Greg Sargent interviewed the woman who said Rand Paul and his college buddy ‘kidnapped’ her and made her worship “aquabuddha” down at the local creek. The gist of the interview is that she stands by the key factual claims but didn’t mean she was kidnapped in the legal sense. She portrays it as something more like hazing in which they went through motions of tying her up and ‘kidnapping’ but she was basically going along with it and wasn’t really being compelled against her will.
Jeff Greene is running for Senate as a Democrat from Florida and he’s got an over-sized reef-destroying, vomit-caked, sorta Cuba-travel embargo busting party boat to prove it.
New details emerge on plane crash the killed Ted Stevens and four others.
Americans views on Health Care Reform. For or against the bill passed this year?
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NBC in Chicago is reporting that former Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) has died. The report is unconfirmed.
The Sun-Times also reporting it, with no details or attribution.
I wanted to flag two articles this morning on the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy. First is a short piece by Rick Hertzberg in the New Yorker. No big comment from me. Just go read it. It’s good.
Next is a piece in the New York Times. It’s a good piece in a lot of ways. The gist is how much the organizers of the project simply were not prepared and did not adequately plan for the firestorm their community center and mosque project eventually engendered. One issue, that I’ve actually heard from other Muslim activists in New York City, is that the key players, Imam Faisal, his wife Daisy Khan and real estate developer Sharif El-Gamal, were not that tied in to the existing New York Muslim community. Not unknowns but just not that plugged in and, importantly, they had not extensively canvassed for support for the project within that community. Read More
The hard-fought GOP primary for governor of Georgia is finally over. After a primary election, a runoff election, and a long night of counting the votes, Karen Handel concedes to former Rep. Nathan Deal, who wins by a couple thousand votes.
TPM Reader PB finds the The Crazy “profoundly disturbing”:
I understand there is a strong temptation to look at primary victories by extreme candidates like Dan Maes as “good for Democrats.” As a strong Democratic partisan I also see them that way. And with Tancredo (another crazy person) in the race, I understand Maes’ chances of winning the gubernatorial are slim to none. On the other hand, I find it disturbing that someone like Maes was able to win the primary of a major political party. As a Democrat, I want to say “see look the Republicans have gone crazy.” But as an American I find the trend toward conspiracy theories and paranoia (on both the right and the left) profoundly disturbing.
Jon Stewart reviews Muslim plans to desecrate Ground Zero with ubiquitous Halal falafel carts. Watch it.
Maddow, on theory-of-relativity-debunking, global-warming-denying, evolution-refusing conservatives: “The war on brains is still being waged every day.” Watch.
See also, Tom Tomorrow (via Krugman).