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The results have not even been finalized in the quirky Alaska Republican Senate primary and already the political world is bracing itself for another instance in which an out-of-nowhere Tea Party candidate derails the highly-favored establishment contender.

On Monday, Democratic and Republican operatives alike expressed interest and consternation (respectively) over the possibility that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) could be the next victim of the purity purge inside the GOP tent.

Christine O'Donnell has, by and large, campaigned outside the media and political spotlight so far this election. But on Monday her efforts to take out Castle in the mid-September primary got a major boost when the Tea Party Express, which spent roughly $600,000 on Alaska Republican Joe Miller's challenge to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, pledged to do the same on her behalf.

The announcement was just the latest in a wave of Tea party momentum to build around O'Donnell's candidacy. The right-wing blogosphere has, likewise, either trumpeted or expressed intrigue in her campaign, disturbed, primarily, by Castle's moderate voting record. O'Donnell herself has pushed the meme, going so far as to pursue the endorsement of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) -- the Tea Party validator in the U.S. Senate -- and to include a picture of herself alongside the poster boy of Tea Party-ism: Florida Republican candidate Marco Rubio. This past weekend, in fact, O'Donnell shot footage at Glenn Beck's Lincoln Memorial rally for future use in her campaign ads.

Still, it remains a long shot effort but one that -- considering the current climate -- has Republicans spooked. While Castle leads Democratic nominee New Castle County Executive Chris Coons in the few public opinion polls out there; O'Donnell trails the Democratic nominee by ten percentage points.

"If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't debate her. She has no credibility." Delaware GOP party chair Tom Ross told Politico. "In the last quarter, she received a total of five donations from the state of Delaware, and she has a problem of the truth. The truth of the matter is she spends 90 percent of the time in Washington or elsewhere trying to raise money."

Perhaps the strongest indication that O'Donnell has people wary if not worried was an e-mail late on Monday sent by a Republican operative to the Huffington Post with a quizzical bit of background research on the Tea Party candidate. O'Donnell, it appears, has no discernible steady form of income.

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The Emmy Awards are almost here! Get ready for the red carpet by taking a look at some of the most glam gals from last year!
If you’re anything like me, you can’t wait to see the gorgeous gowns on the red carpet for the 2010 Emmy Awards on Aug. 29! What better way to gear up for the big night than by taking a look at some of my fave frocks from last year? From the sexy chic, (like Blake Lively’s plunging red Versace), to the whimsical, (like Drew Barrymore’s pale pink Monique Lhuillier), there were an array of dresses that blew me away. Take a look at these lovely ladies and tell us who you think was best dressed last year!

Just 1,200 people have been approved so far for a new program to provide insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, launched in July as one of the immediate benefits of the new health care reform law, offering coverage to the uninsurable until 2014 when people should be able to choose from affordable policies available on an "exchange."

There are roughly four million people uninsured because of pre-existing conditions, and Democrats touted the new program as one of the best immediate provisions of health care reform. But the PCIP's administrators have said they expect it to reach only 350,000 over the next three years. The program is run by the federal government in 22 states and by the state government in the rest.

Kaiser Health News reported that 3,600 people have applied and about 1,200 have been approved for the PCIP. An obstacle is the program's steep premiums, which range from $140 to $900 depending on an applicant's age and location, and its requirement that people be uninsured for six months before applying (though the PCIP is still less expensive and more generous than existing high-risk pools operating in 35 states.)

"As of August 1, over 2,400 people applied for coverage in the 22 States in which the Federal government is running PCIP," said a Health Department spokeswoman in a statement to HuffPost. "About 750 applications had been approved that we were waiting for premium payments from. Over 140 people were enrolled and set to receive coverage."

NEW YORK — The furor over how close is too close to ground zero for a planned Islamic center and mosque has raised a simple question nine years after Sept. 11: Where exactly is ground zero?

The lines marking the site of the 2001 terror attacks change depending on which New Yorker, 9/11 family member and American you talk to. Even those who know it best can't agree on its boundaries. Tourists who come to snap pictures outside of a busy construction site often aren't sure that they're there.

Andrew Slawsky, 22, stood outside the proposed mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of the World Trade Center site. He said ground zero isn't here.

