It's eight days until Election Day, and your Early Returns correspondent is listening to Rush and sifting through the political news so you don't have to. Here are some good links to get your day started:

We start with gratuitous self-promotion: I had a profile run Sunday of Greene County's own Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO and a major force in trying to keep Congress in Democratic hands.

Also in the P-G: Washington County scribe Janice Crompton takes a look at Bill DeWeese, who's still popular in his district despite some, er, legal entanglements. And in Saturday's paper, Jim O'Toole parsed through the mudslinging in the gubernatorial campaign.

The Philly Inquirer's Tom Infeld crossed over to the fun side of the state for a Tom Corbett profile datelined from Shaler. "Corbett, 61, still fits the Shaler mold as the Republican candidate for governor," Infeld writes. "Democrats oppose him, but don't fear him the way they'd fear a tea partyer. Yet in what some see as a calculated move, he has shifted somewhat to the right during the campaign."

Looking for your Senate candidates today? They aren't hard to find. The Morning Call's Colby Itkowitz has a roundup of their hectic schedules. They both need to work as the race is tightening in the final days. The New York Times' Nate Silver, who previously had this race as a 98 percent chance for Toomey, knocks it down to 80 percent because of the tightening polls -- just to keep you interested.

Politico adds it up and finds the DSCC spent more than $5 million in Pennsylvania last week. And it was still behind Colorado and Nevada! Total independent spending this cycle comes to $301,118,796.98. Talk about stimulus.

And The Hill travels to Johnstown to look at PA-12 as "the exception, not the bellwether." Oh how national media narratives can change on a dime.