From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Authorities are investigating whether Rep. Tim Murphy's (R-PA) legislative staff members performed campaign work while on government time, which would violate federal law, according to a broadcast report.

Federal authorities have started interviewing Mr. Murphy's former staff members, according to KDKA-TV, which cited anonymous sources.

It's hard to keep track, but I believe this would be the 19th member of the 109th Congress under federal investigation. Time's running out. Who'll make it an even twenty?

Oh, and no mention of Murphy's alleged transgression should go unaccompanied by a link to this.

Sometimes numbers tell a story better than any amount of words can. But that's only if the public gets to see them.

This chart was just produced by Congress' watchdog, the Government Accountability Office. It shows the number of attacks in Iraq, month by month, based on statistics kept by the military. It was contained in correspondence released today:

You can see a larger version of the chart here. It tells a pretty compelling story -- part of a compelling story. It was produced in December, but it's missing data for the months of September, October and November of this year -- a period of increased violence, according to news reports. What gives?

I called Joseph A. Christoff, the GAO official who produced the document. "I have all [the Pentagon's] data" for those months, he told me. But the military stamped it classified, he said. And despite making weeks of phone calls, he can't convince anyone there to declassify the numbers.

"They give conflicting reasons," Christoff told me. "For some reason, they haven't gotten through their bureaucracy."

News accounts from the period indicate that violence has increased since August, and the rate of U.S. casualties has accelerated. October was said to be particularly bloody.

It was a fundraising pitch for Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), but in a May, 2002 email Jack Abramoff's colleague couldn't help taking time out to praise a favorite: Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA). "[N]obody," wrote lobbyist Todd Boulanger, "comes even close (except for Doolittle, maybe) to doing as much for our main clients as Senator Cochran."

While Cochran went to bat for a moneyed interest in his home state (Abramoff's marquee client The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians), however, Doolittle would help any Abramoff client in need. The Northern Mariana Islands were thousands of miles away from his California district, but they received his special attention; so did Indian tribes from Massachusetts and Iowa.

That's why Cochran has kept his name out of the headlines, while Doolittle nearly lost his recent election due to the Abramoff scandal, which has drained $100,000 from his campaign coffers to pay lawyers to fight off federal prosecutors.

The question for Doolittle now is whether the House ethics committee, following the calls from government watchdogs, will initiate an investigation of him. Despite being more mucked up with Abramoff than even Bob Ney, the former congressman who pled guilty to accepting bribes earlier this year, there have been no clear indications that the largely useless House ethics panel will move against him.

I spoke with Doolittle's office yesterday for this post. His spokeswoman did not provide a comment for the record in time for publication.

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File this one away with the Downing Street Memo. From The Indepenent:

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained"....

Mr Ross says he questioned colleagues at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence working on Iraq and none said that any new evidence had emerged to change their assessment.

"What had changed was the Government's determination to present available evidence in a different light," he added.

Who says we're not spreading democracy in Iraq?

Not long after Republicans harrassed tens of thousands of Americans with automated phone messages in November's election, news comes that the robo call, that staple of American democracy, is being deployed in Iraq. And it's literally terrorizing city residents.

Nir Rosen of the new blog Iraqslogger reports, calling it a "mysterious psychological operations campaign," that Baghdad residents have reported "receiving phone calls that the caller ID shows to be originating from outside Iraq." What follows is a "recorded message from an anonymous man speaking formal Arabic" who goes on to condemn the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia headed by the powerful cleric Muqtada al Sadr that's been a continual thorn in the U.S.'s side.

The Mahdi Army has also infiltrated police ranks, and run assassination squads. Fearing that the militia's inside men have access to wiretapping technology, ordinary Iraqis live in fear that their robocall will be picked up and intepreted as proof they are anti-Mahdi -- and face execution at the militia's hands. The call reportedly left one Iraqi woman in tears.

Like the non-lethal American variety of robo call, the source of the Iraqi calls has been cloaked, and no one has figured out where they're coming from. Or how to stop them.

Starting today, it looks like we'll be all out of Pink Sugar.

Former Rep. Katherine Harris' (R-FL) taxpayer-funded telephone lines at her 13th District office will be cut off today, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports. The failed GOP senatorial candidate said it is a "new beginning."

(Since I read that comment, I've been scouring the Web to find a clip of the Dana Carvey Saturday Night Live sketch in which he performs the original song, "New Beginning," but I just can't find it. Does anybody know if one exists online?)

Katherine -- thanks for the memories.

Washingtonian magazine editor Kim Eisler, a personal friend of Jack Abramoff's, has posted excerpts from old emails he received from the imprisoned former lobbyist.

Nothing particularly new -- Abramoff is modest about his golfing abilities, and immodest about his power, access, and tickets to sporting events -- but they're a fun read nonetheless.

