amusing game of whack-a-mole happening on the House floor. Dems are using this series of 11 votes to whip the climate change bill (if you watch C-SPAN you can see the Dem leaders working the room). Usually, as we saw this past week, it’s …

From Rahm Emanuel, former aide to Bill Clinton and current White House chief of staff, when asked at a Christian Science Monitor reporter breakfast to compare his two presidential bosses:

EMANUEL: I think President Obama has one of the most disciplined minds and styles I’ve ever seen. And I think of my – I exercise every day. I’ve

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfQhdBpCFCA&hl=en&fs=1&]

Confirmed here, by the LA Times. Watch his videos here.

UPDATE: For perspective, the New York Times notes this observation from Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School:

My twitter search script sees

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The Goracle is coming! The Goracle is coming! The Goracle… is staying home.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited former Vice President Al Gore to come help lobby members as she seeks to pass historic global warming legislation in the House this week. He was scheduled to address the caucus and hold a press conference with her. …

(With apologies to Rockwell. Although, really, he should be apologizing to the rest of us for getting that hook stuck in our heads for the better part of the 80s.)

We’ve known for a while that Michelle Bachmann has her own special brand of crazy. She demonstrated it again today when she explained that she plans to refuse to take part …

It hasn’t gotten much notice, but the progressive think tank Third Way has done some really interesting work in the past few months trying to bridge and heal divides between the gay rights community and some religious communities. (And, of course, the two communities are not mutually exclusive. A Barna Group survey released this week on …

I take no pleasure in political sex scandals, even when the perpetrators are politicians I find loathsome and hypocritical. Indeed, any sign that a pol actually is human, has flaws, has faults, is often an indication that, post-scandal, he (or she, but usually he) might be more able to relate a little better to the sinners he represents. …

More on Iran.

The State newspaper, which has been ahead of this story from the beginning, posts a statement from Jenny Sanford, wife of Mark Sanford, in which she discloses that she kicked the governor out of the house two weeks ago, long before his visit to Argentina. She also says she is willing to forgive and reconcile, under certain conditions. …

The sagacious Don Fowler Sr.–former chairman of both the South Carolina and national Democratic parties–notes that the old joke used to be that when Democrats got into trouble, it was over sex; when Republicans did, it was over money. That’s the reason, the punchline went, that there were so many more Democrats than Republicans. But …

I’ll give Mark Sanford this: After all of the terse, tight-lipped, vague apologies for an offense that’s not ever really spelled-out, it was almost refreshing to hear a politician explain–and explain and explain–what he’d done wrong. And it was most definitely a relief to not see the scorned wife by his side.

If, on the odd chance, you’re a fan of C-SPAN, you may have noticed that the House has been stuck voting on motions to adjourn – four of them today thus far. That is because the GOP is protesting – as they have been for a week. The scuffle started when Dems moved to cut off GOP amendments to the Commerce, Justice and science …

The Obama Administration has decided to send a U.S. Ambassador back to Syria, for the first time since Margaret Scobie was pulled by the Bush Administration, which was protesting the likely involvement of the Syrian government in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. This is a wise move on several grounds. It is a …