Paul flagged this today in the Daily Muck. But in case you’re not reading the best daily run-down of corruption news on the web (yeah, if we don’t say so ourselves), check out Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) new counter-attack ad on the Abramoff business.

Just go to his campaign website: it starts rolling the second you land on the page.

Burns’ best line from the spot: you can’t trust the attack ads showing Burns’ multitudinous connections to Jack Abramoff because they’re paid for by people who got money from Abramoff’s clients. Abramoff, Burns reminds us, is “the guy who ripped off his Indian clients for millions and lied to anybody and everybody.”

(Above, Burns zaps Democratic attack ad with TV remote control gizmo.)

Burns: So, you can’t believe the ads that document my connections to Jack Abramoff because they’re funded by people who got money from Abramoff’s clients. And Abramoff’s a lying rat bastard. So I’m in the clear.

Okay, let the Bush Medicare Drug Bill Debacle blogging begin. We’ve got a new team of five Medicare Drug Bill bloggers ready to go over at TPMCafe’s new Drug Bill Debacle Blog. And the first two posts are up — one from Kate Steadman and the second from Ezra Klein, who’ll be leading up our effort. Go check it out, comment, tell us what you think.

Soon we’ll be adding a special comments email address where you can send in your stories, experiences with the program, etc.

Hmmm. Can’t say that’s an angle that would have occurred to me. This off New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams’ column today …

Jack Abramoff’s partner Mike Scanlon admitted to digging up former Congressman Robert Livingston’s private life. Set to become speaker, Livingston then got sidelined for Tom DeLay’s man Denis Hastert. Prosecutors now checking if Abramoff and Scanlon took Livingston down at DeLay’s behest.

For now I’ll stick with ‘hmmm’. But I’m eager to hear more.

Wow. I had just about reconciled myself to the idea that there might be a silver lining to a strong second place showing for Hamas in yesterday’s Palestinian legislative elections — a showing sufficiently strong that it would force Hamas’ inclusion as a junior partner in the next government, which seemed the likely result when I went to bed last night.

Don’t get me wrong: of course, it’s a disaster on like ten different levels.

But political participation can force a hard form of accountability. If there is a major constituency for Hamas in the territories — which certainly there is — perhaps to have them in the government, on the line for dealing with nuts and bolts problems of administration, on the line for delivering a better life for the Palestinians as opposed to just peddling the heroin of violence, has some advantages over having them on the outside as a paramilitary force with a de facto veto over whatever the Fatah-based government chooses to do.

Yes, yes, there’s a lot of grasping for straws here. But as long as the structures of democratic government remain secure and intact — a big ‘if’ — participation in government tends to force a measure of pragmatism and accomodation.

Yet, as you’ve probably already seen, the news this morning is that Hamas has apparently scored a clear victory in yesterday’s elections.

Where does that leave things? I’ll be waiting eagerly to hear and read from others who follow the inner dynamics of these matters more closely and understand them better than I do. But it is hard for me to see how this doesn’t increase the sense and likelihood of the sort of unilateralism that Sharon pushed for the last two years but then seemed on the point of abandoning.

Like a crazy love affair, it’s bigger than the both of them — not the ‘peace process’ but the reality of a two state solution. This just changes the path, though the path can get awfully crooked.

Recently I posted about the RICO suit that the DCCC filed against Tom DeLay and his Money Machine back in 2000.

As I noted, though the suit was met by a general tone of bemused derision at the time, the suit addressed many of the key fact patterns and bad acts that are now going to send a lot of these guys (probably, though not certainly, including DeLay himself) to jail. So what ever happened to the suit? Bob Bauer, who the lead counsel for the DCCC who actually filed the thing, addresses that question in a new post.

How the movie Jack Abramoff made while he was ‘out of politics’ was funded by the apartheid-era South African military. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Could Sen. Linc Chafee’s vote on Alito — for or against — sink his reelection chances next year? Interesting speculation on this question from Chris Cillizza over at his Post blog.

Oh, this is good stuff. Sen. Santorum categorically denies any ties to so-called ‘K Street Project’. “I had absolutely nothing to do — never met, never talked, never coordinated, never did anything — with Grover Norquist and the — quote — K Street Project,” Santorum said yesterday.

