The Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll takes a cheap shot at Greg Sargent today, based on a piece he published referencing one of my posts, so I thought I’d take a moment to weigh in.

DNC stenographer Greg Sargent is attacking Mitt Romney again, this time for Romney’s claim that Obama “has not created any new jobs.” Sargent responds: “But as Steve notes, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the private sector has added around 2.3 million jobs since Obama took office.”

That is just plain false. Obama was inaugurated in January 2009. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics jobs report for that month shows the U.S. economy had 112.04 million private sector jobs at that time. The most recent jobs report, posted on December 2nd, shows that U.S. economy has 109.72 million private sector jobs.

So it appears that the private sector has lost, not gained, 2.3 million jobs since Obama took office.

We’ll update this post if Sargent manages to explain his math error.

Republicans frequently struggle with this — jobs really aren’t their strong point — so let’s set the record straight.

A net decrease in jobs is unavoidable when one starts with an economy that’s fallen off a cliff. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. economy lost a combined, jaw-dropping total of 8.6 million jobs — 3.6 million in 2008 and 5 million in 2009. That’s what happens when there’s a global economic collapse.

No one, not even the staff at the Washington Examiner, should expect the economy to replace 8.6 million jobs in two years following a financial crisis (unless we had a Congress willing to consider a wildly ambitious stimulus agenda). The very idea is absurd.

Does the fact that the economy lost 5 million jobs in 2009 offer proof that President Obama is to blame for those losses? Not if you’re sane — Obama wasn’t responsible for the crash that happened before he took office, and immediately after the Recovery Act passed, the U.S. job picture, in both the private and public sectors, began to improve.

In 2010, the overall economy added about a million jobs, with roughly 1.2 million in the private sector. So far in 2011, with a month to go, the overall economy has added 1.5 million jobs, with roughly 1.2 million in the private sector. (Since March 2010, American businesses have created 2.9 million jobs.)

Indeed, this year, private-sector job growth is already the strongest the U.S. economy has seen in five years, and is even stronger than the growth seen in the final year of the Clinton presidency.

Is this enough to make up for the losses from 2008 and 2009? Obviously not. But the whole basis for the discussion is Mitt Romney’s claim that President Obama “has not created any new jobs.” Conn Carroll’s odd protestations notwithstanding, Romney’s claim is plainly not true. If Romney wanted to argue Obama has not yet reached a net gain for his presidency, that would be accurate (and understandable under the circumstances).

But that’s not what he said. Instead, Romney contradicted the readily-available data.

I’ll update this post if Carroll manages to learn the difference between annual job growth and net job losses.

Postscript: In case this wasn’t quite clear enough, here’s a chart showing private-sector job gains and losses over the last two decades. Blue columns show years in which there’s a Democratic president; red columns show years in which there’s a Republican president. (Note: 2011 is not yet over.)

If Romney and Carroll want to argue that the two columns on the far right edge of the chart (2010 and 2011), aren’t big enough to make up for the losses on the two columns to their left (2008 and 2009), that’s true. It takes time to recover from a crisis as severe as the Great Recession. But Romney and Carroll are instead arguing that the two columns on the far right edge of the chart don’t actually reflect job creation, and that’s just silly.

Paul Krugman, in his column today, highlights a series of blatant lies from Mitt Romney, and notes that the Republican presidential candidate “seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.”

It’s what happens when we enter an era of “post-truth politics.”

Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe. […]

But won’t there be some blowback? Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right.

Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.

Krugman concludes by predicting that Romney will face “no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign,” which will only encourage more dishonesty.

As regular readers might imagine, I strongly agree with all of this. The only point I’d add is that it’s ultimately going to be up to reporters and major news organizations to decide whether a campaign built on deliberate deception is allowed to thrive.

We talked earlier, for example, about Romney lying about President Obama’s record on job creation. It was a rather casual lie, but it was a demonstrably false claim about the nation’s most important issue. The former governor made the claim in an interview with Time’s Mark Halperin, who not only chose to let the lie slide, but passed along Romney’s bogus argument to the public with no scrutiny or fact-checking at all.

