Liz Halloran

They love "the Huckster" in Iowa, and he loves them back.

And former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says that Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a "tactical error" by shunning Saturday's straw poll, instead opting to announce his candidacy for president today in South Carolina.

"He's raining on the parade in Iowa," said Huckabee, taking a break from signing books for the happy crowd mobbing him Saturday morning. "I'm not against Rick at all, but this is the biggest day of the year for Iowa Republicans."

DES MOINES — These sunny August days in Iowa may prove to be Michele Bachmann's best as a GOP presidential candidate.

On the eve of the state's Republican straw poll in Ames, where she is expected to either win or place, the Minnesota congresswoman hop-scotched central Iowa.

She charmed about 100 supporters and the curious in the tidy, Dutch-and-proud town of Pella, and drew easily the largest crowd of any GOP candidates speaking at the Iowa State Fair.

They traded attacks and insults, argued about war funding, and disparaged the man in the White House whose job they want.

The two-hour, eight-candidate Republican presidential debate Thursday in Iowa, coming just days before the state party's presidential straw poll and in the midst of a national financial crisis, had the potential to matter — to elevate or, perhaps, eliminate a contender or two.

The political blame game that has followed Standard & Poor's U.S. debt downgrade has been dismally predictable.

Democrats point fingers at the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. Republicans condemn President Obama for an inability to lead. And S&P has been alternately hailed for calling out Washington's budgeting dysfunction and excoriated for overstepping in its ratings role.

One thing not in dispute?

Congress avoided a federal default this week by raising the debt ceiling in exchange for promised spending reductions, but it ceded the difficult details to a new 12-member "super committee."

If reaction to the bipartisan panel of Senate and House members, yet to be appointed, is any measure, its chances of agreeing on ways to reduce the nation's deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade are slim — no matter who gets picked to serve.

Members of Congress have begun fleeing the nation's steamy capital for their summer break, leaving behind a funk of noxious politics and a debt-ceiling deal that averts a government default but inspires almost universal hatred.

They're also dragging along dueling narratives about what the acrimonious past few weeks have meant for the prospects of the Tea Party movement.

With Republicans so divided on the debt-ceiling plan, the issue could be a major fault line in the 2012 presidential race. Only two contenders currently serve in Congress, but NPR took a look at how they all might vote on House Speaker John Boehner's bill:

What a difference a day makes.

Less than 24 hours ago, Republican House Speaker John Boehner was forced to postpone a vote on his debt ceiling plan after the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that it cut spending by about $350 billion less than promised.

The Tea Party wing of the leader's ornery caucus was continuing to slam his proposal as not going far enough or fast enough in cutting spending as a prerequisite to raising the nation's debt ceiling by Aug. 2.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is the latest Republican to tantalize the restive party base with the prospect of a 2012 presidential run.

The three-term governor, a favorite of evangelicals and the Tea Party faithful, has been meeting with potential donors and ramping up his public profile. He has also scheduled an attention-getting prayer event at a Houston stadium in August.

Earlier this month, Perry told the Des Moines Register that he's getting "more comfortable every day that this is what I've been called to do."

Former two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's campaign for the GOP presidential nomination was always expected to be launched, or extinguished, in next-door Iowa.

But with his once-promising prospects seemingly atrophied, and his first big test at the Iowa GOP presidential straw poll less than a month away, Pawlenty has embarked on an 18-city tour of the state this week to pump up his stuck-in-single-digit support.

He's also plowing about $200,000 into television advertising that will run through the Aug. 13 straw poll — the heftiest candidate buy in Iowa so far.

Conservatives coined a catchy name for the legislation House Republicans have scheduled for a Tuesday vote — Cap, Cut and Balance.

Democrats in the White House have what they think is just as creative a name for the bill — Duck, Dodge and Dismantle.

And those same Obama officials vow that President Obama will veto the legislation if it were to reach his desk.

That's a major if; it's unlikely the Republican bill will get through the Senate.

As the debt-ceiling talks descended into yet another day of deadlock, Democrats tried to pin blame on a new target: House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor.

That Cantor is at the center of the acrimonious debt-ceiling discussions should surprise no one who has followed his efforts to mobilize small-government conservatives.

"Young Guns," the No. 2 Republican in the House calls them — and himself — in a book he co-wrote last year with two like-minded House colleagues.

As stop-and-start debt ceiling negotiations between President Obama and Republican leaders continue, longtime Capitol Hill conservative Steve Bell predicts that the two sides will strike a "mediocre," no-new-taxes-now deal before Aug. 2.

But he also suggests that his party may pay the price at the ballot box next year for its insistence on protecting tax cuts for the nation's highest earners.

The scene has become strikingly familiar over the 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration: congressional leaders footslogging in front of cameras to the White House for another "bipartisan" meeting to resolve yet another stalemate.

This time, however, the Thursday morning debt-ceiling confab in the Cabinet Room opened with a slightly different feel.

With Washington locked in a political stalemate over the nation's runaway debt, you might be wondering — once again — why can't we all just get along? Whatever happened to the art of compromise?

The nation's abortion wars, simmering but largely quiet in recent years, have begun boiling again.

Nowhere has the battle been more pitched than in Kansas, where the Legislature this session passed four anti-abortion measures and adopted strict new licensing rules that this week came within hours of closing down the state's last abortion provider.

