The losing candidate in the Democratic Senate primary in Kentucky, Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, is seeking a recanvass of the election results, even though he conceded defeat last night. He trails Attorney General Jack Conway by 3,542 votes, or less than 1 percent of the votes cast. But we’ve talked to state officials in Kentucky and it looks like Mongiardo has a steep hill to climb here to make up the difference.

Ex-Knight Alan Stanford calls in Alan Dershowitz to fill out boffo defense team. They’re going for the argument that being held in prison is making it impossible for Stanford to prepare his own defense.

Conservative women’s group leader: “If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone. The frat house environment on Capitol Hill does nothing to encourage accountability.”

So is Rand Paul, on a personal level, just a deeply unlikeable guy? One of the weird things about his acceptance speech last night was that he held it at the local country club — to what looked uncannily like a members only crowd. This morning he defended the venue by saying that Tiger Woods has made golf a lot more popular. More to the point, news came out overnight that Paul allegedly refused to take Trey Grayson’s concession phone call last night. Read More

We’ll have more on this as the day goes on, but all this talk of anti-incumbency and “throw the bums out” really oversimplifies what’s going on out there. It’s an easy instant analysis, especially for the time-strapped broadcast media. But particularly as it concerns last night’s results, it’s such an overbroad analysis that it’s not just meaningless, it’s actually misleading.

In almost every respect the big losers last night were national Republicans. Even in cases where the ostensible Democrat lost or suffered a setback — Specter in Pennsylvania and Lincoln in Arkansas — the Democrats emerged with a stronger or potentially stronger candidate.

More on this later, but Democrats come out of last night in about as good a shape as they could possibly have hoped for. And Republicans have to be wondering if they are up to surfing the expected 2010 wave.

Way back during the Lewinsky debacle in 1998, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman got Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) on the phone for an interview and asked if he’d ever had an extramarital affair — at which point the line went dead because he apparently just hung up rather than answer the question.

So maybe we’ve all just had our head in the sand all this time about what old Souder was up to. Speaking of which, here’s the congressman in better days, emerging from Saddam Hussein’s spider hole during a tour of Iraq:

One other point worth making on the Kentucky Senate race. Kentucky remains very red, but the recent polling on a hypothetical match-up between Paul and Conway surprisingly shows Conway very much in this race. The current TPM Poll Average gives Paul a 44.7 to 38.4 lead, but the two most recent polls, taken this month, give Paul only a 1-point lead and 3-point lead:

Hypothetical match-ups are tricky to poll. Or I should say that there’s a higher degree of volatility when you’re asking voters to hypothesize. So it’ll be very interesting to see the new polling done after last night’s results now that it’s no longer a hypothetical match-up.

The general election for U.S. Senate in Kentucky between Rand Paul and Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway is shaping up as one of those races where the voters will have a real choice: tea partier or bona fide progressive? Evan McMorris-Santoro previews the race.

During the rush of the election results last night, Brian Beutler, our reporter on the Hill, kept checking in with me on the machinations on financial reform going on in the Senate, which continued to do business through the evening even as one of their colleagues went down to defeat and another was forced into a runoff. I couldn’t help but think that as the most of the political world was focused on the election results that the real political power struggle was taking place on the Hill.

Wall Street and its Senate allies are desperately trying to beat back changes to the financial bill that would make it a whole lot stronger and thus less favorable to the vested business interests. The fact that their efforts were taking place against the backdrop of an electorate that was in the process up uprooting some of the vested political interests made the battle more striking. But that has been the backdrop to the financial reform debate for the past several weeks, albeit not as starkly, and it’s precisely why the bill continues to move more or less in a progressive direction (even as progressives decry it as weak and insufficient to prevent another financial crisis).

For all the election drama of last night, the financial reform debate is in many ways more dramatic and almost certainly more significant. Brian gets us up to speed this morning on where things stand and what to expect today.

In the first poll of the Connecticut U.S. Senate race since the NYT expose on his fibbin’, Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s big double digit lead against pro-wrestling magnate Linda McMahon (R) has vanished. McMahon’s campaign took credit for tipping off the paper to Blumenthal’s Vietnam fudging.