And welcome to Friday, the first of 2013, which brings NFL playoffs for some and marriage counseling for some GOP others.
- The GOP are having, to quote one House GOP member “relationship issues.” Ah, young love. (Roll Call)
- Says one of the coup plotters: “The Speaker...did not have the support of 218 people in the conference. He has a few months to show people things have changed and if not, we are back to square one.” (The Hill)
- Overheard: “Some idiot voted for Colin Powell for Speaker of the House. Yes, the former Vice President.” (Brad Dayspring)
- Think the inept coup plotters in the GOP House are done for? Maybe not. (Steven Dennis)
- President Obama is taking a page from his Romney playbook to win the debt ceiling fight. (Politico)
- A good, but not great, jobs report shows the fiscal cliff melodrama didn’t take a bite out of our recovery. (Associated Press)
- “There really isn’t that much takeaway from this [jobs] report other than that the economy keeps trudging along, slowly but unbowed.” (Duke St Journal)
- One bright spot in today's jobs numbers: The number of people who have been out of work a year or more is down about 612,000. (David Wessel)
- Also: A huge rebound in construction jobs, partly because of Sandy but also housing. (Neil Irwin)
- But you know what hurt? Cutting government jobs—including almost 12,000 teachers. (Rortybomb)
- The irony of the current economic situation is that most Americans are optimistic about their own future—yet pessimistic about everybody else's. (Real Time Economics)
- From Sandy to Medicaid, to the Wall Street bailout, “with many Republicans it takes a personal experience to make them enthusiastically embrace government action.” (National Journal)
- Karl Rove thinks you missed everything—all those many things—he predicted correctly about the 2012 election. (Karl Rove)
- Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s health appears to be worsening. (The Guardian)
- Russia’s Vladimir Putin is No. 2 on the list of most powerful people. No. 1? There is no ‘No.1.” Meaning Putin is, literally, second to ‘nobody’. (Ian Bremmer)