A woman whose brother is heading out for a second tour to Iraq writes an emotional letter about why she’s backing Dem vet double-amputee and Illinois House candidate Tammy Duckworth.

Damn. Here’s a story that must have about a billion volts of charge in it.

Time says the FBI is now investigating Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) as part of their expanded AIPAC investigation. They are, says Time, “examining whether Rep. Jane Harman of California and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) may have violated the law in a scheme to get Harman reappointed as the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.”

President Bush recess appoints a new pro-industry chief to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Shouldn’t be a problem since mines are so safe already.

Gettin’ in his face …

Harold Ford Jr. showed up uninvited at a campaign event for rival Republican Bob Corker at a private charter airstrip in Memphis this morning. Corker had scheduled the media event earlier this week.

News reporters were surprised when Ford’s tour bus pulled up at the event and, apparently staff at Wilson Air were surprised as well, as they tried to steer media inside the property for the Corker news conference.

“You need to get this bus off our premises please. Right now,” said one Wilson Air staffer.

Corker instead, opted to come out and talk with Ford directly while the cameras were rolling. What followed was a tense confrontation between the two, caught on tape.

See the rest here.

A new, hard to watch, but powerful ad Michael J. Fox cut for Claire McCaskill, Democratic senate candidate in Missouri who’s trying to unseat Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO).

They’re currently running neck and neck, with maybe the slightest of margins in McCaskill’s favor.

More ads to come.

TPM Reader NB catches us up on the final Burns/Tester debate in Montana …

I wish everyone in the nation could be watching the Burns-Tester debate right now just to see how much point-blank honesty devastates the GOP Party line on Iraq. When John Tester listed the things that have gone wrong in Iraq, the best Burns could come back with was that things were “going well” in Afghanistan, and that there are some areas that are almost free of the Taliban. I truly do feel sorry for the old man.

Does anyone know if CSPAN is carrying this?

No depths to how low they’ll go to salvage their power (from the Utica Observer-Dispatch) …

Three Central New York television stations have chosen not to run an advertisement from the National Republican Congressional Committee that alleges Michael Arcuri made calls to a sex hotline while at a conference in New York City.

Local television station WKTV and Syracuse’s WSTQ and WSTM are not running the ad.

“We rejected the ad,” said WKTV Vice President and General Manager Vic Vetters. “This is based on several reviews and discussions with our legal council.”

Democratic Oneida County District Attorney Michael Arcuri is in a highly competitive race for the 24th District Congressional District seat against Republican state Sen. Ray Meier.

Documents provided by both the NRCC and the Arcuri campaign show a call lasting less than a minute to an 800 number that is now a sex line.

Arcuri said that number was dialed by accident by Sean Byrne, the executive director of the New York Prosecutor Training Institute, who was meeting with him and others in the hotel room. Byrne also said that was the case, and records show immediately following the call to the sex line, he called the same seven digits, but with a 518 area code, not an 800 prefix.

A Meier spokeswoman said Meier had called the NRCC and demanded that they not run the ad. NRCC spokesman Ed Patru said his organization is not allowed to coordinate with candidates.

It’ll get much worse.

A short while before the Foley story broke, I was putting together a post about a contest the Sunlight Foundation is running called Congress in 30 seconds. They have a series of web gizmos at the site that allow you to splice together your own 30 TV spot, with film clips and sound and text on the screen. The idea is to create an ad showing what you think members of Congress spend their day doing.

The point behind the exercise is something they call their ‘punch-clock campaign‘. They’re trying to get members of Congress to agree to make their schedules available to the public. So you could go online and look and see what Senator Jones was doing last Thursday. Well, he was in this committee meeting, then he met with Jack Abramoff and then later he went over to the party committee office and called up contributors to pony up money for next year’s reelection campaign.

You get the idea. And if you know how Congress works you know that this is pretty much like getting vampires to sign up for daylight. But you’ve got to start somewhere. And they’ve already gotten 42 candidates to sign up. So far no one who’s actually in office, as far as I know, has signed on the dotted line. They’re actually giving bounties to members of the public who can get officeholders or candidates to sign up. Actually a thousand bucks if you can get a rep or senator to sign on the dotted line.

Anyway, as I was saying, when I started writing this post it was just before the Foley business hit. And then after, well … somehow the idea of what congressmen spend their days doing just took on a whole new light. As far as I know none of the sample clips they have that you can work with is of a fifty-something horndog jamming away at his blackberry on the floor of the House as the sweat trickles down his brow. But who knows. Maybe they’ll add that. Or, actually, I think you can upload your own clips.

Anyway, it’s fun, so give it a try. The entrant in the 30 spot contest gets $5000 and there’s only like a week or so left before they choose the winner.

They know no limits watch (WaPo) …

The Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence suspended a mid-level Democratic staffer Tuesday based on a suspicion that he may have been connected to the leak of a politically damaging intelligence report almost a month ago, according to Republican and Democratic congressional sources.

The action by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), which has drawn sharp criticism from Democratic panel members, was described by legislators of both parties as another example of the increased partisan infighting that has damaged the workings of the intelligence panel during this election year.

“The chairman’s unilateral action is without basis and an abuse of his power to provide security accesses,” Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the panel, said yesterday. “There is no evidence to suggest that the professional staff member in question did anything wrong,” she added.

Late yesterday, Washington lawyer Jonathan Turley sent a letter to Hoekstra and Harman saying he represented the staff member involved, Larry Hanauer, whose name had been leaked to the media. Turley wrote that he wanted an expedited review of his client’s role “to clear his name at the earliest possible date.” He said there was “not a single scintilla of evidence suggesting that Mr. Hanauer had any role in the leaking of the NIE,” or National Intelligence Estimate, and that he was drafting a sworn statement to that effect.

Adding to the political overtones, several Republican lawmakers issued news releases yesterday condemning leaks and praising Hoekstra — including House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.).

If they do crash and burn on November 7th, nothing could be sweeter. But anything’s possible and nothing should be taken for granted.

This is no more than a gut sense and a reaction to the reverberations I can feel in the ground. But my gut sense is that this week the conventional wisdom or perhaps Democratic optimism reached into the realm of irrational exuberance. And my own not particularly scientific perusal of the polls suggests some slackening of the strong trend toward the Democrats we’ve seen over the last three weeks.

Don’t get me wrong. The polls still paint an extremely bleak picture for the Republicans. Race after race that should have been safe for the GOP has crept within the margin of error.

Over the last couple months we’ve seen the campaign knocked this way and that by a series of strong pivots, pendulum swings that have driven the news for two or more weeks. Unfortunately for the GOP, most have swung against them. There was the pre-9/11 uptick in GOP fortunes, minute but real and detectable in the polls. Then the collapse of support with the NIE revelation, the Woodward book and mounting chaos in Iraq. And finally Foley.

We’ve got little more than two weeks left before the big day. But the news cycle the campaign feeds on has seemed a bit aimless over the last week. In fact it’s started to feed on itself. And by that I mean that the major campaign issue has been how badly the campaign is going for the Republicans. But that type of inverted news cycle tends to feed on itself and like a bubble, burst.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so much intensity and no news to chew on is exactly that.

I get the sense that this campaign, even with so little time left, has one more big jolt left in it.

What do you think? And what might it be?