1. Romney 3.0
Mitt Romney works the crowd in Alaska this past November. (David Ryder/Getty Images)
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Mitt Romney told another senior Republican he will "almost certainly" run for president again.
[Washington Post / Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, and Karen Tumulty]
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His case for himself: he came close to winning against an incumbent president when the economy was good, and 2016's conditions will be more favorable.
[Slate / John Dickerson]
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Romney called Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to shore up his support.
[National Journal / Lauren Fox]
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Also reached out to: his former running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).
[Washington Post / Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, and Karen Tumulty]
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Why he might win the nomination: he hasn't alienated the base like Jeb Bush has.
[Slate / Jamelle Bouie]
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Why he might not: the primary electorate only accepted him grudgingly in 2012 and has better options now.
[NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]
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Romney reportedly wants to make fighting poverty a central theme in his campaign.
[Politico / Maggie Haberman and James Hohmann]
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One big winner of an expanding primary field: GOP political consultants.
[Vox / Matt Yglesias]
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If Romney won, he'd be the first failed nominee to win in a second attempt since Richard Nixon, who was the first since Grover Cleveland.
[Washington Post / Aaron Blake]
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But Hubert Humphrey's failed 1972 Democratic primary bid, four years after Nixon beat him, might be the better historical precedent.
[Andrei Cherny]
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Remember Romney's gaffe about the 47 percent of Americans not paying federal income taxes? It's down to 40 percent.
[Washington Post / Max Ehrenfreund]
2. Risen in the clear
New York Times reporter James Risen. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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New York Times reporter James Risen will not be forced to reveal his confidential sources in federal court.
[NYT / Matt Apuzzo]
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The case concerns Risen's 2006 book State of War, which reported on Operation Merlin, a botched CIA attempt to provide Iran with faulty nuclear weapons plan.
[The Guardian / James Risen]
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The plans were supposed to be subtly flawed so as to slow the Iranians down, but they might actually have accelerated the Iranians' progress toward a bomb.
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Former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling is facing charges for being Risen's source on the operation.
[Politico / Josh Gerstein]
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In 2008, Risen was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury that was looking into the leak.
[NYT / Philip Shenon]
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He got another grand jury subpoena in 2010, and a third subpoena in 2011 for testimony at Sterling's trial.
[The Nation / Norman Solomon and Marcy Wheeler]
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Risen fought the third subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.
[NYT / Adam Liptak]
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But ultimately, the Justice Department opted not to call Risen. Executing the subpoena could have sent him to prison for contempt of court for refusing to testify.
3. Misc.
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When people hear and tell stories while getting brainscanned, the brains of the storyteller and the listener light up similarly.
[Aeon / Elizabeth Svoboda]
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Akira Kurosawa's 100 favorite movies, one per director (the biggest surprise to me: the River Phoenix movie Running on Empty).
[OpenCulture / Jonathan Crow]
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The case for letting 16-year-olds vote.
[Bloomberg View / Jonathan Bernstein]
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Can philosophy of language make sense of the sentence, "Fuck the haters"?
[Strong Language / James Harbeck]
4. Verbatim
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"Jerry Brown will almost certainly never be president of the United States, a fact that disappoints no one so much as Jerry Brown himself."
[LA Times / Mark Barabak]
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"The failure of most vampire literature is that the authors can’t successfully imagine what it’s like to be 300 years old."
[Anne Rice to The Atlantic / Peter Nowak]
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"There would not be a next time if we fucked this record up."
[Carrie Brownstein to Pitchfork / Jessica Hopper]
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"I want to tell you that a headache made me overdose on pain medication once, and all I remember was lurching up my lunch at the student health clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, and a beautiful nurse patting my back because I was crying at the same time, crying and lurching, crying and lurching, because the pain didn’t go away, the one in my head, the one pulsating like a heart about to explode."
[River Teeth / Ira Sukrungruang]
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