Presidential politics never far away

It's a rare down day in the presidential campaign, with all three major candidates doing their day jobs in the US Senate.

But while they're not officially on the campaign trail, presidential politics is never really absent.

Republicans are crowing over the fact that the Senate is voting on a one-year moratorium on "earmarks" -- those provisions that members of Congress slip into spending bills that critics call pork-barrel projects. It's a pet issue for GOP-nominee-in-waiting, and Republicans say Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are late to the party by just agreeing this week to cosponsor the legislation.

McCain issued a statement calling on the Democrats to disclose their earmarks.

Obama released his 2005 and 2006 earmark requests, and had previously disclosed last year's, and challenged Clinton to do the same.

"Bringing real change requires changing the way we do business in Washington," campaign communications director Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "If Senator Clinton will not agree to join Senator Obama in releasing her earmark requests, voters should ask why she doesn’t believe they have the right to know she wants to spend their tax dollars."

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, is up to some partisan mischief by submitting an amendment that supposedly funds every proposal from Obama -- a total of $1.4 trillion over five years. It's designed to fail, but to gig Obama for being another tax-and-spend Democrat.

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, weighed in again on the Democratic race, saying forcefully that she does not believe there is any way that Clinton and Obama will run together on a so-called dream ticket.

"I do think we will have a dream team," she told reporters on Capitol Hill. "It just won't be their two names."