Jim Snyder in The Hill reports that some are.

“The only thing that has changed is that everything that was bad got worse,” said Bernadette Budde, political director of the Business Industry Political Action Committee. BIPAC supports business-friendly candidates of both parties, though most of the group’s donations go to Republicans.

If the election were held today, “We’d be lucky to hold our own,” one House Republican said.

Skepticism isn’t universal. Some see hope in Congress’s own low approval ratings. Voters, they argue, are frustrated at the Democrats’ inability to deliver on campaign promises.

But others say leading indicators suggest Democrats will win the White House and both the House and Senate for the first time since 1994. Most sources doubt a repeat of 2006, when Republicans dropped 30 seats in the House.

But a Democratic pick-up of a few seats in the Senate, for example, when coupled with taking the White House, would have serious implications for major issues like global warming, stem cell research and judicial appointments.

From ABC News:

But last year, at the request of a hired representative for an Australian-owned chemical corporation Nufarm, Senator Barack Obama introduced nine separate bills exempting the company from import fees on a range of chemical ingredients it uses in the manufacture of pesticides and herbicides. Nufarm’s U.S. subsidiary is based in Illinois.

Nufarm wasn’t the only beneficiary of Obama’s efforts to reduce customs fees and duties. In early May of 2006, two Washington lobbyists registered to work on behalf of Astellas Pharma, a Japanese-owned drug company which also has offices in Illinois.

The lobbyists’ task? “Introduce legislation to temporarily suspend customs duties for the importation of a pharmaceutical ingredient,” they wrote on their lobbying forms. Less than three weeks later, the men had earned their $20,000 fee, thanks to Obama. On May 26, he introduced S. 3155, a bill specifically exempting Astellas’ key ingredient from tariff payments. The bill cost the federal government more than $1 million in lost revenue, according to government estimates.

Together, Obama’s obscure measures — known as tariff suspensions — steered more than $12 million away from federal coffers, according to government estimates.

From the NY Times:

They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.

Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatches are by turns angst-ridden and prosaic, glib and brooding, anguished and ebullient — a rare unfiltered look into the head and heart of a future first lady and would-be president. Their private expressiveness stands in sharp contrast to the ever-disciplined political persona she presents to the public now.

Clinton writes like an episode of Dawns Creek.

From CNN:

intern working for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was arrested Friday at the Des Moines airport after authorities flagged an outstanding arrest warrant for aggravated battery in Illinois.Derrick Lamon Johnson, 20, of Glen Carbon, Ill., was also charged with fleeing from justice.

Tommy Vietor, Iowa press secretary for the Obama campaign, said Johnson had been working for the campaign for about a month as an unpaid intern. Vietor said Secret Service agents learned of the arrest warrant during a criminal background check after Johnson was scheduled to drive in a campaign motorcade.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., seemed to exaggerate the legislative progress he has made on disclosure of “bundlers,” those individuals who aggregate their influence with the candidate they support by collecting $2,300 checks from a wide network of wealthy friends and associates.

When former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel alleged that Obama had 134 bundlers, Obama responded by telling Gravel that the reason he knows how many bundlers are raising money for him is “because I helped push through a law this past session to disclose that.”

The article goes on to say that Obama supported an amendment in the Senate “requiring lobbyists to disclose the candidates, leadership PACs, or political parties for whom they bundle” however that amendment was never turned into law as Obama suggested. The reason we know the names of Obama’s bundlers is because he has volunteered them, not because of a law enacted that he created.

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California’s voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems’ electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

Grammatical errors aside the article in SF Gate points out the continued problems with E-voting machines.

RAW STORY is reporting that the White House held a blogger conference call to give the administrations talking points on executive privilege.

At the urging of top conservative bloggers, the White House set up a Friday morning conference call to promote its message on the subject of executive privilege, RAW STORY has found.

“The White House hosted a blogger conference call to discuss the issues surrounding the Bush administration’s use of executive privilege in the probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors,” wrote Ed Morrissey, who produces the blog Captains Quarters. “The White House arranged the call based on a recommendation by this blog, in order to familiarize the blogosphere with the legal and political arguments on which the administration will rely to prevail in the upcoming fight regarding the contempt citations Congress seems likely to approve.”

Though the article suggests the end result might not have been entirely successful it does show the growing power of bloggers.

A post from Robert Bluey shows that this isn’t the first time the White House has gone directly to bloggers.

“It’s now become an open joke among people in the consultant community and political movers and shakers that the senator’s wife is really running the campaign,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster and strategist. “The spouse needs to be an integral part of the campaign but it is never a good thing when the spouse runs the campaign because the spouse is never objective.”

Check out the whole article.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12235541

This week the House Judiciary Committee voted to issue contempt of Congress citations against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and President Bush’s former legal counselor, Harriet Miers, for ignoring their subpoenas at the request of the President.

Bush claims executive privilege, Congress doesn’t agree. So what exactly is a contempt of Congress, what is the legal history, what does it all mean?

If you want to learn more first you can check out a brief description of this issue over at NPR.

Then you can check out the Congressional Resource Services exhaustive report (PDF) thanks to the Federation of American Sciences Project on Government Secrecy