Over at The New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a glimmer of hope for Pres. Obama in the GOP’s irresistible impulse to overreach and the perpetually inept leadership of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa of California:

The situation is dire alright—arguably the worst moment of Obama’s five-year tenure. But the Hawaiian Houdini still has one thing going for him, and that’s the uncanny tendency of some of his Republican enemies to turn opportunities into calamities. And none is more adept at this party trick than Darrell Edward Issa, the San Diego loudmouth whose House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a public hearing today, which backfired almost immediately.

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"Done." – Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie pic.twitter.com/vzbLA2hV68

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) November 13, 2013

The GOP/tea party has been promising for years to offer a proposal for replacing the Affordable Care Act with a plan that would move the country toward universal health care coverage. Now, at long last, one of the tea party’s best minds and most innovative thinkers has revealed the basics of the tea party plan for health-insurance reform. Here it is:

“The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left. It’s President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care.”

Every word in this salad is either a lie or simply wrong, of course.

Reuters photo shows Christie presumably among the 60% who voted for him and the 44% who said they'd choose him for president over Hillary Clinton in 2016

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) all but rigged his recent landslide re-election victory, but you know what makes a better story? See if these themes sound familiar:

• Sixty percent win lands Christie at top of 2016 presidential contenders
• Huge victory shows Christie’s broad, non-partisan appeal to voters
• Christie’s re-election signals end to divisiveness in politics

These are the lines we’ve heard since election night, when Christie did indeed take 60 percent of the vote over former NJ state Sen. Barbara Buono (D). But that’s hardly the whole story.

Much is being made of Bill de Blasio’s recent mayoral win in New York City, with the Washington Post even calling it “historic,” since he will be the first Democrat to serve in that office since David Dinkins won in 1989.

It’s not just worth nothing that de Blasio won, but how. De Blasio focused on income inequality in NYC, or what he called “two cities,” one rich and one poor, much the way the ultimately disappointing Sen. John Edwards talked about two Americas.

As Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour noted:

According to the Census Bureau, income inequality in the New York City region is higher than any other major metropolitan region in the country. So taking the whole city, Brooklyn to the Bronx, if you are in the bottom 20 percent in New York your income, on average, is about $9,000 a year. If you’re in the top 20 percent you make, on average, $223,000 a year. So otherwise, put [that] the top 20 percent of the population makes about 25 times what the bottom 20 percent makes.

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The much-watched special election for the U.S. House seat in Alabama’s District 1 ended with a victory for Bradley Byrne, the far-right Republican who was not a tea bagger. After losing the race by just a few points, the tea bagger, Dean Young, demonstrated the sort of juvenile behavior that has become the trademark of the tea party lately:

As we predicted, in the wake of Gov. Chris Christie’s blowout reelection win in New Jersey yesterday, the chattering class has anointed him the Republican Party’s frontrunner in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Talking Points Memo investigated the rash of policy cancellations by heath insurers as a result of implementation of the Affordable Care Act. TPM reporter Dylan Scott found that insurers are routinely not informing customers that cheaper but better policies are available on the insurance exchanges:

If Donna had taken the default option that LifeWise offered outside of the marketplace, she would have paid nearly $1,000 more per month for a worse plan than she was able to obtain on the marketplace.

Before Obamacare, Donna paid a $724 monthly premium for $10,000 deductible, catastrophic health coverage from LifeWise, a subsidiary of the state’s Blue Cross/Blue Shield affiliate. She asked that TPM withhold her last name because she was disclosing personal financial information.

The Sept. 16 letter from LifeWise told her that her existing plan was being canceled to comply with the new requirements of Obamacare and that she would automatically be rolled over into a new plan that was the “closest match” to her old plan. “If we don’t hear from you, we’ll automatically move you to this plan and you’ll be covered starting January 1, 2014,” the notice read.

More after the jump »

Pundits all seem to agree that when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wins reelection today, he will automatically become the Republican frontrunner for the presidency in 2016. That may be so, but most of these pundits live in the Northeast where a sarcastic, bullying style, of which Christie is the examplar, is part of everyday life.

To live in the Tristate Region is to deal with bombastic, aggressive smart asses at every turn — at the DMV, the supermarket checkout, at work and behind the wheel. This is the world in which the political opinionistas live. The fact that their lives are filled with blowhards like Christie blinds them to the fact that the bully-boy persona that is so common in the Northeast is considered ridiculous and repulsive outside the region.