Midday open thread

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday October 18, 2006 · 11:47 AM PDT

2006/10/18 · 11:47

I voted today. Feels good to vote against Ahnold. And the California initiative process needs desperate reform. As always, on principle, I voted "no" on every single one of them even though I was sympathetic to many of the initiatives.

Bowers updates his House and Senate rankings. His verdict? 21-28 seats in the House and 4-6 in the Senate.

If ActBlue wasn't a passthrough PAC, it would be the largest Democratic PAC in the country in candidate contributions. With $11.8 million raised this cycle, that makes it bigger than the top six Democratic PAC's combined. If you consider all PAC disbursements (independent expenditures, field programs, etc), ActBlue would be the 5th or 6th largest PAC of any ideological stripe, behind EMILY's List, MoveOn, America Coming Together, SEIU, and maybe the UAW.
If our little Netroots list was a standalone PAC, it would rank 17th or so for the largest disbursements to federal candidates. The way to lessen the impact of narrow interest groups is to promote people-powered funding of candidates. And ActBlue has made that possible.

Rolling Stone has a cover story on the worst Congress ever, with a companion list of the 10 worst congressmen.

CT-Sen: The non-partisan Connecticut Local Politics blog laughs at the Lieberman camp's latest conspiracy theory of collusion between Ned Lamont and Alan Schlesinger.

It's posts like this one that remind me of the defensive, nasty and paranoid Lieberman campaign that crashed and burned so dramatically this summer: not least of all because the Lieberman campaign suddenly has something to be paranoid about.

Also, this front page story in the Hartford Courant chronicles Lieberman's shifting stances on social security over the years. This was one if his biggest lies at his first debate.