Dems are trying to scare Washington state’s Dino Rossi out of challenging Sen. Patty Murray.

I can’t count the number of emails we’ve gotten over the years asking whatever happened to the criminal case against Tom Delay down in Texas. Here’s your answer. The case is back on after an appeals court in Texas reversed a lower court ruling on a key money laundering charge in the case involving Delay’s Texans for a Republican Majority.

One of the more amusing quotes of this young election year comes from that Iowa Republican congressional candidate who proposed implanting microchips in illegal aliens.

He talked to our Eric Lach and insisted that he was not making a serious proposal. However, as long as we were on the topic, he offered the assurance, as a physician, that there’s no cancer risk associated with doing it: “I don’t support microchipping people, but if it’s going to become part of the debate — which was not my intent — then microchipping people is not one of those things that is going to cause long-term cancer problems.”

Got it?

Some scenes from the looming environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico:

Charlie Crist’s independent run for U.S. Senate makes for a fascinating general election in Florida. Eric Kleefeld previews the three-way race.

That whole reform thing is hard work because people don’t want to be reformed.

Jon Stewart had on former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell (R) and things weren’t going all that well even before Blackwell asserted that George W. Bush didn’t try to expand executive power. Watch.

At a Washington breakfast this morning, NRSC Chairman John Cornyn (R-TX) told reporters that when Charlie Crist quits the GOP primary later today, the NRSC and Cornyn’s own PAC will demand Crist return their contributions.

Jillian Rayfield, with help from TPM readers, uses the crazy immigration law in Arizona as a springboard to look at some of the most-off-the-wall legislation to come out of the states recently. Fun stuff.

With Charlie Crist’s expected announcement this afternoon that he’ll run as independent in the Florida Senate race, we now have two major candidates in the general election facing serious political and legal blowback over the spending and self-dealing scandals rocking the Florida Republican Party.