In New Hamshire news being covered on The Rachel Maddow Show, the state is planning to hold a Republican primary in early December instead of in January or February as it usually does. This, announced Maddow, has the makings of Granite State / Rock feud (Rocky is an accepted nickname for people named Rachel, right? Sure it is.) because it means that Iowa will also have to have an earlier caucus, possibly as early as November and Americans will spend an entire year, pretty much, voting on its next president.

Well its probably safe to assume that Sarah Palin won’t be endorsing Jon Huntsman for the GOP nomination, and not just because they may have different political views within the GOP platform. The former governor appeared on The View earlier today, and was pressed by the Sherri Shepard (and other later Barbara Walters) on if he could survive by running a “nice and civil” campaign. Huntsman first demurred, saying that there was “too much drama and theater in politics” before hitting Palin for “stringing people along.”

Did Michele Bachmann agree that President Barack Obama should be impeached? Video footage of her meeting well-wishers after an Iowa stump speech shows the nominee hopeful nodding and agreeing after being asked, “When will we impeach him and get him out of the way?”

ABC News is reporting that Sarah Palin has announced via a letter to her supporters that she will NOT be running or President. This ends months (if not years) of speculation on will she or won’t she with regard to her plans to run for the highest office in the United States. There were many indicators suggesting that she would not be running, and this letter published today confirms that idea.

In an interview with the New Hampshire Union-Leader, which was broadcast in full on CSPAN, Mitt Romney argued that audience moderation — a point of particular interest this campaign season — is not a part of his job as a presidential hopeful. “I haven’t made it my practice to listen to the cheers and the views and then to try and correct the people on their expressions of their views,” he said, arguing that he would can his line while letting all voices, disagreeable and not, be heard.

Will New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announce plans to run for President by entering the 2012 campaign? A relatively hasty press conference was called late last night to announce his political plans, and the early speculation is that he will reaffirm his countless previous statements that he will NOT throw his hat into the ring, at least this time around. Of course, given the history of New Jersey gubernatorial press conferences set in Trenton, there’s not telling WHAT he could announce, so its probably a smart idea to watch the announcement below, via the live streaming video below:

Looks like Newt Gingrich is just going to tell it straight from now on. Speaking in regards of his fellow GOP hopefuls, he went ahead and explained that he would make the better president because he is smarter. As he explained, “They’re nice people, but they don’t have the knowledge to do something like this on this scale.” The president’s job, you see, “is enormously complicated.”

Herman Cain must be feeling pretty good coming off that Florida straw poll, because word has it he’s looking long. The Daily Caller reports today that, even though not everyone really thinks he’ll get so far as to need one, the Godfather’s pizza magnate has already planned his inauguration. It will be a demure thing, Cain promises. He will waste not his time nor your money on gaudy, star-studded inagurual events. If he is elected, that is.

The Northeast’s wealthy aren’t feeling the current crop of GOP hopefuls and an influential few of the wealthiest have taken out their wallets in hopes of rectifying the race. The Meet the Draft Christie committee, a small but powerful collective of Republican-leaning donors and activists, are pushing to get New Jersey Governor Chris Christie jump into the race — explains it, these men “are Rich. They are unattached. They are looking for a little excitement.” How many millions of dollars boring is Mitt Romney, really?

An oft heard refrain around GOP election headquarters around the nation these days is “broaden the tax base,” as a rejoinder to President Obama‘s repeated desire for the super-wealthy to “pay their fair share” with a higher tax rate. Stephen Colbert illustrated this particular narrative through a series of news clips before focusing on the idea that nearly 50% of all Americans don’t pay any taxes (turns out they make less than $20,000 a year.)

Former President Bill Clinton was not sympathetic in regarding the current crop of Republican presidential hopeful’s opposition to acknowledging climate change. Speaking on the opening day of the Clinton Global Initiatives’ seventh annual meeting in New York, he cautioned that the top contenders aversion to science is “patently absurd” and becoming a liability.

This week the Obama campaign launched a new front in the heightened information wars that come with presidential campaigns, with a starkly designed and somewhat controversial new website called Attack Watch. The site enables user-generated submissions of what Obama supporters deem to be unfair or untruthful media attacks on President Obama, his political campaign and his administration’s policy. Almost immediately after launching, right-of-center Internet outlets derided the effort, and a Washington Post article called it a “laughing stock.”

