The word has been handed down, from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow all the way up to President Barack Obama, and the talking points have come out. Political speech that isn't reported to the federal government is a “threat to our democracy,” in the words of President Obama. The Democratic National Committee has released a television ad accusing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of diverting foreign members' dues toward political ads in the United States.

Massachusetts ultra-liberal Democrat Barney Frank has a real race for the first time in more than two decades, in part because of his record of coddling � and taking campaign contributions from � the financial institutions at the center of the housing bubble.

Scott Bradley aims to give Utah voters a real choice in the November U.S. Senate race. The longtime Republican-turned-Constitution Party candidate faces an uphill battle in the race, but is running on a pure constitutionalist platform.

Members of left-wing war protest organizations plan vigorous protests Monday and Tuesday after a series of FBI raids on September 24 against the homes of war protesters in Chicago, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Carolina. No one was arrested in the raids, though FBI officials seized dozens of boxes of personal effects, mainly electronics and letters, from the houses. The FBI said they expected no arrests from the searches under a grand jury inquiry on what officials termed an investigation on �material support for terrorism."

Every election campaign politicians promise change, yet despite the promises the general trajectory and the final destination that trajectory will ultimately take us remain unchanged regardless if the Democrats or Republicans are dominant in Washington � more and more government spending and indebtedness leading to economic collapse, and more and bigger government leading to total government.

�The Republicans doubled the debt and now the Democrats are tripling the debt,� Rand Paul told his supporters on September 12. �There�s not a lot of kudos to go around to either side.� The libertarian-leaning Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Kentucky won national headlines last spring after easily defeating the establishment-picked GOP candidate in a primary to replace the retiring Republican Senator Jim Bunning. And he won the primary with arguments very much like the argument above that the deficit is a bipartisan problem.

Nine-term incumbent Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson appears to be unwittingly sabotaging her own reelection campaign. Despite voters in the Republican primary choosing an energetic African-American pastor (Rev. Stephen Broden) from Dallas to challenge her in November, the Dallas-based ultra-left Democrat was sailing toward an easy reelection bout in her overwhelmingly Democratic “majority-minority” district just two weeks ago. No longer.

Few seasoned political observers gave Stephen Broden a chance to unseat entrenched leftist Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson from Congress even a few weeks ago. But the national media is now putting a much stronger spotlight on Broden after the Dallas Morning News revealed last week that Representative Johnson had improperly secured Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) scholarships for her relatives and relatives of her staff. Broden may now have a realistic shot at winning this race.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told ABC's Christiane Amanpour he was “mortified” and “appalled” by?last month's?Wikileaks disclosures of U.S. Afghanistan campaign secret documents on Sunday's This Week program. The Wikileaks documents consisted of some 90,000 secret documents related to the U.S. prosecution of the U.S. war in Afghanistan from 2004–2010, and Gates claimed “there was no sense of responsibility or accountability associated with it” and that “it puts our soldiers at risk because they can learn a lot — our adversaries can learn a lot about our techniques, tactics and procedures from the body of these leaked documents.

The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org released more than 90,000 classified U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan Sunday, prompting severe reaction from the Afghan and U.S. governments. "The Afghan government is shocked with the report that has opened the reality of the Afghan war," Afghan government spokesman Siamak Herawi told CNN.