From Ben Smith at Politico:

Palin raises $8 million -- for Obama
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0 908/Palin_raising_for_Obama_.html?showal l

Obama's coffers have been filling since Sarah Palin attacked him repeatedly in St. Paul last night.

An Obama aide confirms Drudge's report that Obama has raised about $8 million from more than 130,000 donors and is on pace to raise $10 million by the time McCain reaches the stage tonight.

UPDATE: Obama spokesman Bill Burton says, "Sarah Palin's attacks have rallied our supporters in ways we never expected. And we fully expect John McCain's attacks tonight to help us make our grass-roots organization even stronger."

There's more...

The mainstream media has already picked the Democratic front runners for the next presidential election. Six months before the first caucus and 18 months before the election, we get a daily dose of their preferences:  Obama and Hillary.  

The chosen candidates receive untold millions of dollars in free advertising as part of the press coverage surrounding the media stampede.  Remember the breathless speculation before Hillary announced?  The unrelenting media speculation for Obama's announcement? Anybody remember similar coverage for John Edwards?  Joe Biden?  Dennis Kucinich?  

Poll results are fundamentally created by media hype and the media then dutifully report them in a self-fulfilling cycle that ends with the election between the two candidates that, too often, the media promoted best.  But history shows that that neither big poll numbers nor big money can guarantee a victory.  

There's more...

Update: Hopefully i is working now. If not, I'll take this post down again. I am sorry for the earlier problems--Chris

Yesterday, along with Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign and Joel Wright of Wright Consulting Services, MyDD released its first ever strategy memo for Democratic Congressional Challengers. The memo was the culmination of more than two months of work on CA-50 post-election research. Producing that memo was a new and original step to take for a progressive blog, and there was no way we could have done it without your help.

Now that we have completed the memo, we need to do two things: make sure as many Democratic congressional challengers read the memo as possible, and pay our bills for producing the memo. We will have work to do on the former for the next couple of weeks, but we need to complete the later right away. Currently, we are still $1,125 in the red for the costs of the entire project. That is even after Joel gave us a very good deal on producing the two polls, and after Matt and I worked pro bono on the analysis of the data.

We need to make up the remaining money as soon as possible, so please, donate what you can to the Courage Campaign today. The sooner we pay for the project, the sooner we can start focusing on getting it into the hands of Democratic candidates and staffers. $1,125 is a very doable target, so let's see if we can finish it up today.

For a complete look at the results of the project, please, check out these links:

• Why Francine Busby Lost (with new, clean crosstabs)
• Question #9
• Republicans Divided on Iraq, Accountability
• Democratic Congressional Challenger Strategy Memo
• The MyDD Polling Project Archives

No matter how hard it was, it was a thrill being able to work with everyone to put this project together. Now, we need to pay off our debts so we can start the hard work of getting Democratic campaigns to read it.