Alright folks - it's Obama's birthday, and folks are aiming to have a "money bomb" today of epic proportions.  (I've heard some say the goal is $10 million in donations.)

DONATE HERE.

Also check out the other birthday thread from last night.

After you donate, head HERE to phonebank for the campaign.  Try making 47 calls today.

Search for local Obama campaign events HERE.

Let's keep at least one Birthday money bomb thread on the reclist for all of today.

Here's a viral email about McCain - please email it on to independents / Republicans you know. (Even to Democrats.) Especially send it out to folks you know who seem to like forwarding chain emails...because we might as well get those folks to help us.  Unlike anti-Obama emails, this email contains the complete truth (where it says "THE TRUTH").  (Thanks to Jed for several of these statements.)

(The email is intentionally phrased as if it is being nice to McCain, but it is really exposing how much money he has and how he wastes it.  You know, how he isn't in touch with anyone whose net worth is less than $100 million.)

Here's a teaser (full email below the fold):

I've been concerned that there are too many rumors going around about John McCain and I wanted to help set the facts straight. Please forward this email to everyone you know.

THE LIE: John McCain gambles away hundreds of thousands of dollars at the craps tables in Las Vegas.

THE TRUTH: While John McCain does frequently play craps in Las Vegas in continuous 14-hour sessions, it is unlikely that he has ever gambled away $100,000 in a single session.

The netroots / blogosphere has picked its favorites, be they Rick Noriega or Darcy Burner or Scott Kleeb.  (All three of whom are great candidates.)

In this diary, I wanted to spread the love a bit to a few candidates that don't get mentioned much, or at all.  Please help me in this task.

Oftentimes moderate Democrats running in Republican districts, who don't and can't hew to the hard left like we might like, lose out in the online popularity contests.  But at the end of the day, their one vote will count for just as much, and will each be replacing the vote of a bad GOP legislator.

In this diary I detail 5 house candidates and 5 senate candidates that are worthy of your donations - even $5 - via ActBlue at this link.  Even better, sign up for a recurring contribution - it helps ensure the candidates a steady financial situation.

50 days.

That's the amount of time we have until the Democratic National Convention - when Sen. Obama gets officially nominated and the election goes into a crazy free-fall until the election.

After that, we have less than 40 days to register new voters before the October 6th voter registration deadline in critical states like Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Let's use the energy of this weekend's celebration to kick-start our own local on-the-ground action.  Take a chance on something you might not have otherwise.

In this diary are some ideas and ways you can get started today.  Please sign up for something, and let everyone else what you've found worked well and what didn't.  Obama has inspired the next generation - let's do our part to pass on a better country to them.

We're up against 3 formidable independent forces in this election: a complacent (or complicit) media pushing pro-McCain, anti-Obama stories, 527 groups that are waiting to attack, and voting machine problems.

We tell ourselves "never again" about 2000 and 2004 - these three forces were in large part to blame for the losses in those years.  What are we willing to do to ensure that "never again" do we repeat 2000 or 2004?  In other words, how can we, independent of the Obama campaign's machinery, overcome these forces?  How much of a vote margin do we need to give Obama to overcome these 3 forces?

Read on to see why I believe we must recruit 198,000 new volunteers who will garner 9.9 million new votes.

Al Giordano has a brilliant analysis of the social movement that Obama has led to get us where we are today as a campaign.  When others doubted this strategy, Obama and his team held firm, and discipline won out in the end.

He begins with a quote from Karen Tumulty in TIME:

Barack Obama was campaigning last October in South Carolina when he got an urgent call from Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who leads his campaign’s finance committee. About 200 of his biggest fund raisers were meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, and among them, near panic was setting in. Pritzker’s team had raised money faster than any other campaign ever had. Its candidate was drawing mega-crowds wherever he went. Yet he was still running at least 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in polls. His above-the-fray brand of politics just wasn’t getting the job done, and some of his top moneymen were urging him to rethink his strategy, shake up his staff, go negative. You’d better get here, Pritzker told Obama. And fast.

"I think you'll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say," she [Clinton] said. "He’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002."

The question I've been asking myself is a simple one: how many Democratic primary voters have actually read Obama's 2002 Iraq speech in full?  Have you, kind reader, read his speech in full?  Have you passed on the full text of his speech to others?  Have you printed it out and passed it along?

In this diary I present a flashback to Obama's Iraq speech from 2002, and dissect his speech into parts to see how his campaign philosophy and platform can be traced to his 926 words from October 2, 2002.

If you haven't read Obama's Iraq war speech before, or haven't read it recently, please take two minutes and read it now (below).

In a stunning move, the Clintons have released the first page of their 2006 tax returns (digg link).

OK, but more seriously, consider that the Clinton campaign made releasing tax returns a central attack on Rick Lazio (extended quote after the jump), yet they refuse to release their own in this campaign.

This diary serves as a collection point where we can reconstruct the entire contents of their tax returns.  Included are wages (senate income), consulting (speaking fees), books, capital gains, and pension (Bill Clinton's presidential pension).  It's incomplete as of now, but I think that we need to put heavy emphasis on this issue this week, and the first step is putting together a plausible list of what we expect to find.  That's what this diary is about, and I need your help.

Finally, we must consider income not seen on tax returns, such as donations to the Clinton presidential library.

Alright folks.  This is something that became very clear to me yesterday:  John McCain will be very very bad for this country - the country that we as Democrats are fighting to save from a disastrous 8 years - some of the worst 8 years this country has seen in several decades.

