Mitt Romney starts his 2012 run as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But, in reinventing himself yet again, the “authenticity” issue that troubled many of us in 2008 looms again.

Ever since he won the New Jersey Governor’s race last year, Chris Christie has been cutting a path through national politics thanks to his blunt talk in the face of an overwhelming fiscal crisis in New Jersey. It’s easy to see why when you look at speeches like this one he made to New Jersey’s [...]

One of the recurring themes that Dave Schuler and I have advanced since the global recession began is that we’re seeing a massive realignment of the economy and that many of the lost jobs will never come back.   That’s especially true of the financial sector.  There will simply be fewer people making big money moving [...]

Has clout become the kiss of death? Politico‘s Jonathan Allen and Manu Raju think so. The back-to-back primary defeats of two powerful appropriators have sent an unmistakable message to lawmakers: The trappings of power can be a trap. On Wednesday night, West Virginia Democrats eighty-sixed Rep. Alan Mollohan, making him the first House appropriator to [...]

Pennsylvania is Reapportionment’s version of the Biggest Loser. If projections hold, Pennsylvania will lose Congressional seats for the ninth straight Census. Smart Politics: Several projections have been conducted by experts during the last few years – with Texas and Arizona universally considered to be the big winners of multiple seats, with the remaining gains coming [...]

One of my commenters brought to my attention an issue that’s not receiving much attention:  Residents of several U.S. states could have to show their passports for domestic travel — or to enter a federal government building — starting January 1 because of the REAL ID Act.  Chris Strohm for Congress Daily: More than half [...]

Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power.  The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks. [V]ast power [...]

To illustrate that US professional sports have a lot of “hilariously anticompetitive interferences in the market” compared to the English Premier League, Daniel Davies constructs an artificial sports league based on all major professional teams in “Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC” in order to achieve a comparable population [...]

Regulars will recall the strange case of Adolf Hitler Campbell, who was denied a birthday cake with his name on it by a local supermarket on the grounds that his first two names are “Adolf” and “Hitler.”  Now, it seems, he’s been taken from his parents, along with his siblings Arylan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler, [...]