Can We Ask?

New campaign by the RNC asking people to submit their questions to Barack Obama.

More coverage from Citizentube and Rob Bluey.

Conservative attack group riling Democrats, Washington Times.

After a staff shake-up earlier this year, Freedom's Watch has become far more active in day-to-day politics, sending reporters several e-mails a day that attack Democratic leaders.

The group has taken a broader role in electoral politics: In recent months, Freedom's Watch ran ads boosting Republican Bob Latta, who won a special election for an open congressional seat from Ohio; ran $560,000 in ads attacking Democrat Don Cazayoux, who won a congressional seat from Louisiana last weekend; and is airing an ad in Mississippi's open congressional district, which holds a special election Tuesday.

To counterattack, the DCCC sent 20,000 pieces of mail in Louisiana's 6th Congressional District to Republican and independent households tying the Republican candidate, Woody Jenkins, to Mr. Adelson.

Obama's army of small donors, AP.

Altogether, Obama's campaign has taken in an unprecedented $226 million, most of it contributed online. His donor base is larger than the one the Democratic National Committee had for the 2000 election.

These are hardly political fat cats. Ninety percent of his donors give $100 or less, and 41 percent have given $25 or less, according to the Obama campaign. Overall, he has raised 45 percent of his money in small contributions. Hillary Rodham Clinton's figure is 30 percent, Republican John McCain's is 23 percent.

...

Obama, a magnet for younger voters, is cashing in on that phenomenon. Among small donors, students have given $303,000 to him, compared with less than $100,000 to Clinton and less than $20,000 to McCain.

NEARLY 18 PERCENT OF INVITED EMAIL LANDS IN JUNK/BULK FOLDERS, NEW LYRIS ISP DELIVERABILITY STUDY REVEALS, Lyris.

Nearly one out of every five permission-based email messages sent to U.S.-based ISPs lands in the junk mail folder, according to the latest email deliverability study from Lyris, Inc. (http://www.lyris.com). Slightly more than 76 percent of invited email successfully makes it to the inbox.

Do people think the Presidency is the only seat up for grabs?, DCRepublican.com

Awhile back, Time Magazine published what they thought were the top 10 Senate races in the 2008 election: Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire. I completely agree with this assessment and if the GOP wants to at least have some voting muscle in the Senate, they need to win these races.

This isn’t new information, but for some reason it seems that these top three campaigns haven’t even moved into full gear yet, even though there is only a little more than 6 months until the November election.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is just a glimpse into some of the things (primarily problems) I’ve noticed amongst the ‘top 3’ campaigns, focusing primarily on the Republican side.

You may be on Facebook, but the money's in the Long Tail, The Long Tail.

I've argued before that social networking should be a feature, not a destination, and that the one-size-fits-all model of Facebook and MySpace will eventually give way to a multitude of narrowly focused sites with social networking built in, such as the 220,000 niche networks hosted on the Ning platform.

It turns out that it's not just the experience that's better on the smaller, more focused sites: the economics work better there, too. Yesterday MySpace's parent company, News Corp, released quarterly financial results and although traffic was up on MySpace, they're having trouble making money.