There's an interesting bit of reporting over at The Hill today, where they got 97 out of the 100 senators to state with whether or not they'd be willing to be vice-president, if asked to do so. That they got so many senators to go on the record about that is, in itself, pretty newsworthy, but the stop-the-presses moment here is that some of the names you see mentioned the most (at least around here) in that context have demurred, with the biggest name being Jim Webb. (Whether that refusal is meaningful at this point is a whole 'nother question, but I'll leave that up to the reader to make that distinction.)

While just about everyone was focusing on Pennsylvania last Tuesday, something remarkable was happening in Mississippi. There was a special election in MS-01, to replace Roger Wicker (since promoted to the Senate, to take the seat left open by Trent Lott’s resignation to spend more time with his money). This seat is deep red, rated R+10; Kerry lost it to Bush 37% to 62%. By all objective measures, there should have been nothing to see here, just another Republican cakewalk.

BRUTUS
Grant that, and then is death a benefit:
So are we Caesar's friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords:
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry 'Peace, freedom and liberty!'

Today's Gallup tracking poll shows, for the third straight day, that Obama has a statistically significant lead over Clinton at the national level (today it's 49-42). That in itself: nice, but nothing new, right? But I looked at some of the breakouts of the subgroups, and I saw something buried down there that set off 'red alert' for me: Obama has taken a 50-46 lead among Hispanic voters nationwide, with an almost 20-point turnaround from the previous round of polling.

All the focus on Washington was on our caucus on February 9, but we’re having a primary tomorrow (Tuesday the 19th). Now before you get too revved up, our primary is what is charitably known as a "beauty contest." In other words, it doesn’t count one whit towards the Democratic delegate count. 100% of our delegates were assigned by caucus.

(Many of you are probably asking "Why bother?" Well, the short answer is that in 1988, Washington decided via initiative that we would have Presidential primary elections, despite the fact that neither of the state parties wants them. And our Secretaries of State... who, since time immemorial, have been moderate Republicans, have been more than happy to oblige, as they keep hoping that the a broader sample of the public will show up at the primary and vote for the more moderate options, instead of just the wackadoodles who show up at the GOP primary and, as they did in 1988, gave Pat Robertson one of his few victories. Nevertheless, they did go ahead and cancel the 2004 primaries, seeing as how the races had been long decided beforehand and no one would have shown up.)

Rep. Fred Jarrett (who represents the 41st LD: Mercer Island and parts of Bellevue) has just switched from the GOP to the Democratic party. Moreover, he's planning in 2008 to run for the state Senate (the seat is being vacated by one-term Dem. senator Brian Weinstein) as a Democrat. (Same pattern as Rodney Tom, from Bellevue's other LD, who in 2005 switched from GOP to Dem in the state house, and then successfully defeated the incumbent GOP senator in 2006.) This moves the Democratic margin of control in the House to 63-35.

Here's some disappointing news for people who were hoping that Mississippi, of all places, might be the state to give us the magic 60th Senate seat to clear the filibuster hurdle: former state Attorney General Mike Moore has apparently withdrawn himself from consideration in the run for the seat that Trent Lott is vacating (and that will be filled by interim appointment soon, but will be up for special election in 2008). Moore, as you may know, is the brightest spot on the Democratic bench in Mississippi and has some of the highest positives of any Mississippi politician (despite having been one of the leaders in the AGs' suit against Big Tobacco... that's him making a cameo playing himself in The Insider.) He's popular enough so that he could make a race in Mississippi at least a toss-up (especially if running against an empty suit like Roger Wicker, who seems to be the likeliest appointee).

There's been a lot of buzzing in the right-wing evangelical community about whether or not to go third-party if the GOP nomination goes to an ostensibly pro-choice, pro-gay-civil-rights, anti-gun, pro-dress-wearing, thrice-married Catholic. (Dogemperor's diary from a few days ago is a great starting point, regarding the dilemma for the Dobsonites and their shadowy umbrella group, the Council for National Policy.)

There’s been a lot of "I told you so" in the blogosphere associated with the dropping approval ratings for Congress over the last month. Regardless of whether or not you think the defunding debacle was a catastrophic cave-in for the Democrats or simply a poorly-played hand in a game of perpetual stalemate, the causation is pretty clear... enough people on the left who previously approved of the Congress withdrew their support to cause an appreciable dip in Congressional approval. (And if Broder says it, it must be true!)

(This was originally going to be a comment, but it’s blown up to diary length. Let me make clear from the outset that these are actual open questions, ones that I’m genuinely curious about and have no answer for, not rhetorical questions asked so I can sandbag respondents for being [insufficiently ready to bolt the party/insufficiently reality-based].)