"To me, ground zero is any site that was destroyed or damaged on 9/11 – mostly the hole in the ground," Slawsky said, referring to the ruins of the trade center towers.

But Maureen Santora, whose firefighter son was killed at the trade center, says ground zero extends far beyond the fenced-off construction site where cranes, skyscrapers and a Sept. 11 memorial are rising. It goes through a wide swath of lower Manhattan, where debris was littered on rooftops and body parts were found years later, she says.

"It will always be a place where my son was murdered. I don't care what they call this place," Santora said. "It will be a cemetery."

The evolving boundaries of ground zero have informed – or misinformed – the debate about its proximity to the planned Park51 community center. The farther away from the place, the bigger it seems.

"It's constructed as hallowed ground when people don't actually have a clear boundary for it or a clear sense of what's within the boundary," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor who studies political rhetoric. "What you have is a classic instance of people responding to a symbol whose meaning is physically divorced from the actual space."

Ground zero for decades had conjured up images of the atomic bomb blasts in 1945. After Sept. 11, it became a journalistic shorthand that evoked war and devastation, with an Associated Press report on the day of the attacks referring to the ruins of the towers as ground zero.

Here's any easy bet to win today in Washington (or anywhere else where true political junkies gather): Where did polling miss the mark most yesterday, in Florida's Republican primary for Governor or Florida's Democratic primary for Senate?

Judging by the tweets I've seen (and my own snap judgment), most of you may be thinking the polls were most off in the Governor's race, where most of the final polls showed Bill McCollum leading. If so, you'd be wrong. The three polls fielded in the last week on the Democratic Senate contest understated Kendrick Meek's margin by an average of 11 percentage points. The three final week polls on the Republican Governor's underestimated Rick Scott's margin by an average of just 5 points (the absolute value of the errors was 7.7; all of these numbers are based on the unofficial count with all precincts reporting).

Thus, we have another example of the pre-election pollster's paradox: The errors that get noticed are those that are just wrong enough to give everyone the wrong impression about the likely winner.

But let's focus on the Republican primary for Governor, for now, since theories are flying about why some polls missed Scott's looming victory. I asked our Pollster.com colleague, University of Wisconsin Professor Charles Franklin, to run one of his patented "bullseye" polling error charts. The chart below displays each poll as a dot, with the vertical axis representing Scott's percentage, the horizontal axis representing McCollum's percentage, and the center of the bullseye representing the actual result.

HOUSTON (AP) -- Federal investigators seeking the cause of the rig explosion that led to BP's massive Gulf oil spill focused Monday on communication and chain of command, wondering at times whether the key players knew enough to handle an emergency.

They also questioned whether a piece of failed equipment designed to prevent the disaster was inspected on schedule. Details about the so-called blowout preventer, which was supposed to lock in place to prevent a spill in the case of an explosion, will be important as investigators pull it from the seabed to analyze.

Testimony about the frantic moments after the spill, when a distraught worker told the rig manager "she just blew, she just blew," will also be key to understanding what happened April 20. That's when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers and subsequently spewing 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Two men who testified Monday were key to the successful operation of the complex deepwater rig. But Neil Cramond, who oversees BP's marine operations in the Gulf, acknowledged he rarely had contact with Paul Johnson, who managed the rig for owner Transocean Ltd., which leased it to BP.

Cramond also testified that captains of rigs like the Deepwater Horizon are ultimately responsible for crew safety and environmental matters, but are not always involved in decisions about how to deal with drilling operations and potential risks.

Members of the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement investigative panel are trying to figure out what caused the explosion and how regulation, safety and oversight can be improved to prevent another such catastrophe.

Investigators asked Johnson about whether maintenance of the blowout preventer had been up to code. Johnson testified that a September 2009 safety audit did not include a complete inspection of the device, and so "I don't think it's a complete audit."

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON — The troubled security firm formerly known as Blackwater will pay $42 million in fines to settle thousands of violations of U.S. export control regulations, according to The New York Times.

The newspaper reported on its website Friday that the Moyock, N.C.-based company now known as Xe (zee) Services reached a settlement agreement with the State Department.

