Okay, you’ve been reading about all the excitement growing up around the Golden Duke awards. This morning, Local Scandal nominee Penn. State Sen. Vincent Fumo was written up in the local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, for his nomination. And in early January the Dukes are going to be featured on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. Seriously, I kid you not: I’m going to go on Moyers’ show and talk with Bill about the Golden Dukes and who the winners are.

Anyway, readers who sent in the winning nominations are going to be getting lots of cool TPM/Golden Dukes swag. And you can see the official Golden Duke statuette right there on the right. But here’s the dirty secret. That’s it. I have to confess that while there’s a picture of the official Golden Duke statuette, there is no actual statuette. But we want to change that. We need to get a real life statuette.

But the truth is we have no idea how to get one made. It doesn’t need to be fancy; doesn’t have to be any nicer really than the kind of Hooray You Won Tenth Place in the Division trophies I used to get playing AYSO soccer back in the day. But it does have to look like the statuette in the picture. It just won’t do to have the Duke be a guy kicking a soccer ball.

Now I normally come to you, the august TPM readership, for tips on political matters and various sorts of expertise. But there must be more than a few of you who know how we’d get this done. Obviously, it can be done. It’s just a matter of how much we’d have to pay and just who we go to, or what kind of outfit we go to, or designer, or whatever to get an estimate.

So, the fate or at least the greater glory of the Dukes is in your hands. If you know who we need to call, what we need to do, please let us know as soon as you can.

New docs obtained by TPMmuckraker under a FOIA request show that the State Dept knew of Blackwater’s fraudulent practices back in early 2005 but signed them up anyway.

TPMmuckraker reporter Spencer Ackerman got hold of a pretty amazing stash of documents here. So we’ll have more coming on this throughout the day and into next week.

Stay Tuned.

McCain sources say he’s up 500% in online contributions this week over last week. Of course, big percentage jumps are a lot easier to put together when you’re coming back from near zero. Still, he’s clearly back in the race. Bears watching.

Third party groups supporting Hillary dropped nearly $300,000 yesterday on mailings and phone-bank calls.

We’ll follow up with a more detailed and official notice. But we’re hiring a new full-time reporter-blogger to work at TPMmuckraker.com. If I don’t say so myself, I think it’s one of the coolest reporting jobs in the business. But maybe I’m biased. Interested? Let us know.

It’s looking like Mitt Romney might have been judged too quickly on the Martin Luther King business. Two witnesses have now come forward to The Politico, insisting that they saw the late Gov. George Romney (R-MI) make a surprise appearance alongside King in 1963.

The campaign has also posted a collection of citations — including a contemporary account from the Detroit Free Press — attesting that it happened.

There’s one lingering question, though: If the facts do vindicate Mitt Romney on this one — and at first glance, this looks legit — why did he handle it so awkwardly and ineptly right off the bat? Why all the parsing about what the word “saw” meant, and the business about “march with” being figurative?

Late Update: Or perhaps not. The Boston Phoenix is standing by their story — the elder Romney participated in the march, but they insist King did not:

Then-governor George Romney did indeed march in Grosse Pointe, on Saturday, June 29, 1963, but Martin Luther King Jr. was not there; he was in New Brunswick, New Jersey, addressing the closing session of the annual New Jersey AFL-CIO labor institute at Rutgers University.

Late Late Update: On closer inspection it looks like the Free Press article actually doesn’t show that the two men were there at the same march. So if King wasn’t actually there — even if George Romney was — then this whole thing looks like it was just spin from camp Romney, right down to taking the Free Press and other news sources out of context.

Why the didn’t the US government crack down earlier on fraud and lawlessness by military contractors in Iraq? Maybe because the consultant they hired to advise them on the issue also happened to be the head of the contractors’ lobbying group.

You may have heard that over the weekend the Concord (NH) Monitor published what’s being called an ‘anti-endorsement’ of Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA). The paper hasn’t decided yet who it is endorsing in either race. But they’re willing to go on the record saying that Romney definitely should not be president.

Their case is hardly a surprising one — Romney is simply too big a phony, too big a made-to-order, change-any-position-to-get-elected chameleon to be trusted.

We’re putting in some calls this morning trying to find out more. Because I’m curious, what’s behind this exactly? Certainly, the Monitor ed board isn’t the only one to see what a phony-baloney Romney is. And I haven’t seen any other papers taking this almost unprecedented step. The Monitor’s, I believe, considered the main liberal paper in the state — at least in comparison to the Neanderthal, but now somewhat moderated, Union-Leader. But that doesn’t answer the question either. We’re poking around. If you know more, let us know.

Romney: Concord Monitor dissed me because I’m so conservative.

I did not see it myself. But numerous readers told us late Friday how Chris Matthews devoted a substantial portion of Friday’s Hardball to trumpeting an article in the New York Times exonerating Rudy on the Shag Fund front and lamenting how his beloved candidate’s campaign was torpedoed by a bum rap.

If what the Times reported comes as a surprise, it shouldn’t. Because it’s what we were reporting as far back as November 30th. The initial story in the Politico suggested that the accounting funny business was intended to hide Rudy’s shagging visits. But a look at the records themselves didn’t bear that out. The real story was that late in his administration Rudy’s team started putting more and more expenses effectively off the books to hide his increasingly high-living ways because he’d made a big point publicly about how he’d reduced spending in the mayor’s office.

(As is so often the case, we came to this insight through the scrupulous and meticulously fair-minded research of Paul Kiel who, along with a group of TPM interns, figured this all out in a couple days with the documents.)

That was basically the argument Rudy’s team was making — that whatever fishy accounting techniques they were using, they were using them to cover Shag and non-Shag funding a like — actually mainly non-Shag funding — so the aim couldn’t be to conceal his affair. That was basically right, only it was in the nature of things, not surprisingly, a difficult argument to make: We weren’t just hiding shag, we were hiding everything!

And that wasn’t the worst of his problems. The burst of press attention focused a bright light on something that had been partly known in the NYC press but had been the subject of little scrutiny during this campaign: the fact that as Mayor Rudy expended tens or perhaps hundreds of thousand of taxpayer dollars on his mistress while his wife and kids were still ensconced at the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion.

It wasn’t just the Shag trips to the Hamptons, that was the least of it. It was NYPD security detail he had assigned to Nathan before their affair was even known — on the basis to fairly obviously bogus ‘threats’ she face. The personal NYPD-expensed valet service she, her friends and family enjoyed thanks to Rudy. Even the NYPD-dog walking.

So was it a bum wrap? To me that’s a highly debatable point. The original story got a key point wrong, though I guess I’d leave to others to debate exactly what was said in the original Politico story. But what sunk Rudy was the clear evidence that Rudy had used shifty accounting methods to conceal his high-living mayoral lifestyle and spent gobs of taxpayer dollars keeping his mistress up in style. Is that a bum rap?