Third-quarter campaign finance reports for House and Senate members are due at midnight, in just about an hour. Here at the Sunlight Foundation's Real Time Investigations, we're experimenting with a new utility that monitors the Federal Election Commission's Web site for reports as they trickle in--in, well, real time.

With a little over an hour to go before the reporting deadline, 130 House candidates in 104 districts, including 41 incumbents, have filed reports, according to the Sunlight-compiled spreadsheet. Check out their summary information, including amount raised, amount spent, and make-up of contributions between individual contributions, political action ...

We're playing with the new stimulus data released last week on the Recovery.gov Web site - analyzing the data, trying to find out which states are receiving the most money and what kinds of projects are receiving the most money. Data on contracts can be downloaded from FPDS site and the grants and loans from the USAspending Web site.

Although there is an easy way of downloading contracts data from FPDS, those wanting either grants or loans data will have to rely on the USASpending site, which allows downloads of slices of the data, from each agency or state ...

Our colleagues at The Pew Charitable Trusts, with whom we collaborate on Subsidyscope, have produced a nine-page overview of federal subsidies -- the "hidden budget" -- that's worth a read.

The paper is packed with interesting data and useful context. For instance:

*In 2007, the federal government subsidized about $874 billion of the nation's health care.

*The first known U.S. subsidy -- which gave fishermen five cents for every barrel of pickled fish they exported -- dates to 1789.

*From 1974 to 2004, the amount of revenue lost to the government due to tax breaks tripled, from $240 billion to $730 ...