After days of pressure from Republicans and Democrats alike, House Republican leaders finally put a woman in charge of a committee Friday afternoon. But if Speaker John Boehner and the rest of …

Nate Silver: Politico Covers Politics Like Sports But ‘Not In An Intelligent Way At All’

New York Times polling guru Nate Silver took aim at Politico’s brand of reporting on Friday, saying the Washington-based news outlet covers politics like sports but “not in an intelligent way at all.”

Pelosi Puts The Squeeze On House GOP Over Bush Tax Cuts

House Speaker John Boehner says budget negotiations with the White House have stalled.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks she can get them started again.

In her weekly Capitol briefing Friday, Pelosi said she’ll take a procedural step to force a vote on extending the middle-income Bush tax cuts, if Republicans don’t put that legislation on the schedule themselves.

Campaign Obama Returns To Pressure GOP On Taxes

The election may be over, but the campaign continues. On Friday, President Obama hit the trail once again to pressure Republicans into immediately extending tax cuts for Americans making under $250,000 a year.

“I need you to remind members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans — to not get bogged down in a bunch of partisan bickering,” Obama told a crowd at a toy factory in Pennsylvania. “Let’s go ahead and focus on the people who sent us to Washington and make sure that we’re doing the right thing by them.”

Jon Stewart: Fiscal Cliff Like An Asteroid Barreling Toward Earth That We Created And Fired At Ourselves

Jon Stewart on Thursday presented viewers with a primer on the so-called fiscal cliff: During the debt limit negotiations of 2011, Congress put in place a catastrophic penalty that would be triggered if lawmakers couldn’t compromise and work together to reduce the deficit.

“Let me put it another way. There’s an asteroid headed towards the Earth. We made it and fired it at ourselves, because otherwise we would never have done the hard work required to protect ourselves from asteroids,” Stewart said.

Perhaps the problem can be solved with words instead of hard numbers, Stewart suggested. “Rather than fixing this, why don’t we call this bad thing something less bad.”

The One Bit Of Leverage John Boehner Actually Does Have In Fiscal Cliff Talks

Democrats won the election, handily, on a platform of raising income tax rates on wealthy Americans.

Now, thanks to the expiring Bush tax cuts, they have all the leverage they need to lock those higher tax rates in permanently.

And yet they’ve been drawn into a spat with Republicans over which party should put forward ideas for cutting Medicare spending as a down payment on further deficit reduction in 2013.

Why are Dems even bothering to entertain the idea that Medicare cuts right now are necessary?

Allow me to reintroduce you to the debt ceiling.

Dems Laugh Off GOP Demand That They Make First Move On Medicare Benefit Cuts

Faced with the reality that taxes are going up, either automatically or with their tacit assent, Republicans are hoping that they can bank an ideologically suitable down-payment on a broader deficit reduction package in the form of cuts to Medicare spending.

The problem is, unlike the Democrats’ calls for higher taxes on rich Americans, the GOP’s preferred Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular. So they’re trying to cow Democrats into proposing these cuts first — to effectively author both sides of the proposal — and provide them political cover.

Both Parties Take First Crack At Immigration Proposals

With immigration surging to the front of the national agenda, Democrats and Republicans alike are getting an early start on outlining new legislation. And their proposals already hint at some of the biggest fault lines in the coming debate.

On Wednesday, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus offered up a set of baseline demands for any comprehensive immigration bill next year. For immigration activists, it was a familiar list: a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in America, more visas for highly skilled math and science workers, a guest worker program, tougher employer verification systems, a crackdown on border crime, and clarification that the 14th amendment grants citizenship to any person born in the United States. The idea is to bring together various interests — immigrants, agriculture, high tech companies, border hawks — behind a unified package that benefits each.

GOP Rejects White House Opening Budget Bid

Republicans have rejected President Obama’s opening budget bid.

In a Capitol meeting with House Speaker John Boehner Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner submitted the Obama administration’s proposal for addressing medium term deficits, and avoiding across the board tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year.

Republicans called the proposal outlandish and brushed it aside as unserious. But it’s almost entirely comprised of policies Obama campaigned on and included in his budget for the current fiscal year. And by satisfying GOP demands that Obama offer up a plan that includes spending cuts, it paints Republicans, who have been reluctant to specify their own Medicare cut proposal, into a tight corner.

Romney Adviser Stuart Stevens Takes A Do-Over

If Mitt Romney’s campaign could go back and fix one mistake in order to win the election, chief strategist Stuart Stevens said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” on Thursday, it would be improving outreach to women and Hispanic voters.

Stevens’ latest assessment had a strikingly different emphasis than the one he wrote for the Washington Post a day earlier. In an op-ed he penned for the newspaper, he said the Republican campaign could take comfort in the fact that it won wealthier and whiter voters and held onto the moral victory over President Obama.