Eric Kleefeld has the latest developments in the Minnesota governor’s race recount.

After that fun moment with freshman Rep. Andy Harris, some Dem activists have been encouraging congressional Republicans who oppose Health Care Reform to forego their government-subsidized health care benefits. After all, fighting the scourge of Obamacare starts at home.

Interestingly, though, Republican voters agree. Republicans across the country overwhelmingly agree that Republicans on Capitol Hill should give up their government-provided health insurance.

28% of Republicans say take the benefits; 58% say don’t.

Chief of staff to Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ) fired after arrest in suburban DC for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor in a police sting.

An interesting take from Roy Temple and Michael D. Jones on which part of conservative political communications strategy is worth emulating and why: “Conservatives are the heroes of their own stories. Progressives need to internalize that same sense of pride in their efforts and then infuse their policy narratives with political champions.”

After a couple of posts on Netflix, our reader email is starting to look like Netflix’s customer service complaint line (although I gather Netflix doesn’t offer customer service via email anymore). But there’s one complaint about the streaming video service that jumped out: the limited availability of closed captioning for the hearing impaired. Read More

A detailed, narrative account of the almost 20 hours from crash to rescue in the mountainside wreckage of that plane crash that took the life of former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and four others back in August.

I did a brief segment on Hardball this afternoon. And as I was waiting to go on, I listened through my earpiece to the preceding segment on the on-going TSA/pat-down controversy saga. The key is that I was mic’ed up so could only hear the audio. I wasn’t able to see who Matthews was interviewing. But it was a rank introduction to the level of lurid and vulgar demagoguery a lot of conservatives are resorting to to milk this story for political gain. The guy Matthews was talking to kept referring to people’s right not to be forced to have “nudie” pictures taken of them or their daughters and wives. Always with the menfolk unwilling to let their daughters and wives be ‘scanned’ — but that’s another story.

In any case, it’s worth remembering that the idea that your daughter or whoever strikes you as your most inviolable kin is having a ‘nude’ picture taken of them is just nonsense. Whatever else you can say about the backscatter scans, they usually reveal about as much as you do walking around the pool in a tight bathing suit. (Note: A number of the more revealing ‘backscatter’ pics you find on Google are actually fakes.) Of all the issues I’ve seen raised in this story, the invasiveness of the backscatter imaging strikes me as by far the weakest. And a poll out today shows that the public overwhelming approves of the use of the scanners as a tool to combat airliner terrorism. The pat-downs are another matter. And I’ve heard enough to make me wonder about the longterm risks of repeated exposure to these scans.

Next up was a clip from Mike Huckabee in a really gutter-minded, scurrilous voice daring President Obama to take his wife and two daughters to National Airport and have them get an aggressive pat-down in full view of the public if he wants ‘our’ wives and daughters to submit to the same. The mix of race and sex and populist demagoguery packed into Huckabee’s verbal slash was enough to bring you back to one of a hundred or a thousand rants below the Mason-Dixon line fifty or sixty or seventy years ago.

Now, let’s stipulate to the obvious fact that having me or you get a pat-down in a crowded airport while most people are more concerned about getting to their planes on time or aggravated about standing in line or whatever is a rather different matter than even imagining the sort of nutso media circus that would ensue with the president having to drag his 9 and 12 year old daughters down to DCA for a pat-down that would amount to a ritual humiliation in front of the international press corps. The comment itself, the visual created, is simply disgusting, as is the whole personalizing of the situation with regards to the president.

He’s president. He’s ultimately responsible. But President Obama didn’t come up with this idea. And bringing the air of looming sexual threat to his daughters or even his wife in cheap political hustler comments is just shameful.

There’s no other way to put it.

Late Update: I found video of the segment here.

For a rising-star like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), surviving the midterms was only half the battle: Now comes the bleak landscape of fewer plum committee assignments, less influence and a rockier road to leadership.

It was pretty audacious for former Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer to file suit against the party for failing to pay him severance after it fired him for allegedly defrauding the party of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But then Greer — currently awaiting trial on criminal charges related to the alleged fraud — took it a step further and invoked his right against self-incrimination in refusing to be deposed in his own lawsuit. So the judge has thrown the lawsuit out.

Here’s a good, measured run-down of some of the possible safety concerns about those backscatter x-rays. The issue isn’t that there’s clear evidence they’re unsafe but rather than this particular technology operates somewhat differently and may be used somewhat differently than the x-rays used in the studies that supposedly prove their safety.

Interestingly, there’s another technology, millimeter-wave scanners, that doesn’t use x-rays at all and seems not to have any health concerns tied to it at all. They’re in use in a few airports but not many. Ironically, for those worried about junk-exposure, they seem to produce slightly more revealing images than the backscatter junk detectors.