Inside Politics: Ben Affleck won’t run for Kerry Senate seat

Piers Morgan deportation petition goes viral

An online petition to deport British journalist Piers Morgan has gone viral, collecting 60,000 signatures — and counting — as of Tuesday afternoon after the CNN host blasted a gun rights advocate on his show last week as “stupid.”

The petition, created Friday on the White House website, has already hit the 25,000-signature threshold that the White House requires before it will comment.

MASSACHUSETTS

Romney’s oldest son says dad never wanted the job

The Boston Globe, in an in-depth post-mortem on the Mitt Romney presidential campaign published over the long holiday weekend, reports Tagg Romney saying his dad never really wanted to be president.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to run,” said Mr. Romney, the presidential candidate’s oldest son. “If he could have found someone else to take his place he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

TEXAS

Ron Paul rejects NRA’s armed-guards proposal

Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Republican, isn’t backing the National Rifle Association’s call to place armed guards in schools.

“Do we really want to live in a world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and warrantless physical searches?” Mr. Paul wrote in a statement Monday.

“We see this culture in our airports: witness the shabby spectacle of once proud, happy Americans shuffling through long lines while uniformed TSA agents bark orders. This is the world of government provided ‘security,’ a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse. School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.”

The Texas congressman, who made a bid for the Republican presidential nomination this year, is retiring from public office at the end of the month.

TEXAS

George H.W. Bush spends Christmas Day in hospital

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