Whether Halperin didn’t know he was being lied to or simply didn’t care is unclear. But the larger point remains the same: media professionals (a) have to know the basics so they can have some idea when candidates are trying to mislead them; and (b) have a responsibility to call out blatant dishonesty when they see it.

As Greg Sargent put it earlier today, “Look, Romney is going to make the claims that Obama didn’t create any jobs, and that he made the economy worse, countless times between now and next fall. They will be central to his entire campaign rationale. Can we please start pressing him to justify it when he says this stuff?”

That need not be a rhetorical question.

The alternative is a further descent into “post-truth politics,” with a negligent media enabling liars every step of the way.

It hasn’t been a good month for the GOP and election fraud. Two weeks ago, a Maryland jury convicted a Republican official who oversaw illegal voter-suppression tactics in the 2010 election. This week, a state judge found that Indiana’s Secretary of State, Republican Charlie White, not only committed voter fraud in 2010, but wasn’t even eligible to seek the office to which he was elected.

Charlie White is ineligible to serve as Secretary of State and should be replaced by his election opponent, Democrat Vop Osili, a Marion County judge ruled today.

White is facing seven felony charges, including allegations of voter fraud. Osili was the second-highest vote-getter in the November 2010 election.

Kay at Balloon Juice added, “Besides the obvious embarrassment of the state official who is in charge of elections being indicted on charges of voter registration fraud, it’s just perfect that this happened in Indiana, because Indiana paved the way for the voter suppression laws we’re seeing all over the country…. Indiana has one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country, and that didn’t stop their top elections official from registering and voting in the wrong place. That’s because voter ID laws target the imaginary problem of voter impersonation fraud, while doing next to nothing to address the fraud that actually occurs.”

Quite right. Republicans nationwide, as part of the “war on voting,” keep putting new hurdles between voters and the ballot box, ostensibly because they fear the scourge of fraud.

The irony is, the deceit Republicans are worried about is imaginary, while the real-world fraud is coming from their side of the political divide.

Brent Bozell, head of a right-wing outfit called the Media Research Center, appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” last night, and chatted with guest host Mark Steyn about various media figures they don’t like. It led to a noteworthy exchange.

The far-right personalities were complaining about MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who complained on the air that Newt Gingrich “looks like a car bomber,” adding, “Look at the guy — this is not the face of a president.”

After showing the clip, Steyn said he thinks Gingrich looks like “a big cuddly, slightly older Winnie the Pooh.” Bozell decided to go much further.

“Mark, how long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence he made a comment about saying the president of the United States and said that he looked like a skinny ghetto crack head, which by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does?”

I’m going to assume this won’t interfere with Fox News inviting Brent Bozell back — probably many times — because in Republican media, the only rhetoric that leads to banishment is criticizing others on the right. Suggesting the president of the United States looks like “a skinny ghetto crack head” is just another day on Fox News, the news outlet Americans turn to if they want to get less informed about the world around them.

Well, he wanted to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. And with leading status comes scrutiny.

First it was the racist newsletters. Now it’s the direct mail advertising them. In a signed appeal to potential subscribers in 1993, Ron Paul urged people to read his publications in order to prepare for a “race war,” military rule, and a conspiracy to use a new $100 bill to track Americans.

The eight-page mailer obtained by Reuters via Jamie Kirchick, who unearthed Paul’s newsletter archives in 2008, is mostly focused on a rambling conspiracy theory about changes to the dollar. But Paul tries to bolster his credibility on the issue by noting that his newsletters have also “laid bare the coming race war in our big cities” as well as the “federal-homosexual coverup on AIDS,” adding that “my training as a physician helps me see through this one.”

