Today Michaele and Tareq Salahi were on MSNBC to talk about their latest run in with the Secret Service. Considering all the rumors that the Salahis will be starring in a series on MSNBC’s sister network Bravo soon (coincidence!: they also showed up on the Today show this morning), the Salahis were probably expecting a puff piece interview. But that is not what MSNBC’s Lynn Berry gave them. Things got very uncomfortable, very quickly.

ABC News is reporting that the Secret Service stopped a limousine carrying Michaele and Tareq Salahi last night, as it ran a red light and tried to enter a restricted parking area for the White House. The Salahis are best known for crashing the last state dinner, and the White House made it known that [...]

As the White House prepares for tonight’s state dinner for Mexican President Felipe Calderón, they have taken steps to ensure that this affair quiets the unfortunate echoes of November’s Salahi-crashed state dinner. At Monday’s briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs assured reporters that additional steps will be taken, although he wouldn’t elaborate for fear of tipping off potential crashers. I did manage to get Gibbs to confirm one change, that there will be someone from the Social Secretary’s office at the Secret Service checkpoint.

2009 has been a year of controversies. Some of them were big, like Climategate. Some of them were not very big, but were nevertheless blown up by blogs and cable news, like Jackass-gate, when President Obama referred to Kanye West as a “Jackass.” Many were united by that ever-persistent “-gate” suffix. In this slideshow, Mediaite fondly looks back on a year of -gates (and wonders if it’s time to give the “-gate” suffix a rest):

There were several disappointments at Thursday’s Crasher-gate hearing, but chief among them were Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan‘s continued insistence that the now-famous security breach posed no threat to the President, and the committee’s focus on Social Secretary Desiree Rogers‘ role in said breach. This is absurd on two counts.

During House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Crashergate, the Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan spent the morning on the hot seat for his agency’s failure to repel uninvited guests Michaele and Tareq Salahi from last Tuesday’s White House state dinner. Among the revelations this morning is the embarrassing fact that, according to Sullivan, the Secret Service learned of the breach on Facebook.

As a Congressional hearing gets underway to drill down on how the uninvited Salahi couple managed to breach White House security, the White House has removed any and all doubt as to whether the Secret Service might have had a legitimate excuse for letting the couple past the first checkpoint.