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7:04 p.m. | Updated Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, took to the floor of the Senate at 10:24 this morning to denounce the tax cut deal struck between the White House and congressional Republicans — and kept going for more than eight hours.

Mr. Sanders is fiercely opposed to the deal to continue all of the Bush-era tax cuts, even for the highest-income Americans. He thinks that it is a huge and unnecessary giveaway to the rich. And he has already put Senate leaders on notice that they will have to jump over all the procedural roadblocks available to him. As a result, a vote to overcome a filibuster is already set for Monday afternoon.

But unlike Senate Republicans who have made a strategy of throwing obstacles in the way and then heading back to their offices or just going home, allowing the Senate clock to tick its way toward the inevitable, Mr. Sanders on Friday decided to use the floor time available to him to make a full-throated display of his opposition to the bill.

“I think everyone knows, the president of the United States, President Obama and the Republican leadership have reached an agreement on a very significant tax bill,” Mr. Sanders began. In my view, the agreement that they reached is a bad deal for the American people. I think we can do better, and I am here today to take a strong stand against this bill, and I intend to tell my colleagues and the nation exactly why I am in opposition.

“You can call what I am doing today whatever I want,” said Mr. Sanders, who often calls himself a socialist. “You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech. I’m not here to set any great records to make a spectacle. I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.”

While Mr. Sanders may have not set out to create a spectacle, he certainly got some attention. Many of his colleagues were not at the Capitol to listen; many were not even in Washington. For example, the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, who personally sealed the tax cut deal with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was home in Kentucky.

But even if they were not in the Senate chamber, or near a television set to watch C-Span, Mr. Sanders’s very long speech was amplified with modern accouterments not even dreamed about when Mr. Smith went to Washington. As the minutes and hours ticked by, his staff sent out a flurry of Twitter messages, including quotes and updates on his remarks. His filibuster is also being streamed live on http://sanders.senate.gov.

His speech, however, was more interesting and more lucid in chunks larger than 140 characters.

“This nation has a record breaking, $13.8 trillion national debt at the same time as the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing,” Mr. Sanders said. “It seems to me to be unconscionable, unconscionable for my conservative friends and for everybody else in this country to be driving up this already too high national debt by giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires who don’t need it and in some cases, Mr. President, don’t even want it.”

(He was referring to the Senate President pro tempore, not speaking to Mr. Obama directly.)

“Two of the wealthiest people in the world — Bill Gates of Microsoft, Warren Buffett, Berkshire — billionaires. They said ‘It’s absurd. We don’t need a tax break.’ All over the country, you hear a lot of folks who have a lot of money saying ‘don’t drive up the deficit and force our kids to pay higher taxes to pay off the national debt in order to give tax breaks to the richest people in this country.’”

Beyond the continuation of lower income tax rates for high-earners, Mr. Sanders also railed against other aspects of the tax deal including a provision granting a generous tax exemption to wealthy estates and the continuation of a 15 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, which he noted would mean a big tax break for rich people who live off passive income from accumulated wealth.

“The agreement between the president and the Republican leadership also calls for a continuation of the Bush-era 15 percent tax rate on capital gains and dividends, meaning that those people who make their living off their investments will continue to pay a substantially lower tax rate than firemen, teachers, nurses, carpenters, and virtually all the other working people of this country. And I just don’t think that’s fair. That’s wrong.”

Mr. Sanders also dismissed assertions that the tax cut deal was worthwhile because it will keep jobless benefits flowing to the long-term unemployed, saying that assistance should have been approved regardless of what happened to the Bush-era rates. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “In the midst of a serious and major recession, at a time when millions of our fellow Americans are out of work, through no fault of their own, but they have been out of work for a very, very long time, it would be, in my view, immoral and wrong to turn our backs on those workers.”

And then, at 4:20 p.m., another Tweet:

Sen. Bernie Sanders is trending FIRST in the nation right now. We will continue to tweet the senator’s speech. #filibuster

A later Tweet knocked down a report that Mr. Sanders was going to end his speech at 6 p.m.

About 6:40 p.m., this update arrived: Sen. Bernie Sanders is now in his 9th hour of non-stop #filibuster. Sanders has not left the floor once in that time.

But around 7 p.m., the gentleman from Vermont left the floor.

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Mark Wilson/Getty Images Sen. John Ensign at a Senate hearing in November 2009.

Justice Department prosecutors have cleared Senator John Ensign of criminal allegations arising from his affair with an ex-aide and his effort to secure lobbying work for the ex-aide’s husband, the senator’s lawyers announced Wednesday.

His lawyers said the Justice Department informed them that Mr. Ensign, the Republican from Nevada who has been embroiled in legal and political controversy for more than a year, “is no longer a target of its investigation.”

Mr. Ensign’s office said it was “certainly pleased” by the developments and noted that he “has long stated that he acted in accordance with the law.” However, he could still face disciplinary action by the Senate ethics committee, which has also been investigating the matter and has a lower bar for bringing action against a member than does the Justice Department.

The Justice Department’s decision to end the case against the senator is something of a surprise, criminal lawyers said, because there was extensive evidence indicating that he had secured lobbying jobs for Douglas Hampton, the husband of his former mistress, as a way of ensuring his silence. Because Mr. Hampton worked for the senator just months before the lobbying began, the lobbying work was a potential violation of a criminal ban on lobbying by former aides within a year of working in the Senate.