Last November he told the same paper: “The K Street project is purely to make sure we have qualified applicants for positions that are in town. From my perspective, it’s a good government thing.”

This sort of poorly executed ex post bamboozelement just never ends well.

In his press conference today, President Bush suggested that the existence of photographs of himself and Jack Abramoff are no big deal and generally pooh-poohed the press’s focus on the story. But our reporting suggests that the White House is actively involved in covering up and possibly destroying photographic evidence of the two men together.

Earlier this month, we were alerted to the existence of a series Abramoff photos at the website of Reflections Photography, a studio that does photo shoots for many Republican political events and sells copies to the individuals who attended the events and other members of the public through an online photo database. Reflections was an official photographer for Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign events and for the 2005 inauguration.

One of those photos was of Abramoff and Ralph Reed at a party for the launch of Reed’s Century Strategies DC office in 2003. We contacted Reflections Photography and purchased the rights to publish that photograph and did so on January 11th.

Things weren’t so simple with the late 2003 photograph of Jack Abramoff and President Bush.

When we went to the page for the photograph of President Bush and Abramoff, the page in question had disappeared from the site. Indeed, in the sequence of photographs from the event in question, each had a unique identification number in perfect consecutive order. All were there on the site, in sequence, with the exception of the one that was apparently that of President Bush and Abramoff.

I called back Reflections Photography and spoke to the woman who had earlier sold us the licensing rights to the other image. I told her there was another photograph we wanted to purchase the rights to publish but that it appeared no longer to be on their website.

She told me that sometimes pictures going back as far as 2003 had not been transferred over to the online catalog.

I told her that as far as we knew the photograph had been available on the site until quite recently. Then I asked if the photograph in question were available in their offline archives and whether I could purchase it that way.

She said that it was and that the CD in question was available for purchase.

I asked her if it would be possible for her to pull the CD. Then I could describe the photograph with the identification number in question to her to verify that it was the same picture.

The woman, who was helpful and friendly throughout, said she could and asked me to wait a few minutes while she retrieved the CD in question.

After a few minutes, she returned and proceeded to pull up the photo in question on the CD. Then, to her audible surprise, she told me the “photo was deleted” from the CD.

That, as you’d imagine, caught my attention. So I asked what that meant. The woman from Reflections told me that that this sometimes happened when the White House wanted to prevent the public from accessing certain photographs of the president.

When I asked her when this had happened she told she didn’t know and wouldn’t be at liberty to tell me even if she did.

This was back on January 11th. From what we could tell, the photograph had been removed from the site roughly a week earlier.

Now, we contacted Abramoff’s spokesman Andrew Blum. And he declined to comment. We contacted the White House press office but they wouldn’t return our calls. Since we can’t get the photo in question directly from Reflections or get any of the relevant parties to speak with us, there was really no way for us to proceed.

But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.

Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, “not relevant.”

When I asked her who had instructed her to remove the photos, she told me she was the president of the company. She did it. It was “her business decision” to remove the photographs. She told me she had done so within the last month.

So, here we have it that the president of Reflections admits that she removed photos of Abramoff and the president from their online database. If what her employee told me on the 11th is accurate the photos were also deleted from the CDs they keep on file in their own archives. So the scrub seems to have been pretty thorough.

Did the White House send out the word to deep-six those Bush-Abramoff pics?

Scott McClellan won’t answer our questions. But this mystery would not be difficult to solve by a press outlet with sufficient juice to get a question answered by Scott McClellan. Has the White House or anyone working at the White House’s behest instructed Reflections Photography to destroy or remove from its archives photographs of President Bush and Jack Abramoff?

Simple question. I doubt it has a simple answer.

Here’s a quick update on the scrubbing of the Bush/Abramoff photos from the Reflections Photography photo archive. David Donnelly points out that the owner of Reflections, Joanne Amos, is a maxed out Bush-Cheney ’04 contributor.

Also, many of you have suggested that the photographs may be cached at Google or The Wayback Machine. We’ve checked; it’s not. We have the photo ID, the original URL and screen cap, etc.. We suspect it was never picked up by those services because of the way the Reflections dynamic database is set up. But if it was ever there, it’s not there now.