CNN senior political analyst David Gergen noted last night on Anderson 360 that many Americans were “horrified” at what they heard during Monday night’s Republican debate. ”I was getting notes about, they ought to keep these people locked up and not let them out — don’t let them do anything to the country,” he said. “People [...]

One of the stranger moments of last night’s CNN/Tea Party Debate featuring leading GOP presidential candidates came when moderator Wolf Blitzer challenged Texas Rep. Ron Paul (a Doctor) on how he would handle a theoretically uninsured and comatose man. Somewhat exasperated by Paul’s libertarian talking points, Blitzer pressed “would you let him die?!” At this point, someone in the audience shouted “yeah!” which was followed by a smattering of applause. The crowd’s reaction, it turns out, surprised Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

President Barack Obama used today’s Labor Day address to preview Thursday’s jobs speech and to ask the Republicans in Congress to put country before party. He did not, to the dismay of many, address Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa Jr.‘s remarks from earlier in the day wherein he rallied union workers to war with the Tea Party.

Politico thinks that Rick Perry’s book, Fed Up!, “may be one of the biggest gifts ever given to the opponents of a presidential candidate.” It’s no wonder, then, that Perry has taken to telling people, “I wouldn’t have written that book if I was going to run for the presidency of the United States.” We all have our skeletons, but Fed Up! only came out last year – in November – could he really not have seen this all coming?

The conflict between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner over the Speaker’s unprecedented rejection of the President’s request to address a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7 has been resolved. The White House released a statement which maintained that the Speaker had been “consulted” about the date in advance of the President’s request, but that the President has agreed to Boehner’s preferred, post-debate date of September 8.

Joe Scarborough showed off his best Texan accent this morning while accusing Rick Perry of being a liberal who had traded teams just to gain power on today’s Morning Joe.

The White House surprised a lot of people today when it announced that the President had asked to address a joint session of congress to discuss a plan to lower unemployment and improve a stagnant economy. Perhaps more surprising than the joint session request was that it conflicted with a previously scheduled GOP presidential debate set to air on (and hosted by) NBC News. Well it is now being reported that that Speaker John Boehner has told President Obama to delay his joint session speech one day.

Earlier today, the White House announced that President Obama is calling for a joint session of the U.S. Congress to deliver his plans to address a stagnant economy and high jobless rate. Given the heightened and bipartisan calls for the administration’s plan to address these issues, this would be big news on its own, but the fact that the White House set the date for the speech on the same evening as a planned GOP Presidential debate has added an intriguingly nuanced level of political gamesmanship that’s been noticeably absent of late from the Obama administration.

Michele Bachmann has a sense of humor, said Michele Bachman, in an attempt to make casual her comments (jokes?) from the weekend wherein she suggested the East Coast’s recent spate of natural disasters were meant as a warning from God to the politicians in Washington.

Republican frontrunner Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has been under a glaring media spotlight since entering the GOP field, and while it hasn’t been completely ignored, Perry’s life insurance scheme to open a futures market on dead Texas teachers deserves more attention than it’s getting. Even the liberals who have noted the ghoulish plan have failed to connect it to his new vision of the Civil Rights movement. Perry’s plan perfectly illustrates the need for what he calls “over-regulation,” but what the rest of us call “regulation.”

Michele Bachmann was campaigning in Florida this weekend and got some attention while speaking to a roomful of her supporters when she openly suggested that the recent spate of natural disasters (Hurricane Irene and the Virgina earthquake from last week) were God’s way of trying to get politicians’ attention. She later revealed that her comment was meant to be a joke, though some are already pointing out the risky move of “attributing political motive to natural disasters.”

This AP Fact Check from over the weekend seemed to have slid under a lot of radars. It’s a quiet item that received little fanfare but cuts straight to the heart of current economic policy and inflamed political rhetoric, specifically the contention that the U.S.’s enormously high debt is due to a weak economy and not “runaway” government spending.

HBO’s Bill Maher recently chatted with Humboldt County, California’s 94.1 KSLG about a variety things, like religion, politics… and Fox News host Sean Hannity‘s apparent concern regarding the Playboy mansion.

Host Myles Cochrane shared a snippet from a Hannity segment wherein he stated that Maher “hates God, he hates religion, he smokes pot, he wants to be Hugh Hefner” and that he “has a dark agenda.” Maher laughed it off. “Yeah, Sean’s a little… shall we say frustrated?,” he asked. “I don’t know. Jealous much, Sean? I think that’s what it is.”

But, Maher continued, he’d be totally willing to appear on Hannity’s show himself.