Quick, stop selling your pitchforks on eBay — it’s time to stab people again! “WASHINGTON - Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.” And then the stocks PLUNGED of course but who could have known! They were at all time highs! Buy high sell higher, RIGHT? MORE »

There is nothing Washington editors fear more than the daily e-mails from Liz Richardson, deputy press secretary to the honorable guy from Massachusetts who isn’t Teddy Kennedy. It’s not because of Liz herself — we don’t know her and can’t blame her for taking whatever job comes up in these tough times — but because her name is attached to these endless John Kerry responses to everything that happens. MORE »

• Polls in the Connecticut Senate Primary opened 6 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Senator Joe Lieberman still trails in polls behind challenger Ned Lamont, but the gap had narrowed by election day. [NYT, NYT]

• A poll shows most Americans have an anti-incumbent mood coming into the midterm elections. [WP]
• Corrupt Democratic Congressman William Jefferson will get a primary challenge from Louisiana State Senator Derrik Shepherd. [CQ]
• Texas Republicans have abandoned their fight to keep disgraced Representative Tom DeLay off the November ballot. [AP]
• “[B]y one estimate, state and local governments owe their current and future retirees roughly $375 billion more than they have committed to their pension funds.” [NYT]
• The largest oil field in the US shut down after investigators detected “heavy corrosion and a small leak in a critical pipeline,” sending oil prices up yet again. [NYT]