Zogby/Times Square released this afternoon the results of their 3rd New Year’s Eve National Poll in which, unsurprisingly, Barack Obama blew away the competition for with whom Americans would most like to spend New Year’s Eve. The poll shows 16 percent of Americans would prefer to spend it with Obama, while 10 percent would like to spend it with Huckabee, and Thompson and Edwards tied for third place with 9 percent each. Obviously, there are way too many people who don’t kiss on New Year’s Eve because, otherwise, Obama would be leading by more than 6 percent and Edwards would not in any way be tied with Fred Thompson. The only good thing about spending New Year’s with Fred is that he’d probably doze off at 10:00 and leave the rest of the champagne for me to drink by myself to help forget that I was spending New Year’s Eve with Fred fucking Thompson. [Zogby]

John Edwards is a plaintiff’s lawyer and a politician and so, frankly, we distrust much of what comes out of his pretty, pretty mouth because, hello, politicians tell you what you want to hear. But, Johnny’s been saying how much he abhors those 527 groups created by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform because they can just spend money willy-nilly and run ads against candidates. Of course, like the Alliance for a New America, (run by a local SEIU chapter) they could also run ads for a candidate, like they are for Edwards who would totally like for them to stop, he swears. Of course, the union leaders mighta sorta discussed the 527 when they were discussing what kinds of support they could offer with Edwards’ staff, but everyone swears that they totally wouldn’t've mentioned the 527 they were starting in order to advertise in support of him when talking about how to support him. Luckily, the laws that define impermissible coordination are so lenient that, according to D.C. lawyer Ken Gross “I don’t know if my wife and I met the standard for coordination before we decided to have a child.” Lawyers are funny. [NY Times]

Some women like her, others don’t! Hillary, like many Democrats, tends to poll better among the less well-off, but her campaign is reaching to get a little more grrl power at the CEO level (which is, sadly, a rather shallow pool from which to draw). Since Romney’s already locked up Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, and McCain’s got former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and Giuliani’s got Wendy’s CEO Kerrii Anderson, Clinton’s advisers are trumpeting her support from unnamed Google and E&Y managers, senior managers at JP Morgan Chase, a bunch of former Clinton appointees who work in the corporate world, Billie Jean King, and Diane von Furstenberg. Supposedly Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy is supporting Hillary, but she refuses to say so publicly which is why she’s listed in a story in the Wall Street Journal. Does name-dropping women that support her make you want to vote for her more? Yeah, us neither. [Wall Street Journal]

So, remember how Bill Clinton left office in a flurry of pardons? And there were all kinds of allegations of family members taking money to ask for said pardons? Yeah, some scandals never die.

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Rudy Giuliani used to be the mayor of New York City, a socio-liberal bastion of Communism. He got elected despite being a Republican because, well, he wasn’t all that Republican-y. But, now he wants to win the right to challenge the inevitable Hillary juggernaut and so he keeps telling everybody what kind of delicious Republican goodness he brought to New York. The problem? He might be exaggerating just a tetch.

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One of the main planks of Ron Paul’s Presidential platform is the long-awaited elimination of the income tax. Paul claims that he can eliminate the income tax, pull us out of all international activities (and eliminate some small pieces of the federal government like the Department of Education) and thereby save the world. Or something. Someone smarter than us runs the numbers after the jump.

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Mark Souder really, really likes his bread toasted and not grilled. Really, really, really likes it. He likes it so much that, upon not getting his sandwich in exactly the way he likes it last week, he stormed out of the cafeteria complaining. “Coincidentally,” the worker in charge of the sandwich at the time is no longer employed in his menial job that he probably worked really hard at. Souder denies filing any complaint or talking to anyone, but had his spokesman tell The Hill that he “assumes that there were problems with the employee’s service far beyond what he experienced last week.” I hope he knows better than to try to get a sandwich there for a good long while because you never fuck with people who handle your food. [The Hill]

Harper’s, or at least Ken Silverstein, has a weird hard-on for Congressman Ric Keller of Florida. Don’t know who he is? That’s kind of my point.

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So, TPM Muckraker and Salon are all over the video in which a McCain supporter asks him, “How do we beat the bitch?” and McCain laughs with embarrassment and knows that she’s referring to Hillary. But, our question is: how are there McCain supporters still convinced that the person Walnuts has to beat is Hillary? The video, for your entertainment, after the jump.

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The mainstream media, other candidates and even Hill herself feigned shock this weekend after Clinton’s campaign was caught planting questions at public forums. The only shocking thing was that there’s a possibility that some Americans didn’t think this was (and will continue) going on. Do people really still believe that these public forums with politicians aren’t completely scripted? I though GWB burst that particular bubble several years ago. [Washington Post, NY Times, ABC News, The Guardian]