I know, choosing America’s worst columnist when there are so many recipients of wingnut welfare putting their income to work hammering out ridiculous screeds in support of politicians who wish to return our country to the stone age, but when George Will decided to hand out the title of America’s Worst Politician to Alan Grayson, well he really seemed to be angling for the prize.

While there is no doubt the GOP will make big gains on election night, the plausible range of pickups is incredibly wide. Depending on if the national mood breaks one way or another, dozens of seats could be won or lost by very narrow margins.

With that in mind, here are 98 hotly contested races that Firedoglake will be watching closely over the next 10 days. . . and in the case of a few of them, maybe even longer than that.

An analysis earlier this year by Paul Blumenthal at the Sunlight Foundation found that, even in wave elections, incumbents who raise 70 percent of the total campaign contributions in their race almost never lost. It was also determined that, even in 1994, only one-third of incumbents that raise between 60 to 70 percent of the money in their races ended up losing.

If this pattern holds up, Democrats should be in better shape than generic ballot polling or political prognosticators indicate. There are currently nine incumbent Democrats who are ranked as “toss-up” or “likely to lose” who have raised 70 percent or more of the money in their race, and 18 Democrats who have raised between 60 and 70 percent of the total contributions in their races.

I wasn’t the only one to deride the FHFA’s ingenious plan to end the foreclosure fraud crisis. Indeed, the reliance on internal reviews, and encouragement to engage in more foreclosures, raised the eyebrows of many housing advocates and prominent politicians. Now, six Senate Democrats have sent a letter to FHFA Acting Director Ed DeMarco and top regulators on the systemic risk council (including Geithner and Bernanke) calling for legitimate action on the servicers, who have no specific federal regulator.

The six Democrats – Sherrod Brown, Barbara Boxer, Sheldon Whitehouse, Debbie Stabenow, Tom Harkin and Mark Begich – pushed back on the idea that these are merely technical errors, as the FHFA letter intimates, rather than systematic violations of the law.

In a letter to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the board made up of chief regulators of the financial industry, Rep. Alan Grayson has called for a national moratorium on all foreclosures because of the systemic risk of fraudulent practices.

Rep. Alan Grayson takes us back to the very beginning of this crisis, during the housing bubble, where runaway mortgage sales and poor record-keeping led to confusion over title ownership on the part of the servicers. He explains the foreclosure fraud crisis here in a video giving four real-world examples.

The Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Charles Canady, was the lead prosecutor in the Clinton impeachment trial, while serving as a Congressman. Charlie Crist appointed him to the Supreme Court in 2008. This ruling came from an ideological conservative Republican, not a dispassionate umpire ruling on the law.

There are lots of things Congress could have done and might still do to fix the problems and improve the benefits of the law. Just google, e.g., “Firedoglake, Jon Walker, health reform.” These measures would actually improve health care, expand and improve coverage, or reduce its costs. But nothing, absolutely nothing the Republicans are proposing would improve health care in America.

GMAC, the struggling financing arm of General Motors, whose mortgage arm holds $26 billion of mortgages, just suspended foreclosures in 23 states in a harried, chaotic policy shift. The only thing I can think of to elicit that kind of reaction is the noose tightening around foreclosure fraud.

The activity on the left to fire Alan Simpson from the Catfood Commission is growing. Today, Rep. Alan Grayson joins the effort.