Join the discussion here if you are of a mind.

Roskam and the Repubs outspent Duckworth $10 million to $7 million even though Tammy personally outraised Roskam by over a million bucks. That's quite a bit more than the $300,000 Ryun outspent Boyda by. The Repubs weren't going to be outspent for Henry Hyde's seat which is bordered on one side by Hastert's and Emanuel's on the other. I expect with Hastert retiring there won't be nearly as much money spent in this district next time. If that means fewer dumb DCCC commercials undermining the Dem candidate then that's fine with me. If there ever was too much money spent on a race this one was it.  

Roskam claims he won by being the "local" candidate. Of course that included photoshopping Duckworth's eyes in his ads to make her look like Mao's daughter. But he may have had a point when he said it was more important to have a write up in the Lombardian than foreign mags like the Economist or the Financial Times.

As for running a better campaign herself, Tammy could have done worse. Jon Carson her campaign manager is now Obama's Illinois manager. The ground game was there but she got carpet bombed in the air war.

I have been connecting to the internet via my Sprint cell phone for years, without serious problems. I have their older "Vision" service so it's not nearly as fast as their newer "Power Vision" service, which is supposed to approach if not rival broadband speeds (in both directions). More like a 56K modem connection for me, maybe a tad faster. But it works, is reliable, connects anywhere I can use my phone, and fast enough for occasional use when I'm away from home or free WiFi.

By way of illustration, last year I took Amtrak cross-country, and was able to connect to the internet most of the time, even in remote areas, because it works wherever cell phones work. Try doing that with WiFi. If you do much travelling and driving, this is really the only reliable way to connect to the internet at present.

Note that my setup requires a special USB cable to connect the phone to my laptop, but that this is supposed to be equivalent in terms of performance and connectivity to a dedicated PCMCIA card. I do it this way because I don't have a need for a dedicated card since I don't use it that often, and service is essentially free, since it doesn't eat up my talk minutes or cost me anything extra because it's an extension of the "Vision" service that's mainly meant for phone-based browsing.

Sprint reportedly frowns upon such usage, but the word is that so long as you don't abuse it--which I don't, around 100MB-200MB/month--they won't bother you. And I understand that the much faster and newer "Power Vision" service does away with this restriction if you have the right service plan. You can even connect your phone wirelessly to your laptop using bluetooth, if both have this capability. But if you'll be using this a lot then you probably want a dedicated PCMCIA card and service plan.

Basically, it works, it's reliable, it's available just about everywhere, it's not that expensive, and with their newer phones it's supposed to be quite fast. And I'm guessing that it's also more secure than WiFi.

Good luck.

It would have been a race we could have won if sockpuppet duckworth hadn't used democraticparty funds to torpedo the true local candinate Cegelis just so a good corporate d could block out a grassroots progressive.

Duckworth's entire campaign was made in Emmanuels office with no regard for the district or the grassroots. Duckworth is a loser and a spoiler to hear of her thinking about a grassroots campaign is a joke.

We can make IL-06, IL-10, IL-11, and IL-13 all safe Dem districts in the 2011 redistricting.  The key is moving some 85%-15% Democratic territory close to Chicago in Cook County out of IL-01, IL-02, and IL-04 into all of these districts and taking away chunks of Dupage, Will, and the Westernmost more conservative parts of Cook county and placing them into IL-01, IL-02, and IL-04.  This could give us a 15-4 Democratic delegation in 2012.

Sprint has 2 USB cards, so that would work with Macs and PCS, which is a nice plus. Since I use Sprint for voice as well, I get the unlimited plan for $49.99. I get 700kbps-1200 on speedtest.net everywhere I have used it (DE and FL). I like Cingular for voice coverage, but Sprint overall meets voice needs well and data needs exceptionally.  I'd call them and simply ask if they can match the "SERO unlimited MB plan for 49.99". I bet they will and that will save you $10 a month :)

It was so great to see Pelosi become Speaker and Duckworth lose.