Democratic Insider

In his crafty memoir, "Courage and Consequence," Karl Rove reveals that his remarkable skills flowered early and that political battles waged even before puberty left scars that forever fed his partisan bloodlust.

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AP - The moderate middle is disappearing from Congress. Evan Bayh is just the latest senator to forgo a re-election bid, joining a growing line of pragmatic, find-a-way politicians who are abandoning Washington. Still here: ever-more-polarized colleagues locked in gridlock — exactly what voters say they don't like about politics in the nation's capital.

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AP - Nebraska's Democratic senator says he will join Republicans in opposing a union lawyer's nomination to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.

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AP - It's time to repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and allow gay troops to serve openly for the first time in history, the nation's top defense officials declared Tuesday, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff proclaiming that service members should not be forced to "lie about who they are."

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AP - Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday will take the first real steps toward lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the military, announcing a yearlong review aimed at answering practical and emotional questions about the effect of lifting the ban, and imposing looser standards for enforcing the ban in the meantime.

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Anne E. Kornblut's "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling" offers a dim view of the near-term political prospects of women.

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Sensing a clear political opportunity, congressional Democrats are rushing to craft legislation to counter a Supreme Court ruling that they fear could lead to a flood of foreign spending on U.S. political campaigns.

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AP - Declaring "I don't quit,'" an embattled President Barack Obama vowed in his first State of the Union address Wednesday night to make job growth his topmost priority and urged a divided Congress to boost the still-ailing economy with a new burst of stimulus spending. Despite stinging setbacks, he said he would not abandon ambitious plans for longer-term fixes to health care, energy, education and more.

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Frustrated Democrats began laying plans Friday to chip away at a landmark Supreme Court decision unleashing corporate expenditures in political campaigns, but the ruling's broad sweep will make it difficult to stem a tidal wave of new spending in this year's pivotal midterm elections.

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A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept aside decades of legislative restrictions on the role of corporations in political campaigns, ruling that companies can dip into their treasuries to spend as much as they want to support or oppose individual candidates.

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"Game Change" supplies the juicy tidbits, eye-opening anecdotes and political jujitsu that made the 2008 election supremely gripping.

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AP - Sarah Palin believed that Sen. John McCain chose her to be his running mate in 2008 because of "God's plan," according to a top political strategist in the Arizona Republican's campaign.

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