Is Filibuster Reform finally going to happen?

Who is Joe Ricketts? The latest mogul fixin' to go to war against President Obama?

Documents released Thursday show police investigators initially concluded that Martin's killing was 'ultimately avoidable' and recommended charges of manslaughter.

The George Zimmerman legal defense fund has fallen on hard times.

We got so many great emails of book recommendations, I haven't been able to get through all of them yet. Please keep them coming and I'll report back on the great finds soon.

Eduardo Saverin just released a statement which was first interpreted as pledging to pay the taxes he had renounced his citizenship to avoid. But it actually means just the opposite and amount to pushback and goodbye to the USA.

Most of today's news has been occupied by the Times story, which reported that a gaggle of Romney supporters were prepping a big ad campaign to toss Reverend Wright and everything but the kitchen sink at President Obama. Since then virtually everyone involved has either denied involvement or is insisting that it was just an idea and not one that they'd ever planned to go ahead with.

But there's a bigger story here. And the key is the strategist's claim, quoted in the Times, that the plan would "do exactly what John McCain would not let us do."

This is an old saw that's been going around for almost four years now. And I cannot tell you how many GOP operatives I've heard it from.

The idea is that John McCain either could have won or had a much better shot at it if he'd really released the hounds on then-candidate Obama. The idea being that McCain was just too honorable a guy or perhaps too much of a fuddy duddy to really do what had to be done to win. If only the campaign or the RNC had prepped a few dozen commercials featuring Obama in a foot-wide-brim pink fur hat, maxing around with Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground terrorists about to send his race army of ill-tempered rappers to shake down a few good white folk, the thinking goes, he would have just come apart at the seams.

That's most of what is behind the continued, and, in some ways, really passionately believed mantra on the right that Obama was never really 'vetted.' If we'd only said Kenya a few more times we could have done this thing!

But here's the key: McCain -- or more likely his senior advisors -- weren't doing Obama any favors. There's a calculus in all of these decisions. Yes, going full race, terrorist pal Crazy on Obama probably would have gotten some voters more suspicious of Obama or more ginned up to vote against him. But it also would have repelled a lot of loosely affiliated voters in the middle. The McCain camp realized that. At least the more seasoned folks. And the Romney team gets it just as much.

The whole thing amounts to a fantasy of the right-wing id, not altogether unlike some of the hits on President Bush that the general public just didn't take to. Everybody heard about Jeremiah Wright. Everybody found out the president is black. It didn't turn the public against Obama when he was a relative unknown back in 2008. And it's far less likely to today.

"I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said whatever it was."

Romney today on the campaign trail: Watch.

Most disturbing part of this new Drudge story is that President Obama was apparently once repped by the same literary agent as New Kids on the Block.

Will Republicans ride the Citizens United SUV all the way to the White House? The numbers are looking daunting.

Democrats unveil new bill to target tax dodgers like Facebook's Eduardo Saverin.

A photo of Donna Summer, who died today, from her heyday.

Archetypal disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker is back -- now hawking apocalyptic survivalist gear on the web. Including full body cleanses!

Over recent days we've been following the story of Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook, now residing in Singapore, who has renounced his citizenship to avoid the big time tax bill that would have come with the Facebook IPO windfall. But will Saverin ever be able to set in the US again?

Over the last few days I've been exchanging emails with TPM Reader PM, who notes that US immigration law does not look kindly on former citizens who renounce their citizenship to avoid US taxes. Specifically, it doesn't look like Saverin should ever be able again to get a Visa to enter the United States.

Sec. 212. [8 U.S.C. 1182] details general classes of alients ineligible to gain entrance into the United States. And the law specifically references people in Saverin's category ...

Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation.-Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is excludable

The question PM and I have had was whether Saverin realized this was a consequence of his decision. And the latest from his lawyer suggests that he very much does. His lawyer is now attacking the "the false impression that tax was the reason behind Eduardo's decision."

The law certainly says he's excludable and probably would be excluded by default. But I'd be curious to hear from tax and immigration attorneys whether we should expect this to actually be enforced. His lawyer certainly appears to be laying the groundwork to claim that taxes had nothing to do with the decision.