Most Recent Posts

Good morning, fellow political junkies.

This week, the political headlines are expected to be dominated by several important off-year elections whose outcomes seem a foregone conclusion, if you believe the polls.

Democrat Terry McAulliffe in Virginia and Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey have significant polling leads in their governor's races. In New York City, Democrat and mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio appears poised to win in a blowout.

But that's tomorrow's news. On Monday, a critical procedural vote is scheduled in the Senate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which would give lesbian, gay, bisesexual and transgender workers similar federal protections against workplace discrimination like those protecting most other workers.

And that's a good place to start with a quick look at some of the more interesting pieces of political news or analysis that caught my eye this morning.

The Senate is thought to be one vote away from the 60 needed to advance the ENDA legislation to a final vote. One of several Republican senators is expected to provide the needed vote on a divisive issue for the GOP, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters reported. The bill's prospects in the GOP-controlled House are less certain.

And in an op-ed whose timing couldn't have been better for the ENDA debate, Maine congressman Michael Michaud, a Democrat running for governor, confirms that he's gay in an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News. "Yes, I am. But why should it matter?"

President Obama's aides have had to remake his schedule for the next few months because of the problems with the Affordable Care Act website. The president won't be spending nearly as much time at events urging people to enroll under Obamacare since the website is under repair. Instead, he will do more immigration and economic events, report Carol E. Lee and Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal.

Mitt Romney made news over the weekend by accusing President Obama of "fundamental dishonesty" in his sales pitches for the Affordable Care Act. Appearing on NBC New's Meet the Press, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee said Obama "has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it is rotting away."

Obamacare giveth. Under the ACA, millions of low-income people will be eligible for health plans that will cost them nothing because of the government-provided subsidies, report the New York Times' Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas.

Obamacare taketh away. The growing political threat to Democrats can be measured in the anecdotes that keep rolling in of people who have to buy more expensive insurance coverage because their older policies aren't being renewed under the law, report the Washington Posts Ariana Euchung Cha and Lena Sun.

Obama's tech buddy, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, slammed the NSA over allegations that the spy agency monitored traffic between the data centers of several Internet giants. He told the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Kan the NSA practices, if true, were "outrageous."

Former House Speaker Jim Wright, 90, was rebuffed on his first attempt to get a voter ID card in Texas, report the Ft. Worth Star Telegram's Terry Evans and Anna M. Tinsley. "Nobody was ugly to us but they insisted that they wouldn't give me an ID," he was quoted as saying.

Channeling his inner Andrew Jackson, Sen. Rand Paul joked (at least we think he was joking) to ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that if dueling weren't illegal in Kentucky he might challenge one of the "hacks and haters" who have accused him of plagiarizing in his speeches.

Small flickering oil lamps known as diyas are lighting up Indian homes in South Asian communities around the globe on Sunday as hundreds of millions of people observe Diwali.

Otherwise known as the Festival of Lights, it's a religious celebration of self-awareness and reflection. Diwali is a public holiday in a number of other nations, but it's not nearly so well-known in the U.S., where families must rely on themselves to keep the tradition alive.

Nestled among old colonial homes in Haverford, Pa., the Shukla home is a vibrant display of light and colorful decoration. Inside the kitchen, it's a feast for the senses. For the Shuklas, Diwali ushers in a new year for self-reflection or, as they put it, finding the light within.

He started at the Air Force's historical records agency down in Alabama, but the search ballooned wildly from there, into the National Archives, and then into interviews with surviving airmen from the unit. And then it continued onto these missions that he began making at least once a year to Palau, with a backpack full of gear, which over time became increasingly complex technology that he would use to try to find the airplane, including magnetometers and infrared film that he believed he might be able to use to see through the water in the channels of the islands. So he would strap himself into the open doorway of a Cessna and have a pilot fly him over these channels and he'd be hanging out, you know, almost parallel to the surface of the water.

But the problem was all of the accounts of what happened to this airplane were different. The stories that family members heard were different from the official story that they heard, which (was) also different from the stories that Palauan tribal elders who had observed the crash heard, and so none of it added up, and it was very hard to even have a sense of where he should be looking.

On the moment when, after a decade of searching, Scannon and his team found what they believed to be the rest of the plane

It was a moment of great joy and also great sorrow ... I've seen footage of the day that that plane was found, and you can see both those emotions so clearly on the faces. There's this sort of ashen-faced horror at having found the wreckage of at least part of this aircraft. And yet there was also this sense that after having spent the first decade of this process searching and searching, wondering, that they had finally come to a point of some clarity about at least where most of the plane and many of the men wound up.

On why the son of one of the airmen traveled to Palau to dive down and see the plane himself

He told me that when he went down to the plane he still wasn't sure whether his father was on it. Like so many families, he had grown up wondering if his father had perhaps found some way to get off the plane and survive. So he got to the dive site and he made his dive down and he saw the waist-gun door — this huge yawning opening where the 50-caliber machine gun sticks out. And he reached out and he touched the plane, and he held on, and he had a conversation with his father for the first time ever, feeling that perhaps his father was there — although he still had no way to know for sure.

Read an excerpt of Vanished

Steve Lickteig's life as he knew it was a lie. Lickteig thought he was the adopted son of a former World War II vet and his wife. Life was simple: They ran a farm in Kansas, went to mass at the local Catholic church and raised Steve and their eight biological children.

Lickteig wondered who his real parents were and thought he'd set out to find them someday. Then, when he turned 18, two of his best friends told him the truth: His adopted parents were actually his biological grandparents. The woman who he knew as his older sister was actually his mother.

Decades after that revelation, Lickteig turned the camera on his own family to try to understand how a secret like this could be kept for so long. Lickteig is the senior producer for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. His film is called Open Secret and it premieres in the U.S. Sunday night on Al Jazeera America. He joins NPR's Rachel Martin to discuss how his relationship with his family changed after he discovered their secret.