Hillary Clinton closed with her town hall, which was pretty similar to the previous one. It was a friendly crowd with friendly questions, and Hillary did a pretty good job of staying on message. I’m not sure if they are going to archive it on the website, but it’s quite a long broadcast. So, perhaps we’ll see some clips on youtube coming up soon.

Barack Obama has produced a 2 minute long ad that will be airing across the states in play tomorrow. I’ve posted that over the flip. Tomorrow, I’ll be banning the “boiler room” for election protection in the Austin Obama Headquarters. I’ll try to get some info posted tomorrow during the slow times.

This was and probably could/should have stayed a quick hit, but I’m in a mood.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack and her husband Rep. Connie Mack are joining forces to form the new America Supports You Caucus. Reps. Adam Schiff and Allen Boyd join them as co-chairs.  The group will, at least in part, serve to highlight the Pentagon service that provides veterans with links to support services (instead of providing those services?).

I’m all for connecting veterans with support services and all, but at some point you can’t wave that miniature American flag hard enough to hide that you aren’t actually serving members of the military as well as you should.  How fast before this becomes a de facto test of support-the-troops devotion?

Open Thread yourselves as well. Fun with Metronomy’s Radio Ladio on the flip.

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, right wing attack ads are up, running and dishonest in CA-11 against Rep. Jerry McNerney. I’m certainly not going to embed it, but you can head here if you want to check it out.  Basically, it accuses House Democrats of enabling terrorists because they stood up to President Bush on FISA.

Our new boogeyman is a newly-formed PAC called Defense of Democracies.  The ad is running all over the country, in both generic and targeted form.  Who exactly is Defense of Democracies you ask?

Defense of Democracies is a spinoff of a bipartisan anti-terrorist foundation of the same name that had included Democrats until the ads began running. Former member Donna Brazile, who worked for former President Clinton, said in a statement that the organization “has morphed into a radical right-wing organization that is doing the dirty work for the Bush administration and congressional Republicans.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer and former GOP vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp are among the members of the organization’s board of directors.

The group running the ads is led by a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Factcheck.org got to refute everything that’s wrong with the ad which is…well…actually everything in the ad. Starts off by saying FISA expired. Not true. Says the House refused to vote. Except it voted and passed FISA in November. Says the government’s ability to fight terrorism has been crippled. Except the current law runs through August, so nothing’s changed.

But reality isn’t the sort of thing that Republicans are likely to let get in the way of trying to scare the crap out of people.  At the very least, it’s good to know that, if the right-wingers are leading off with this, it probably means they don’t have a single credible issue to run on.  Good luck with that one Dean Andal.