The alleged violations included providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan and making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan, the newspaper said. The State Department requires government approval before the transfer of certain types of military technology or knowledge to other countries.

A company spokeswoman confirmed the deal to The Associated Press but did not immediately know the amount. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he was unaware of the settlement and had no comment.

The settlement involves practices from before Blackwater was rebranded as Xe Services.

The private company provided guards and services to the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It became one of the most respected defense contractors in the world but also attracted sharp criticism over its role in those missions.

It has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 people and outraged the Iraqi government. A federal grand jury has indicted five Blackwater officials on conspiracy weapons and obstruction of justice charges.

The company still has contracts to provide security for both the State Department and the CIA in Afghanistan. In June, the CIA gave Xe an additional $100 million contract to provide security for its regional offices in Afghanistan.

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com

The Democratic National Committee is once again using the imagery and words of former President George W. Bush to present a stark "choice" to voters heading into November in what an aide said is the DNC's first television ad directly related to the midterms.

"This fall, America faces a big choice: Do we continue to move forward like the Democrats are doing? Investing in education for every child, manufacturing right here at home, clean energy powering a new economy. Do we put Main Street ahead of Wall Street; do we hold big business accountable when they've gone to far? Or do we go back to the same Republican policies that got us into this mess?" the spot reads before fading to audio of Bush proclaiming "you can't get fooled again."

As a first salvo in the 2010 cycle, the advertisement makes the macro pitch for keeping Democrats in power. Echoing a new stump speech from President Obama, the election isn't a referendum, it's about choosing between a reversion to old economic policies or building on recent accomplishments.

Whether the specter of Bush is enough to energize voters or, simply, a tired boogeyman remains to be seen. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was asked about the role his brother has been playing so far in the 2010 elections.

"It's a loser issue -- they have a big L on their foreheads," Bush told the New York Times. "If that's all they've got, it's a pretty good indication of the problems that the Democrats face in 2010."

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said on Wednesday that conservative criticism of plans to develop a mosque and Islamic community center in close proximity to "Ground Zero" in New York City is "one of the most disgraceful things that I've heard."

"I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it," he said, according to the State Journal-Register.

“It’s a community center. They’re going to have a gym. They’re going to have point guards. Muslim point guards,” Franken said, to laughter and applause.

“They (Republicans) do this every two years. They try to find a wedge issue, and they try to work it.”

Franken also reportedly called out former House Speaker Newt Gingrich specifically for incendiary comments about the proposed religious center earlier this week.

"The most offensive thing I heard was from Newt Gingrich: 'We can't let the Nazis put up a building next to the Holocaust Museum," asserted the Democratic Senator. "That's equating all Muslims with Al Quaida. George W. Bush said Al Quaida is 'a perversion of Islam.'"

Gingrich analogized building the religious establishment near "Ground Zero" to Nazis putting up signs close to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. on Monday's edition of "Fox and Friends."

In sharing his take on the matter, Franken told his audience, "I lost a friend in 9-11 and I understand the feelings of the families."

Levi Johnston, the on again, off again boyfriend of Bristol Palin and father of ex-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's grandson, is reportedly set to break into the music business.

Politico reports that plans are in the works for Johnston to star opposite singer-songwriter Brittani Senser in the music video for her R&B song "After Love":

It's set to air the week of Sept. 12 to coincide with MTV's Video Music Awards, Senser's agent, Belinda Foster, told POLITICO in an email. Johnston completed the video shoot in Los Angeles on Monday...
Johnston recently made a red carpet appearance with Senser at the Teen Choice Awards.

According to TMZ, the 20-year-old will appear in the video as a man facing a perceived threat from his lover's mother -- a role that reportedly doesn't make his erstwhile girlfriend/fiancee/baby mama Bristol too happy:

But here's the part that may have REALLY pissed off Bristol -- in the video, the girl's mother uses a police officer to arrest Levi and drag him to an empty parking lot ... where she confronts him and forces him to open a mysterious manila envelope.
Levi opens the package -- and his face turns "pale" at its contents. The mother then makes Levi call up her daughter and break things off ... with the insinuation that she would expose something if he refused.

News of the music video debut comes on the heels of reports that Johnston is cooking up a bid for mayor in his hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, as part of a developing reality television show.

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com