The Federal Election Commission published new rules today for political donations.  This is my interpretation (thanks to DSCC staff for help, but any errors are my responsibility).  For anyone who has a 5 or 6 figure donation budget has to follow these rules:

The major DCCC donors were invited to a dinner party at the Italian Embassy in honor of Nancy Pelosi on the eve of her becoming the first Italian American speaker of the house.  Some folks had asked about how the donors were celebrating, and we weren't asked to keep anything confidential, so here goes:

See below for the whole story.

The New York Times has a major story this morning http://www.nytimes.com/...
on trading votes for "pork barrel" spending in the member's districts.

The gist of the article is that Murtha leads a small group of democrats who will vote with the republicans in exchange for massive amounts of defense spending being specifically directed to their districts.

He has sided with Republicans 169 times on close votes since 1994, more often than all but three of the most conservative Democrats. Many of those votes have been on nonideological but politically pivotal questions. For example, Mr. Murtha has often led members from his corner crowd to vote for procedural rules that limit potential amendments or debate on Republican bills -- votes that typically follow party loyalty.

More below...

Today's New York Times has a story, mostly about the inconvenience of people who's social security numbers are used by illegal immigrants.  The important point that I get is that all of these people are paying money into the Social Security system, with no plans to ever get any money out.  That money is a significant subsidy to everyone else.

"It's basically a subsidy from migrant workers to the aggregate of American taxpayers," said Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton who studies Mexican migration.

(See below for more)

(This is breaking on the BBC)

President Bush has authorized the marines to recall the inactive reservists (marines who have been out of the corp, not training or anything) 2,500 at a time to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is not going to be popular with those marines who thought that they were done with the war, or with their families.

See below the fold for the rest of the BBC's story.

Merriam Webster published a report of the most popular definitions requested from their on-line dictionaries.

With clear political implications as a non-scientific survey of what is on people's minds, they are:

 10. inept
  9. levee
  8. conclave
  7. pandemic
  6. tsunami
  5. insipid
  4. filibuster
  3. contempt
  2. refugee

and number one is:

  1. Integrity

Take a look here if you want to see for your self:  http://www.m-w.com/...

Over in Broward county (Fort Lauderdale) a huge number of New Yorker dems were using the NAACP offices as their HQ.  They report that the Democratic party offical poll watchers are being very aggressive and successfully defending the voters who are being challenged.  There are a lot of people who have been working very hard in Florida today.

They have a few people who saw the wrong name in the summary, and went back and changed their ballots.  People who arrived at the last minute did vote with "provisional" paper ballots.

Best of all, the republican poll watchers said as they were leaving that their exit polls say that Kerry won Florida.

As JFK says, we don't claim that God is on our side, we pray that we are on God's side.

A large group of New York democrats (including my wife) spent the day going door to door in Scranton Pennsylvania.  They saw a lot of people who are not doing well financially, mostly democratic, mostly Kerry voters.  The mission was to talk to anyone who was undecided to show them the light, and to make lists of people who said they would vote for Kerry.  (Dem staffers will cross check the lists at the polling places on election day, and call people in the early evening if they haven't shown up yet).

Most importantly, they were distributing memos on where the polling places are...