Hillary will pull in $2.5 million at tonight’s big fund-raiser with Elton John, TPM Election Central reports.

Larry Craig feels David Vitter’s pain:

Craig said he has told Vitter he regretted the fact that his own case seemed to cause the media to dredge up and rehash Vitter’s situation. He also said he sympathizes with Vitter’s treatment by the media.

“My story became a situation where my wife and I watched it almost as if it were caricatures out there being talked about,” Craig said. “It certainly wasn’t me, but that was quite typical in a 24/7 news cycle like we have today.”

Hillary decides to whack McCain for his 100 years in Iraq claim too.

From AP:

An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against AP photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him freed after nearly two years in U.S. military custody.

Gallup’s national tracking poll has ebbed and flowed quite a bit in recent weeks, but for frame of reference, Obama’s 10-point lead today matches the biggest he has held, which came on March 29:

Click on the graph for a larger version.

Why doesn’t every Democrat, when saying anything about the presidential race, start their remarks by saying: John McCain says he’d be happy to see our troops in Iraq for another hundred years. I just can’t agree with that.

That’s really all you need to say. Keep it simple.

Seven months after the start of the “surge,” General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday to update senators on the “fragile and reversible” progress in Iraq. We have the highlights …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

In TPM’s election coverage we’re generally tightly focused on congressional elections. But over the last three-plus months we turned our attention almost exclusively to the presidential contests. But with the primary season coming to a close and particularly with the hiatus in contests on the Democratic side of the ledger, we’re digging back into the congressional races. And we’d like to ask for your help.

One of the reasons I’m so keen on our congressional coverage is that it’s in our coverage of hundreds of races around the country that our model — relying on tips and leads from readers around the country — really shines.

So keep us posted on what you’re seeing in the local press, local candidate events and what you’re hearing in your area. Just by way of example, during the Social Security battle in early 2005, I think TPM had political intelligence as good as anyone in the country — in terms of what was happening in the field, I think better than all the pols and political committees. And it was entirely because a piece couldn’t appear in a local paper or in constituent mailings or be heard at a townhall without one of our readers tipping us to it. Google and Nexis are great levelers of the investigative playing field. But as they say in the intel world, there’s no substitute for robust human intelligence.

Whether you’re just a close reader of the election news or involved in a campaign or reporting on one for a newspaper in your area, it is simply invaluable to us if you can keep us up on the details of the races in your state and district.

Now that Hillary’s fired Mark Penn, can she now fire Lanny Davis? Please? Or ask that he be put under some sort of house arrest?

Permanent US occupation of Iraq just like America’s permanent occupation of the American South? So says Redstate.com.