From this morning's "Morning Score" email from Politico, which I called last night.

PICKING FAVORITES: The DCCC is announcing 11 new additions to its "Red to Blue" list of targeted races Monday, with two particularly telling names on the list: Hawaii state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa, the non-DCCC-favored candidate in last month's special election for her state's 1st Congressional District, and West Virginia state Sen. Mike Oliverio, who ousted Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan in a May primary. Neither of those contenders was their party's top choice; both of them are now the standard-bearers Democrats have settled on for November. Also on the list: Tarryl Clark (in MN-06); Chad Causey (in AR-01); Joyce Elliott (in AR-02); Denny Heck (in WA-03); Julie Lassa (in WI-07); Gary McDowell (in MI-01); Tommy Sowers (in MO-08); Manan Trivedi (in PA-06) and Trent Van Haaften (in IN-08).

NOTABLE: Seven of those seats are actually not targeted for flipping from "red to blue" -- they're open seats being targeted for retention.

(The "Picking Favorites" opening at the start of that paragraph is the actual wording used in the email.  It's irony applying to what the DCCC, DPW, and David Obey did is just delicious to no end.)

As I posted last night in my compilation post, the DCCC doesn't have a catch-all program for its seats like the NRCC's "Young Guns," so they're piggybacking the name "Red to Blue" for many of the Democratic-held open seats this cycle.  The confusion (and irony) is that many of these seats were never "Red" in the first place.

It isn't even midnight yet on the East Coast as I type this and already a budding Civil War between the Obama White House and the traditionally-friendly Union groups such as the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and others over the result of the Democratic Primary Runoff in Arkansas.  There, the White House and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee backed incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln, while the unions poured some $10 Million dollars to support Lt. Governor Bill Halter.

Here's what the White House told Ben Smith at the Politico after the results came in.

A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkanas.

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toiled on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

Lincoln relied heavily both on Obama's endorsement, which she advertised relentlessly on radio and in the mail, and on the backing of former President Bill Clinton, who backed her to the hilt.

Lincoln foe Bill Halter had the unstinting support of the AFL-CIO , SEIU, AFSCME, and other major unions.

Labor has spun the Halter loss as a "moral victory," and they responded to Smith less than twenty minutes after he went to press with the above.

The major labor federation AFL-CIO took sharp objection tonight to a White House official's assessment that they'd "flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet" in the "pointless exercise" of supporting the failed bid of Bill Halter to unseat Senator Blanche Lincoln.

"If that's their take on this, then they severely misread how the electorate feels and how we're running our political program. When we say we're only going to support elected officials who support our issues," said AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale. "When they say we should have targeted our money among some key house races among Blue Dog Democrats --that ain't happening."

"Labor isn't an arm of the Democratic Party," Vale said. "It exists to suport working families. And that's what we said tonight, and that's what we're gong to keep saying."

Labor not an arm of the Democratic Party...wow, they sure had me fooled.  I guess I'll just bare it as coincidence that half the events at this upcoming weekend's Democratic Party of Wisconsin State Convention are sponsored by organized labor in one way, shape, or form as pure coincidence.

From the State GOP, a picture of their billboard advertisement on the road leading to their state convention; scheduled for this weekend in Middleton, just northwest of Madison.

As I was reading this at the American Spectator, I kept asking myself one thing: How would the MSM be reacting if the Bush White House even dreamed of doing this?

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

"The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."

The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."

In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.

Here's pretty much what we now know after this report:

1) The White House and HHS knew the bill was going to blow up costs, and couldn't release this report to the public because its facts would have derailed their legislative agenda.  This is actually worse than the whole "WMD" meme from the Left in the lead-up to the Iraq War.  At least with the WMD intelligence, other nation's had similar facts and findings that the CIA and NSA had.  In this case, they actually had the counter-intelligence telling them otherwise, and acted anyway.

Maybe those suggesting Health Care Reform was Obama's Iraq War were truly on to something after all...

2) Everything the White House and other Democrats said in the final week up to passage was a lie.

3) Any Democrat who parroted the White House talking points like a Champion, is either a) Ignorant, b) A Puppet, c) An Ideologue d) Also Lying, e) All of the Above.

The act of burying the report; for short-term legislative gain, is going to end up costing many Democratic Congressmen and Senators their jobs in the long-term.  The Obama White House must be so proud.

Great opening to yesterday's "Best of the Web" by James Taranto.

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Even in 2008, the Democrats' best presidential year since '64, if the black vote had been evenly split between the parties (and holding the nonblack vote constant), Barack Obama would have gotten about 48% of the vote and John McCain would be president.

To keep blacks voting Democratic, it is necessary for the party and its supporters to keep alive the idea that racism is prevalent in America and to portray the Republican Party (as well as independent challengers to the Democrats, such as the tea-party movement) as racist. The election of Barack Obama made nonsense of the idea that America remains a racist country and thereby necessitated an intensifying of attacks on the opposition as racist.

