A fascinating little nugget out of Florida. Rudy Giuliani is going to be in Florida next week campaigning for … Marco Rubio. Now if there’s anything to what’s supposed to be Rudy’s brand of Republicanism (and yes, agreed, it’s quite a hypothetical) you’d expect him to be down there campaigning for Charlie Crist, not Rubio.

But then there’s that thing about payback. One of the most comical things about the 2008 presidential cycle was that Rudy was apparently banking everything not just on Florida — we knew that — but on Crist’s endorsement making the deal for him. What Rudy didn’t figure on though is that whatever the deal the two of them may have had (and Rudy seems to think they had a deal) it was going to be tough for Crist to come through for him if he came into Florida lolling around fat and happy under a 50 ton rock.

When does it end with this goof? Wake me when he comes out for the 10th amendment making Health Care Reform unconstitutional.

A fascinating reappraisal of the photographic memory of pre-war European Jewry by Alana Newhouse in the New York Times Magazine.

Read the whole piece. But one thing I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on. Alana begins the piece with a look at an iconic photograph (actually two photographs but serving as one) and explains that what we’d been told was happening in the photo is almost certainly false. I was struck by this because the mood of the faces in the photo seems playful, not terrorized or fearful. I thought this before I even read her description. So it seems odd to me that anyone could ever have believed the original description. What am I talking about? Hard to tell without seeing the photo. So hop over to Alana’s piece, see the photo and read the first few paragraphs and then come back and let me know what you think.

Once you’ve done that go back and read the whole thing.

Late Update: For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Newhouse is the Editor-in-Chief of Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news and culture.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) says Health Care Reform is a “cancer.” “You can’t take a tumor out in part. You’ve got to pull it all out.” Watch.

With polls showing the initiative to legalize marijuana in California could pass this November, it sets up a potential culture war flash point for the 2010 midterm elections.

Gen. McChrystal, chief of US forces in Afghanistan …

“We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective. We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”

See the rest of the story here.

Sometimes I think to myself: maybe people on the right wouldn’t have gotten so riled up if President Obama hadn’t pledged to pass Gun Reform in his first term.

Along those lines, Zack Roth compiles the top ten cases of right-wing anti-Obama/anti-government violence of the Obama Era … so far.

Steve Clemons asks if things are getting too cozy for some of the press covering the Obama White House.

Sen. John McCain holds a 15-point lead over Rep. J.D. Hayworth in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona, according to the latest poll.

The next big item on the legislative agenda in Washington is financial regulatory reform, where a familiar pattern is playing out. No Republicans in the Senate have indicated publicly that they’ll support the reform bill under consideration, but Democrats are confident they can peel away one or two or three GOPers to bypass a filibuster. Can they?

It’s too early to say that Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) is in trouble in the Democratic primary. It’s probably even too early to say that trouble is brewing there (although trouble is definitely brewing for her in the general election). But Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who’s challenging Lincoln, has to like how the early indicators are reading: he’s out-fund-raising her, the polls in their race are tightening a bit, and recent polls of the general election show him doing slightly better against the Republican field than she is doing.

In early April of a volatile year, those three positive indicators don’t add up to Halter momentum, but the absence of any one of those three would probably be enough to write off his campaign. So this one bears close watching.