GOP retirements in both the House and Senate since the party lost in 2006, makes the task of winning back congressional majorities daunting. Plus Republican donors are not donating.
The Republican Party has a real horse race happening among its 3/4 top tier presidential candidates. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain have each reported their Q3 fundraising totals. Basically, Fred Thompson did really well with fundraising considering that he was only a declared candidate for 24 days in Q3. Fred Thompson raised $9.3M, and all in all, did the best of the top 4. Rudy raised $11M. Mitt Romney raised $18+M but had to loan himself $8.5M of his own money (why does he need to keep giving his own campaign money??).
Fred Thompson has the fastest money raising rate. I know this is anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth, but in our family the 6 or so voting members were all positively impressed with Fred's announcement of his candidacy on the Jay Leno show:
Hugh Hewitt has a link rich post this morning, full of important things:
"Radioblogger has the key transcripts from yesterday's MoveOn.org rally to change the Constitution by adding a super-majority vote on judicial nominations...Pay particular attention to Barbara Boxer's explicit discussion of what the Dems are up to...Instapundit immediately saw the importance of the Boxer blurt."
"Ryan Sager's column from the New York Post on campaign finance reform needs wide dissemination."
"Many great posts on the effort to save Terri Schiavo's life around the blogosphere, including What'sTheRumpus and OkieontheLaminLA...TerrisFight is here, and LordofthePeeps has a touching and inspiring post as well."