One of the biggest disasters with the broken campaign finance system is that we actually have no reporting mechanism for assessing how much money gets spent on campaigns, at least on television. Sometimes candidates and PACs will announce their spending on ads, but local stations are not obligated to report how much they make from political advertising. You see organizations like the Campaign Media Analysis Group quoted in articles about campaign finance, but they basically make educated guesses that involve a lot of legwork. The only way to truly find out how much one television station makes from political advertising is to physically go down to the station and find the person with that information.

The big story for the 1,500 media members scurrying around Iowa trying to find something for cable news to shout about for the next few hours is that Newt Gingrich called Mitt Romney a liar, accusing Romney of illegal coordination with the Super PACs that firebombed Newt’s candidacy with negative ads in Iowa. But the problem is the unfettered secret Super PACs themselves.

If Elizabeth Warren were no threat to the established order, they wouldn’t get around to any effort to stop her ascension in the Massachusetts Senate race until much later in the cycle, if at all. But her surge over Scott Brown, and the possibility that she would have an even bigger perch from which to articulate her agenda for the middle class, clearly has Wall Street spooked. So much so that they’re already marshaling forces against her, with a year until the general election.

Today was the day that challengers in the Republican Presidential primary took out their heavy machinery on the front-runners. In two pretty devastating Web ads, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are filleted, cut down by their own past public statements.

Occupy Wall Street has an ad. It’s a 30-second spot with members of the protest movement explaining their perspective, why they are in Zuccotti Park, simply and clearly. And it’s set to run on national television, thanks to a savvy crowd-funding group:

Incredibly, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is launching a half-million dollar ad buy into New York City with one weekend to go until a special House election in NY-09, the seat once held by Anthony Weiner. That half a million dollars would have come in very handy next year, when Democrats make a push to take back the House, no? Instead, it’s being chewed up in the expensive New York City media market to protect a bad candidate whose district will probably get chopped up in redistricting anyway.

Newt Gingrich is in the midst of the worst Presidential campaign rollout in history.

Why would you play this funny? Why give the message that old people are worthy of derision, essentially because they’re old? This looks like a really bad Super Bowl spot when the issue discussed is deadly serious. Republicans are claiming that the ad represents “scare tactics” but no, I could show you scare tactics. A closeup of a senior’s hand as she struggles in the last throes of life and then pulling out to reveal she’s laying on the middle of the sidewalk as white men in suits ignore her, that’s scare tactics. This looks like a GoDaddy ad.

If the legislative battle has ended, the legal and electoral battles are just beginning. And on the electoral front, Democrats have released two ads today that highlight Walker’s assault on workers’ rights.

Another large rally took place in Madison, Wisconsin today, as filmmaker Michael Moore and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) spoke to a crowd estimated at around 12,000 by Capitol police. Other estimates were higher, and in addition to the throng outside, close to 8,000 protesters gathered inside the Capitol today.