This mailer, like the racist newsletters that went out under Paul’s name, includes some truly insane ideas, including warnings that American currency would soon feature chemical tracking agents as part of an authoritarian plot. Indeed, Paul claims to have learned directly about this scheme as a member of Congress.

Paul’s presidential campaign, of course, denies the Republican candidate saw and/or endorsed this.

Even if one accepts Paul’s defense at face value — a step that strikes me as foolish — it doesn’t exactly speak well of the radical congressman’s skills. Apparently, a large operation existed over the course of many years, which distributed racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic propaganda and fundraising appeals. Ron Paul was the head of this operation, and yet he had no idea what messages were going out under his name, or why people who agreed with this garbage kept sending checks to support Paul’s venture.

That’s not what critics are saying; that’s what Paul and his staff are saying.

For more on this, I found Rachel Maddow’s coverage of the story last night very compelling.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that won’t necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Former President George H. W. Bush informally threw his support to Mitt Romney yesterday, saying the former governor is “not a bomb-thrower,” and is “the best choice” for Republicans.

* Newt Gingrich has repeatedly challenged Romney to a one-on-one debate. Yesterday, Romney told the AP this isn’t going to happen.

* In Virginia, Romney, Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul qualified for the state’s March 6 primary ballot. Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Jon Huntsman did not.

* Not surprisingly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) told Fox News yesterday he’s not ruling out running as vice president on his party’s 2012 ticket. Christie is a leading surrogate for the Romney campaign.

* In Iowa, right-wing leader Bob Vander Plaats is facing allegations that he offered to sell his presidential endorsement. The head of the FAMiLY LEADER denies any corruption, and announced his support for Santorum earlier this week.

* In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) has attracted so much Republican attention, outside far-right groups have already spent nearly $2.9 million to try to destroy his re-election bid. To date, outside progressive groups have not yet spent a penny to bolster Brown’s chances.

* In Nevada, a new poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal shows Rep. Shelley Berkley (D) narrowly leading appointed Sen. Dean Heller (R), 44% to 43%.

* And in Alabama, don’t be too surprised if Rep. Spencer Bachus (R), who’s had a very bad year, faces a Republican primary challenger.

Congress sure can move quickly when it wants to.

Late yesterday, House Republicans caved to Democratic demands and agreed to accept a slightly-tweaked bipartisan compromise from the Senate. This morning, just to move the process along, the Senate preemptively approved the tweaked version by unanimous consent. Less than an hour later, the House took up that bill and it too passed it by unanimous consent.

And with that, the bill heads to President Obama for his signature. The White House took down its countdown clock this morning.

There was some question as to whether House passage would be this easy. Boehner told his members that if any of them objected, he’d hold an up-or-down vote on this bill next week — a vote that was very likely to pass the deal anyway — so rather than delay the inevitable, House Republicans bit their tongue, dropped the silly “Braveheart” routine, and let the two-month extension pass.

The next step is the arguably-more -difficult conference committee, which will be tasked with shaping a year-long extension. This morning, Democratic leaders — who seemed to be in a very good mood — announced which members would lead the negotiations.

Mr. Reid later announced his appointees to the conference committee: Senator Max Baucus of Montana and chairman of the Senate finance committee; Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island; Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland and Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, also named her appointees: Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan; Mr. Van Hollen; Representative Xavier Becerra and Representative Henry Waxman both of California and Allyson Y. Schwartz of Pennsylvania.

The conferees are expected to begin meeting during the winter break.

They’ll be trying to strike an agreement with several congressional Republicans, most of them have said they don’t want a payroll-cut extension no matter what concessions Democrats are willing to make.

But that’s a fight for January. In the meantime, today’s a good day.

Mitt Romney seems to think his strongest issue in a general-election race against President Obama is jobs. I’d argue he has that backwards.

In an interview with TIME Magazine’s Mark Halperin, Romney said, “I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital…. 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”

“I’ll compare that record with his record, where he has not created any new jobs.”

This detachment from reality fascinates me, so let’s unwrap the argument.

