Steele speaks out on lesbian-themed bondage event: “It’s what happens in a business.”

Meet Rolando Negrin. He works for the TSA. But probably not for much longer. You’ve heard for a while about those backscatter airport security scanners that can see through your clothes.

Negrin has been arrested for aggravated battery for attacking a colleague after coworkers poked fun at the size of his penis during a body-scanning machine training session.

In the current political climate — with its mix of resurgent culture war politics and a still deep recession, Ohio is the last place I’d expect to see as a bright spot for Democrats. But the number for Democrat Lee Fisher have actually been trending up. And now even Rasmussen has him a point ahead of Republican Rob Portman.

Our Justin Elliott works the terrorism beat here at TPM. And he noticed that the Obama DOJ seemed to be using the already existing “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule in a greatly expanded and qualitatively novel way.

Beneath all the partisan back and forth about reading terror suspects their Miranda rights, this is the real story about what’s going on. Really a must-read.

TPM Reader MS makes a point about the Ohio senate race that I confess I’m embarrassed I didn’t consider. As I noted below, Democrat Lee Fisher is doing fairly well and seems to be on the upswing. (Interestingly, the Dem is rising on a similar trend in the state’s governor’s race.) The Republican in the race is former Congressman Rob Portman. But here’s the key. Portman served in 2005 and 2006 as President Bush’s U.S. Trade Representative.

Now, I think Democrats tend to be a lot more bark than bite on using trade policy to protect domestic industries — an unwillingness that on policy grounds I think I often agree with. Still, that will put Portman on the line for a lot of trade policies that could prove a real heavy load to carry in a state like Ohio during a bad recession. At a minimum, they’ll provide a lot of grist for political attacks from his Democratic opponent, Fisher.

The first ballot has been finished at the Utah Republican convention, where Sen. Bob Bennett (R) could potentially lose re-nomination without a primary unless he can reach 40% of the delegate vote.

The results, courtesy of the Salt Lake Tribune: Attorney Mike Lee 28.75%, businessman Tim Bridgewater 26.84%, the incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett 25.91%, and businesswoman Cherilyn Eagar 15.84%, with four others at around 1% or less each.

Now the convention will move on to the second ballot, in which only the top three choices — Lee, Bridgewater and Bennett — are competing. One of them will be eliminated, bringing the race down to two, and it can’t look good for Bennett going into this round in third place. As a GOP source in Utah told me yesterday: “if Bennett is third, then I think Bennett is toast, because Bennett is not gonna get many second votes of the delegates.”

Before getting caught returning from a European vacation with a gay escort George Rekers apparently made a nice living as an expert on the evils of homosexuality.

In fact, back in 2008, Bill McCollum, Florida’s attorney general who is now the leading Republican candidate for Governor, paid Rekers at least $60,000 in taxpayer funds to serve as an expert witness on homosexuality as McCollum was defending the state’s law banning adoptions by gay couples.

Muhlenberg is running a daily tracking poll of the Democratic senate primary in Pennsylvania. And after surging over the last few days, Joe Sestak has pushed into a 2 point lead in today’s number.

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) has been defeated for re-nomination at his state party’s convention.

Google’s Chrome browser continues its rapid growth. The last time we checked the percentage of TPM Readers using Chrome was in January of this year, when it accounted for 7.17% of visits to the site.

By April that number had risen to 9.15%.