The New York Times has an editorial this morning noting that Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) “is now struggling to maintain his lead against a Republican challenger, Benjamin Lange, who is running on a familiar program of smaller government and opposition to the health care law, the stimulus and growing federal spending.”

I hadn’t realized that Braley — one of the good guys in Congress who founded the House Populist Caucus and won reelection in 2008 with 65 percent of the vote — was in trouble. The truth is it’s hard to tell. There’s been virtually no polling of the race. The one poll that has been conducted in the Iowa First Congressional District was commissioned by the American Future Fund. It gave Braley a 13-point lead. But that was back in September, and AFF isn’t the most reliable source. The group has poured more than $800,000 into attack ads against Braley. The Chamber of Commerce is also active in that race with big money. Read More

Tim Profitt, the Kentucky stomper, thinks it’s time for Lauren Valle, the woman he stomped, to apologize to him.

Couple of items this morning that give you a pretty good snapshot of where things are in House elections:

The final iteration of The Hill 2010 Midterm Election poll anticipates a 50-seat gain in the House for Republicans. They need 39 seats to take the majority.

Meanwhile, indirectly confirming that number, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last night reported to the FEC that it was dropping another $21.6 million in 66 different House districts. That’s all for air time to try to stop the wave.

Taken together, it gives you a sense with less a week to go of the size of the map Democrats are playing defense on.

I’m a bit late to the party on this, but as I was catching up on the morning news I stumbled across Sen. Al Franken’s speech last weekend at a Mark Dayton rally in Minnesota, the one President Obama attended. Al can be a hoot, of course, but this speech seems to me to capture the current moment: a bit desperate and a bit antic but with so much at stake: Read More

Roll Call had an interesting article (sub.req.) out last night explaining how top House GOP leaders are assembling lists of top-flight Chiefs of Staff to match up with those anti-politician Tea Partiers who will be showing up in Washington in January. So they’ll hit the ground running, know the ropes and be able to get started early on getting reelected in two years.

But I’m wondering. First you’ve got the Kentucky Stomp. You’ve also now got word that Fort Richardson is investigating the two active duty soldiers who were working Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller’s security detail when they detained that journalist a couple weeks ago. With these and other examples, I’m wondering whether the bigger issue might not be help with assembling the paramilitaries these folks are going to bring with them to Washington.

News organizations won the release of documents from Senate candidate Joe Miller’s time as attorney for Fairbanks North Star Borough. They were released today and they don’t look good for Miller. The former Borough Mayor had publicly said that Miller had been less than truthful about the activities that led to his resignation. But the documents contain pretty blunt words from Miller himself about his activities. One document has Miller admitting …

Over the lunch hour this past Wednesday, I got on three computers (not belong to me) in the office. All of them were on and none of them were locked. I accessed my personal website for political purposes (participated in a poll), and then cleared the cache on each computer. I did the same thing on my computer. Jill asked the office what happened. I lied about accessing all of the computers. I then admitted about accessing the computers, but lied about what I was doing. Finally, I admitted what I did.

Lots of people have lied about stuff. But calling yourself a liar a week before the election doesn’t help.

Really not sure what to say other than just go read it.

I mentioned earlier that Tim Profitt, Rand Paul’s head stomping volunteer, issued a non-apology apology about his attack on Moveon activist Lauren Valle.

But TPM Reader AF points out that there’s a bit more along these lines. Profitt’s argument seems to be that not only did Valle have it coming but that the whole incident was partly the fault of the police for not proactively arresting Valle before Profitt and his friends had to rough her up and stomp on her head.

The AP says Profitt “criticized police for not stepping in and says other supporters warned authorities about the activist.”

Paul volunteer stomper, Tim Profitt, issues non-apology apology (a new innovation based on non-denial denial methodology): “I’m sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand’s safety.”