Two Republicans made big news this week. One had a comeback, the other a lapbelt operation. The first was a sideshow, the second points toward a decisive test of whether the Republicans can be a competitive presidential party in 2016.

A special election in South Carolina saw the defeat of a first- rate Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who deserves to be known as something other than Stephen Colbert's sister. Congresswoman would have been nice. It was not to be. I was wrong and John Avlon was right: It turns out the mythical trip on the Appalachian Trail didn't lead Mark Sanford to political oblivion, but to the House of Representatives. It also turns out that the self–ordained, self-righteous voters in the land of Bob Jones University believe in family values—-until they don't.

Their flexibility could be critical to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has acknowledged shedding 40 pounds with the help of weight-loss surgery. He's right that it's "ridiculous" to assume that his poundage precluded a race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Fat is an easy, unproven shibboleth of a barrier to the White House—much like age used to be, until that truism was soundly disproved by Ronald Reagan. The New Jersey governor says he had the operation for his health, his family, his children.

Rand Paul makes his maiden 2016 journey into Iowa on Friday to introduce himself to a Republican Party that has been largely overtaken by his father’s top allies.

And that unique dynamic could prove critical to his chances in the first-in-the-nation caucus state as he prepares for a likely White House run.

Iowa Republican Party chairman A.J. Spiker says the senator’s rollicking 13-hour March filibuster against the president’s drone policy was the impetus behind the decision to extend the invitation to the Kentucky freshman to headline Friday’s Lincoln Day dinner in Cedar Rapids.

Every politician looks for a niche where they can combine their passion and their ambition, and advocating for women fits both for New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Her rapid rise in the Senate since being appointed to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat in 2009 has made her a force to be reckoned with on key issues, notably this week on sexual assaults in the military, and along with her increased visibility, Gillibrand has become one of the most mentioned potential female candidates for president—after Clinton of course.

“When I heard her challenge the general or whoever it was speaking for the military, it was pretty presidential,” says Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project. “She’s not only good on issues and standing up, she’s gotten to be a real force. She is someone who has grown leaps and bounds in the job.”

Gillibrand was at the White House Thursday, one of 15 senators attending a meeting called by Valerie Jarrett to talk about the alarming increase in sexual assaults in the military. Gillibrand called the meeting “super-productive,” and as the first woman to chair the personnel subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has been instrumental along with the increased presence of women in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, in finally generating outrage about behavior that has been tolerated for far too long.

The debt ceiling should really be renamed the default ceiling. This catastrophic game of chicken cost the U.S. our AAA credit rating and $19 billion when it was last employed in the summer of 2011 by House radicals who pretended their intransigence was a stand for fiscal responsibility.

Now the default ceiling is looming again, promising yet another showdown between President Obama and House Republicans. But even Speaker John Boehner realizes that the 50 or so radicals on the far right of his own party—the Bachmann, Broun, Gohmert and King crew—are the greatest impediment to responsible self-government right now.

That’s why the new responsible Republican proposal, which passed the House Thursday by a vote of 221-207, could be the best way to defuse the debt ceiling from its most destructive impact.

How in the hell did Democrats wind up struggling in the Virginia governor’s race?

Virginia is an important state. An emerging purple state. A state poised to have the kind of election-swinging clout of Ohio or Florida.

Upping the ante this cycle, Virginia Republicans, for their gubernatorial standard-bearer, have tapped the proudly inflammatory Ken Cuccinelli, who has used his reign as state attorney general to, among other notable hits, crusade against climate change and on behalf of the state’s recently junked anti-sodomy laws. For a party struggling to dispel its reputation as a bastion of right-wing nuttery, putting Cuccinelli front and center is a bit like tapping Mitt Romney to dispel the GOP’s rep as a bastion of rich old white guys.

To the conservative Heritage Foundation, comprehensive immigration reform is an epic boondoggle. To wit, in a report released earlier this week, Heritage puts the cost of immigration reform at a whopping $6.3 trillion. That’s nearly half the size of the United States economy.

But there’s a problem. To come to this number, Heritage assumes that unauthorized immigrants will claim the full array of federal benefits as soon as they become citizens. As Heritage president Jim DeMint explained on ABC News’ This Week, “We just want Congress, for once, to count the cost of a bill. They’re notorious for underestimating the cost and not understanding the consequences.”