"Sue Schmidt is making a career out of me," Abramoff wailed to Eisler in a September 2004 e-mail, reacting to the Washington Post reporter unfurling the evidence against him in her paper. "seems [sic] I am on the front page of the Post more than Kerry is. She's my swift boat veterans all rolled into one." (Schmidt later won a Pulitzer prize for her reporting on the Abramoff scandal.)

The Department of Homeland Security is still holding and processing several hundred workers grabbed in early-morning raids Tuesday -- and finding some surprises.

Agents have charged at least 35 more detainees with criminal violations, according to DHS figures quoted in the Grand Island (Neb.) Independent. "More than 100 people nationwide have now been charged with criminal violations," the paper reports this morning. On Wednesday, that number was 65.

DHS has not said how many of those charged were accused of identity theft.

Meanwhile, agents have also identified a number of legal workers they swept up in the raids, dubbed "Operation Wagon Train," and held for days before releasing them. The United Food and Commercial Workers union has rented vans to pick up newly-released workers from government holding facilities and bring them back home.

Michael Crichton, following his fictionalized trashing of The New Republic's Michael Crowley, gets the treatment from Keith Olbermann:

Bush Weighing Deeper Commitment in Iraq, Officials say
"President Bush is weighing whether to make a deeper American commitment in Iraq despite growing public unhappiness with the war, according to senior U.S. officials and former officials familiar with Bush's high-level review.

"The proposed changes, with a few exceptions, conflict with the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which warned earlier this month against an open-ended commitment to Iraq and said American combat brigades could be out of Iraq by early 2008....

"While some key decisions haven't been made yet, the senior officials said the emerging strategy includes:

"-A shift in the primary U.S. military mission in Iraq from combat to training an expanded Iraqi army, generally in line with the Iraq Study Group's recommendations.

"-A possible short-term surge of as many as 40,000 more American troops to try to secure Baghdad, along with a permanent increase in the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, which are badly strained by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan....

"-A revised Iraq political strategy aimed at forging a "moderate center" of Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim Arab and Kurdish politicians that would bolster embattled Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. The goal would be to marginalize radical Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents.

"-More money to combat rampant unemployment among Iraqi youths and to advance reconstruction, much of it funneled to groups, areas and leaders who support Maliki and oppose the radicals.

"-Rejection of the study group's call for an urgent, broad new diplomatic initiative in the Middle East to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reach out to Iran and Syria.

"Instead, the administration is considering convening a conference of Iraq and neighboring countries - excluding Iran and Syria - as part of an effort to pressure the two countries to stop interfering in Iraq....

"...Bush appears to have been emboldened by criticism of its proposals as defeatist by members of the Republican Party's conservative wing and their allies on the Internet, the radio and cable TV." (McClatchy)

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Announcing the success of its massive "Operation Wagon Train" yesterday, DHS officials insisted the raids that netted nearly 1,300 arrests were about busting up an identity theft ring. The stats tell a different story.

According to DHS' own tally, only 65 of the 1,282 arrests were for criminal violations, including identity-theft related crimes. That means that over 1,200 of the people arrested had no connection to any identity theft rings, and were guilty only of run-of-the-mill immigration violations. That didn't temper the agency's rhetoric.

“'Enforcement actions like this one protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans while striking a blow against illegal immigration,'” an official press release quotes DHS chief Michael Chertoff.

"[H]undreds of these illegal aliens may have illegally assumed the identities of U.S. citizens," the press release goes on the explain, "and improperly used their Social Security numbers and other identity documents in order to gain employment at Swift facilities."

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Washington runs on money -- no one understood that better than Jack Abramoff, who built his empire directing huge volumes of sometimes clean, sometimes dirty money from interest groups to politicians (and directed political favors back the other way).

Another man who understands the maxim is Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), a senior lawmaker who has helped control the flow of billions of dollars from his seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee for many years.

As it turned out, Abramoff had a fat contract to represent one of the wealthiest interests in Cochran's home state, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. So it's no surprise that in the relationship between the three -- Abramoff, Cochran, and the Choctaws -- one might find the purest example of the way money can put politicians to work. And vice versa.

An email obtained by TPMmuckraker and never before published provides perhaps the best example of a lobbyist hitting up his colleagues for donations to a friendly lawmaker. In it, one of Abramoff's lobbyists makes a strong pitch for contributions to Cochran in the midst of his 2002 re-election campaign because "Sen. Cochran's office [had] never said 'no'" to the Mississippi Choctaw -- the casino-owning tribe that was one of Abramoff's prime clients since the beginning of his lobbying career.

"[W]e have been hitting them up for projects almost everyday [sic] the last couple of months," Abramoff associate Todd Boulanger wrote of Cochran's office. The Choctaw tribe is one of the largest employers in Mississippi.

Abramoff and his associates had already donated thousands to Cochran's campaign committee at the time of the email. That was "good," Boulanger allowed, "but not good enough for the member who keeps the lights turned on here at Greenberg."

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The Denver Post reports at least one bogus arrest: a legal worker at the site of the Greeley, Colo. raid was cuffed, bused away and detained for the day, before being released that evening. Yesterday, a DHS spokesman told me there had been no such incidents:

Sergio Rodriguez was taking a break about 8 a.m. near his position on a production line when ICE agents approached.

"One guy showed up and said, 'Why are you hiding there?' He put handcuffs on me and I still have the marks," he said, rolling up his left sleeve and pointing to a thin red line on his wrist.

Rodriguez, who said he has been in the United States for 27 years, said he didn't have his resident alien card with him. Although his wife brought the document to the plant, she wasn't allowed to give it to him, he said.

He said the agents told him they had a warrant for his arrest. He said he was taken to Denver and held until 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and then released.

Anyone hear of others?

A New York Sun report that Ahmad Chalabi may now be the Bush Administration's point man in reaching out to Syria did not go unnoticed at today's White House briefing. The piece cited "an American diplomat" as saying that Chalabi "was gauging the interest of the Assad regime in a limited rapprochement with America."

Tony Snow professed to not know of any recent U.S. activity with Chalabi, the Iraqi figure known for flirting with American neocons, the Iranians, and the truth with equal abandon, but hedged a bit on what Chalabi might be doing or claiming: "There are also times when people will make claims about what they're doing and the auspices under which they're doing it. And sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong."

Another story of kids left behind by the DHS raids (earlier stories here and here). From today's Worthington (Minn.) Daily Globe:

Jesus Alcantar, a Swift employee and union representative, said through an interpreter that he had found four children knocking on doors looking for their mother.

“I took them by the hand and started knocking on doors, looking for family members who would take them in,” he said. “I saw a little girl on the street. I saw someone take her, but I don’t know who that was.”

For Washington insiders, one of the most troubling aspects of the Department of Homeland Security's six-state raids is their timing. An agency doesn't execute the largest immigration raid in U.S. history, complete with a press conference and a pretty color map for republishing, because it woke up one day and decided the weather was right.

In fact, it seems there's almost no political climate for the raid. The elections are over, Congress is in recess, it's two weeks to Christmas, the White House has no plans to talk about immigration until next year. I talked this morning with one of the top corporate lobbyists on immigration issues this morning, who echoed the sentiment.

Laura Reiff is with Washington powerhouse firm Greenberg Traurig (once home to Team Abramoff), from where she chairs the "Essential Workers Coalition" -- a bunch of corporations and trade groups which rely on low-wage labor.

Saying she was "very disappointed" with DHS for the raids, she lambasted their political sensibilities. "It makes no political sense whatsoever" to run these raids now, she told me. "I can understand doing this prior to the elections." Furthermore, everybody in power is already focused on immigration -- as an issue for next year. "I talked to the president and Karl Rove last week" about the importance of immigration reform, she said. It's a top priority for both Democratic and Republican leadership. . . You don't need to go in and do these high-profile raids."

Anybody?

The battle between anti-global warming activists and their critics is frequently uncivil. Name calling, put downs, you name it, they fling them.

But this marks a new threshold, I think.

This March, Michael Crowley wrote a cover story (sub. req.) in The New Republic hitting blockbuster novelist Michael Crichton's very public denials that global warming was a proved phenomenon.

That was the last he'd heard from Crichton until he picked his latest novel, Next. Here's what he found:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

In an article posted to the New Republic's Web site today, Crowley responded:

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire. And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

The federal government continues to hold hundreds of detained workers from Tuesday's six-state "Operation Wagon Train" raid on Swift meatpacking plants, and the fallout continues.

In Iowa, governor and presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack (D) expressed displeasure with the Department of Homeland Security, which has opted to bar access to detainees by family members or lawyers. DHS is changing its policy, Vilsack's spokeswoman said.

The operation -- which was the largest federal immigration raid in U.S. history -- may not have gotten much play in the national media, but made a profound impression on the communities which lost hundreds of members overnight. "The sight of federal agents raiding the local packinghouse is nothing new. In fact, it's happened several times over the past 15 years," reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune of the Worthington, Minn. raid. "But never quite like this. . . .

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A friend in need is a friend indeed. So if you're buddies with Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), now's the time to show it.

Ney, who pled guilty to bribery charges last month, is scheduled to receive his sentence January 19th. The prosecutors have recommended he serve 27 months of not-so-hard time. Like Jack Abramoff, he would likely serve it in a minimum security prison.

But Ney's lawyers want as much leniency as possible so they've written to Ney's friends and colleagues, asking them to write to the judge about "your feelings about Bob’s character, his work for his constituents in Ohio, his work on national issues, his integrity, his dedication to public service, and anything else that you think will give the judge a full understanding of who Bob is and the work he has done.”

Letters like these can indeed help at a sentencing -- but so does taking responsibility for your crime, which Ney (like former administration official David Safavian, who was also convicted of charges related to the Abramoff investigation) has shown no indication of doing.

'04 Pentagon Report Cited Detention Concerns
"A previously undisclosed Pentagon report concluded that the three terrorism suspects held at a brig in South Carolina were subjected to months of isolation, and it warned that their "unique" solitary confinement could be viewed as violating U.S. detention standards." (WaPo)

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Merry Christmas, baby:

A priest's and nun’s mission to find the mother of a nursing baby was thwarted today after they said officials from Camp Dodge would not let them inside to tell their story.

Sister Christine Feagan, from the St. Mary’s Hispanic Ministry, and The Rev. Jim Miller, who is a priest from the St. Mary’s Parish, both said they drove to Camp Dodge [an ICE detention center] this afternoon to find out the status of a nursing mother who was deported and nursing a baby. . . .

At the church’s Hispanic ministry, the baby whose mother was arrested was passed among staff and a community activist who had agreed to help care for her.

They said they don’t know when the girl, whose father is absent, will be reunited with her mother.

I just spoke with a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While most of the 1,282 workers arrested and transported to "processing centers" have been processed in "Operation Wagon Train," their multi-state raid, Michael Keegan told me, he has not heard of anyone being released after proving their legal U.S. residency.

"So far we haven't had any reports," he said. (Union officials are complaining that workers aren't allowed to contact them or lawyers.)

I mentioned to Keegan the report from Utah that ICE agents had separated workers by skin color. "Is that right? I can't confirm that," he replied.

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The first big ruling in the wake of the Bush administration's detainee law has come down -- in the now famous Rumsfeld v. Hamdan case -- and the Bush administration wins.

From the AP:

A federal judge upheld the Bush administration's new terrorism law Wednesday, agreeing that Guantanamo Bay detainees do not have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson is the first to address the new Military Commissions Act and is a legal victory for the Bush administration at a time when it has been fending off criticism of the law from Democrats and libertarians....

Though Robertson originally sided with Hamdan, he said that he no longer had jurisdiction to hear Hamdan's case because Congress clearly intended to keep such disputes out of federal courts. He said foreigners being held in overseas military prisons do not have the right to challenge their detention, a right people inside the country normally enjoy.

This is only the first round, however.

The fate of children whose parents have been swept up in the government's meatpacking plant raids isn't going unnoticed by the media. As just one example, KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, Utah, reports on the fate of affected kids in its local schools:

[A]t Lincoln Elementary School in the Cache Valley School District there are dozens of children who went home with someone else yesterday, a relative or only one parent.

A similar situation in the Logan City School District at Bridger Elementary School. Yesterday, secretaries and teachers found themselves calling homes to make sure students got picked up. . . .

Just at Bridger Elementary School alone there were seven students affected by yesterday's raid. One teacher said that most of those students were not in school today.

As the principal said, one issue is the fact that they are afraid, but the other issue may be that they are literally preparing to say goodbye to their parents.

This afternoon I spoke to the Washington Post's Susan Glasser, the paper's assistant managing editor for national news, about John Solomon's hiring.

Glasser was unwaveringly positive about Solomon, citing his "great mind, enthusiasm, zeal for an important subject" -- money in politics -- and calling him "one of the most distinctive assets that the Post has gained in the past few years."

She declined to discuss criticism of his reporting on incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). She "wasn't involved in those stories," she said, and didn't "have anything to say about them." She confirmed that concerns over his work on those stories was "not at all" an issue in his hiring, and emphasized that Solomon is an "extremely well-regarded, practiced, thoughtful, responsible, agressive reporter."

"You guys should be out there reading him closely and carefully, but this is a good thing, an exciting thing for us," Glasser added.

Glasser said that Solomon will be "a reporter covering money in politics" at the Post and will not be getting his own investigative unit, as stated in an AP internal memo about the hiring. "He’s going to be a reporter here at the Post, although I imagine a leader of our coverage," she said.

So there you have it. Don't worry, Susan, we will be reading him closely.

Allow us to ride our Solomon hobby horse a little more.

Yesterday, not long after The Washington Post announced that it had snagged the AP's John Solomon -- citing, among other things, his courageous exposure of Sen. Harry Reid's "ethical missteps," -- news came that the Senate ethics committee had cleared Reid for accepting free ringside seats from the Nevada Athletic Commission.

That ethics complaint, of course, had been spurred by one of Solomon's hit pieces on Reid, and the one, to our judgment, most riddled with inaccuracies and omissions that served to pump up Solomon's rather lame story.

But who doesn't get cleared by the congressional ethics committees nowadays?

Most interesting to us was the AP's story on the decision, which was written by the AP's Erica Werner -- not Solomon.

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A troubling report from the DHS immigration raids yesterday, from the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune. In this case, DHS agents allegedly separated workers by their skin color -- light-skinned were considered citizens, dark-skinned got scrutiny. Predicatably, they swept up at least one dark-skinned U.S. citizen up with immigrant workers:

If only for a few minutes, Maria felt like an ''illegal alien'' in her homeland - the United States of America.

She thought she was going on break from her job at the Swift & Co. meat processing plant here [in Hyrem, Utah] on Tuesday, but instead she and others were forced to stand in a line by U.S. immigration agents. Non-Latinos and people with lighter skin were plucked out of line and given blue bracelets.

The rest, mostly Latinos with brown skin, waited until they were ''cleared'' or arrested by ''la migra,'' the popular name in Spanish for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), employees said.

''I was in the line because of the color of my skin,'' she said, her voice shaking. ''They're discriminating against me. I'm from the United States, and I didn't even get a blue bracelet.'' . . .

Women were crying as they were handcuffed with plastic ties and put on the buses. Some weren't allowed to get their belongings from their lockers. Maria, who declined to use her last name, argued with an agent because she was getting the coat for her 34-year-old niece, Blanca, who was arrested.

''She [the agent] told me, 'Do you think it's going to be cold in Mexico?' '' Maria said, holding back tears.

The paper confirms that the federal agents took an undisclosed number of people away in buses away to an undisclosed location.

More voices rise to join the chorus denouncing the House ethics committee's report exonerating GOP leaders for their blind-eye behavior to former Rep. Mark Foley's page seduction:

Houston Chronicle - "Critics for years have described the bipartisan U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct as a joke. [The Foley report] removed all doubt about the House's inability to discipline itself."

U.S. News & World Report - "The bipartisan report on the Mark Foley scandal was a study in pitiful cowardice." (Opinion)

Orlando Sentinel - "If willful ignorance among members and staff to Mr. Foley's exploits and reckless endangerment of teenage pages doesn't break any rule or call for any penalty, the committee's standards aren't low. They're subterranean. . . . The long-awaited report on the Foley scandal was an acid test as to whether the House ethics committee -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats -- was finally ready to wake up to its responsibilities after years of slumber. The committee flunked."

Ouch. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), now the ranking member of the House appropriations committee, has paid out $861,000 in legal fees since learning in May he was under FBI scrutiny, the CREW blog reports.

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) has run up bills totaling more than $117,000. And Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) has paid more than $70,000, according to CREW.

Is the era of the millionaire-backed attack group coming to an end?

The Federal Election Commission hit the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth with a $299,500 fine today for playing too fast with election rules. The Swift Boat Vets were a "527" organization, which has no limits on contributions, but were acting like federal political committees, the FEC charged. 527s are allowed to work for or against certain candidates, but if they have no other "major purpose," according to FEC spokesman Bob Biersack, then they should register as a committee.

That's a huge difference. Committees can only accept $5,000 in contributions per person per year. The Swift Boat Vets, by comparison, accepted $4.4 million from GOP money man Bob Perry in 2004. Perry played the same trick in this year's election, throwing $9 million at three different 527 attack groups, which used it to target dozens of Democratic congressional candidates all over the country. Democrats have also taken advantage of 527s, and two liberal groups were fined today: MoveOn and the League of Conservation Voters.

If the FEC were to really crack down on this sort of thing (the 527 loophole has been an open secret for a number of years), as they've idly been threatening to do, then 2008 would be a remarkably different election than the past two cycles.

Update: I talked to David Donnelly, the director of Campaign Money Watch, who knows a lot about this sort of thing, and he said that these fines (and the ones rumored to follow soon), probably will have a significant deterring effect in the '08 elections.

We'll be overhauling the site a little bit in the coming weeks, and we've made our first improvement: adding comments. Enjoy.

We'll be checking back periodically to see how the conversation is going, but for those of you who want to be sure to reach us directly with a tip, comment, or correction, please email us using the "Comments" and "Hot Tips?" links in the top left hand corner.

For our first discussion thread, here's a question. What improvements to the site would you like to see?

Union officials are outraged over a massive immigration sweep yesterday, which sent 1,000 Homeland Security Department agents -- some in riot gear -- to meatpacking plants in six states to round up immigrant workers suspected of using fake identification, but may have picked up legal workers in the process.

"Stormtroopers came in with machine guns, rounded [the workers] into the cafeterias, separated identified citizens from non-citizens, and then they took away all green cards and put non-citizens onto buses," regardless of the immigrants' legal status, Jill Cashen of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UCFW) told me this morning.

Cashen said that reports from all six states confirmed that legal immigrants were among those taken away, and have not been returned. "We're still trying to find out where the buses went," she said. "Children have been left at church day cares. Nobody knows where these people are."

Recently unsealed court documents show that DHS had identified 170 identity-fraud suspects it wished to apprehend, but that the agency wanted to round up as many as 5,000 other workers because it "further expect[ed] to apprehend persons who are engaged in large-scale identity theft[.]" Union officials say the total number of detained workers may be higher than 5,000. (Update: We've uploaded those court documents to our document collection here.)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released official tallies from the raids, but have promised to do so at a 10 a.m. press conference in Washington. UFCW is holding a press conference at 9:30 to discuss what they believe to be heavy-handed tactics used by the federal government.

Dems Consider Creating Outside Ethics Panel
"House Democrats are seriously exploring the creation of an independent ethics arm to enforce new rules on travel, lobbying, gifts and other issues that Democrats intend to put in place on taking power next month.

"Senior party officials said Tuesday that Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the incoming speaker, had consulted with Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, on forming a bipartisan group to examine outside enforcement. The goal would be to have the group report back in the spring.

"An independent Congressional watchdog, if approved, would be a major break with tradition. Some lawmakers say House and Senate members have sole responsibility for policing themselves when it comes to internal rules." (New York Times)

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Morale has tanked at the Justice Department's counterterrorism division, a well-informed source tells me. These are the officials who oversee the federal government's terror prosecutions around the country -- the part of the war on terror that involves actually locking up real terrorists. Why? The administration doesn't seem focused on that part, he says.

These Justice guys are at the business end of the domestic war on terror, but they haven't seen much real action, and that's got to burn. While the NSA sifts through millions of phone records, and the FBI runs down tens of thousands of mostly useless tips, federal prosecutors have only fielded a few hundred cases since 9/11. And even those are mostly chump change: Of 510 cases brought by the Feds in the past five years, they've won only four convictions on terror charges, according to one study.

But the complaints aren't about the stats, my source says. It's the leadership vacuum that keeps them from fighting the good fight. "There's widespread dismay at the adminisration's complete lack of focus and ability to get anything done," he said. "There's no coordination. Nothing actually happens. It's all the same [expletive]."

Via ThinkProgress, I see that Tom DeLay has admitted to not authoring his own blog posts. "“I have the ideas, and I have somebody else put the words together," says he.

Punchline, anyone?

As predicted earlier, it's official. William Jefferson won't be getting his plum spot back.

From a chat at washingtonpost.com this morning with the Post's White House reporter Peter Baker:

Rochester, N.Y.: I'm sure you won't take this one, but it's worth a shot: is anyone in the newsroom concerned about the fact that the Post is hiring John Solomon (formerly of the AP), whose pieces on Harry Reid were widely criticized, not only in the blogosphere but also by media critics (such as your own Howard Kurtz)? Does his hiring mean we can look forward to more RNC-inspired hit pieces on Democratic leaders?

I'll bet your getting a lot of questions like this today. And I'll bet you won't take any of them.

Peter Baker: Old trick: "I bet you won't take this question cuz you're scared, nyah, nyah." (And by the way, glad to welcome back our friend in Rochester to these chats.) But the serious answer to your question is everyone I've talked with in the newsroom is absolutely thrilled that John Solomon is joining us from the Associated Press. John is one of the marquee names in political journalism and he's going to help us build the best accountability team in the business going into the 2008 election cycle. Has he been criticized by partisans in the blogosphere? Personally, I don't know, but who hasn't been? He wouldn't be doing his job as an investigative journalist if he didn't make some people squirm. John and the team he's led at the Associated Press have broken a lot of important stories without regard to political party; in addition to the ethical missteps of Senator Reid, he and his team exposed the Dubai ports deal that caused a huge civil war within the Republican party and uncovered the videotape showing what President Bush was told about Hurricane Katrina before it hit.

Many things I could point out about this response (nothing easier than painting critics with the broad brush of partisanship), but I'll settle for this: Baker, listing Solomon's accomplishments, notes the Dubai ports deal and the pre-Katrina Bush tape, both indisputably big stories, together with Solomon's stories on Reid. The paper also did this in their press release on the hiring.

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Incoming House intelligence chief Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) found himself in hot water recently for failing to know the basics of Islamic radicalism. But he's got other problems: WarandPiece.com blogger Laura Rozen and other reporters recently noted that Reyes attended a strange meeting with former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) and lying arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, according to former CIA official Bill Murray.

Reyes has simply denied the claim, but Weldon is apparently outraged. And while he may be leaving Congress, he's not one to leave an embattled friend behind. So to Newsmax.com, he fired off a defense of Reyes in his inimitable style:

"Bill Murray's aim was to impugn the reputation of the incoming chairman of the House intelligence committee. . . . This is outrageous. And it is a blatant lie, because Reyes never met with Ghorbanifar in Paris."

That's right -- Weldon doesn't deny the meeting took place, nor that he attended. He's only incensed that Murray insulted Reyes by suggesting he was also there.

Does that remind anybody else of that old Groucho Marx line, I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me for a member?

Update on the case of the admitted criminal who's still working at the National Insitutes of Health -- it turns out Dr. Trey Sunderland can't quit, and NIH can't fire him. Here's why:

First, NIH can't fire him because Sunderland doesn't work for NIH. He's a member of a quasi-military organization called the U.S. Commissioned Corps, we're told. Corps members are medical experts with ranks and uniforms who can be dispatched to respond to disease outbreaks and other medical emergencies. When they aren't responding they work in the federal health system, but they're under the control of the U.S. Surgeon General.

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The notoriously late "Phase II" of the Senate's investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence will be revealed next year, according to incoming Senate intelligence chairman Jay Rockefeller.

Here's another major Republican name who blames Americans first for the problems in Iraq — and will explain why. Tom DeLay, appearing on Hannity and Colmes last night to promote his new on-and-off blog, took square aim at the real culprits for problems in the war in Iraq. "It's the fault of the liberals and the media and the Democrats, that from the very beginning have tried to undermine the will of the American people to fight this," DeLay said.

After Alan Colmes, in a moment of bravery, reminded DeLay that Democrats were out of power during the course of this war, DeLay nevertheless set out to explain in detail just how the problems in Iraq are the fault of liberals and other war critics. "It has nothing to do with power," DeLay said. "It has everything to do with perception, Alan, and you know it as well as I do."

The new slogan for Fox News and the Bush Administration: "It has everything to do with perception."

You probably don't know the name of Rep. Gary Miller (R-CA), but you should.

One of the richest lawmakers in Washington (and allegedly one of the most corrupt), reporters have been digging into him for months. Today the Los Angeles Times delivers a punishing combination of allegations from former aides -- and most appear to be violations of federal law.

First, there's the possible attempted bribery (which has Miller trying to land a local pawnbroker a seat on a presitious federal panel). Then there's illegal "self-enrichment" -- in this case, Miller appears to have trumped up "rent" fees for his campaign in order to give himself a cut of his political donations.

But our favorite allegation is his apparent abuse of federal funds. Miller seems to have a habit of using his taxpayer-funded congressional staff to do personal errands for him -- like check his stock prices, help his son register for college classes -- or score him sweet tickets to a Rolling Stones concert:

Miller learned in May 2002 that the band was coming to Edison Field in Anaheim that October.

"Per his instructions, we are checking with city officials, Edison contacts, etc., to see what we can come up with," an e-mail written by an aide to Miller's chief of staff states.

A few days later, the staff was told by Miller's chief of staff to look for tickets to a Staples Center concert as well, according to e-mails. By May 29, a Miller staffer had prepared a memo outlining four options for getting tickets. The most promising was for the Edison Field show.

What should the Democrats do about Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA)? Today's Washington Post seems to hold Nancy Pelosi's final answer.

Last year, of course, Nancy Pelosi, backed by a majority vote from the Democratic caucus, yanked Jefferson off of the powerful Ways and Means Committee. But now that New Orleans-area voters have spoken with one voice that they don't mind if their rep keeps thousands of dollars of intended bribe money in his freezer, the Congressional Black Caucus has been pressuring Pelosi to reinstate Jefferson.

Today's Post quotes "a source close to Pelosi" as saying that she won't reinstate his powerful seat, but won't shut him out altogether. He'll get a spot on "a lower-profile committee" instead. Compromise! The source adds that Pelosi hopes "the controversy dies down" with such a solution.

Fat chance. For months, Jefferson has been on the cusp of indictment for bribery charges. The only thing that's saved him was the FBI's raid of his congressional office, which, because it involved the seizure of possibly Constitutionally protected materials, ignited a litigation battle that still rages on. Until that gets sorted out, there will likely be no indictment. And when will that be? The Post piece does some inside baseball figuring as to what the prosecutors options are -- but the bottom line is the indictment will come down "probably in the first half of 2007." Meanwhile, prosecutors continue to fatten their case against Jefferson: the Post reports that they're "looking at about a dozen business deals in the United States and Africa in which Jefferson allegedly used his official position for financial gain." About a dozen? Not so long ago, it was in the neighborhood of eight.

When that indictment comes down, of course, the controversy will fire back up again. And Jefferson's been very clear that he won't be stepping down when that happens. We may very well have a trial of a sitting congressman.

Dems Will Eliminate Pork Projects
"Democrats tidying up a cluster of unfinished spending bills dumped on them by departing Republican leaders in Congress will start by removing billions of dollars in lawmakers' pet projects next month.

"The move, orchestrated by the incoming chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees, could prove politically savvy even as it proves unpopular with other members of Congress, who as a group will lose thousands of so-called earmarks.

"'There will be no congressional earmarks,' Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said Monday in a statement announcing their plans, which were quickly endorsed by incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev." (AP, WSJ)

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This is just a test of our system. Sorry for any inconvenience.

"A 16-year-old kid was entrusted by his parents to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Congress has a responsibility," Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Chicago Tribune in October.

"The most important questions are, 'What did the Republican leadership know, when did they know it and, if they knew something, why didn't they do anything to protect the child?'"

Now, Emanuel's questions are boomeranging back on him and his Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. A House report revealed last week that he and the DCCC knew of Foley's emails during the 2005 period but did not bring them up with the House Page Board or other groups.

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A bit more about John Solomon, the long-time Associated Press investigative reporter who's been hired away by the Washington Post.