First, the confused former governor believes 25 million people are out of work “because of Barack Obama.” If Romney can explain why Obama is to blame for a recession that began in 2007, I’d love to hear it. For that matter, the economy lost 3.6 million jobs in 2008 — the year before the president took office. How exactly is Obama responsible for that, too?

Second, Romney now claims to have created “over 100,000 jobs” at his vulture-capitalist firm. Romney also appears to have made this number up out of whole cloth. Indeed, two weeks ago, when Romney’s Super PAC ran an ad claiming he “helped create thousands of jobs” as CEO at Bain, Super PAC officials were asked to back that up with evidence. They refused.

Third, it’s remarkable that Romney is only willing to compare his “experience in the private sector.” What about when Romney was willing to put his experience to work in the public sector, during his one term as governor of Massachusetts? Romney doesn’t want to talk about it for a reason — his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country,” ranking 47th out of 50 states in job growth. It’s one of the reasons Romney left office after one term deeply unpopular, and why his former constituents don’t want him near the White House.

And fourth, Obama “has not created any new jobs”? The ease with which Romney lies continues to be disconcerting.

With one month remaining this year, the U.S. private sector has now added 1.67 million jobs in 2011, well ahead of last year’s private-sector total of 1.2 million, and the best year for businesses since 2006. Since March 2010, American businesses have created 2.9 million jobs.

I’d encourage Romney to consider this chart showing private-sector job growth by month since the Great Recession began…

…and this chart showing private-sector job growth by year over the last two decades (and 2011 isn’t over yet).

Reporters really need to brush up on this stuff. When Romney lies to their face — which seems to happen just about every day — they should be able to push back with reality.

PolitiFact made a credibility-killing mistake this week, choosing a claim for its Lie of the Year that, upon further reflection, happens to be true. I didn’t intend to return to the subject, but PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair, clearly aware of the criticism, published a follow-up defense yesterday.

I won’t go through Adair’s piece in detail — Dave Weigel and Jamison Foser both published compelling, thorough responses, exposing PolitiFact’s misguided judgment — but I will note what a missed opportunity this was. I didn’t really expect the fact-checking website to admit its error, but I’d hoped Adair would read this week’s criticisms and take the time to consider the substance behind the condemnations. Instead, he published a petty, overly defensive, and self-congratulatory piece that ignored the underlying policy concerns altogether.

Adair acknowledged that “some” of those responding negatively were “substantive and thoughtful.” That’s nice, but it’d be even nicer if PolitiFact explained why those “substantive and thoughtful” critiques were incorrect. More than anything, I guess I’m just disappointed that PolitiFact chose not to take a more professional approach.

Paul Krugman today once again sets the record straight.

The background here is that Republicans voted to dismantle Medicare as we know it — a single-payer system in which the government pays essential medical bills — and replace it with a voucher scheme that, in the judgment of many health-care experts (and the Congressional Budget Office), would leave seniors having to pay large premiums out of pocket in order to afford adequate insurance; clearly, some and perhaps many would end up without adequate coverage.

This really is the end of the program we now know as Medicare. Maybe PolitiFact would like Democrats to use longer words and include qualifications, rather than saying simply that it ends Medicare — although as Brad DeLong points out, some of the Ryan plan’s supporters actually boasted that, yes, it ends Medicare as we know it. But it’s just absurd to call Democrats’ basically factual statement “Lie of the Year”.

Making that call was just a terrible decision, and it reeks of a philosophy that ranks achieving “balance” as being more important than reporting the facts.

I rather doubt Adair will want to return to the subject, but I’ll pose just two questions for PolitiFact’s editors to consider, as it comes to terms with just how damage they’ve done to their site’s reputation:

1. By PolitiFact’s judgment, the accuracy of the Democrats’ Medicare argument comes down to an interpretation of the word “end.” As Adair put it in his follow-up piece, some “view” the meaning of the word differently. If the debate ultimately comes down to semantics, and differing views are the basis for the disagreement, how in the world could this possibly be the Lie of the Year, especially when it was competing against several nominees that are actual, demonstrable, unambiguous, pants-on-fire lies?

