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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was in high school, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, on Sept. 11, 2001. He writes about two of his classmates and the paths they took after 9/11, for The Atlantic.

On most of the anniversaries of 9/11 over the last ten years, I’ve linked to a short report I filed for Salon.com within a couple hours of the attack from the streets in my then-neighborhood in Washington, DC. You can read it here, search for the word “bizarre.” It’s a page of numerous dispatches from different locations on that morning ten years ago.

I generally do not have much to say on these anniversaries. For me what seems most fitting is just silence. I have nothing more than the obvious to add to the discussion. I did read one piece that was disturbing and deeply affecting, a report that brought me back to that morning in a way I’d never been there before. You can read it here. It’s about the people who jumped/fell that morning from the Towers. Don’t read it unless you’re ready. It’s not easy. Read More

Simple as that. Pawlenty endorses Romney, joins campaign.