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse for poor Monica Goodling, now it's come out that she's under investigation within the Department of Justice (by the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility), over whether or not she considered the political affiliation of applicants for entry-level prosecutor hires in the U.S. Attorneys' offices. (Needless to say, this is illegal... and one more thing for her to start singing about once she testifies under the grant of immunity.)

John McKay (former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington) is one of the 'Gonzales Seven,' the U.S. Attorneys inexplicably fired en masse in the last few months and replaced largely by administration insiders not subject to confirmation due to a little-noticed provision added to the Patriot Act renewal. McKay (although a Bush appointee himself, and a lifelong local Republican insider, including as an aide to Congressman Joel Pritchard long ago) was widely liked and respected, and although Deputy AG Paul McNulty claimed that McKay's dismissal was "performance-related," it was revealed last week that his last performance review in 2006 was positive.

When we last checked in on the case of the U.S. Attorneys (aka the 'Gonzales Seven') who mysteriously were fired (and most of whom were replaced with interim appointments of administration insiders), Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had testified before the Judiciary Committee last Tuesday. He had more or less admitted that Bud Cummins, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas, had been fired purely to make way for Rove protege Timothy Griffin. But he continued to claim that the other six were fired for "performance-related" issues.

The sudden termination of a number of U.S. Attorneys has piqued a lot of Kossacks’ interest, but it’s kind of been sliding off the radar screen. But a WaPo article this weekend shed another little beam of light on the ongoing situation.

(For those who haven’t been following the situation, seven U.S. Attorneys, most of whom were well-regarded and not under any professional clouds, have been fired recently without any explanation. They were replaced by Bush administration loyalists, which was odd, since all of the U.S. Attorneys were appointed by the Bush administration in the first place. This was in not-coincidental conjunction with passing of a little-noticed provision in last year’s Patriot Act renewal that allows the Attorney General to appoint U.S. Attorneys on an interim basis for an indefinite length of time without Senate approval. There is a U.S. Attorney in every state (or in states with multiple federal district courts, in each judicial district), who acts on behalf of the Attorney General, prosecuting individuals who violate federal laws.)

I think most of us at Kos have started moving beyond the tired old red state/blue state formulation. Every state has its red areas and blue areas, and moreover, they’re in constant flux; everywhere is reddening or bluening, or vacillating back and forth. I’ve often wondered about how to express that concept in an easy-to-digest table, and finally decided to let my inner stats-geek out.

The table I’ve created lists all of the nation’s counties (and independent cities) with a 2000 population over 250,000. They’re ordered from 1 to 230, with 1 being most Democratic and 230 being most Republican. Democraticness is measured in order of percentage of the total vote that the Democratic presidential candidate received. (So, for 2004, we start with Washington, DC, where Kerry got 89.1% of the vote, then San Francisco, CA, where he got 83.0% of the vote, all the way down to Utah County, UT, where he got 11.6% of the vote.)

Need some evidence that we’re already having a huge impact with the Democratic takeover of Congress? Here are three huge bullets that we dodged.

You might remember that two weeks after the November election President Bush, in the first indication that he hadn’t learned anything from his ‘thumpin,’ re-nominated a whole raft of right-wing judicial nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal circuit courts. The most objectionable from this rogue’s gallery were William Myers (one of the nominees at issue in the whole ‘nuclear option’ imbroglio), Terence Boyle, and William Haynes. It was a move that even the Washington Post op-ed page said smacked of "GOP chest-thumping and a gratuitous thumbing of the nose at bipartisanship."

In the wake of the Republican insider memo that was leaked to Chris Bowers yesterday (which may or may not require a grain of salt on the side), here's another interesting piece of Republican internal info that The Hill just got access to: it's the NRCC's "Final Push List," meaning a list of the 33 GOP candidates most needing money (29 of which are GOP-held seats). The list is circulated to other GOP congresscritters and to lobbyists, helping them target their giving.

Here's a minor blockbuster to go next to the major blockbuster in the House polls: Survey USA says McCaskill 51, Talent 42 (MoE 4.5%, 10/9-10/11)! (Previous numbers from 9/14/06 were McCaskill 48, Talent 47.)

Driving this is a big (maybe too big to be anything but an outlier) shift in independent voters:

Most of the movement in the race comes from Independent voters, who supported Talent by 12 points in September but now support McCaskill by 13 points, a 25-point swing.

But also driving this is a big gain by McCaskill among men:

McCaskill has made big gains among male voters: Talent leads by 1 point among men, a 14-point drop from September.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the same poll shows broad and growing support for Missouri's stem cell intiative, up 57%-27% (up from 52%-24% last time).