The DCCC and the DSCC have targeted a few House and Senate races, and provide no financial assistance to campaigns other than those it has selected. The strategic goal of each is to obtain a majority in the House and Senate, respectively. When that goal is met, Richard Pombo will no longer chair the House Committee on Resources, James Inhofe will no longer chair the Senate Committee on the Enviornment and Public Works, and Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist will no longer make the rules for the the House and Senate, respectively.

We haven't been able to flog the Draft Gore 2008 PAC's $5 Qualifying Contribution Primary for the past 10 days as we'd hoped, as we lost our satellite's modem to a flash flood in South Central Kentucky on June 18th.  Hopefully, a new one will arrive in Iowa within the next few days.  In the meantime, I'm relying on free wi-fi from the Coral Ridge Mall's Panera Bread.  Despite our being off the Net, over 1250 Gore supporters have contributed $5 or more since June 1st.  With just over 2 days left, that leaves us with just under 750 to go to reach our goal of 2008.

Here's what I wrote about it when we started:

So in order to have as many people counted as possible by our next FEC quarterly filing due on July 15th (closing date, June 30th), we're asking for Gore supporters to contribute $5.

CEI to Launch Ads Exposing Truth about Gore's Movie
May 16 2006 01:32 PM
By Lisa DePasquale

The Competitive Enterprise Institute will launch TV ads focusing on global warming and Al Gore's cinematic self-love, An Inconvenient Truth.  The ads will be aired at a press conference tomorrow, May 17, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.  The ads will air in a dozen cities beginning on May 18.  Gore's An Inconcenient Truth premieres in DC on May 17 and will be in select theaters nationwide next week.  Gore, narrates and stars in this vanity piece.  Who sees Gore on TV and thinks, "That kid should be in movies!"

Democrats will err if they pick Gore
By Eric Peters

WASHINGTON -- It took three election losses as the Democratic presidential candidate to push William Jennings Bryan onto the Chataqua circuit expounding a version of fundamentalist Christianity that would make Pat Robertson seem as tame as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It took only one presidential loss - although surely the most controversial one in U.S. history - to send Al Gore onto the true believer's lecture trail spreading the doctrine of catastrophic climate change.

A few days ago, I ran across an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, comparing Al Gore's past, present and potential future political life with that of Richard Nixon.  Nixon, after eight years as VP to a popular Dwight Eisenhower, lost a close, and controversial bid for the Oval Office against John Kennedy, Jr., left politics to go back into private law practice, and then made a surprise comeback, claiming the Presidency eight years later against Hubert Humphrey in 1968.  

Later today, we hope to unroll our first "child" site, NH.DraftGore2008.org, which will be the first step in our goal of being a fully "distributed" campaign.  However, we still have much to do on the main site in order to even begin to be the strong, independent well-oiled machine we'll need to compete with already up-and-running candidate-run operations.

Now we realize that there are other DraftGore sites, and our goal is to work with such efforts, not compete with them.  But the mission of our campaign is simple:  To gain the delegate count necessary to win the nomination of Al Gore, Jr., at the 2008 Democratic Convention.

Much is made these days about South Dakota's lack of an exception for rape and incest.  Not so much, though, for an exception for the physical and/or mental health of the mother.  However, it is the latter that terrifies me, the forty-one year-old married mother of five, rather than all the others combined.

For a couple of weeks now, I've been writing about what I've come to view as the much bigger scandal involving everyone from Jack Abramoff to Gale Norton to Richard Pombo to Grover Norquist, and generally every major Republican in between.  It too has to do with Indians, but not only those with gaming operations.  In fact, the real actors in this drama are the poorest of Indians, mostly in the West and Plains.

This morning, I tried to summarize the issues in a comment thread at MyDD.   It was the first time since starting my research that I've tried to put the "story" down in as few words as possible.  Because the fact is, unless people can actually grasp the basics of this scandal, and how it effects not just a few hundred thousand Indians, but everyone in this country, I think it will never make it past a few interested links on Technorati.  

So below the jump is my best try to do just that.

How do I cook a turkey without an oven?

Ms. Schmidt: Yesterday I stood at Arlington National Cemetery attending the funeral of a young marine in my district. He believed in what we were doing is the right thing and had the courage to lay his life on the line to do it. A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bop, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. Danny and the rest of America and the world want the assurance from this body - that we will see this through.

Of course, as we all know as well, Schmidt's personal attack on the Hon. Congressman (and two-time war veteran from Pennsylvania) sent the House floor into a well-deserved meltdown, with Democrats shutting down the body until Schmidt withdrew her words.