BIG quarter coming up for people-powered Howard...

With the 3rd quarter ending, it's clear my guy for prez, Howard Dean, is going to clean the clocks of the other Dem candidates in terms of dough raised. As of 3pm today, the total figure was $12.5 million on the Dean bat.

On Monday, I'll be volunteering to help tally some of the mailed-in checks in order to get the numbers as high as possible before the end of the month (though the official deadline for reporting is October 15). I was told that there are thousands of checks that need to be counted, so lots of volunteers are going to be burning the midnight oil.

So as impressive as the numbers are now on the Dean blog, they're about to go much higher. $15 million is not out of the question, and that should finally quiet some of the more reasonable critics who concern themselves over Dean's electability.

He's gonna have about $15 million worth of that by the month's end.