http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/41725.html

Pundits still have two months to prognosticate and ponder the depth of likely Democratic losses in November, but they’re kicking off this fall’s election season with a hefty dose of pessimism for the party in power.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/leading_indicators.html

I know I'm a broken record about this stuff but, well, here's Joe Klein:

If Obama is not reelected, it will be because he comes across as disdaining what he does for a living. I don't think he thinks of it that way, but you watch someone with a real love of the game -- Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell, Mississippi's Haley Barbour (and, of course, William Jefferson Clinton) -- and you can tell the difference immediately. The most important leading indicator of a one-term presidency in my lifetime has been indifference on the stump. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were fine men, but diffident, tone-deaf pols. (Bush managed to get elected only because Michael Dukakis was even worse at it than he was; ditto for Carter and Gerald Ford.)

http://www.frumforum.com/predicting-the-coming-gop-wave

Political scientists Joseph Bafumi, Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien predict a 50-seat loss for Democrats in November.

How many House seats will the Republicans gain in 2010? . . . Our methodology replicates that for our ultimately successful forecast of the 2006 midterm. Two weeks before Election Day in 2006, we posted a prediction that the Democrats would gain 32 seats and recapture the House majority. The Democrats gained 30 seats in 2006. Our current forecast for 2010 shows that the Republicans are likely to regain the House majority. . . . the most likely scenario is a Republican majority in the neighborhood of 229 seats versus 206 for the Democrats for a 50-seat loss for the Democrats.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/24/why-the-gop-will-raise-taxes.html

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday soon, political and fiscal forces will conspire to make tax hikes very hard for Republicans to resist.

http://futuretense.publicradio.org/episode/index.php?id=997507735

A fair question. And one that frankly we never imagined ourselves asking.  But there it is.We’re only in August but the fall election season is very much under way. I don’t know about your neighborhood but there are already a ton of campaign signs around where we live. And with it the ongoing controversy about the reliability and security of electronic voting. Today, we want to inject a new angle into that issue: Pac Man. Yes, Pac Man. A couple of engineers were recently able to take a standard voting machine, hack into it, and program it to play Pac Man.  We talk to Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. He worked on the project with Princeton University PhD student Ari Feldman.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Editorial-Board-Blog/2010/0813/Midterm-elections-Will-Republicans-gain-seats-despite-dismal-ratings

A new poll shows voters have a more positive view of Democrats.

Most political observers expect big gains for the GOP this November. Yet a new poll shows that most Americans have a more positive view of Democrats than Republicans. Just 24 percent of Americans view the GOP positively, a record low – while 33 percent give a thumbs-up to Democrats.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/bottom-line-newt-gingrich-11303774

The former Speaker is confident Republicans will win back the House in November.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128758329&sc=tw

According to a number of published reports, BP's Tony Hayward is out as the oil company's head. And he's far from the only casualty of the Gulf oil spill and its aftermath. In Washington, the disaster also helped sink congressional efforts for a comprehensive climate bill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/16/AR2010071602107.html?wpisrc=nl_pmheadline

One of Russia's most popular newspapers said on Friday it had managed to get Paul, the oracle German octopus which accurately predicted the World Cup results to forecast who will be Russia's next president.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4262721/did-mcchrystals-liberalism-lead-to-his-downfall/