Late Thursday, Kansas officials agreed to license Planned Parenthood's Overland Park surgical facility, which provides abortions, after the organization scrambled to comply with the week-old clinic rules by Friday's deadline.

Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, riding a wave of Tea Party excitement over her strong showing in a new Iowa caucus poll and a round of national media appearances, has conspicuously altered the early race for the GOP nomination.

Just ask the Minnesota congresswoman's home state rival for the GOP crown, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who, despite dogged organizing in Iowa and efforts to improve his own national profile, has so far failed to find a receptive audience.

Irish mob boss James J. "Whitey" Bulger's scheduled arraignment in a Boston courtroom Friday after 16 years on the lam will open yet another chapter in the violent crime-and-politics family saga that has consumed Beantown reporters since the 1980s.

"I've spent half my career chasing Whitey Bulger around," says Gerard O'Neill, retired head of the Boston Globe investigative team, which in 1988 outed Bulger as an FBI informant since the mid-1970s.

Not so long ago, when the question was war, the response on Capitol Hill was an automatic blank check.

A largely compliant Congress, and presidents and politicians who were fearful of looking "weak on defense" or "unpatriotic," rubber-stamped massive military spending.

Funny how 10 years, two $1 trillion-and-counting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a budding military engagement in Libya, and a nation mired in unsustainable spending and debt can change what was once a military imperative.

It was no accident that Jon Huntsman chose the Statue of Liberty as the backdrop to announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Sure, the scene had echoes of Ronald Reagan, who used the same spot to launch his 1980 White House run. But it was also far from the cornfields of Iowa.

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner may be gone, but his three-quarters apologetic and one-quarter "I'll be back" resignation speech hinted that he believes a future in elective politics may not be out of the question.

History clearly suggests otherwise.

While plenty of politicians who have misbehaved --even criminally-- weathered their scandals and remain in office, the comeback prospects for those who resign or abandon reelection dreams are decidedly dim.

It wasn't long ago that the conservative, free-market Club for Growth was viewed by a swath of Republicans as a furtive, well-heeled enemy whose efforts to purge moderates from the GOP had to be thwarted.

The club and its agenda are "not representative of the Republican Party," the director of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of moderate GOP congressional members once said, adding: "We raise money on a daily basis to defeat them."

Michele Bachmann has been a caricature in the minds of some Americans who have followed her exploits as the founder of U.S. House tea party caucus and a go-to right wing pundit on Fox News.

Disgraced New York Rep. Anthony Weiner no doubt feels the walls closing in on him, what with key fellow Democrats calling for his resignation and his once high-flying Big Apple mayoral ambitions in shambles.

But one thing the married congressman likely won't have to fear in the wake of his sexting scandal is tough love from the secretive House ethics committee.

"They'll take their sweet time and do just about nothing," says Melanie Sloan, who heads Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). "The ethics committee is where ethics investigations go to die."

It's been a week of tough domestic economic news.

Home prices continued to slide. Manufacturing growth clocked in at the slowest rate in almost two years. Consumers cut back on discretionary spending.

And Friday's anemic job numbers — just 54,000 jobs added in May, far below forecasts — told perhaps the most powerful story of economic pain that continues to wrack Americans, and holds the potential to complicate President Obama's 2012 reelection aims.

The debt ceiling show vote in the House is now in the rear view mirror, Wall Street having been fully briefed that the GOP-orchestrated rejection of a national borrowing limit increase would signify absolutely nothing.

The House-Republicans-visit-the-White House-for-debt-ceiling-talks charade has also wrapped up, but not before a bout of chest-puffing and sputtering over who's demagoguing whom.

"Demagoguing" having emerged as the Beltway's new favorite buzzword.
Because it's something so very unusual.

Updated at 2:23 pm — CBS News reports that some journalists are worried that Sarah Palin's East Coast bus tour is creating a dangerous situation on the highways by not telling the news media beforehand about its planned stops.

Instead, journalists are having to trail her small motorcade bus from stop to stop. The response from Palin and her aides to journalists is, in a paraphrase, "tough."

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It's been nearly a decade since Congress, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, hastily approved the USA Patriot Act and its historic expansion of law enforcement and domestic intelligence-gathering powers.

For just as long, civil libertarians have been agitating for legislators to hold a full-blown debate on the sweeping measure, fast-tracked to President George W. Bush's desk just four days after it was raised in Congress.

The day that Tim Pawlenty officially announced that he's entering the hunt for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, iseems as good a day as any to ask a Pawlenty presidency might look like?

In his announcement speech in Des Moines Monday, the former two-term Minnesota governor offered that he would confront tough issues with an honesty he alleges President Obama has failed to.

President Obama's policies have failed. But more than that, he won't even tell us the truth about what it's really going to take to get out of the mess we're in...

Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump are out.

Ron Paul and Herman Cain are in; so is embattled Newt Gingrich — for now.

Mitt Romney is raking in the dough, if not enthusiasm, but hasn't "officially" announced.

And Thursday, former two-term Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, most recently President Obama's man in China, has become the latest to formally test the GOP presidential waters, beginning a swing through New Hampshire to see if he's the Republican they've been waiting for.

Some Beltway sages suggest that the 2012 Republican field is coalescing.