HotAir Daily Express 01/04/2013

Barney Frank: I want the temp job in the US Senate 1/4/2013 9:41:54 AM  Ed Morrissey 21 Comments After an initial demurral on the question, Barney Frank has changed his mind about taking a temp job across the corridor on Capitol Hill.  Joe Scarborough asked the retiring Rep. Frank whether he’d consider accepting a temporary appointment to fill More... December jobs report: 155K jobs added, jobless rate stays at 7.8% 1/4/2013 8:36:01 AM  Ed Morrissey 45 Comments If Barack Obama hoped for a boost in jobs numbers from the Christmas season, the BLS left him not much more than a lump of coal and a couple of sticks in his stocking.  Despite an optimistic report from ADP yesterday, the jobs market only added 155,000 More... White House finally releases 1st briefing photo of Obama on night of Benghazi attack 1/4/2013 8:01:16 AM  Ed Morrissey 93 Comments The White House in any modern administration has an official photographer whose duty is to take pictures all day long of official and unofficial activities of the President.  Sometimes those events are obviously momentous, while others only become so in More... Quotes of the Day 1/3/2013 10:01:05 PM  Ed Morrissey 714 Comments The speaker took the gavel with a nod to his disgruntled members, promising his priority in this new Congress would be to reduce the nation’s rising $16.4 trillion in debt. “The American Dream is in peril so long as its namesake is weighed More... California: Invasion of the job-snatchers 1/3/2013 9:21:59 PM  Erika Johnsen 65 Comments Ah, competition; drink it in, it always goes down smooth. If, as California maintains, businesses will not react negatively to recent increases in all sorts of taxes, the requirements of their state’s cap-and-trade program, and other upcoming More... Hmm: Utah’s existing health exchange gets conditional nod from feds 1/3/2013 8:31:11 PM  Mary Katharine Ham 24 Comments It’s hard to tell exactly what this means yet, but it’s a flashpoint to watch as the federal government works to create health care exchanges in more than half of the states— a task it foolishly didn’t think it would have to do and is More... Reasonable Reid threw Obama cliff offer into a fire after he was booted from negotiations 1/3/2013 7:41:35 PM  Mary Katharine Ham 60 Comments Some will no doubt applaud him for his actions, and wish McConnell and Boehner had taken similar ones with the final deal. But I think it’s important to note this story, since we hear no end of stories about how terribly unreasonable and More... Is Cuomo stalling on declaring fracking safe for New York? 1/3/2013 6:51:30 PM  Erika Johnsen 34 Comments Breaking news: The decades-old hydraulic fracturing technique currently being employed across the country to embrace all of the economic advantages offered by our wildly abundant oil and gas resources, can, in fact, be conducted safely and without More... Biden: “Spread your legs, you’re going to be frisked” 1/3/2013 6:01:39 PM  Erika Johnsen 80 Comments Lest we let the fact that we’re looking at another long four years of an Obama presidency depress us too deeply, at least we can take a small bit of comfort in knowing that, since the president ultimately decided to stick with his running mate, More... Pelosi to GOP: You really ought to take back your party, you know 1/3/2013 5:11:25 PM  Erika Johnsen 74 Comments As expected, Nancy Pelosi retains her position as House Minority Leader after going unchallenged for the spot earlier today and garnering an even wider margin of support than at the convening of the 112th: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) More... New Egyptian president on Israel, 2010: We must employ all forms of resistance against these bloodsucking warmongers 1/3/2013 4:21:23 PM  Allahpundit 40 Comments Via MEMRI TV, a chat with the future pharaoh recorded less than six months before Mubarak was toppled. I was shocked by it, not because it’s surprising — the rhetoric is Muslim Brotherhood 101 — but because it’s such a vicious, More... Toomey: GOP should be willing to risk shutdown to get cuts in debt ceiling deal 1/3/2013 3:31:35 PM  Mary Katharine Ham 95 Comments Sen. Pat Toomey is one of the great accomplishments of the Tea Party Movement, and after supporting him in ’04 back when Bush was backing Specter, it does my heart good to see him in our dysfunctional deliberate body. For that same reason, some are More... Bloomberg: Geithner leaving at end of the month 1/3/2013 2:41:08 PM  Ed Morrissey 47 Comments In the midst of all the attention on John Boehner’s re-election as House Speaker, Bloomberg dropped a small bombshell of its own.  According to two sources, Tim Geithner will resign as Treasury Secretary by the end of January, even if the debt More... Coming soon: The Hillary Is Totally Awesome Movie? 1/3/2013 1:51:44 PM  Ed Morrissey 81 Comments Even before Barack Obama won re-election in November, speculation had begun over the Democratic primaries for the 2016 presidential cycle.  Hillary Clinton has received most of the mention and a majority of support so far, but her relatively thin resume More... Meet your new IRS withholding tables 1/3/2013 1:01:09 PM  Erika Johnsen 34 Comments With a new tax scheme comes new tax withholding patterns, and since the fiscal cliff deal is finally officially official, employers will now have to implement the changes in withholding in time for the first few paychecks of the new year. Our dear More... Open thread: House Speaker vote; Update: Boehner wins 1/3/2013 12:11:38 PM  Ed Morrissey 545 Comments Under normal circumstances, the vote for Speaker of the House would be a footnote to the opening day of a new Congressional session — but these aren’t normal circumstances.  There has been some grassroots effort to unseat John Boehner in More... Orszag: Yeah, the White House has less leverage in the spending fight now 1/3/2013 11:21:49 AM  Ed Morrissey 74 Comments As I wrote earlier this week, the fiscal-cliff deal was mostly a win for Barack Obama, but only a temporary victory fought on one issue.  By delinking the tax debate from the spending debate and keeping the debt limit out of the fiscal-cliff deal, More... Big jump in December background checks for firearm purchases 1/3/2013 10:31:05 AM  Ed Morrissey 111 Comments All of the talk in December about pursuing gun-control legislation had a big impact on the firearms industry — only perhaps not the impact intended by gun-control advocates.  The FBI reported yesterday that background checks for firearms purchases More...