The Idaho Statesman was investigating allegations surrounding Sen. Larry Craig’s (R-Idaho) sex life before the scandal broke in earnest in August, and the paper never stopped. Today, the Statesman runs a report documenting four gay men, all of whom have gone on the record, who say “they had sex with Craig or that he made a sexual advance or that he paid them unusual attention.”

There’s probably very little the Senate Republican caucus can do about any of this, but it’s certainly a painful coda for a humiliated senator who had hoped to avoid these kinds of headlines.

In retrospect, National Review might have been better off not going after the Jayson Blair and Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories with so much enthusiasm. As Tom Edsall reports, the conservative political magazine has been publishing stories about events in the Middle East that were apparently fabricated.

There is a growing dispute over the veracity of reporting from Lebanon by former Marine W. Thomas Smith, Jr. who is posting reports on his blog, The Tank, published by the conservative website, National Review Online (NRO). Smith is a supporter of the war in Iraq, and is affiliated with two politically conservative organizations, the Counterterrorism Research Center and the Family Security Foundation. He is the executive editor of World Defense Review, and the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design.

At question are two reports filed by Smith on The Tank — reports which appear to be designed to bolster support for the ongoing presence of U.S troops in the Mideast.

Edsall focuses specifically on a series of reports about Hezbollah activities that not only fail to withstand scrutiny, but may even “endanger the press corps in the troubled region.” He also spoke directly with four professional journalists in the area, all of whom condemned Smith for publishing a variety of false reports. One called Smith’s reports “pure fabrications,” while another was more blunt, calling the work “insane.”

Confronted with reality, Smith, who repeatedly blasted TNR and Beauchamp’s dubious reports, tried to backpedal, saying he should been “more specific,” and conceding that he lowered his stands for accuracy because he was writing for “a blog.” Smith concluded, “In the future, I’ll provide more context.”

It’s not exactly a persuasive defense. Reporting on fictional events as if they occurred in reality goes beyond simple questions of “context.”

Glenn Greenwald has a gem on all of this, noting, among other things, that “National Review did not merely help to fuel the Beauchamp outrage against TNR; they were one of the leading instigators of the months-long lynch mob.”

As the Shag Fund scandal has unfolded over the last several days, one of the details that stands out is the fact that Rudy Giuliani provided a security detail for his mistress — even when he wasn’t around — which led NYPD personnel to, among other things, walk the mayor’s girlfriend’s dog.

Today, the New York Daily News adds an interesting angle to this.

Unlike her predecessor as mayoral girlfriend, Mike Bloomberg’s gal pal, investment banker Diana Taylor, has never had a separate police protection detail.

Taylor, 52, takes the bus every day to her midtown office and rides the subway to business appointments. In the six years Taylor and Bloomberg have lived together, she said she has never had reason to want or need personal NYPD security.

“I don’t have security in Bogota or Nairobi or Moscow when I travel there on business, why would I need security in the safest city in the world?” Taylor told the Daily News yesterday. […]

The nearly 6-foot tall Taylor is often recognized on the streets and subway by New Yorkers, who shout out advice for her to pass along to the mayor.

While that’s interesting on its face, I’m also curious about the story behind the story. Did Bloomberg know that Taylor was dishing to the Daily News about an angle that makes Giuliani look worse?

And if so, might this a subtle example of Bloomberg throwing Giuliani under the bus?

The 2008 elections are still 11 months away, but it’s only natural for political observers to look ahead and notice a certain trend. The narrow Democratic majority in the Senate is poised to get bigger. The same is true of the modest Democratic majority in the House. While there’s plenty of presidential-campaign wrangling left to do, the current landscape seems to suggest a Democratic president will be inaugurated in January 2009.

The result will be a Democratic trifecta for the first time since the 1992 elections. And while that would obviously benefit the country, corporate lobbyists, already depressed about losing a friendly GOP congressional majority, are starting to panic — and get White House help now before it’s too late.

Business lobbyists, nervously anticipating Democratic gains in next year’s elections, are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor.

Hoping to lock in policies backed by a pro-business administration, poultry farmers are seeking an exemption for the smelly fumes produced by tons of chicken manure. Businesses are lobbying the Bush administration to roll back rules that let employees take time off for family needs and medical problems. And electric power companies are pushing the government to relax pollution-control requirements.

“There’s a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic,” said Craig L. Fuller, executive vice president of Apco Worldwide, a lobbying and public relations firm, who was a White House official in the Reagan administration. “Corporate executives, trade associations and lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies.”

At issue is everything from highway safety to mountaintop pollution to family-leave protections.

As Kevin Drum concluded, “I can hardly wait to see what kind of last minute damage Bush decides to inflict on the Republic as his term in office draws to a close.”

I once knew a jazz pianist who told me, “When I hit a wrong note, I keep hitting it — so the audience will think it’s intentional.” To move away from the wrong note would be a subtle admission of a mistake, and make the error more obivous.

Karl Rove clearly lives by the same principle.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, Karl Rove reiterated his false claim that Democrats in Congress — not the Bush administration — forced a war vote prior to the 2002 midterm elections. Despite having being contradicted by former Chief of Staff Andrew Card and former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Rove continued to press his make-believe story about how the Iraq war vote occurred.

I realize Newsweek wanted a conservative analyst for its election coverage, but it’s a shame the magazine couldn’t find someone slightly more connected to reality.

In his first term as mayor, Rudy Giuliani appointed Brendan Sexton to head NYC’s Procurement Policy Board, one of the little-known offices that, we now know, Giuliani used to hide the costs associated with his romantic, adulterous getaways.

And what does Sexton think now that he knows his office’s budget was misused by his former boss? I’m glad you asked.

A former Giuliani administration official says he’s “sick” over reports that his little-known agency was used to hide taxpayer money that funded police escorts during the ex-mayor’s romantic rendezvous in the Hamptons.

“The cover-up of this and the explanations for it have been so disingenuous,” said Brendan Sexton, who chaired the Procurement Policy Board in 2000. The panel was charged $29,757 for travel bills racked up by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s security detail as he hung out with then-girlfriend Judith Nathan on Long Island.

“He didn’t want anybody to know what he was doing. That’s the truth. I don’t care about his personal life – it’s not shocking to me that he wanted to visit his girlfriend,” added Sexton, a Democrat who served as sanitation commissioner under Ed Koch.

“The part that’s disturbing to me is that my organization or any government organization could be used to conceal from the public how their money was being spent.”

Sexton added, “At first, I thought it was humorous. I just couldn’t believe anybody would do this. After that, I was sort of sick about it.”

In case you didn’t catch it over the weekend, don’t miss Rudy’s new ad going on offense on Shag Fund …

Bush Administration: Oh, all the things we might have accomplished this year had we not been bogged down by congressional oversight.

Two Washington Post reporters criticize paper’s front page Obama Muslim hit piece. Ombudsman to follow?

Over the weekend top Giuliani adivsor Anthony Carbonetti claimed that “it’s fiscally responsible to anticipate expenses and prepay them.”

That was a reference to Team Rudy’s weird practice, while mayor, of prepaying hundreds of thousands of dollars to AMEX to be drawn down against future travel expenses for the mayor and his subordinates — some Shag Fund-related, some not.

It seems to have been another ploy to hide away big chunks of the Mayor’s office’s budget.

Has anyone heard of this kind of massive prepayment to a credit card company? In the public sector or private?

Late Update: As I suspected, the consensus of TPM Reader financial planners, accountants and money managers is that prepayment like this, of this large a sum, is basically never justified unless you’re getting some sort of discount, which Rudy wasn’t. So why were they doing it?