On the day Ted Nugent is set to meet with the Secret Service about some incendiary remarks he made about President Obama at last weekend’s NRA national convention in St. Louis, the NRA deleted the archived footage of the comments from the internet.

Mitt Romney will not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, according to spokeswoman Andrea Saul.

“He supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law,” she told Talking Points Memo in an e-mail. Republicans in the House and Senate overwhelmingly opposed the law’s initial passage in 2009, with all but two GOP senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, voting against it.

Robert DeNiro offered a clarification of his joke at an Obama fundraiser Monday about whether the nation was “ready for a white first lady.” The line drew an outraged response from Newt Gingrich earlier in the day, who told a Louisiana audience that DeNiro was promoting racial conflict and that the president should apologize on his behalf.

At his victory party in Georgia Tuesday night, Newt Gingrich again turned his attention to gas prices, the issue that he’s staked the hail mary hopes of his campaign on. But this time, Gingrich added a little something to his pitch: a paraphrase of President Obama’s answer on gas prices at a Tuesday press conference that was so broad, it became pure fiction. “I thought today, in one of the most shallow and self-serving comments by a president I’ve heard in a long time, he was candid in his press conference,” Gingrich said. “He said, you know, I’m really worried about higher gas prices because it will make it harder for me to get re-elected. I did not make this up.”

Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK) sent Talking Points Memo a public apology Thursday after the site obtained audio of the five-term Republican telling constituents at a town hall this week that he’d have to personally shoot members of the U.S. Senate to get a budget passed through the chamber.

Since Rick Santorum’s photo finish in Iowa, Republican voters are finally starting to listen to him bring the “true, hot and heavy and strictly missionary,” Stephen Colbert said Monday.

With Iowa Republicans set to vote tonight in the state Republican caucuses, thus kicking off the national GOP’s presidential nominating process, some readers might be wondering: How exactly do the caucuses work?

Ron Paul’s campaign tells TPM that the presidential candidate did not write a signed direct mail piece in 1993 aimed at attracting subscribers to his newsletter by warning of a “coming race war” and a “federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS.”

Even George W. Bush’s top strategist Karl Rove thinks House Republicans overreached in reneging on the payroll tax cut deal. His advice: having lost the politics, Republicans should wait until (or to see if?) President Obama flies off to Hawaii on vacation, bash him and congressional Democrats for abdicating their duties, and then … pass the same Senate payroll tax cut compromise they could have passed on Tuesday.

Facebook on Monday published a note pointing to Newt Gingrich as an example of the one of the most “Facebook savvy” politicians on the social network. “Gingrich’s Facebook page is a great example of providing many ways for supporters to get involved, catering to every level of engagement while equally promoting all of the tabs,” [...]

CNN is reporting that Michele Bachmann will not participate in Donald Trump’s debate. That leaves Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as the sole debate participants.

A simple yes or no would have sufficed, but when House Speaker John Boehner was asked whether anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist was a positive influence on his caucus, he feigned ignorance.

“It’s not often I’m asked about some random person in America,” he said.

The strange case of the missing Mitt Romney YouTube video has been solved, Team Romney says: Turns out CNN did it.

In an email to TPM, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said her campaign pulled down the tough attack on Perry at the request of the news network.

Michele Bachmann spent a lot of time at Tuesday’s debate trying to get moderator Anderson Cooper’s attention.

Congress has always been Washington’s whipping boy, particularly near election time. The antics get sillier, the pace shifts from glacial to gridlock, and the frustrated public gets daily reminders that lawmakers are often too mired in politics to function in the national interest.

That’s not news.

What is news is that this time it’s starting to scare the pros.

Jon Stewart is famous for his legendary take-downs of Fox News, but in an interview with Rolling Stone, he says The Daily Show and Fox are not so different from one another.

Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday.

Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress “sons of bitches” and said union workers are ready to “go to war” with the tea party next year and “take out” Republicans at the ballot box.

Hoffa said he’d say the exact same words all over again.

Anthony Weiner‘s seat, which includes parts of Queens and Brooklyn, should be safe for Democrats, but the September 13 special election to replace him is proving surprisingly competitive. Democrat David Weprin is losing ground to Republican Bob Turner. Making matters worse for Democrats, Weprin has turned into a gaffe machine right as voters are tuning in for the final stretch.

With Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) insisting that funding the recovery from Hurricane Irene be offset with spending cuts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday that Congress should be focused on providing relief and not get caught up in political gridlock.

Call him crazy, but former Utah Gov. and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman is doubling down on his criticism of climate change skepticism as “not a winning formula” for the GOP in 2012, while calling out his opponents in the Republican presidential primary on their willingness to let the US default on its debt. [...]

Jon Huntsman is often regarded as too moderate a Republican to qualify for the GOP’s presidential nomination — he does, after all, support civil unions for gay couples, and served in the Obama administration as Ambassador to China. And his latest comments might not help fix that: Slamming Rick Perry‘s denial of global warming and non-answer on evolution.

Rick Perry is facing a full-on assault from former Bush aides over his comments on Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, pushing a long-rumored rivalry between the two ex-governors’ camps out into the open.

Acknowledging to TPM that “there is no love lost between the W camp and the Perry camp,” one Bush veteran appealed for detente.

“I do not think it serves any purpose for any Bushy to fuel to fire or resentment,” the person said. “The goal for us sh

Newt Gingrich fired up the crowd in this blue state with the promise that President Obama is so bad that he’s made it possible for the Republicans to win over the African American vote in 2012.

Gingrich stopped off at an airport Marriott near Baltimore Thursday to keynote the Maryland GOP’s annual Red, White & Blue banquet. Before the speech, he assured reporters that his campaign was still going strong. When he took the podium, he offered Republican donors a long, dense speech full of red meat and warnings about the state of the world around us.

The DC media’s jaw-dropping obsession with the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal will peter out when the New York congressman officially resigns this afternoon. But there’s no better illustration of how this story came to consume the press than the video below.

Democrats had been prepared to up the pressure on Weiner to resign Thursday, but not before House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi held her weekly press availability in a large studio in the basement of the Capitol Visitors Center.

Ousted from the Senate in 2010, Russ Feingold, may have fewer Democratic friends to count on if he chooses to enter the race to replace retiring Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI). The progressive icon eviscerated his former colleagues in an e-mail for his advocacy group Progressive United on Tuesday, accusing two prominent Democrats of enabling “corruption” by opposing new transparency measures on political donations.