The site is also selling straw poll tickets for $20, or $10 if purchased before July 4.

The Iowa Straw Poll, a highly anticipated event by Republican presidential candidates and political enthusiasts alike, will be Aug. 13 in Ames. Iowa GOP officials said late last year presidential candidates will also be invited to a debate co-hosted by FOX News and the Republican Party of Iowa in conjunction with this year’s event.

For Republican presidential contenders, the Ames Straw Poll is the first opportunity to show their grassroots fortitude in the Hawkeye State. Many rent buses and offer perks to supporters who are willing to attend the event and cast their ballot. Since the whole affair is essentially a major fundraiser for the Republican Party of Iowa, some have opined that the party itself is the one true winner of the event.

In 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was the winner of the Ames Straw Poll with 31.6 percent of the votes cast. Ultimate Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee took second place with just over 18 percent of votes. Paul, who garnered 9.1 percent of votes, finished in fifth place.

On caucus night 2008, Huckabee gathered nearly 35 percent of GOP support, while Romney had just over 25 percent. Paul improved from the Ames Straw Poll from a percentage standpoint — he garnered 9.93 percent of supporters — but once again landed in fifth place. Eventual GOP presidential nominee John McCain placed fourth in Iowa.

* “In 2008, Norm Coleman was ahead on Election Night by over 700 votes.”

That’s true, but, as with all elections, late arriving ballots and math errors always change Election Night tallies. Only in close elections are we aware of such shaking out of ballot tallies. When the official recount began, Coleman led by 215.

* “Soon, additional ballots were discovered, over 300 of which should have been disqualified as they appear to be have been cast by convicted felons.”

That’s not true. Additional ballots weren’t “discovered” anywhere. And where does the “300″ number of convicted felons come from? Do Democrats only win close elections by fraud? That’s the implication.

* “Yet, Franken was declared the winner by 225 votes out of nearly 2.5 million cast.”

Off a bit. He won by 312 with more than 2.9 million cast.

As for the convicted felons claim, Weiner explains that while it’s not without any merit, it’s most likely overblown. It originates from an allegation made by a conservative group called Minnesota Majority, which recently alleged that thousands of felons cast ballots in the 2008 election:

Not so, said the county prosecutors who examined the Minnesota Majority’s lists. So far, in the state’s largest counties, which include Minneapolis and St. Paul, a total of about 80 felons who are still on probation and who are barred from voting in Minnesota, have been charged. Not all have been convicted. Across the state, there are handfuls more, it seems, not hundreds.

Franken won by 312 votes. There’s no indication there were anywhere near that many who may have registered or voted illegally. Plus, what makes the Republicans think felons only vote for Democrats? In the first such case revealed about the 2008 election, the illegal voter admitted to casting his vote for Coleman.

At the heart of the New Black Panther case was Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which offers legal protections against voter intimidation. It had only been used once prior to the Bush administration — in 1992 to prevent a statewide voter suppression effort initiated in South Carolina by then Sen. Jesse Helms. In this case, the Bush administration wanted to use Section 11(b) against several New Black Panthers who had stood in front of a polling place in a black neighborhood, one of whom wielded a baton.

“There was no pattern and practice, no concerted effort to cage thousands of voters like in the [1992] Jesse Helms case.” said Gerry Hebert, a former senior Voting Rights Section attorney who has served under multiple administrations. “That strikes me as the kind of large-scale voter suppression case that would be more appropriate for Justice Department resources to be spent on.”

The Bush administration filed two Section 11(b) cases, both on behalf of white voters, both supervised by Coates: The Black Panther case and a separate case in Noxubee, Mississippi. The Voting Rights Section had gone from ensuring voting rights for all Americans to focusing on the conservative bugaboo of “reverse racism.”

In 2000, McCain was locked in a functionally two-way battle for the GOP presidential nomination with George W. Bush. By Feb. 22, when Arizona held its primary, it was clear that Bush would win the nomination. McCain scored 60 percent of the vote anyway, a 24-point landslide over Bush, carrying every county, and carrying all but one, Graham County, with a majority.

In 2008, Arizona held its primary on Feb. 5, and McCain was moving ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the race for the GOP nomination, but most voters went to the polls thinking Romney had a chance to win if events broke his way. McCain won Arizona, but only with 47 percent of the vote, beating Romney by about 13 points. Romney carried three of Arizona’s 15 counties. McCain only won a majority in three counties: Coconino, Gila, and La Paz.

What does it mean? It’s open for debate, but it certainly suggests that McCain has a more conservative electorate to deal with these days. Both Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee performed better in their home states than McCain performed in Arizona.

I don’t know whether he’s angry about his loss or whether he’s preparing himself for the next presidential run.

The odds of McCain — who will be 76 years old when voters go to the polls in November 2012 — mounting a third presidential bid are, needless to say, not good.

In passing, Raju and Martin mention McCain’s “damaging criticism of the Democrats’ climate change plans when he was an early supporter of cap-and-trade legislation.” This might be the most important decision McCain has made. In 2008, when environmental legislation had little chance of surviving presidential vetos, it was the sort of thing that self-identified mavericks like McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) latched onto. In 2009, with Democrats ready to actually pass environmental legislation, it’s transformed from a “common sense solution” issue to a “liberal” issue — and thus of no interest for the likes of McCain.

