National

Word is that Hillary is having lunch with Joe Biden today, after having lunch with the President yesterday. The combination of lunches tells me that she is informing them that…

A new Gallup Poll finds that if given the opportunity to vote on a law legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states, the slight majority of Americans, 52%, say they would cast their vote in favor, while 43% would vote against it. Now, that is a little misleading. The poll is not saying a majority of the respondents in all 50 states are in favor or marriage equality. What the poll is saying is a majority of the respondents across the country as a whole are in favor of marriage equality in all 50 states. Indeed, there is one region of this country were a majority of the respondents are bigoted and against equality. But even there, it is a bare majority. Can you guess where?

It's a quiet Saturday, the weather is nice, and I'm not finding any political news this morning that is new and interesting. So it's your turn. And in the meantime here is some audio tapes of our Presidents in some more candid moments. Kennedy Johnson & Truman More inside...

Kudos to former President George H.W. Bush, pictured above with the 2 year old son of one of his security detail. Bush, and his entire security detail, shaved their heads in support of the child, who is going through chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. This is a kind and classy move. Meanwhile, from Jonathan Chait: "The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses--partisanship, obstruction, gridlock--don't come close to describing this situation. The hard right's extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists."