Exactly one week before Election Day, a new CNN poll shows the race between Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Claire McCaskill tied.

Of the larger pool of 1,004 registered voters, McCaskill led with 51% to Talent’s 43%. Click here to download the PDF of the 3-page report from CNN’s polls of Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia voters.

A new television ad attacking Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Claire McCaskill features photos of Hispanic men and women carrying Mexican flags with a female voice delivering the following message:

Between 10 and 12 million illegal immigrants reside in America costing taxpayers more than $45 billion a year. How did so many illegal immigrants get here? They walked right in.

Claire McCaskill does not favor restrictive measures to protect our security, like a border fence.

If Claire McCaskill’s view prevails, America won’t be America anymore.

The ad is paid for by a group called Americans for Honesty on Issues. The group’s Web site does not give an address or phone number, nor does it list any of the officers or sponsors. It says only, “Americans for Honesty on Issues is organized to engage in political issue communications in compliance with federal and state laws.”

According to Wikipedia, the group is a Houston, Texas based “527″ that has spent over one million dollars on television advertisements, critical of Democratic candidates.

“527″ groups are tax-exempt organizations that participate in political activities, typically via soft money contributions, which have no legal limit. By federal law, they are not allowed to coordinate their efforts with political campaigns. According to the New York Times, if past trends hold, the total raised and spent by such groups on this election will surpass $300 million, eclipsing the $258 million spent by such groups in the last midterm election, in 2002.

Again according to Wikipedia, Bob J. Perry, a Houston construction firm owner, appears to be the sole funder of AHI. Perry was the major funder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who ran a campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election.

Sue Walden, a Houston business owner, is the president of AHI. Walden was a lobbyist for Enron and is considered a close ally of the former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was forced to resign from Congress amid ethics scandals. Walden has been a Minor League Pioneer fundraiser for George W. Bush, raising $43,000, and was an adviser to Kenneth L. Lay, the former chief executive of Enron.

We’ll try to post the video as soon as we can find a version on the Web.

After losing his latest campaign for the Republican nomination for Congress, Leslie Farr says he is now a Democrat.

“I came to a point where I had to ask myself if the Republican Party was right for me and obviously that answer was no,” wrote Farr in an email to the media and supporters.

“For five years, I served the Republican Party and my reward was a Primary loss to a person that had only been in the Party for three months. There is obviously no loyalty to African-American people from certain people within the Republican Party,” said Farr.

Maybe Farr should ask a few black elected Dems about their party’s loyalty before he hops on the donkey.

You know, you don’t have to register with a party to vote in Missouri, Leslie.

The Associated Press is reporting that President George W. Bush will be coming to Missouri on Friday to stump for Sen. Jim Talent. Details are still not available, but such a public event would mark a shift from a perceived distancing from the president by the Talent campaign.

More details as they become available…

We hope you enjoy our new “mini theater” on the left side of the page. Now you can play several of PUB DEF’s most recent interviews and exclusive videos from any page on the site.

You can even create “remixes” on the fly by playing two videos at once. To enlarge the video, simply click on the YouTube logo. Enjoy.

UPDATE: ACORN representatives tell us today’s press conference has been cancelled because of “new information” regarding a possible agreement between the group and the Board of Elections on the recent letters mailed to voters registered by ACORN workers.

Representatives from the embattled Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) will hold a press conference at noon today in front of the St. Louis Board of Elections to address recent allegations made by election officials in St. Louis City, County, and Kansas City.

Check back later for details…

And as we predicted over the weekend, a letter sent last week from the Board of Elections to thousands of people that were registered to vote by ACORN workers has indeed sparked criticism from civil rights groups.

Denise Lieberman, the former legal director for the ACLU of Eastern Missouri and the current voter protection coordinator for the Advancement Project, a DC-based civil rights organization, told KSDK yesterday, “The cards that were subject of this letter were based on a registration that was targeted to the African-American community.”

She told Channel 5 reporter Rebecca Wu, “Our concern was the letter was suggestive to voters was that if they failed to place a phone call to the election board and to sign the bottom of that letter, in fact their application would not be processed.”

The Board has drafted a second letter, with the help of the Advancement Project, that aims to clear up the confusion. It will be mailed out today.

I’ll be a guest on “Collateral Damage” tonight discussing the various amendments and propositions on next week’s ballot with Dave Drebes of the Arch City Chronicle and hosts D.J. Wilson and Fred Hessel. The show starts at 7:00 and can be heard on KDHX 88.1 FM or online at www.kdhx.org.

UPDATE: Oops, it seems Fred and I got our wires crossed. I’ll be on next week. KWMU’s Tom Weber joined Drebes tonight.

COMMENTARY

We observed back in January that the 20% increase in St. Louis’ crime rate coincidently matched the proposed pay increase for Police Chief Joe Mokwa. Perhaps now that St. Louis has once again been crowned the most dangerous place to live in America, the Mayor and his fellow police board members will pay more attention to how and where Mokwa assigns St. Louis’ finest.

St. Louis is more than just downtown. There are places in our city that have been completely left out of the revitalization occurring just a few miles away. And it is no coincidence at all that these are also the places where most of our young people are dying.

Also back in January, Mayor Francis Slay wrote on his blog, “as most of you know, many neighborhoods in the City are very safe places today. However, as the stats make too clear, a few neighborhoods are not.”

Wouldn’t it make sense then in the 10 months since those words were written that those “unsafe areas” would have seen a surge of police patrols, a strong and permanent presence of officers to show both residents and criminals that crime would no longer be tolerated?

But ask anyone who lives in the 5th, 6th, 7th, or 8th districts and they will tell you that has not happened.

Maybe it’s as they say in national politics: We’d rather fight them over there than over here.

Could it be that the spirit of the Team Four Plan still exists in St. Louis? When faced with limited resources, protect downtown and the southern neighborhoods first?

True or not, when it comes to politics, crime, home-buying, home-building, and property values — perception is reality. And the numbers don’t lie.

What remains to be seen is who will accept responsibility and if the problem of “a few neighborhoods” will be seen as the problem of the entire city — and indeed the entire region. Because it is.

UPDATE: Police Chief Mokwa was on the news Monday night responding to this “Most Dangerous” label. He said if you asked his officers, they would tell you St. Louis was a safe place to live.

Maybe he’s forgotten those public meetings earlier this year on the issue of lifting the civilian residency requirement. Just behind the city’s schools and affordable housing, “crime” was one of the most cited reasons Police Department employees gave for wanting to move out of the city.

We need a little help. A minor, but annoying, bug in our site has been eating away at us for way too long.

We use Macs mostly and if we have to use a PC, we use Firefox to surf the Web. So we rarely get to see the bug ourselves. But last week we were reminded of the less-that-perfect experience of PC owners who use Microsoft’s incredibly unsafe Internet Explorer when our site was featured on Fox News.

There we were on TV in all our orange and black glory, but then as the reporter scrolled to the top of our page (gasp) we were shockingly incomplete.

The problem is that in most modern browsers (Safari and Firefox) we look like this. But in IE we look like this. Notice the difference? A piece of our background image doesn’t show up, instead revealing a thick chuck of our orange background.

Any of you techies have a clue how we can fix that?

UPDATE: Fixed! Thanks, Ben Smith.

A review in yesterday’s Boston Globe:

Sometimes elections come down to which flavor of hubris leaves less of a bad taste in your mouth: the hubris of political dynasty, where a candidate waltzes in with the pedigree of a last name; or the hubris of ego, where a candidate says hey, I’m trying really hard, that’s enough for your money and your vote, right?

The title of Frank Popper’s new documentary “Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?” is a play on the 1939 Frank Capra film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” The new movie follows a young buck named Jeff Smith who, in 2004, ran for the House of Representatives to replace the outgoing Richard Gephardt. Smith was 29 at the time, and the film shows him barreling into his campaign despite the skepticism he faces even from his own mother, who thought the whole idea “just seemed like an off-the-wall notion.”

Smith seems to be a decent guy — he cofounded the Confluence Academy, a St. Louis charter school that serves primarily minority students — even if he never is fazed by his complete lack of previous public service.

He looks and sounds like Al Franken doing his Stuart Smalley bit, and one of his own campaign staffers concedes that Smith is “short, looks like he’s 12, and sounds like he’s castrated.” That makes it all the more entertaining to see Smith go from zero name recognition to serious contender in a primary field that includes Russ Carnahan, the Missouri equivalent of a Kennedy…