Starting at 9:30 this morning, room 325 of the Russell Senate Office Building is only big enough for one reputation -- either Army General George W. Casey's or Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ).

Today the Senate Armed Services Committee takes up Casey's nomination to become the next Army Chief of Staff. For the last two years, Casey has had a far more stressful job: corps commander in Iraq, where he presided over a deteriorating and calamitous war. Consistently during his tenure, Casey promised that stability -- and subsequent troop reductions -- were just a few months away, only to have to renege. Just as consistently, Casey argued that increasing U.S. troop strength would deepen the Iraqis' sense of occupation and build an unhealthy dependency on U.S. troops.

McCain has also been consistent: he's backed a massive infusion of U.S. troops regardless of the changing circumstances of the war. And since he's counting on supporters of President Bush's relentless stance on the war to propel him to the party's nomination, criticizing Bush too much on Iraq has been a danger. Luckily for McCain, Bush renounced Casey's Iraqis-first approach in favor of escalation. Problem solved for McCain: Casey becomes the scapegoat. On a January 21 "Meet The Press" appearance, McCain blasted Casey's "failed leadership" and said he had "serious concerns" about Casey's nomination as Army chief.

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Conservative activists have been screaming bloody murder about a provision in the Senate ethics bill that would require grassroots groups to report on their fundraising activities. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who previously had championed a similar measure, has heard their call and is switching his position on the matter.

So-called "grassroots" groups spend millions of unregulated dollars trying to change public opinion each year -- money that often comes not from individuals but from corporate coffers. McCain, as The Hill reports, "sponsored legislation last Congress that included an even broader requirement for grassroots lobbying coalitions to reveal their financial donors."

But conservative figures as powerful as Richard Viguerie and James Dobson have weighed in hard on the measure in the current bill. Viguerie is calling it "the biggest threat to free speech ever," and Dobson's Focus on the Family is circulating a petition against it.

Now, as The Hill reports, McCain, who recently said he wanted to have a "dialogue" with Dobson, "has told conservative activists that he will vote to strip a key provision on grassroots lobbying from the reform package he previously supported."

"They're simply not complying with the law. It's incredible."

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) raised eyebrows yesterday with that comment regarding the Bush administration, made before a crowd of several hundred at a Washington, D.C. event.

At issue is a report on climate change that Congress requires every four years. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for producing the document, last filed a report in 2000. A new report -- the first to be filed by the Bush administration -- was due in November 2004, but to date the agency has not done so.

"When you get to that degree of obfuscation, then you get a little depressed," McCain said, according to several attendees. McCain's comments were also reported by the trade daily Environment and Energy.

McCain has rapped the administration before over the long-overdue report.

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The House Government Reform Committee has released hundreds of new emails from Jack Abramoff's lobbying firm pertaining to his and his associates' contacts with Administration officials.

We're scouring them now, and here's a good one. In an email exchange subject-lined "were you able to whack mccain's wife yet?" Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff discuss derailing the nomination of a woman named Angela Williams to an Interior post.

Williams was up for head of the Office of Insular Affairs in the Department of the Interior, which has authority over decisions affecting the Northern Mariana Islands, an Abramoff client.

With the White House's help, Abramoff's effort was successful. Ralph Reed emailed Abramoff, "talked to rove about this and I think I killed it." You can see the exchange here.

"Williams is married to former Federal Trade Commissioner Orson Swindle, who was a Vietnam POW with Senator John McCain," according to Time.

In response to questions from Congressional Quarterly about whether he would support Sen. Arlen Specter's (R-PA) bill to counter the President's use of "signing statements," McCain said this:

“I think the president will enforce the law."

That sounds pretty faint -- but if you consider the context, it just sounds lame.

The point of the signing statement, of which Bush has made unprecedented use, is for the President to declare that he will not enforce part or all of a law.

McCain knows this -- Bush used the gambit to gut the Vietnam War veteran's own torture ban legislation. As one law professor described Bush's move to the Boston Globe:

"[Bush's] signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me.... 'They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

McCain -- himself a former torture victim -- worked hard to assemble veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress to pass a torture ban only to see the president undermine it in an instant.

So how can he say he doesn't think the President's abuse of signing statements is a problem?

What would happen if Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) let his talented investigative team loose on the DoD?

As part of our continuing series of guest posts from muckrakers, here's Laura Rozen of the muckraking blog War & Piece on what we might have to look forward to:

The Democrats may not pick up the House or the Senate come November, but there’s likely to be some penetrating investigations emanating from the Hill come January anyway. That’s when Sen. John McCain is scheduled to assume the chair of the Senate Armed Services committee – and he’s bringing his chief Indian Affairs Committee investigator Pablo Carrillo with him; Carillo, you will remember, led the investigation that helped methodically take down the house built by Jack Abramoff (See their final report here).

Over at Armed Services, what’s there that McCain might want to investigate? Not clear, but the committee oversees the Department of Defense, the organization with the single largest budget in the world. McCain’s Senate website publicizes his recent support for an independent review of Army Corps projects, and for more transparency in federal funding, including a searchable database that would list each entity receiving federal funding.

And the former POW in Vietnam and prospective 2008 GOP presidential candidate has led Senate opposition to fuzzy Bush administration guidelines on detainee treatment issues, and in that regard, has held his ground pushing back against the Vice President office’s expansive view of executive power. Interesting revelations may await, and more healthy tensions between the executive and the Congress.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) used his report to clobber Grover Norquist, and Norquist rebutted by calling McCain a "liar" and "delusional."

Oh, but this wasn't the first time. This is namecalling with a history -- dating at least back to the 2000 election, when Norquist mounted an ugly effort to defeat McCain.

McCain suddenly found himself with the upper hand in 2004, so the story goes, when the Abramoff investigation landed in his lap at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where he was chair. He had all sorts of damning emails at his disposal.

Back in March, Ryan Lizza wrote in The New Republic where things went from there...

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Norquist found the time to talk with conservative news site Newsmax.com about the recently-released McCain Report, which highlighted numerous transactions between Jack Abramoff, Norquist's nonprofit, and various recipients, including organizations tied to former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed.

"When McCain claims this was something other than an annual contribution, he is lying," Norquist said of the report, which found that ATR frequently pocketed several thousand dollars off the top of the "pass-through" amounts Abramoff funneled through ATR to needy Republican causes:

"McCain has misused his chairmanship of the Indian Affairs committee for two years to attack me and Ralph Reed because he thinks we beat him in South Carolina," Norquist said, referring to McCain's primary battle for the presidency. "He has told people I personally spent $12 million to defeat him in South Carolina. He is delusional[.]"

The New Republic's blog, the Plank, has more questions for presidential aspirant Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) about the $20,000 in campaign donations he recently returned to the Wyly brothers. In 2000, the duo funded a costly ad campaign smearing McCain's environmental record.

Remember presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) enemies-turned-financial-backers? They're getting the old hairy eyeball from a federal grand jury and a Senate investigative panel. (via Senate Majority Project)

With visions of the Oval Office dancing in his head, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) continues to cozy up to persons of questionable integrity. This time, ABC News catches him making nice-nice with a bunch of former Bush-Cheney moneybaggers who funded dirty tricks that ultimately derailed his "Straight Talk Express" campaign in 2000.

I frankly find this unbelievable.

Monday, we reported that John McCain's new senior aide Terry Nelson had a checkered past - he was involved with Tom DeLay and his co-defendants in their effort to get around Texas campaign finance laws and tied to the New Hampshire phone jamming scandal.

Yesterday, as part of his tour out West, McCain visited talk radio host John Carlson in Seattle. And one intrepid caller (a TPMmuckraker reader?) used the opportunity to get McCain on the record. You can listen to the audio of the call here, for which we have the blog TalkCheck to thank.

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor.

Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: You don't believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I've never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I've never heard of them before.

You might be skeptical that McCain was actually ignorant of Nelson's past, but when I spoke to Carlson's producer Dave Carson, he said that McCain seemed "surprised" by the call and that afterwards he "started asking his handlers" what all this was about. So that might be true.

I'm not sure what would be worse - if McCain actually was ignorant or just pretending. In either case, it would be yet another page out of the Bush playbook.

Below we noted that John McCain's new "senior aide" Terry Nelson played a central role in the money laundering scheme for which Tom DeLay is being prosecuted in Texas.

But 2002 was a busy year for Terry Nelson.

He was deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, where in addition to being in a position to funnel money back to Texas congressional candidates, he was the superior of one James Tobin, the New England political director for the RNC. Tobin, you'll remember, was convicted late last year for his role in a scheme to jam the phone lines for Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.

Maybe Nelson had nothing to do with it. But if he didn't, it makes you wonder why he was on the government's witness list to testify at Tobin's trial. He was never called, so it's not clear what he knows, but clearly he knows enough that the government thought he might be helpful for their case.

There have been a number of signs lately that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), eyeing 2008, is cozying up to the Republican establishment, but this just might be the surest one yet.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that McCain had hired Terry Nelson to be a senior advisor to his political committee, the Straight Talk America PAC. Who is Terry Nelson? George W. Bush's national political director in 2004, for one. It's just the latest example of McCain's strategy of taking what he can of Bush's money infrastructure - as the Post reports, he's been busily recruiting Pioneers, Rangers and Super Rangers from '04.

But there's one crucial, telling detail about Terry Nelson that the Post leaves out. And that's his role in the money laundering scheme for which Tom DeLay is being prosecuted down in Texas.

Nelson was the deputy chief of staff of the Republican National Committee in 2002 when the alleged crime occurred. His role was crucial, although he hasn't been charged. He's named right there in the indictment.

DeLay and his money men, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, are accused of trying to get around a Texas law against using corporate money to fund candidates. To do that, they wrote a check to the RNC and had the RNC bounce the money back to the Texas candidates they wanted to fund. According to the indictment, the scheme was laid out to Terry Nelson, and he made sure the RNC carried it out.

So what gives? Sen. McCain, Mr. Campaign Finance Reform, has just hired a man who (allegedly) played a key role in breaking a campaign finance law to advise him on how to spend his PAC's money. Anything to win in '08?

The New Republic has an interesting story on the feud between Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Grover Norquist, the Republican power broker and head of Americans for Tax Reform, who has extremely close ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

McCain, who has spearheaded an investigation into Abramoff's misdeeds, appears to be letting Norquist off the hook, despite the fact that Norquist's fingerprints are all over Jack's dealings.

Norquist and McCain have hated each other for about a decade, since McCain started pushing for campaign finance reform, TNR's Ryan Lizza tells us. Norquist, whose livelihood depends on the sizeable GOP power base he maintains in part by directing donations to various candidates and organizations, doesn't take kindly to McCain trying to swipe his lunch money. Hence, feud.

When McCain, head of the Indian Affairs Committee, heard of Abramoff's misdeeds, he jumped at the chance to investigate them, knowing of Jack's ties to Norquist.

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