LIGHTNING ROUND: BASHING WINGNUTS, ET AL, EDITION.

• We now have a price tag to go along with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats' economic stimulus package: $500 billion over two years. Not to be outdone on the policy front, John Boehner wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, John Taylor wants to make tax-cutting a "permanent" policy, and Grover Norquist believes that "the economy is in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006 you knew those tax increases were going to come in 2010." Oh, and remember that $350 billion Hank Paulson was going to leave for the incoming Obama administration? Turns out ol' Hank wants it back. Now that's some leadership!
• While most of the Republican party remains mired in supply-side fantasyland, some conservatives are at least attempting to move on. James Joyner recommends that the Right needs new public intellectuals, John Derbyshire starts up a "Secular Right" blog, and Jose Antonio Vargas profiles the efforts of Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn to build up the "rightroots."
• Hillary Clinton's appointment as Secretary of State could be barred by the Constitution's explicit ban on Senators or Representatives being appointed to civil office if that office's emoluments (salary) was increased during the Senator or Representative's time in Congress. The traditional "Saxbe fix," however, is simply to reduce the compensation for the civil office to its previous amount.
• I think Karl Rove missed his true calling as a groundbreaking stand-up comic when he decided to cash in on the pundits' talking heads circuit: "Well, at least in the White House I was in, policy won out, but you had to be aware of the political fallout of what you were going to do in order to contain it and deal with it. You bet. But to -- but first and foremost if -- the president I worked for, George W. Bush said, you know what, let’s do right, and the politics will take care of itself."
• Whatever small steps conservatives are taking to retool are hardly being replicated by libertarians, however. Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch spend 3757 words -- half of which is focused on the 1970s -- arguing that America now stands at the precipice of a new libertarian era of "hyper-individualized" freedom. Not to be a wet blanket on these utopian dreams, but aren't a lot of our public policy problems the very product of hyper-individualism?
• George Bush issued 14 pardons and commuted the sentences of two individuals yesterday, though none are controversial. Slate has a handy list of other possible contenders for the liberating power of Bush's pen.
• Freedom's Watch, the conservative advocacy group that was all bark and no bite this election season, is closing up shop after spending $30 million on television and radio ads in the general election. I tell you, they sure don't make billionaire right-wing philanthropists the way they used to.
• And finally, the Campaign Finance Institute takes a look at Barack Obama's fundraising and concludes that "After a more thorough analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), it has become clear that repeaters and large donors were even more important for Obama than we or other analysts had fully appreciated." In other words, Obama mastered the art of getting people to repeatedly open their wallets for successively bigger amounts.

--Mori Dinauer