2. In 2009, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year was a Republican lie. In 2010, the Lie of the Year was another Republican lie. In 2011, the top two vote-getters among PolitiFact readers were both Republican lies. Is it just a coincidence that this year, PolitiFact overlooked obvious and deliberate GOP falsehoods in order to pick a semantics fight over the meaning of the word “end,” or did the editors make a conscious choice to create a sense of partisan “balance,” even if that meant selecting a lie that appears to be true?

Like I said, I rather doubt Adair wants to respond — indeed, he already had a chance to answer questions like these in his piece yesterday, and he chose not to — but I’d argue these two questions get to the heart of PolitiFact’s misjudgment.

In Minnesota, the state Senate Majority Leader, Republican Amy Koch, recently resigned from her post after getting caught in the middle of a sex scandal. It appears Koch, who is married, engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with a subordinate staffer.

Yesterday, Koch received a stinging “apology” from Minnesota’s LGBT community. (thanks to reader J.W.)

The gay and lesbian community of Minnesota has issued a letter of apology to recently resigned Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to stray from her husband and engage in an “inappropriate relationship.”

“On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.”

Ouch.

Clearly, this is pretty brutal, but let’s not overlook a key detail: Koch has supported a state constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage in Minnesota. She was the one who said she wants to protect traditional marriage against those rascally gays who want equal rights.

As best as I can tell, Koch has not responded to John Medeiros’ “apology.” Go figure.

This week was Round One of a larger fight, and for Democrats, it was a win on points. For the next two months, Dems got the middle-class tax cuts they wanted and the clean extension of unemployment benefits they wanted. It’s not a bad way to wrap up the year.

The next question to consider, of course, is what happens in Round Two.

Republicans took a beating this week, but they don’t leave the ring empty handed. They’ll get an expedited decision on the Keystone XL pipeline and a conference committee process to work on a full-year extension.

It’s obviously early — the two-month deal still needs to pass — but it’s not too soon to look ahead and realize that the odds of a successful conference-committee process aren’t good at all. Ezra Klein had a good item looking at the bigger picture this morning.

One possibility is that the Republicans decide that fighting the payroll tax cut is simply too much trouble. If that’s their conclusion, then the next extension might pass easily. But another possibility is that House Republicans are furious at having been forced to buckle this time, and their takeaway is that, next time, they need a better strategy, and they need to make sure Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are on the same page. In that case, the next extension will be an even heavier lift.

I’m inclined to expect the latter. In fact, it’s practically a mortal lock.

The House GOP leadership has already announced its slate of members to participate in the conference committee, and not coincidentally, most of them have said they don’t want a payroll-cut extension no matter what concessions Democrats are willing to make.

House Republicans aren’t looking to start cutting deals; they’re angry and now even less inclined to compromise. But won’t the GOP run into the same pressures that led to this week’s capitulation? Maybe, but let’s not forget why Boehner & Co. were so eager to send this to a conference committee in the first place.

To offer a quick refresher, conference committees have historically been used to bridge the gap between similar-but-distinct versions of the same bill that have already passed the House and Senate. It works a bit like the recently-disbanded “super committee” — members of both parties and both chambers work out a bill that’s then sent to the floors for up-or-down votes.

In this case, Boehner believes that the conference committee will fail — Republicans will refuse to compromise — and the process will provide him and his party cover. Instead of this week, in which the House GOP became the clear villain, if/when the conference committee struggles to come up with a bipartisan solution, Republicans would find it easier to spread the blame around.

“It’s not our fault,” GOP leaders would say. “We tried to work with Democrats on a deal, but one didn’t come together. Oh well.”

For Republicans, it would be the best of all possible worlds: middle-class taxes would go up, the economy would take a hit, public disgust for Washington would be renewed, and the media would feel obligated to say “both sides” failed to reach an agreement.

