As The Iowa Independent previously reported, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert used his all-too-real Super PAC funds to establish an ad buy on Des Moines television stations in advance of the GOP presidential debate and Ames Straw Poll. While KCCI-TV and WHO-TV aired the ad, which encouraged straw poll attendees to give a write-in vote to Rick Parry, with an “A,” the Des Moines ABC-affiliate, WOI-TV, rejected the ad on the basis that it would be confusing to straw poll voters and Iowans in general.

In his usual style, Colbert ragged on WOI’s news team, their low ratings and even highlighted a piece on garage sales produced by a reporter at the station.

Here’s that segment from August 11:

Four days later, on Monday, Aug. 15, Colbert then apologized to WOI when it turned out that he had previously met the station’s general manager, Ray Cole:

And, finally, Thursday evening, Colbert took the bit even further, pulling in members of the WOI team as part of a bid to get to the bottom of the write-in vote counts at the Ames Straw Poll, figures the Republican Party of Iowa has pledged not to release.

This is a shift from just four months ago, when the same question, asked in December, found 36 percent of respondents advocating spending cuts alone and 60 percent advocated tax increases and spending cuts together (the precise numbers are now 31 to 64 percent). Increasing taxes alone remained by far the least popular option, with just 3 percent of those polled supporting such a tactic, up 1 percentage point from December.

The overwhelming popularity of combining the traditionally liberal notion of tax increases with the traditionally conservative notion of spending reductions cut across party lines, though it was more popular with Democrats than Republicans. Nearly half — 47 percent — of Republicans chose that option, compared to 77 percent of Democrats. Independents were right in line with the overall picture, with 64 percent of them choosing the twofold approach to fixing the deficit.

That wasn’t the only indication in the poll that the majority of Americans are more moderate than vocal extremists on either side of the political divide would have it. A full 71 percent of those polled said that Republicans have not been willing enough to compromise with President Obama over the budget, while only 16 percent said Republicans were too willing to compromise.

The American Independent previously reported on the poll’s findings that more than half of all Americans are now in support of legalizing same-sex marriage.

ABC’s John Parkinson writes:

Although aides in Bachmann’s congressional office said she has received frequent encouragement from supporters to challenge President Obama next year, they would not confirm quite yet that she officially was throwing her hat into the ring.

However, Bachmann’s senior staff did admit the Minnesotan is not ruling out a presidential campaign. “Nothing is off the table,” Bachmann chief of staff Andy Parrish told ABC News when asked whether the Iowa trip signaled Bachmann’s intent to run for president.

“The congresswoman is excited about her first trip to Iowa this year.”

Bachmann has already proven herself to be a fundraising juggernaut, giving her an immediate advantage if she chooses to enter the field of presidential candidates. For her 2010 re-election campaign against Democrat Tarryl Clark, she brought in $13.4 million. Bachmann has around three million of that sum left over for future campaigns.

Bachmann’s name has been floated as a potential Republican candidate to challenge Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar when she is up for re-election in 2012. Based on early polls conducted by Public Policy Polling, Bachmann is the clear favorite among state Republicans for the Senate nomination, easily topping former Gov. Tim Pawlenty or former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman. But those same polls indicate that Bachmann struggles outside the comfort of her own party or congressional district, with all Minnesota voters favoring Klobuchar by a 56-39 percent margin over Bachmann.

An award-winning Iranian nuclear scientist, who disappeared last year under mysterious circumstances, has defected to the CIA and been resettled in the United States, according to people briefed on the operation by intelligence officials.

The officials were said to have termed the defection of the scientist, Shahram Amiri, “an intelligence coup” in the continuing CIA operation to spy on and undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

A spokesperson for the CIA declined to comment. In its declassified annual report to Congress, the CIA said, “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons though we do not know whether Tehran eventually will decide to produce nuclear weapons.”

Pretty serious news if true. Expect a new National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program to rely significantly on Amiri.

As I’ve noted before, prominent Illinois Democrats such as Sen. Dick Durbin have been strong supporters of the move. Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, led by Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), the GOP front-runner for Obama’s old Senate seat, have strongly opposed transferring terror suspects to their state.

Conservative Republicans and “tea party” activists are already planning their protests.

In fact, it turned out that the memo was a draft from the Justice Department prepared for the president, as Andrew McCarthy at National Review acknowledged in an update of his earlier breathless post.  That post relied on a post from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site, which obtained a copy of the leaked memo and posted it.

To McCarthy, who is not one to shrink from a little fearmongering, the notion of transferring to Illinois all those Gitmo detainees who’ve been imprisoned for up to eight years without charge on an island prison created precisely to deny them the right to a fair trial is “an outrage. It will inevitably result in trained terrorists being released in the United States — bank on it.”

In his update, McCarthy sheepishly acknowledges that an administration official told ABC News, which bothered to contact the administration about the document, that the memo “is a draft, predecisional document that lawyers at various agencies were drafting in preparation for a potential future announcement about where to house GTMO detainees.”

Here’s an interesting example. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank with funding from the energy industry, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Treasury documents that suggested a cap-and-trade program would cost taxpayers more than the Obama administration claimed. Earlier today, CEI’s communications director Christine Hall needled Tapper via Twitter to report on the think tank’s findings.

“did u see the updated docs Treasury released late Friday?” wrote Hall. “~$300~ bil cap-n-tax costs, prev. redacted.”

Tapper fired back: “i wrote about it on sunday at my blog abcnews.blogs.com.”

Sure enough, Hall tweeted about the original report on Friday. Tapper wrote it up on Sunday in a story titled “A Secret Cap and Trade Tax of $1,761 Per Family?”, keying off Mitt Romney’s statement that the proposal would cost that much. In it, Tapper concluded that the figure itself was produced by sloppy math. It was “possible to see as false the assertions by Romney and other Republicans that the president has been hiding a $1,761 tax from the American people while also wondering if the Treasury Department is being as forthcoming and transparent as President Obama’s campaign promises would suggest.” He quoted CEI’s “Chris Holder” making the point. Hall tweeted to correct him: “@jaketapper – Horner. Chris Horner.”

Kibbe has walked that number back, crediting the mistake to misinformation on Twitter, and that leaves ABC’s estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters as the one that most media are using. Some conservatives are arguing for a bigger number; Robert Stacy McCain, in a post linked by Michelle Malkin, argues that “a people-meter at the intersection of Constitution Avenue and 11th Street” counted 450,000 people, and that some people made it late to the event due to traffic problems, so the media is undercounting it.

This dispute won’t end soon, as any veterans of anti-war protests could tell conservatives; it’s tough to get accurate crowd counts and tough to believe that something that felt massive was not, in fact, historically large. This was the largest march on Washington by conservatives in anyone’s memory. But Washington was home to one of the largest public gatherings of the decade just nine months ago, when 1.8 million people filled the mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial for President Obama’s inauguration, and that has given future protesters a barometer for their success. The reports of “2 million people” on the mall this weekend were always ludicrous.

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The official told ABC news: “a few just got lost and the CIA does not know what happened to them.”

The information was supposedly blacked out for “national security” reasons.

As I mentioned earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought the documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is considering whether it will challenge the legitimacy of the government’s redactions.

“A major American company is making a contribution to the Obama administration in the form of an infomercial,” said Norquist, explaining why they’d organized the event.

Price marked the administration’s priorities as a potential “death knell” for private health care and worried that positive media coverage of the president was slanting the gameboard. “If the fourth estate in this administration remains in the tank for this administration,” he said, attacking ABC News, “it does endanger the future of our nation.”