Just back from his chat with President Bush, Neal Boortz explains how Democrats are “praying” for America’s defeat.

Just out from Roll Call (sub.req.) …

Capitol Police officials have stepped up the department’s security presence on Capitol Hill in response to intelligence indicating the increased possibility of an al-Qaida terrorist attack on Congress sometime between now and Sept. 11.

The August-to-Sept. 11 time frame was confirmed by a Capitol Police source who said Congressional security officials were recently made aware of the potential threat by federal anti-terrorism authorities. The Capitol Police department has a liaison from the Homeland Security Department working in its Capitol Hill command center.

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer, who currently serves as chairman of the Capitol Police Board, acknowledged the noticeable increase in Capitol Police presence on the Hill but declined to discuss any specific threat or dates.

Dem Minnesota Senate candidates Al Franken and Mike Ciresi suspend campaign activity in wake of bridge collapse — while the RNC continues on with its Minneapolis summer meeting. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Our intrepid TPMtv video crew lands in Chicago to greet the Orange Satan and talks with McJoan (aka Joan McCarter) of Daily Kos …

So, if the new regulations Mayor Bloomberg wants go through, we’ll have to get a permit to take our little TPMtv video camera out in front of our office to shoot the intro to one of our shows. I guess we’ll have to be in-door only from now on. It sounds silly and like it’s a joke but it’s not. We’d have to get one just like Spielberg if he showed up filming Godzilla 9.

Here’s a site where you can find out more and sign a petition to help to stop this silliness.

According to the Post, the reason for the administration’s feverish effort to get legislation to expand its surveillance powers under FISA is that earlier this year a FISA Court judge declared a key portion of the administration’s program illegal. The ruling of course was secret. And it seems that until now the White House had kept this information hidden from Congress.

So why are we finding this out now? Well, that’s another interesting story. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) went on Fox News Tuesday night and discussed the whole thing. But the very existence of the ruling is highly classified. So it seems he publicly revealed highly classified information.

Needless to say, his flack disagrees: claims that Boehner leaked classified secrets on Fox News are “just plain wrong and distracts from the critical task at hand — fixing FISA to close the serious intelligence gaps that are jeopardizing our national security.”

The director of national intelligence makes a counter offer to the Democrats for legislation on the wiretapping program.

A new poll finds that the race for Iowa is a three-way dead heat among the top Dem contenders. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

DNC Chairman Howard Dean gets things rolling in Chicago …

E.J.Dionne has a very good column today about Kos, Yearly Kos and seeing all of this in a longer-term context of partisan mobilization and new media. Dionne’s point of comparison for Kos is Rush Limbaugh, and while it’s easy to blanch at that comparison on its face, I think it’s also a very apt one when you judge it in functional terms.

The average age of TPM Readers is actually a bit older than most people think. At 38, I’m probably pretty close to our average reader in age terms. Still, there are a lot of you who don’t have a clear recollection of the political mood of the late 80s and early 90s. And even if you were old enough, perhaps you just weren’t interested in politics back then.

But all the other differences and parallels aside, the two eras seem very similar to me at the intersection of political mobilization and new media.

Nowadays, of course, ‘new media’ is the web or even Web 2.0, as it’s called. But twenty years ago talk radio was definitely ‘new media’. Not a new technology. But very much new media. There was a similar mix of bizarreness and uncanny novelty that a guy with a radio show could be standing toe-to-toe on the national stage with the biggest political players in Washington.

It’s important to separate out whatever we think of Limbaugh himself from, functionally, the role he played in the politics of the period, particularly from about 1990 through the middle of the decade. Back then the Democrats seemed pathetically wrong-footed or out of date on all these new ways of mobilizing and connecting with voters. And today the inversion seems pretty near complete. I wouldn’t want to compare Limbaugh to Kos or the rest of the progressive blogosphere on substance. But when you set aside Rush’s buffoonishness, racism and complete indifference to the truth, there is an important comparison on the level of novel ways of pulling in or at least energizing and empowering whole new political constituencies.

And the essential distinction — a very encouraing one for the progressive community and the Democratic party — is that what’s happening today is vastly more participatory and distributed, in the most concrete of terms, than anything happening back then.

The key to understanding all this, I think — and I’ll leave this to another post — is to get a proper handle on the interplay between the media technologies, the wave of organizational fervor that they are both helping to generate and also being sustained by, and the ideological shifts that seem to be sweeping over the body politic.

Like then, I think you can hear the rumbling over the horizon.