For all the problems President Obama has now — and they’re getting hard to count — he still runs even or just ahead of his main potential opponents in virtually every poll. What continues to surprise me is that he does about the same in North Carolina. Whatever else is happening in our politics, North Carolina — once reliably Republican in presidential politics — seems to have clearly moved into the swing state category.

Yesterday NASA launched two lunar satellites on a mission to produce an extremely detailed gravitational map of the moon.

As I noted in my overnight post, TPM continued to publish news at its temporary home on Tumblr during the most extreme phase of last night’ DDOS attack. Still it disrupted some of our publication and reporting. We are now in the process of publishing stories that we were not able to publish yesterday afternoon and evening. The attack is on-going. But we have put in place countermeasures that are allowing the site to remain online and accessible, albeit in a diminished, less robust capacity.

As some of you may have noticed, TPM was offline and inaccessible for roughly 8 hours starting just before 5 PM on the East Coast this evening. The site was the victim of a massive denial of service (DDOS) attack. Here’s what we know about what happened. Read More

Some reader reaction to the NY-9 special election and what it means: Read More

A couple of corrective data points on the NY-9 race, where Democrats seemed primed for a big defeat come Tuesday.

I mentioned yesterday how heavily Democratic this district is. That’s true in general. There’s a 3:1 Democratic to Republican voter registration there. But Obama only won 55 percent of the vote here in 2008, which is relatively low for a NYC district and was actually worse than John Kerry performed there in 2004. So it’s not one of those hardcore Democratic havens in the city. That doesn’t mean Democrats should lose there, but it does make it somewhat more susceptible to the prevailing political climate.

The second data point comes from a closer look at the polling numbers coming out of the district. Respondents there overwhelmingly think the country is on the wrong track, and Obama’s approval ratings are in the tank. “It’s hard for Democrats to win open seat races in places where Obama’s that unpopular,” PPP polling director Tom Jensen tells TPM.

The upshot is that while the Democratic candidate is far from the ideal candidate, it would be a mistake to pin the blame for this loss (if it turns out to be a loss) entirely on him. The district is a better bellwether than I realized, and a loss here would paint a very bleak picture for Democrats going into 2012.

U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) has lost basically her entire campaign warchest in the embezzlement scandal rocking California Democrats.

Pretty amazing interview with one of the first two fighter pilots scrambled after the 9/11 attacks to take down any more airliners coming into the DC air space. The problem? As she tells it, there hadn’t been time to arm the fighters.

We’ve got the mugshots of the 16 alleged “hackivists” arrested in July who the feds claim were involved with the group Anonymous. Take a peek.

Hot new poll out on Tuesday’s special election in NY-9: Republican Bob Turner up 50-44 on Democratic state Rep. Dave Weprin 44%.

Another national Dem outfit is going up with a TV ad today to try to salvage this thing.