Rand Paul, who just clinched the Republican Party nomination for the Senate race in Kentucky, is apparently not quite ready for primetime. His recent remarks on the Civil Rights Act painfully show why being a politician is not as easy as some people think. The problem for Paul, son of Ron Paul, is that even if he somehow survives this flap, it is almost guaranteed that there are going to be plenty more of them during the campaign. Because both Pauls, father and son, are (at heart) libertarians. Which requires some explanation, because many folks have never come into contact with the concept of libertarianism.

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Arizona is a truly beautiful state. It has many spectacular sights, of which the Grand Canyon is the most awe-inspiring. But Arizona is also a state of forbidding landscapes -- much of the state is desert or near-desert, where the heat of the midday sun is a force of nature to be heavily respected, if not downright feared. But what has put Arizona into the news recently is its "forbidding" political landscape. Specifically, on immigration.

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Since it's the Friday after month's-end, the new monthly unemployment numbers were released today. Which adds another bar to the "bikini bottom" chart. Now, the measure of how many people know exactly what this means is exactly the measure of how well Democrats are getting the "jobs" message out. Because, as I've said previously, this chart should be front and center in the Democrats' campaigns this year.

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Democrats had a pretty good week last week. As attention shifts away from unpronounceable volcanoes (more on them in a moment) to the struggle in the Senate over Wall Street reform, the two parties almost seem to have changed their normal methods of playing the political game. The Republicans are all over the map on the issue, and extremely worried about the impression by angry voters that they are doing Wall Street's bidding -- as well they should be. Republicans are, one day, loudly denouncing the reform bill, using their standard Big Lie technique... and then, the next day, saying a deal is very close, and even voting for strong reform in committees. Republicans (some of them, at least) are chickening out of the upcoming partisan battle the Republican leadership seems to want over the issue (more on chickens later on, too). Democrats have, so far, managed both to admirably stay on message and showed an amazing amount of backbone in countering specious Republican arguments. And, so far, polls show the voters are solidly on the Democrats' side on this one, and just not buying what Republicans are telling them. As I said, we seem to have entered BackwardsLand, or something.

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I've written here before in defense of Sarah Palin, and since the two just recently shared a campaign rally stage, I thought it'd be timely to write at least a partial defense of Michele Bachmann today. Because a recent comment by the Minnesota Representative has gotten a lot of ridicule from the left side of the blogosphere, but nobody bothers to point out that she's actually right in what she says about the U.S. Census Bureau and Japanese internment during World War II. This is intellectually dishonest, I feel, which is why I have to make the attempt to defend her words.

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Phelps is in the news today because a Maryland family brought a lawsuit against Phelps, seeking damages for Phelps' actions at their son's funeral, and the U.S. Supreme Court has announced it will hear the case's appeal. By doing so, they open up the door to refining what is and what is not acceptable speech allowed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. While the Supreme Court may instead rule much more narrowly (on the case itself, without addressing the free speech issue), the question is worth discussing: should what Phelps does be legal?

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The first privacy issue comes from an interesting story earlier this week about how some states are considering banning the release of recorded 911 emergency calls to the public (or -- more to the point -- to the press). This is an interesting First Amendment hair to split, because a reasonable case can be made both ways.

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But what really worries me about the new rules for corporations and unions is what could happen out of sight of the voting public. I can foresee two ways for such invisible influence to happen, although there may be others I have not thought of as well, I admit.

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Welcome back to my annual outright theft of The McLaughlin Group's awards categories for the past year in politics. What's that? We're sorry, but out lawyers insist we instead use the phrase "my annual legally-allowable constitutionally-protected parody" instead. So sorry. For those of you who missed it, Part 1 of this column ran last week, on Christmas.

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This column is really a second installment to yesterday's ("How To Not Give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed What He Wants"), where I took a look at two of the criticism's against Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in federal civilian court rather than in a military tribunal.

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