Days after we learned that the bailout of America’s government-backed mortgage orgy is likely to surpass $150 billion, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is peddling a strikingly counterintuitive idea: fund $20-$30 billion in improvements in public housing by taking out government-guaranteed mortgages on its housing …

A week before Election Day, both parties are spinning early-voting tallies as a positive omen for their midterm prospects. “Despite national momentum being on the Republican side for months, we are not seeing anything resembling a Republican surge,” New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee Chairman,

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She can always run again in 2012, when Delaware’s other Senate seat, held by Democrat Tom Carper, is up for a vote.

But it won’t be much easier: Carper won with 70% of the vote in 2006.

Update: This, from commenter acameronw, seems likelier:

“Dancing With the Stars,” here she comes!

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay briefly redefined his public profile from ruthless Houston Machiavelli to goofy bad dancer. But it’s back to hardball politics now that the Hammer begins his Texas trial on conspiracy and money-laundering charges that could land him in jail for more than 100 years.

The charges against DeLay …

Readers will know that a central debate in the closing weeks of the 2010 campaign has to do with anonymous campaign contributions to independent political groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, and whether the names of people and corporations giving those cash donations ought to be made public. That would …

Hamid Karzai, confronted with an extremely embarassing story, angrily lashes out against the U.S.:

Mr. Karzai made his remarks during a rambling, sometimes incoherent appearance at a news conference during which he accused the United States of funding the “killing” of Afghans by paying thousands of gunmen at private security

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In 2008, a scary, inaccurate adage made the rounds: Lose your house, lose your vote. It spread after the Michigan Messenger, a publication that described itself as “a coalition of long-time progressive bloggers, freelance writers and professional journalists,” reported that a local Republican group was planning to use lists of …

I have a longer piece in this week’s print and IPad editions on how the failure of a community bank in Cornelia, Georgia, has undermined the town’s confidence in government, the economy and itself.

While the big banks have largely stabilized, small bank failures are still growing, and the piece addresses a few issues that come with …

The WSJ looks past next Tuesday to what the Tea Party, such as it can be defined, wants from the next presidential election:

[T]he movement’s rise has complicated matters for potential 2012 candidates by dividing the GOP into three camps.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, one third of Republicans say they

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