Just before the end of qualifying for the U.S. Senate race late this afternoon in Louisiana, a well-known former state Supreme Court justice jumped in to the Republican primary against incumbent David Vitter.

It's been a long time since I covered Louisiana politics, but if memory serves Chet Traylor was first elected to the court in the 1990s with major, major backing from the state's biggest business group in an effort to steer the court to the right. It was a hugely expensive race by the standards of the day. We'll be reporting more on this development, but what it suggests to me is that the business community is abandoning Vitter. And unless things have changed a lot in the dozen years since I moved away, Traylor is going to have access to boatloads of campaign cash for this primary.

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Who'll play those eleven Russian spies in the upcoming movie? We review the possibilities.

I'm awfully surprised that the Feds would want to be predicting something like this, even suggesting it, rather than waiting for good news and announcing it after it actually pans out. But Adm. Thad Allen, chief of the disaster response is now saying that the Gulf Spill could be completely contained as early as Monday.

TPM Reader TS got a chance to give the Pentagon some feedback on DADT:

I didn't get an invite to take that ridiculous survey but I was invited to send a comment to the DoD Comprehensive Review Working Group. The invitation came with this: "This is a non-confidential Online Inbox. Please do not use your name or the names of others within your comment."

I was given a 1000-character limit. I am not an eloquent writer but I managed to write the paragraph pasted below. I would argue that it is fairly representative of the feelings of a large majority of the military I am currently working with.

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It looks like the pro-Nullification presumptive Republican nominee for Governor in Minnesota is going into damage control mode. But not for saying that Minnesota shouldn't have to obey any federal laws. He's back tracking because his plan for getting the state's economy back on track was to cut the wages of waiters and waitresses by about 2/3 -- a move he said would "level playing field [between waiters and employers] so the employers can continue to exist, survive and thrive." Now he's going on a listening tour next week to hear from the servers.

I'm actually a little surprised at the relatively optimistic notes from Democrats on my question about how people think the November election will go. Obviously all optimism is relative. At this point I would count optimism from Democrats as a number of House losses that keeps Nancy Pelosi as Speaker next year. So basically fewer than forty seats lost.

Here's TPM Reader BC's take ...

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Okay, we've now gotten a copy of the survey the Pentagon is sending out to members of the military on Don't Ask Don't Tell. See it here.

Self-funding Florida Gov's candidate says campaign finance law is cramping his millionaire campaign style.

We're four months out. What do you think is going to happen in the 2010 midterm elections? And why?

CA Tea Partier struggles to get fellow Tea Partiers to turn out to protest women vets event.

Gay service member groups debate whether or not to fill out the Pentagon's new gays in the military survey, which was just sent out to about 400,000 active duty, guard and reserve members of the military.

Colbert runs through the official GOP hairstyles. Watch.

Because the enthusiasm gap means you end up with a pool of "likely voters" more than half of whom, according to one new poll, think President Obama's a socialist.

The Pentagon has lifted its edict banning Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, from going to Guantanamo to cover the military commissions there. Rosenberg is the leading journalist on the story of Gitmo, military detentions and tribunals, so that's good news.

The bad news is there doesn't seem to be any formal resolution to the underlying practice of the Pentagon issuing such a ban in the first place.

On this lazy, enervating Friday morning I wanted to flag your attention to this piece by Bernard Avishai over at TPMCafe. Over the years, as the Israelis and Palestinians prove themselves endlessly incapable of embracing the obvious, there are recurrent calls that the time for a 'two state' solution has passed and that now only a 'one state' solution is possible. This has always struck me as profoundly crazy. These two people are so angry, intractable, episodically violent to each other and unwilling to compromise that the only solution is to make them all live peacefully together in one pluralistic, compromise-based state. Truly a genius idea. As Avishai notes, the alternative to two states isn't Belgium it's Bosnia where you could have a pleasant bloodbath for a decade or so until you came out the other end with two states or something like you have now. In any case, this isn't so much his point as his premise. And what he does describe are some provocative thoughts on what the two states will eventually look like. Definitely give it a read.

Boehner and Co. get cracking on bringing back the K Street project in the new GOP Capitol Hill.

Let's face it. The crazy world of politics involves a lot of mock surprise and feigned outrage. But every so often I hear something and can't help but think: You're kidding. We're really talking about this?

I just happened upon this article in the Post about the 'tanning tax' in the Health Care Reform law and whether it is unconstitutional because it violates the equal protection rights of white people. In other words, in the era of Obama, who presumably isn't in great need of an insta-tan, the tax on tanning salons is a grand effort to stick it to whitey.

On the one hand, yeah, I can conjure up some funny scenes of Snooki and The Situation from Jersey Shore marching down the boardwalk singing 'We Shall Overcome'. But apparently, this is actually being discussed. Rush has been going on about it and a guest host on Glenn Beck's show said: "I now know the pain of racism."

It's part of my professional responsibility to keep up on what's percolating on the outer fringes of The Crazy and, man, I hadn't heard about this and did not see it coming.

Now, lest I be misunderstood. The Post doesn't seem to have much question that the law probably passes constitutional muster.

But still, we're talking about this?

The latest on the district court ruling ruling certain parts of the DOMA law unconstitutional.

The DOJ just put out a statement detailing the guilty pleas and swap deal over those Russian spies. Statement after the jump.

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