After House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) surrendered in the payroll tax-cut fight late yesterday, he did what he should have done on Sunday: he told his caucus what they didn’t want to hear.

After the Senate approved its bipartisan compromise, the Speaker initially approached his members, hat in hand, asking for their permission to pass the extension. They said no. Yesterday, Boehner presented the same deal as a fait accompli — and this time, he took no questions from his caucus.

As for what happens now, the GOP leadership will, probably later today, bring the tweaked Senate agreement to the House floor, hoping to approve it by unanimous consent. If Republicans balk — and they might — Boehner will reconvene the House next week for an up-or-down vote. Since that vote would very likely pass the Senate bill, an objection today would only delay the inevitable, and extend this fiasco for a few more days.

For his part, the Speaker conceded yesterday that putting his caucus between 160 million Americans and a popular, bipartisan tax cut probably wasn’t the “smartest thing in the world.” That’s clearly true. In fact, there was nothing “smart” about Boehner’s strategy at all — he fought to kill a middle-class tax cut; he allowed his unhinged caucus to push him around; and he falsely assumed Dems would raise the white flag first.

Indeed, perhaps one of the most striking realizations from this entire dispute is that Republicans gambled that Democrats would cave when the pressure was on — and Democrats didn’t. Arguably for the first time all year, Democrats from the White House to Capitol Hill knew they had the better hand, told Republicans that Dems wouldn’t fold this time, and sat back and watched and the GOP unraveled.

That’s the good news. Unfortunately, there’s some bad news, too.

First, this extension only keeps the status quo in place for two months, and the odds of another bipartisan deal before the new February deadline are poor. I’ll flesh this out in more detail later this morning.

Second, Dems held their ground this week, but they were really only standing firm after having made concessions in the Senate compromise (they dropped the surtax and accepted an expedited Keystone XL decision). I give Democrats credit for doing the right thing this week, but it’s only fair to note they refused to compromise after already compromising.

And third, as Greg Sargent explained, Republicans have still been able to block the larger Democratic jobs agenda, of which the payroll tax cut was a part.

[T]his is the only piece of Obama’s jobs plan that Dems have been able to pressure Republicans into supporting. As a result, the basic overall dynamic may remain unchanged: A bad economy next year; Congressional gridlock; rising public disenchantment with government; and an incumbent running for reelection after failing to prevail on Congress to pass many of his major proposals to fix the economy.

Having said all that, Dems still have reason to smile this morning. After a year in which policymakers have moved from one hostage crisis to another, Democrats won a big one to close out the year, leaving Republicans looking awful and a weakened Speaker looking beaten.

For a party that earned a reputation for capitulating a little too often, it’ll start 2012 on the right foot.

Today’s edition of quick hits:

* A series of deadly terrorist attacks in Iraq: “A wave of 16 bombings ripped across Baghdad Thursday, killing at least 69 people in the worst violence in Iraq for months. The apparently coordinated attacks struck days after the last American forces left the country and in the midst of a major government crisis between Shiite and Sunni politicians that has sent sectarian tensions soaring.”

* Because the report holds both sides responsible, and notes that Pakistanis fired first, this won’t lessen tensions: “Mistakes by both American and Pakistani troops led to airstrikes against Pakistani posts on the Afghanistan border that killed 26 Pakistani Army soldiers last month, according to a Pentagon investigation that for the first time acknowledged some American responsibility for the clash.”

* We thought GDP grew at a 2% annual rate in the third quarter, but the Commerce Department revised that total down today to 1.8%.

* Domestic terrorist sentenced: “A 37-year-old white supremacist, Kevin William Harpham, was sentenced Tuesday to 32 years in prison for placing a bomb-laden backpack along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in January, the U.S. Justice Department said.” (thanks to R.P. for the tip)

* Good: “A federal judge blocked several parts of South Carolina’s immigration law Thursday, saying in his ruling that the measure tramples on federal powers. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel granted a preliminary injunction, according to The Associated Press and Reuters, ruling that the federal government has the sole constitutional authority to set immigration policy and regulate enforcement. Gergel said parts of South Carolina’s law are in violation of those powers.”

