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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

The three-way is on in Florida.

A couple days ago I told you about Iowa congressional hopeful Dr. Pat Bertroche who advocated forcibly implanting illegal immigrants with microchips so authorities could more easily track their movements.

It seems people were taking him too literally. Bertroche now says that he took the step of advocating an obviously crazy idea as a way to dramatize how the immigration debate has gotten completely off track and other ideas are no less crazy than the one he advocated while not actually advocating it.

Or something like that.

“This idea isn’t any more politically dumb than any other one,” Bertroche tells TPM. “I was trying to call attention to how radical the conversation has become.”

In a fight for his political life back home in Nevada, Harry Reid is doubling down on Health Care Reform.