Campaign finance maven McCain unveils his campaign’s finance team.

Fox News tosses Gingrich a bone, gives him his own America and God news special.

The office of Senator Tim Johnson has released the following at approximately 5pm ET:

Admiral John Eisold, Attending Physician of the United States Capitol said, “Senator Tim Johnson has continued to have an uncomplicated post-operative course. Specifically, he has been appropriately responsive to both word and touch. No further surgical intervention has been required.”

Help us puzzle this one out:

In the name of fighting identity theft, hundreds of Homeland Security agents rounded up 1,300 people in raids Tuesday, nearly all illegal immigrants. Only a few dozen of those arrested had any tie to identity thefts, it turned out. Too bad: nearly all of them will be deported for standard immigration violations.

The deported workers will be forced to leave behind an uncounted number of children, including infants. This practice isn’t new, but the scale of the raids — the largest such operation in U.S. history — makes the number of forcibly abandoned children likely to be unusually high.

DHS arrested workers who came from stable, working-class neighborhoods. Their kids were enrolled in schools. The communities are reported to be ripped apart by the raids; in some, the local authorities refused to help the feds. In some cases state authorities intervened to demand DHS behave better.

What’s the monetary cost of mounting the biggest raid on immigrants in U.S. history? What’s going to be the cost to the communities affected? What is the cost that will be borne by state and local governments?

And most importantly, who is served by raids that by any measure failed to achieve their stated goal, and at such great expense?

I’d be curious to hear your feedback on this. The latest news on Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) seems to be positive and hold some real grounds for optimism. He’s obviously had a major, potentially life-threatening event. But, hopefully, he’s going to get through it. As most of you probably know, Johnson was in the midst of a reporters’ conference call when he began to show the first signs of impairment which soon sent him to the hospital with what then appeared to be a stroke. In the nature of things, that conference call was being recorded.

Does it strike you as a little tasteless and gratuitous that a host of news outlets are broadcasting the recording? So you can hear how Johnson began to stumble through his words and lose his ability to concentrate as the bleeding in his brain reached a critical point?

A reader mentioned this to me this evening and told me he thought it was ghoulish. And I take it it’s being played on various chat shows and on the radio. Where I noticed it though was on the front page of the Washington Post either last night or early today. On the front page package, there’s a link that reads “AUDIO: Johnson Interview on Wednesday.” And if you click through, you’re taken to an audio file where you can hear the stuttering interview.

(I hadn’t listened to it or wanted to listen to it. But before writing this post, I clicked through and listened to the first few seconds just to make sure it was what I thought it was.)

I don’t want to be a mortality prude. These things hold a certain fascination.

But Johnson’s not dead. He’s in the hospital fighting for his life. This isn’t like video of an assassination where the events recorded are an essential part of what happened. It’s just live audio of a guy having a stroke, or what appeared to be one. I would have expected it to show up bootlegged on some no-holds-barred website. But there it is in the Post.

Former Saudi Ambassador Bandar egging the Cheney-ites on to bomb Iran?

Give this a close read. It’s from the Wall Street Journal …

The Bush administration is leaning toward temporarily sending as many as 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq, even as the Democrats taking charge of Congress demand a drawdown of forces.

U.S. officials say the increase is needed to make a new push to stabilize Baghdad and to bolster efforts to train the Iraqi army. The emerging plan is facing opposition from Iraqi officials adamant that more U.S. forces aren’t the answer. U.S. military commanders in Baghdad have drawn up plans for the country that don’t require any new personnel. The debate over whether to send additional U.S. forces to Iraq is the most visible manifestation of the high-level tumult roiling the Bush administration as it works to find a way forward there ahead of a presidential address to the nation early next year.

Who’s for this exactly? That is, beside President Bush, people who work for President Bush and John McCain? The American public seems dead set against it, at least if we’re willing to go by numerous national polls and a recent national election. The top brass in the US military seems, at best, highly skeptical — because it’s a textbook example of reckless hope over experience. To the extent there still is such a thing, most of the US foreign policy establishment is against it. Who’s on this bandwagon beside the president and the pundits?

Senior officials offer a sneak preview of Bush’s New Way Forward in Iraq. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

News Flash: New York Sun opens its ed pages to 3rd graders. That and they finally expose Drudge as the cat’s paw of the dying liberal media. I was hoping someone would do that.

The Post says senate Republicans are going to push for what amounts to a special Johnson mortality clause in the resolution to organize the senate.

Late Update: Jonathan Singer has more here at MyDD.