This is a great day for America—because the news organizations have spent a ton of money on "covering" Iowa and New Hampshire, and they'll be sending fewer staff and resources to South Carolina, which starts tomorrow, after New Hampshire "votes" today, and which also gets under-covered because it's a three-hour drive down the J. Strom Thurmond Freeway from outside Myrtle Beach to Columbia, as opposed to the one-hour drive from Nashua NH to Concord NH, and the bigger things get, well, all the reporters are kind of lazy and they miss a lot of events, and so you will be hearing less of the Republican primary prattle, which is all a lot of hot air and doesn't matter one tiny little bit. (Perhaps you will remember when Herman Cain dominated the news cycle! Ha ha! Creeping sharia! It was literally a couple weeks ago!) After South Carolina comes Florida, with the primary on January 31, which will be a total LOLfest, but will also be a less hysterically covered "news" event. So vote on, New Hampshire freaks! Only 229 days until the Republican convention in Tampa!

I arrived back in New Hampshire a couple days after Christmas, attending a Mitt Romney event at Geno's Chowder & Sandwich Shop on a wharf at the port's mouth in Portsmouth. A few hundred people showed up too, the usual Republican mix of dyed-blonde women in furs, size-38-pants men, Brooks Brother-y bros, and girls in those knee-high brown storm-trooper boots that have recently invaded the suburbs. READ MORE

Gingrich: There is a lot of big government behind Romneycare, not as much as Obamacare, but a heck of a lot more than your campaign is admitting. READ MORE

It's astounding that this is lingering as a news cycle as long as it has already, but can we all just agree to now ignore Herman Cain? Every election cycle some alleged front-runner dominates the news—welcomed by the candidates who'll be the real front-runners once there's actually primaries and stuff. Then this person gets pilloried and there's a "miraculous fall" or explosion or petering-out or whatever, and then we can get down to the real business. The point being that no one can stay front and in the center in the news that long without burning America's attention span right out. And the news cycle sure doesn't care who's getting the attention as long as someone is. But the actual politicians who'll really be running for president, and their financial backers, they totally do. They're counting on it. Good job, Herman Cain! Your work is nearly done!

What's John McCain's plan for the economy? Why, another "repatriation tax holiday," wherein companies bring money onto virtual "U.S. soil" at a reduced rate. He's going to "unveil" it today. (Bloomberg says: "Independent studies showed that when a tax holiday was last offered, in 2004, the lower tax rate for returning profits spurred little hiring or domestic investment. Most of the money was used to buy back stock.") The McCain reasoning is: "more capital in America = better for economy." Who benefits? "The proposed holiday would reward the companies that have most aggressively parked profits in tax havens such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland," is what a former Treasury Dept. guy told Bloomberg. And here's what Goldman Sachs says, in an analyst report published for its investors last night. READ MORE

On Tuesday, September 6th, Paul Ryan spoke at the Whitnall Park Rotary Club in Greenfield, Wisconsin. For what has become the only way for even his constituents to see the Congressman during his summer town halls, tickets were $15. And in what looked like a polar negative of the healthcare town halls of 2009, Ryan was disrupted over and over again by those (paying) attendees. Three were arrested. READ MORE

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In the long-awaited matter of the Wisconsin recall elections, two Republican state senators were indeed recalled. That puts the state at 17 Republicans and 16 Democrats, and, even with forthcoming recall elections, at the very least the legislature will remain with a Republican majority. READ MORE

Florida governor Rick Scott's new initiative is actually, quite literally, one in which he travels the state and takes peoples' jobs. He is touring about, making doughnuts and delivering newspapers and performing lowly paid labor—basically taunting the jobless. It's really quite bizarre—as the unemployment numbers in Florida are worse than those in Detroit.

• John Barrasso READ MORE