Not only does Heritage assume a world where every unauthorized immigrant becomes a citizen, but it assumes one where upward mobility has disappeared—every immigrant is taking more in benefits than paying in taxes—and one where there are no economic gains from legalizing and integrating immigrants.

Finally, committee action is set to start today in the Senate on the immigration bill. The dead-enders on the right are gearing up. Utah’s Mike Lee, for example, is evidently introducing amendments that say in essence, “strike everything after the words ‘an act.’” Less extreme colleagues are still trying to push the bill rightward in various ways. This puts Marco Rubio in a spot. He needs to placate these forces if he’s going to have a shot at the GOP nomination in 2016. But somewhere on that continuum, there’s a tipping point, at which he loses the trust of the Democrats he has spent months negotiating with, and the bill itself perhaps loses some Democratic support. The sweet spot is awfully small, and if he doesn’t find it, his 2016 hopes, and maybe even the bill, are in agua caliente.

Here’s the situation. What the conservatives are hopping mad about—aside of course from the general idea that they have to do this in the first place, which in many ways is the inescapable problem—is something called the RPI provision. That’s “registered provisional immigrant” status. In the current language, if an undocumented immigrant was in the United States on December 31, 2011, that person can come forward and get a work authorization and permission to travel. Then they start the 10- or 13-year process of becoming a citizen.

But this is all contingent, to some extent, on the border being secure. In the first year of the law’s life, the secretary of Homeland Security has to put forward a plan to achieve 90 percent control of the border. Once the plan is submitted, processing of the people applying for RPI status can begin.

Say what you will about Chris Christie, the man can laugh at himself—that is, as long as he’s the one making the jokes, of course. In attempt to remain in the spotlight while redirecting the national conversation away from his recent lap-band surgery, the gregarious New Jersey governor has decided to bring back the fleece joke for an encore. You remember the fleece. That notorious blue pullover Christie sported for weeks as a symbol of his commitment to Hurricane Sandy relief. Despite telling SNL’s Seth Meyers that the fleece was “fused to my body,” the governor eventually took it off, which was clearly a huge mistake as he realizes, in a new star-studded YouTube video, that he is nothing without fleece.

In the not-quite-viral video, the governor turned actor is at first unconcerned by the news that his precious fleece has disappeared from its glass case. “The fleece was so last year,” he scoffs. “I’m back in the Time 100 most influential people in the world. Bruce is my new best friend. I’m friends with Bon Jovi and now I’m back on Morning Joe!” But he soon discovers that his newfound clout came with a fleece attached. Mika and Joe are sick of him, he can’t get into a Bruce Springsteen show, and Jon Bon Jovi won’t give him the time of day. As the seven-minute-plus video carries on, we learn that James Carville is in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, who stole the fleece but accidentally left it with Alec Baldwin, whose wife, Hilaria, adheres to the “finders keepers” rule of life. This ultimate sequence is not only funny, but it makes the point that Christie can not only take a joke, but that he’s chummy enough with some pretty public Democrats that they’d be willing to appear in this silly video of his.

Christie has used this tactic before. Last year, instead of stewing in silent jealousy as Newark Mayor Cory Booker was repeatedly hailed for his heroism, the governor took matters into his own hands and made a video acknowledging how inadequate he is in comparison to the valiant Booker. Whether this video will actually make anyone forget about the lap-band surgery, or keep them from making 2016 predictions, is unlikely. But it does serve as a good reminder that Christie is the kind of guy who can take a joke—as long as it’s on his terms, of course. 

The redemption tour is over and Congress has a new Comeback Kid.

Scandal-laden former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford won back his old congressional seat on Tuesday night, defeating Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 54 percent to 45 percent margin in a high-turnout special election.

The victory shocked the national press corps, who had been predicting a Colbert-Busch victory—with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example, declaring “this is not serious” after a PPP poll found Sanford 9 points behind the Democratic nominee two weeks from Election Day.

“We've had a tough go of it this last year,” Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey said Tuesday morning. “The facts are indisputable regarding the impact certain things have had on ad dollars."

Dickey told analysts on the earnings call that his radio empire’s revenue was down $5.6 million in the first quarter of 2013 on top of a boatload of debt. Why? Parse the weasel words (“the impact of certain things”) and you’ll see that Dickey is blaming one man for the precipitous decline of right-wing talk radio’s profitability: Rush Limbaugh. 

