Household finances continue to dog Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.

Just how close was Sen. Christopher Dodd to AIG? So close that in late 2006, when Democrats were about to take control of Congress, then-AIG Financial Products CEO Joseph Cassano urged top executives to donate to the man about to become banking chairman.

You could call it a field of dashed dreams. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which convened today to consider Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, is an object lesson on the soaring ambitions of America’s top politicians - and the often deflated realities of their achievements.

Sen. Barack Obama may be the only smoker running for president, but the occasional snapshot of him taking a puff has not endeared him to the powerful tobacco lobby.

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of the candidates popularity in the Iowa caucuses, then Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners of their parties caucuses after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second place finisher Hillary Clinton. John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

It was a story of connections. But were they real?

“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,” first appeared on the website the Real News Project on Oct. 18.

The story was then reprinted in the Nov. 5 issue of The Nation and it has circulated widely on the Internet.

It either opens a window on to a significant shift of a controversial Republican money man to the Democratic camp, or it overstates the actions of a hedge-fund savvy financier who may have been hedging his bets by contributing to several candidates.

The piece by Russ Baker and Adam Federman argues that “notorious financier Alan Quasha” was a secret force behind the presidential campaign of New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner isn’t done with politics yet.

After raising $9 million to run for president on the Democratic ticket last year, Warner dropped out of contention in October and contemplated his options. Now, the former governor announced Thursday he’s running for U.S. Senate to replace U.S. Sen. John Warner, who is retiring after five terms. (The two politicians are not related.)

John Warner’s retirement gives Democrats another chance to extend their majority in Congress. According to the New York Times, two Republicans have said they will run for the Republican nomination - Thomas M. Davis and former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who himself mounted a presidential this year before dropping out in July.