The question of whether McCain did or did not flip-flop on Medicare cuts notwithstanding, McCain’s citation of FactCheck.org — the reputable fact-checking Website operated by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center — is itself a pretty dramatic flip-flop.

In the heat of the campaign last year, I asked McCain if he had any comment on a series of FactCheck.org analyses that found that many of his campaign advertisements contained false or misleading information. McCain responded by chuckling and giving a rather dismissive answer that failed to address the heart of the question.

Me: Senator, FactCheck.org, the nonpartisan fact-checking Website, has cited nine — eight or nine — of your recent ads as containing false or misleading information. I was wondering how you would respond to this, and how do you reconcile it with your pledge to run an honorable campaign?

McCain: [Chuckling] I don’t respond to Websites that I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m proud of our campaign. We have been fair. We have been balanced, and we have clearly pointed out the differences between myself and Sen. Obama.

So in August of last year, McCain had a low opinion of FactCheck.org when it was criticizing the factual basis of his campaign ads. But today, McCain requested that one of the site’s reports that supported him be entered into the Congressional Record.

And what’s more, if you want to be absolutely technical about it, McCain’s comments on the Senate floor today actually represent a rare (and risky!) double-flip. As I reported last year, even before McCain pleaded ignorance on FactCheck.org’s credibility, his campaign put out a press release using one of the organization’s analyses to defend the Arizona senator from an AFL-CIO attack ad about his support of veterans’ health benefits. That press release mysteriously vanished from the campaign Website sometime after I wrote about it.

It would seem that, just as he did last year during the presidential race, McCain is still trying to have it both ways.

Ahead, on my right, I saw the Alaska Right to Life (RTL) booth, where a poster caught my eye, taking my breath away. It featured the sweetest baby girl swathed in pink, pretend angel wings fastened to her soft shoulders.

“That’s you, baby,” I whispered to Piper, as I have every year since she smiled for the picture as an infant. She popped another cloud of cotton candy into her mouth and looked nonchalant: Still the pro-life poster child at the State Fair. Ho-hum.

Well, I still thought it was a nice shot, as I did every time I saw it on its advertisements and fund-raiser tickets. It reminded me of the preciousness of life.

It also reminded me of how impatient I am with politics.

A staunch advocate of every child’s right to be born, I was pro-life enough for the grassroots RTL folks to adopt Piper as their poster child, but I wasn’t politically connected enough for the state GOP machine to allow the organization to endorse me in early campaigns.

Time and again, Palin uses her large family for political purposes, and then complains that they’re “off limits” when she decides they’re under attack. We’ve seen it with the use of her son Trig–Palin put him on national TV at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and has occasionally accused liberals of wanting to kill him. We’ve seen it with Bristol Palin, whose pregnancy became a national story, and with Track Palin, whose military service Palin has referred to again and again. But it seems like Piper Palin’s star turn for Alaska Right to Life was the first political deployment of a Palin family member.

Revelation one: John Edwards, who at that point was several months into his career-killing affair with Rielle Hunter, told Kennedy that it would be “right for the party” if he endorsed him.

I know you’ll do that and when you do what’s right for the party you will be with me. It can make all the difference. We can win this. I’ll win Iowa.

Revelation two: Bill Clinton definitely lost Kennedy after his attacks on Obama, but what really got Kennedy angry was when Clinton claimed that his wife was not really voting for a war in Iraq by voting for the 2002 resolution. Clinton “cited the support for the resolution by Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel.”

Kennedy, who had led the opposition to the war, was furious. “It was a vote for war,” he said firmly. “I was there. I said it at the time. That resolution was a vote for war. Everybody understood it.”

Revelation three isn’t as big of a surprise. When Kennedy endorsed Obama, “his endorsement came with conditions. Kennedy wanted a commitment from Obama that as president he would push for universal health care. He wanted it to be a first priority of an Obama administration. Obama agreed.”

Upon his installation as attorney general, Eric Holder declared, “We will protect the civil rights of our fellow citizens, all of our fellow citizens – in the workplace, in the housing market, in our educational institutions and in the voting booth, as well as in their day to day lives.”  I believe that the House Judiciary Committee has an obligation to determine whether Mr. Holder’s deeds match his words, especially in light of the many unanswered questions posed by the Commission on Civil Rights and members of Congress.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to the Department of Justice is currently dominated by George W. Bush appointees like Peter Kirsanow, who excitedly blogged about a letter from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to the Department of Justice concerning the incredibly important case.

How flimsy is this story? Both Wolf and Kirsanow quote “civil rights activist Bartle Bull” to prove that the actions of two fringey activists, who made no perceptible impact on the election, represented “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.” But Bartle Bull has an ax to grind; he endorsed McCain for president (“Do you suppose that Obama, or talky Joe Biden, can land an A-4 at night on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier in heavy seas?”) and has run around hyping this story for eight months.

“Every Senate seat is important,” said Van Dongen. “When you think of the amount of money involved in the recount and the subsequent proceedings — whatever it was, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million — that’s the smallest amount you’ll see spent on a Senate seat anywhere in the country, in any state.”

Van Dongen would have been ready to raise funds for more Coleman challenges — “I think there would have been a broad base of support” — but he supported the decision. “It’s his decision to make. From our perspective it’s a loss to the U.S. Senate and a loss to the free enterprise cause, and I hope to see him in public life again.”

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