Anyone with a Twitter account who wants to join my campaign to get Obama to stop looking for reactionary ministers for his inauguration and choose a different “outreach” speaker–my minister Dan Paul, a progressive who is a cousin of Ron and Rand–can retweet my tweet on the subject. It’s a half-serious way to deal with a serious problem in the White House’s thinking about religion.

Here are some mid-day news morsels lovingly selected at the news deli:

* At Wonkblog, Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews offer six key facts about Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew. The one that got my attention was his stubborn fight to keep Medicaid off the cut list during the 2011 debt limit negotiations.

* George Will fulminates at length about federal spending and the need for a balanced budget amendment, but does not once mention defense spending.

* Law professor offers novel way around debt limit: issuance of IOUs (formally, “registered warrants”) to selected federal creditors.

* Harold Meyerson discusses possible successors to Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary.

* Dave Weigel explains the inevitability of Cory Booker as a U.S. Senate nominee.

And in non-political news:

* Fun post providing one sentence on the 2012 seasons of all 124 major-college football teams.

Back after a quick lunch of flotsam and jetsam.

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.