We have been the party of principles - principles that are grounded in the people and the constitution and common sacrifice and common wealth.  Clinton has spoken about how it takes a village.  Obama has spoken about how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Where am I going with this?  What event caused me to realize the trouble that lies ahead?  This is my call to both Obama and Clinton supporters.  This diary is about stepping back and seeing the ocean for the waves. I know, it may not sound as fun as the latest attack diary, but there's a broader picture here.  Please read on, and rec if you want to promote some healthy pro-Democrat dialog.

Cross-posted at MyDD.

Does the title of this diary not make much sense?  Well, it shouldn't, but it appears as though the folks that run Hillaryis44.org (a vile but popular site, for those who don't know) are not only embedding javascript to direct traffic to illegal online pharmacies, but are also using hacked webservers to go one step further.

Details after the jump.

Yesterday I read about the first solution to the Michigan and Florida delegate crisis that I am willing to accept as an Obama supporter, and I'd like to share this compromise with you in the hopes that we can get the DNC to adopt it.

First, we need to understand the reason we have to accept a compromise or a revote:  the Clinton campaign will stop at nothing, will take it to court if they have to, and will eventually only hurt Obama even more as he tries to move on to the general election.  We need to win the PR war here, even if it means "rewarding FL/MI for breaking the rules".

So, given the bind we're in, we need to do what will help the party win in November: we need a compromise of some sort or we need a re-vote.  The re-vote doesn't look likely at this point, but that's not important - it is actually better for us to not have to deal with a repeat Pyrrhic victory that Clinton will get out of a Florida win, and the associated spin that will last for a few weeks.  Without a revote, she won't get the free press from that to push her case (despite still being behind in delegates and votes, no matter the outcome there).

This leaves a compromise, and after the jump I'll present why I think it may be the best option we have.

We need to bring back the Dodd talk clock.  No, not for debates, because, if we're lucky, there won't be any more of those in the primaries.

We need the Dodd talk clock for network news coverage.  Case in point: I was just reading a comment that CNN's ballot bowl '08 coverage during a particular one hour block had two Hillary Clinton speech clips, a Bill Clinton speech clip, and a McCain clip, but no Obama or Obama surrogate clips.

Enter the Dodd talk clock: just put up the numbers, broken down by program, of unfiltered time given to video of the candidates by CNN during their political coverage, and publish the numbers.  That's it.  (We'd have to not count clips less than, say, 30 seconds, because otherwise we'd end up including time given to speech clips that are then picked apart by know-nothing pundits.)

Would someone be willing to do this?  (I rarely watch TV, let alone CNN.)

Americans had a hard time finding out where their hard-earned tax dollars went. Until December 2007.

Now we can track contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans, thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 of Tom Coburn and Barack Obama.

What's at the site? Read on for 13 examples (contracts with KBR/Halliburton, VECO, and General Atomics, Tom Delay's pork and Duke Cunningham's backers, no bid contracts with defense contractors, contracts with shadowy Blackwater subsidiaries, declining support for homeless veterans with increasing support for abstinence programs, spending on guided missiles, maintenance of dams, and stranger things including flags, perfumes, hand tools, and boll weevil eradication).

I also talk about how this fits into Sen. Obama's broader plans to make government transparent.

The win in South Carolina was great. But it's just a start.

All of us know that the opposition will just grow more determined and aggressive. And the smear emails will keep going and morphing.

I'd like to trace them: try to find their patterns and their origins. And I'd like to apply some recent techniques from computer science research on worm/virus propagation to do so.

What I need, though, is data. And that's why I'm turning to everyone here.

To begin with, please forward any smears you get to smearbank@gmail.com.  This isn't limited to just Obama smears, but any smear emails circulating out there.

Read on...

How do we tell voters what Obama stands for, but do it in a way that isn't burdensome?

The answer: 1 page flyers.

The problem is that the campaign has not provided us with any such flyers.  Most policy documents are really long, and while they're complete, they're hard to hand out.  Also, the "Blueprint for Change" document has a great amount of detail.  But people don't want to read something that huge on first glance.  And heading into the remaining states, we're going to be dealing less and less with "high information voters".

So, continuing what I started on for Iowa, I present to you in this diary 2 new flyers, each of which help us tell voters where Obama stood on Iraq in the past and what he plans on doing about it in the future.

Also, for those who are interested, you can also check out my "2nd choice" flyer that I made for Iowa.

Greetings from Lisbon, Iowa.  I'm here in the high school cafeteria and we're just getting started with today's festivities.

Read on for liveblogging of the evening's events.

Disclaimer: This report is not in any way intended to be representative of what is happening in Iowa, let alone here in Lisbon.  It's only an account of what I see from a corner of the room. Also, I am an Obama supporter, but as an observer, I cannot and will not speak during the time I'm here.  (Clarification - I am not participating in the caucus.  So I fall into the "press/media/observer" category.)

Americans had a hard time finding out where their hard-earned tax dollars went.  Until 2 days ago.

Now, thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama, anyone can discover the pockets of federal dollars.  The site tracks contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans.

What can we dig up?  Read on for 7 examples (contracts with KBR/Halliburton, Tom Delay's pork, no bid contracts with defense contractors and even the government of Canada, spending on guided missiles, maintenance of dams, and stranger things including flags, perfumes, and hand tools).  I also talk about how this fits into Sen. Obama's broader plans to make government transparent.

I've posted a substantially revised version of this diary here

Today witnessed the launch of USAspending.gov, which was created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama.  The site enables tracking of $1 trillion in federal spending on contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans.  The bill faced serious opposition, including anonymous holds by some of the biggest porkbarrel spenders (including Ted Stevens), but in the end, Coburn and Obama prevailed.

So what kind of data does this site give us?  Well, how about the top 100 recipients of federal money, or say which congresspeople rake in the most pork.  And that's just scratching the surface.