* Rachel Maddow had a fascinating chat with Slate, and her comments on Fox News and Roger Ailes were of particular interest.

* Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote one dissent in an 8-1 ruling year. It offers some insights into her broader thinking.

* As Glenn Kessler may have learned today, sarcasm is sometimes hard to express in print.

* Derek Thompson takes a look at the Most Important Graphs of 2011.

* Job training matters: “Despite the fact that community colleges exist at least in part to train people for jobs, many such institutions are apparently now having trouble keeping up with demand, and have had to cut back on job training programs.”

* Paul Krugman raises an important point about political parties and the new mercury emissions standards: “[I]t matters who holds the White House. You can complain about Obama’s lack of a strong progressive agenda, which I sometimes do, or wonder what good it is to hold the White House when the other side blocks every attempt to do good through legislation. But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president. Elections have consequences, and this is one delayed consequence of 2008 that will make a big difference.”

* When the First Lady’s buttocks become a topic of conversation for members of Congress, there’s a problem.

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.

This morning, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other leading officials from his caucus told reporters that House Republicans would stick to their guns when it comes to extending the payroll tax break. If Democrats wanted to avoid a tax increase on the middle class, they would have to cave and make Boehner and his cohorts happy.

Not quite six hours later, Boehner and his cohorts threw in the towel.

House Republicans on Thursday crumpled under the weight of White House and public pressure and have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2 percent payroll-tax cut, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal.

The House made the move after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed to appoint conferees to a committee to resolve differences between the Senate’s two-month payroll-tax cut and the House’s one-year alternative.

Reid, you’ll remember, made this offer on Monday, and soon after Boehner said this morning that the deal wasn’t good enough, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) endorsed Reid’s solution. President Obama backed the same approach shortly thereafter.

The House will reportedly make some technical changes to the Senate bill, and the Senate will approve that final bill by unanimous consent.

With nine days to go, it appears all but certain that the payroll tax break — as well as a clean extension of unemployment benefits — will be extended for two months. Between now and then, a conference committee will be tasked with working on a deal for a full-year extension.

What changed Boehner’s mind? Or more accurately, what changed Boehner’s mind again? The Speaker, as recently as Saturday, wanted to pass the Senate compromise and send his caucus home for the holidays. They rebelled and the leader quickly became the follower.

By some accounts, this happened again today. House Republicans —- Wisconsin’s Sean Duffy, Arkansas’ Rick Crawford, Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, among others — started breaking ranks after getting an earful in their local districts. GOP lawmakers who wanted to fight the Senate Braveheart-style came to the conclusion, “Maybe that Senate bill isn’t so bad after all.” When his members reversed course, the Speaker again took his cues from them, rather than the other way around.

If Boehner were a stronger, more effective House Speaker, this fiasco could have been easily avoided. He could have told his caucus this was a fight they were likely to lose, so passing the Senate bill quickly was the smart course of action. But he couldn’t — Boehner takes orders; he doesn’t give them.

It’s what helps make this story a disaster, not only for Republicans in general, but also for John Boehner personally. As he surrenders this afternoon, Boehner becomes The Speaker Who Has No Clothes.

He stuck out his neck, vowing not to cave, knowing he’d likely have to cave anyway. Boehner than waited until the pressure became unbearable — after he’d lost face and friends — and walked away with his tail between his legs.

Neither party has had a Speaker this feeble in modern times. His instincts told him to take the deal over the weekend, but Boehner allowed himself to be pushed around by his unhinged caucus, then get pushed around by Democrats, then get pushed around by his allies, then get pushed around by Senate Republicans.

How big a disaster was this for Boehner? Keep an eye on whether Eric Cantor’s travel schedule changes over the holidays.