Happy Monday Caférs,

We have two features lined up for you this week:

First, David W. Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls, is leading a discussion on polls in our Special Features section. The race is down to the wire with only 15 days left. No doubt many of us are going to be watching every fluctuation of the polls with bated breath, flinging numbers and percentages around like stale twinkies in a food fight. But what's the real significance here? Is there a cream filling or are we just throwing around empty shells?

Joining Moore, who was a senior editor at the Gallup Poll for thirteen years, will be Nancy Mathiowetz, sociology professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and past president at the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), George Bishop, professor of Political Science at U of Cincinnati, Mark Blumenthal, journalist and editor of pollster.com, Michael Traugott, former president of AAPOR, and professor at U of Michigan, and Scott Althaus, author and professor at U of Illinois Champagne-Urbana.

Next, we've been feeling the slime on the campaign trail lately, so what better time for a spotlight on special interest groups in Washington!

Spearheading our dive into the muck is Ken Silverstein, here to discuss his latest, Turkmeniscam, in Book Club.

The book is a great piece of investigative journalism, following Silverstein in his guise as "Kenneth Case" through the (under)world of Washington Lobbyists. His mission: to find a lobbying firm wiling to brand Turkmenistan, a nation under one of the world's ugliest totalitarian regimes, into a bankable commodity in Washington. Silverstein set out to answer the question, how far will lobbyists go for a buck?

Joining Silverstein in this hard look at lobbying are Stephen Walt, professor of International Studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Sam Loewenberg, freelance journalist specializing in the intersection of business and public policy, Ted Goldman, Senior Editor at Roll Call, Capitol Hill's newspaper, Ari Berman, contributing writer for The Nation, and Jonathan Taplin, seasoned blogger and professor at USC Annenberg, School for Communication.

Join us.