Midday open thread

• Pollster Rasmussen: Hillary is not inevitable.
• There's been a long-running debate in the wingnutosphere about whether they should be "pundits" (like their heroes Rush and Hannity), or "activists" like the more effective progressive blogosphere. Here's Patrick Ruffini's latest on that theme, and it's a fascinating debate. (See this as well).

  The one thing the conservative blogosphere doesn't seem to grasp is that progressive bloggers have grown the way we have because we filled a market need -- strong progressive voices in the media. They have plenty -- in talk radio, on Fox News, even on CNN and MSNBC. We had no such regular voices on the radio until Air America came around, and none on TV until Keith Olbermann. So for a while, us bloggers were it.

• UN Daily Security Updates from Iraq: September 28 and September 30 (PDFs). Lots of progress and turned corners and last throes, as usual.
• Rudy ditches the GOP African American debate in order to accept an endorsement from Latino-hating former GOP California Gov. Pete Wilson, then attended a fundraiser hosted by Bo Derek. And acts like an asshole doing it.
• And speaking of Giuliani, it was his money people behind the now-seemingly aborted effort to steal a chunk of California's electoral votes for the GOP's benefit.

  A major New York fundraiser for GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has been revealed as the money man behind a proposed ballot measure that would have changed California's winner-take-all Electoral College vote system - and likely benefited Republicans.

  Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund executive and Giuliani policy adviser, acknowledged his role to the New York Daily News on Friday just a day after GOP organizers in California said they were folding their effort to collect signatures for the group called Californians for Equal Representation.

  The Chronicle reported earlier this week that Missouri attorney Charles Hurtt III was the legal agent for a tax-exempt corporation called "Take Initiative America," which provided the sole donation - $175,000 - to the effort to qualify the measure for the California ballot.

  But Hurtt and his organization would not reveal the source of their money - even as Democrats in California threatened legal action and charged that the GOP-backed effort smacked of money laundering. They suggested there were numerous links between the ballot effort and the Giuliani campaign, and challenged the former New York mayor's campaign aides to reveal where the money came from.

• Meet Shailagh "The Devil" Murray, reporter, Washington Post.

And two YouTube clips for you:

Iceland is no longer in the "Coalition of the Willing", since their one "troop" has been pulled out.

Meanwhile, Major General (Ret.) John Batiste on Rush Limbaugh:

Of course, what he says is irrelevant. He's a "phony soldier".