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.

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

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.

Americans views on Health Care Reform. For or against the bill passed this year?

Click on the TPM logo to see full sized graph.

New details emerge on plane crash the killed Ted Stevens and four others.

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.

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.

A new poll shows that 68% of Americans nationwide oppose the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”.

But top social conservative Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association says no more mosques.

At all.

Anywhere.

On the AFA’s website Fischer says no more mosques should be built in the United States at all.

Speaking yesterday on CNN PA Senate candidate Pat Toomey said he’s so hardcore against government spending he actually led a filibuster … on the House floor, um … where there’s no such thing as a filibuster. They only do that in the Senate.

What was sort of weird on this one is that our reporter Megan Carpentier rung up the Toomey campaign. And rather than saying he misspoke or something like that, they insisted that they’ve been calling what Toomey did a filibuster for a long time. So basically they’ve created their own little Toomey-world in which this really was a filibuster. And we should respect their indigenous Toomey culture and not try to impose our Western, journalistic norms on it.

Viva Toomistas!!

In his new article, Jeff Goldberg rates Israel’s chances of launching a unilateral attack on Iran at now above 50%- 50%. Steve Clemons looks at Goldberg’s argument and what’s to come.