Mr. Ensign, who was considered a possible Republican presidential contender in 2012 before the scandal hit, announced recently that he would seek a third-term in the Senate.

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The House’s new Republican leadership will begin doling out coveted committee chairs after the Thanksgiving break, and it’s unclear whether Rep. John Shimkus is helping his chances to lead the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee by arguing that climate change is a myth because God told Noah he would never again destroy the Earth by [...]

The ever-expanding media-publicity empire that is headed by former Gov.  Sarah Palin of Alaska got a bit larger Monday with the official release of her second book, “America by Heart.”

Some parts of the book had leaked earlier, prompting Twitter messages from Ms. Palin complaining about illegal publishing activity.

But now the book is fully available for perusal by anyone.

It is dedicated to her younger son Trig, and begins with the sentence: “Do you love your freedom?” As the subtitle of the book suggests, it is primarily full of “Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag.”

It is also a road map to the kinds of political attacks that Ms. Palin would most likely use against President Obama should she decide to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

The book is clearly not a vehicle for venting the intraparty feud that will by necessity come before a general election campaign. Of her likely Republican opponents, only former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, are mentioned — and both in a positive way. The rest — former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and others — receive nary a word in the book.

Mr. Obama’s name, by contrast, appears 44 times (eight as part of the term “Obamacare”).

Among the criticisms Ms. Palin levels at Mr. Obama and his White House:

*  Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party think “something is wrong with our country and what we value. So they are hell-bent on changing it.”

* Mr. Obama  favors judges who will follow their hearts rather than the law. In this charge, she dusts off Mr. Obama’s comments about the need to have judges who base their decisions, in part, on empathy. (Ms. Palin inaccurately says Mr. Obama made the remarks as president. In fact, they were from 2005, when as a senator he voted against confirming John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court.)

* Some people believe America that is a fundamentally unjust and unequal country, and “Barack Obama seems to believe this, too,” Ms. Palin writes, raising repeated questions about his love for his country. She also recalls Michelle Obama’s comments during the 2008 campaign, saying Mrs. Obama “never felt proud of her country until her husband started winning elections.”

*  The president’s tendency to apologize to foreign leaders is suspect, Ms. Palin writes: “I think that Americans are tired of Obama’s global apology tour and of hearing about what a weak country America is from left-wing professors and journalists.”

* Ms. Palin appears disturbed by Mr. Obama’s answer to a question about “American exceptionalism,” posed by a reporter during the president’s first major trip abroad. She notes his answer, that he believes in American exceptionalism in the same way that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Later she adds, “When President Obama insists that all countries are exceptional, he’s saying that none is, least of all the country he leads.”

* The $787 billion stimulus that Mr. Obama pushed through Congress was an example of “bribing the states to surrender their rights.”

* Mr. Obama’s health care reform has produced untold numbers of unfunded mandates and regulations, she writes. “In the process, America has come to be less a federal republic than a 50-state colony of Washington, D.C.”

Ms. Palin is scheduled to take the new book on tour during the next several weeks, and if history is a guide, she will generate huge crowds in each of the 16 cities she plans to visit.

“The question going forward, is how?” she asks in her concluding chapter. “How do we embrace our exceptionalism at home and abroad? How do we take this great awakening among the American people and turn it into a positive force for reclaiming our country and our heritage?”

She adds, “Like so many Americans, I have been thinking about this a lot lately.”

But it remains far from clear from her latest literary endeavor whether Ms. Palin truly wants to campaign for office again, or whether she is more interested in the political commentary that she offers in the book and on Fox News.

One of the pictures in the book is of her and the Fox host Glenn Beck, posing together near the Statue of Liberty.

“Glenn and I share an appreciation for Lady Liberty,” she writes. “America’s most famous symbol for freedom-loving immigrants serves as an inspiration to all: America, continue to be exceptional, hard-working, faithful and free.”

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9:50 a.m. | Updated When Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York filed charges against the financier Steven L. Rattner last week related to a kickback scheme involving the state’s pension fund, no one expected Mr. Rattner to take it sitting down. Well, actually, Mr. Rattner did take it sitting down — on the [...]

More than 40 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson used images of a little girl, a daisy and a mushroom cloud to urge people to vote for him, saying the “stakes are too high.”

Now, a group backing the ratification of a new arms treaty with Russia has created a version of Mr. Johnson’s famous “Daisy” ad, using the same images to warn against delay.

The new ad begins as the old one did: with a little girl picking petals off a flower and counting to 10. When she gets there, a menacing voice begins to count down to zero.

“In a world where terrorists seek to destroy everything we hold dear, Russia’s nuclear weapons cannot be left unmonitored,” an announcer says in a grim voice. As he speaks, a mushroom cloud erupts, reflected in one of the little girl’s eyes in grainy, black-and-white video, much as it did in the original ad.

The commercial, which is scheduled to run on cable television in states whose senators will be key to passage of the new treaty, is the work of the American Values Network. A countdown clock on its Web site indicates that it has been 349 days since the U.S. last inspected Russia’s nuclear weapons.

President Obama has started a concerted push to try and get the new treaty passed this year. Republicans, led by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, have expressed resistance, saying that more time is needed to study the treaty that Mr. Obama negotiated with Russian leaders.

But like the original ad by Mr. Johnson, the group’s new version uses dramatic imagery to make their point. The threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of a third country — like, for example, Iran — is a real one. But no one on either side is suggesting that nuclear war with Russia is likely if passage of the treaty is delayed.

The original 1964 ad is below.

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