These charges of racism are partly based on circular reasoning. Among Blow's evidence that the tea-party movement is racist is "a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday [that] found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic." Other polls have put the black proportion as high as 5% (and, as Tom Maguire notes, Blow misreports his own paper's Hispanic figure, which is actually 3%). But with blacks constituting some 12% of the population, there's no question that the tea-party movement is whiter than the nation as a whole.

Yet to posit racism as an explanation is to ignore far more obvious and less invidious causes for the disparity. The tea-party movement's racial composition reflects a pre-existing partisan alignment: The movement arose in opposition to the policies of a Democratic government, and the vast majority of blacks are Democrats, or at least vote for Democrats. Pride in the first black president, a normal and wholesome attitude, reinforces this partisan allegiance.

The GOP is not totally without dirty hands themselves in the media stereotype.  I personally would like to take every "Son of the South" who does or says something incredibly stupid on a racial matter and beat them upside the head...repeatedly.  It doesn't help, and it gets magnified ten-fold by the media which seems to have a need to continue the "Republicans are Racists" template.

But it is the political left which really seems to need racism now; it's gone beyond a crutch like in the past.  Maybe it was the election of Obama that has spearheaded this, but I've never seen such levels before -- both by politicians and media.  Seriously, when you have a reporter insinuating a racist comment was made because one political opponent said "America needs a President, not an athlete," just because said President is black (and not because of said Presidents countless media appearances where he's shooting a basketball or picking his NCAA bracket), you have a political left which has gone beyond any form of parody.

Democrats vote to give Massa pass, this after news that his earliest action of sexual harassment and other "actions" against his staff may have started a mere three months into serving in Congress.

House Democrats easily turned back another Republican effort to force a formal ethics committee investigation into how House leaders and their aides handled allegations of sexual harassment against then-Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.).

The 235-157 vote to "refer" Minority Leader John Boehner's resolution to the ethics committee carries no force in compelling the panel to act. Boehner and his Republican troops hoped the House would vote to adopt his resolution and force the ethics committee to begin a formal probe. But Democrats circumvented a direct vote on the resolution by moving to refer it to ethics.

Given all the crap that went down after the Mark Foley incident occurred in 2006, it's amazing to watch the Democrats now in charge of Congress go into "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" with Eric Massa.  What Foley did was apprehensible at best, but it seems to be small in comparison.

Be honest with yourself, who hasn't now cringed when "snorkeling" -- in its proper term and usage -- is brought up after Eric Massa?

The winners of the first round of "Race to the Top" funding are out, and they were Delaware and Tennessee.  So congratulations to the 1st State and the Volunteer State. Here's hoping the interstate fighting for federal cash does wonders.

So, how did the Badger State do?  According to the findings by the Department of Education, Wisconsin may have either never had a chance, or factions inside Wisconsin were never going to give to win the funding.

Wisconsin ranked 26th out of 41 states and the District of Columbia that applied for the first round of Race to the Top, a competitive grant process meant to stimulate education reform across the country.

The winners of the first round of the $4.35 billion competition - Delaware and Tennessee - were announced today by the U.S. Dept. of Education. Finalists for the first round included the District of Columbia and 15 other states.

Likely to spark chatter among state leaders and others following education in Wisconsin is the state's Race to the Top scorecard, which shows Wisconsin earning 341.2 points out of a possible 500.

For comparision, winners Delaware and Tennessee scored an initial 454.6 points and 444.2 points, respectively.

We're still sifting through the score card and reviewer comments, but it appears Wisconsin's score was reached by averaging the final scores of five reviewers that assesed the state's application. The scores from the reviewers ranged from a high of 381 to one reviewer's score of 293 points.

One theme that emerged among a number of reviewers: Wisconsin lost points because school districts were not explicitly committed to working on certain aspects of Race to the Top criteria. One reviewer points out that only 11% of district-level union leaders committed to the projects Wisconsin proposed in its application.

So when do we just stop and admit the following:

1) WEAC isn't going to let a little thing like "Better Grades and Performance for Kids" ruin what they have going now.

2) The trip to Madison to announce "Race to the Top" was not about Wisconsin, it was about pushing Tom Barrett into running for governor.

Yes, just wonders...

Police are investigating vandalism at the Albemarle County Republican headquarters.

The Daily Progress of Charlottesville reports that someone threw bricks through the headquarter's windows, breaking three of them.  The vandalism was discovered Friday morning.

Earlier this week, someone cut a propane line leading to a grill at the Charlottesville home of Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello's brother after the address was posted online by activists angry about the health care overhaul.

Albemarle County Republican Chairwoman Rachel Shoenewald says people are angry on both sides of the political spectrum.

In November, someone glued the county GOP headquarters' doors shut on Election Day.

Charlottesville is the home of both the University of Virginia and Monticello, the historical home of Thomas Jefferson.