El Rushbo is still a giant in the industry, but the impact of slamming Sandra Fluke on his radio show one year ago persists—with some $2.4 million in losses attributed by Dickey to declines in the “syndicated-talk segment.”

The immigration reform bill currently winding its way through the Senate provides a much needed and long overdue framework for creating a pathway to citizenship for the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. today. But among many important components, one piece that should not be overlooked is whether aspiring citizens will finally have access to affordable health care.

When immigrants were left out of health reform—by maintaining a waiting period for low-income lawful residents and by banning undocumented immigrants entirely from the overhauled market—several lawmakers promised that immigrants’ health care and coverage needs would be addressed in immigration reform. But unless steps are taken to amend the Senate bill, that promise will not be kept.

Numerous myths and stereotypes have led to immigrant women in particular being punished for their reproductive capacity and their presence in this country, regardless of whether they came here through legal channels. Unfounded concerns that women migrate to the U.S. in order to have children and utilize public benefits have led to draconian measures that are not based in reality and that undermine public health, economic productivity, and social integration. As a result, a number of unjust laws have denied immigrant women access to health services including prenatal care, contraception, breast cancer and cervical cancer screenings, and abortion care.

If anyone wonders if two-term Newark Mayor Cory Booker is really committed to campaigning for the Senate from New Jersey, he left no doubt on Monday night at a fancy dinner with fancy New Yorkers.

“Yes!” he told CBS This Morning anchor Norah O’Donnell during a mealtime Q&A presented by The Atlantic magazine and the Aspen Institute at the trendy Del Posto restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “Unofficially, I’m running.”

In the 35-minute chat, O’Donnell managed to pose a few questions while Booker displayed his ability to speak in lengthy, well-ordered paragraphs—a gift that could come in handy during a Senate filibuster.

Count me as one who never knew, until this past weekend’s Niall Ferguson dust-up, that conservatives have long held John Maynard Keynes’s sexuality against him. I know, silly me; of course they did. And the nature of the protest is so typical of the conservative mind. The insistence on highlighting (usually inaccurately) one element of a person’s biography, and then arguing that this element represents the person’s full “character,” and then making the claim that said character is destiny; that’s how conservatives tend to see and explain the world, whether in limning their heroes (how Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War) or in making sense of villains like Keynes.

Many commentators have by now risen to Keynes’s defense on a personal level and argued that his childlessness does not prove that he didn’t care about future generations. But surprisingly to me—especially as we concurrently debate the abysmal failures of austerity—no one that I’ve seen has defended Keynes against the larger historical charge and said the obvious: that in fact, Keynes-inspired policies as implemented in the United States and elsewhere have done immeasurable good for future generations, one hell of a lot more good than supply-side economics could ever even pretend to.

Let’s review the allegation, which Jonah Goldberg summarized over the weekend with the kind of bemused indifference that did not characterize his earlier iteration of the bill of particulars supporting his claim that John Kennedy was a fascist. Goldberg pronounced himself surprised that what Ferguson said was news to anyone. He then carries us on a brisk journey from Joseph Schumpeter (whose 1946 quote about Keynes has been oft-mentioned these last few days) to Gertrude Himmelfarb to William Rees-Mogg (see, even the Brits said it!) to Bill Greider (see, even a lefty said it!) to show that people have been saying this about Keynes for years, so what’s the big deal?

I've spent a lot of time with politicians, so it would be fair to assume that my proximity would increase my cynicism about the process, the people, or both. As the saying goes, no man is a hero to his valet – and political consultants are the valets of the modern American political system.

But I've gone the other way. The more time I've spent with men and women in office and running for office, the more I've come to respect the extraordinary pressures they are under and the very personal pain inevitable in a public life where there often seems to be no public space. Unless you have been through it or seen it up close, it's difficult to imagine.

In the dark arts of political campaigns known as oppo research, the most basic tools of the trade include campaign finance reports, arrest records, lawsuits, old newspaper clips.

In Virginia, though, it seems as if all it takes to embarrass the opposing campaign is a working library card.

Over the past week, Republican operatives have been barely able to contain their glee as they email out select passages from What a Party!: My Life Among Democrats, Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, And Other Wild Animals, the memoir by Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, top fundraiser and ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and now the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia.