I was away from any reliable connectivity over the weekend. So I'm just catching up now with my reading. And I note that Kevin Drum and Greg Sargent at The Prospect are both pushing the point that Democrats need to tie their arguments about Republican corruption to real world policy failures and costs to ordinary Americans.

Along those lines, what about the increasing signs that the implementation of the new Medicare prescription drug plan -- and probably the underlying program itself -- appears to be more or less an unmitigated disaster?

This clunker embodies the whole story. It was conceived in sleaze, midwifed with lies and saw its first light of day in a burst of incompetence and corporate handouts.

Remember Nick Smith getting bribed on the floor? It was to cast his vote for this new program. Remember how Thomas Scully, former director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (now Scott McClellan's brother has the job), threatened to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster if he told Congress the actual estimated cost of the program?

These are not, admittedly, the choicest examples. The biggest is too broad and thorough to capture in a single nugget: the fact that the entire bill was written as a pay-off to big ticket campaign contributors from the pharmaceutical industry. But they make a start at desription why public corruption has a more direct effect on people's lives than whether Bob Ney gets to jet over to Scotland to play a game of golf.