As we've catalogued here on TPMm and at TPM, Solomon -- a Washington-based muckraker -- likes to do hard-hitting pieces that expose corruption and wrongdoing among the government's elite. That much we applaud. However, a number of his pieces feature key distortions and omissions that serve to pump their conclusions up to the edge of what may have been supportable by the facts.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has been a favorite target of Solomon's this past year. In February, Solomon wrote a story pulling the senior Democrat into the Abramoff mess. The piece repeatedly mentioned that an Abramoff associate lobbying Reid. Yet he did not mention that Reid voted against the measure Abramoff's team was pushing.

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As Josh just noted, John Solomon will be moving to The Washington Post, according to an internal AP memo leaked to TPM. The memo, which comes to us from a reliable source, reads:

John Solomon is departing at year's end for the Washington Post, where he will run an investigative unit. John has been a reporter, a news editor and investigative editor here over the last 15 years. His own reporting and his work with other Washington reporters has won awards and praise for the AP. We wish him well in his new challenge.

Our calls to the Post, the Associated Press, and John Solomon were not immediately returned.

For those who need reminding as to Solomon's curious predilection for chasing Democrats, here's an earlier TPM post explaining. And another.

Update: AP spokesman John Stokes confirms. "John Solomon is departing at year's end for the Washington Post," he wrote to us in an email that reproduces verbatim the memo we posted above.

Uh-oh, you just got a subpoena from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) in the mail. What do you do?

As we've noted here before, a Democratic Congress means big business for those who make their living defending big business. And law firms have done what they can to whip their corporate clients into a panic over the coming investigations.

In today's Washington Post, Jeffrey Birnbaum reports that "just about every company on K Street is vying for a piece of the soon-to-thrive 'crisis management' business" -- and offers a glimpse of what costly (and sometimes contradictory) opinions from legal eagles, publicity consultants, and lobbyists will look like. The result is a rough primer for targetted corporations:

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A senior official at the National Institutes of Health has admitted to committing a criminal conflict of interest by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in unauthorized payments from the drug company Pfizer, Inc. But he's still on the job -- at least for the moment.

Dr. P. Trey Sunderland III will have to pay back $300,000 he took from the pharmaceutical giant, whom he had been supplying with spinal fluid his government staff had extracted from Alzheimer's patients. His full sentence will be determined Dec. 22.

Despite his admission, a spokesperson for NIH -- where Sunderland has worked since 1982 -- confirmed to me today that he is still an employee there. (Sunderland has in the past tried to retire, only to be stopped by his superiors.) So there will be an asterisk next to his name on our Great List of Scandalized Administration Officials.

The reviews are in on the House ethics committee report on the Foley scandal, and they aren't good.

"[A] 91-page exercise in cowardice," a New York Times editorial thundered."The report’s authors were clearly more concerned about protecting the members of the House than the young men and women under their charge in the page program."

"What, one has to wonder, would it take for the House ethics committee to hold a lawmaker or a staff member accountable?" asked the Washington Post in its editorial, "The Buck Just Stopped." (The Wall Street Journal, however, pronounced the report "fair and sensible.")

Even some GOPers are whispering that those who dodged a bullet only did so because the committee purposely fired above their heads. Roll Call's John Bresnahan quoted one unnamed "Republican insider" with ties to Hastert who called the report a "shrewd political document" that carefully criticized only members and staff who were leaving power.

"They kicked people who don't care anymore," the source told Bresnahan. "Hastert doesn't care, and the other guys don't care either. . . . This doesn't hurt them at all."

TPMmuckraker welcomes Tom DeLay, former Majority Leader and frequent post subject, to the blogosphere.

Although the stated purpose of TomDeLay.com is to "find new ways to connect, unite and organize conservatives from all over America into a real grassroots political force," I have to say, the blog is the perfect place for him to keep everyone updated on all his legal travails. Hopefully he'll realize that eventually. Who better to give us the skinny on the Jack Abramoff investigation than one of its main subjects?

Update: More on Tom DeLay's "new conservative force" here.

Update: Shortly after launching, DeLay's blog quickly dropped the comments after his invitation in his inaugural post to "speak truth to power" was taken too literally by visitors. Luckily, an enterprising blogger preserved them here.

Jefferson Win Poses Dilemma for Party
"Rep. William J. Jefferson may be a pariah in some Washington political circles, but voters in this storm-battered city weighed in over the weekend with their own verdict regarding their scandal-plagued congressman: He's still our guy.

"Voters gave the Louisiana Democrat an emphatic reelection victory over state Rep. Karen Carter, even though his campaign had been weighted with revelations that federal authorities had videotaped him taking $100,000 in alleged bribe money, and that $90,000 of it had been found inside a freezer in his apartment in the District. The investigation led his House colleagues to dump him from a key committee, donors abandoned him and the state Democratic Party switched its allegiance to his opponent....

"[His] victory now poses a quandary for Democrats, some of whom have shunned him politically, and possibly also for the city, as leaders here seek to project an image of civic probity as they lobby for more federal money for recovery from Hurricane Katrina." (WaPo, NYTimes, The Hill)

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