So howbout that Sen. Stevens (R-AK)?

There’s a perverse dynamic being publisher of TPMmuckraker. There are only 100 senators. And the site’s business model depends on a good number of them being ridiculously corrupt. But it’s not every day that one of them is revealed not only in crooked dealings but also in the sort of lavish and easy to chronicle tale that really makes for a good story.

Now, for the moment and almost for the next two years, we have the Bush administration in place. So that means we’ll continue to get major scandals like the US Attorney Purge, pay-offs to crooked contractors, secret plans to stop African-Americans from voting and a lot of other stuff that will fill the site’s virtual pages.

Still, when a guy like Sen. Stevens gets into a scandal on the order of the one he seems to be involved in we really need to jump right on it because there just can’t be that many senators as crooked as he seems to be.

As we noted yesterday, not only is the already-reported grand jury in Alaska now looking into Stevens’ shenanigans. There’s also another grand jury impanelled in DC also looking into Stevens’ dealings with Veco Corp. and specifically how the crooked oil services company (two of its execs, including its CEO, recently pleaded guilty to bribing public officials) managed to end up renovating Stevens’ home.

The second grand jury in DC, which has no connection to the Veco investigation save for Sen. Stevens, is the pretty sure sign that Stevens is in the colloquial if not the technical sense a target of the investigation.

In any case, common sense tells me that you don’t come up with an MO like that that led to the shady house renovation deal thirty-plus years into your senate career. And we’re already hearing tales of lots of other at least borderline scams by Alaska’s senior senator. Indeed, since we started reporting in earnest on the Stevens’ story quite a few Alaska readers have come out of the wood with more helpful details about Sen. Stevens.

So here’s the deal. We’re interested in the Stevens story in a big way. If you’re from Alaska and you know some details about the story we should know, drop us a line. Confidentiality and anonymity of course assured. Maybe you’re a reporter from Alaska and you’ve got some new nugget on the invesigation and you want to make sure your story doesn’t get buried. Let us know. If you’ve got more details, context or insights on the Stevens story, don’t be a stranger.

What does it mean that there’s a separate grand jury investigating Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) in D.C.? Probably that prosecutors wanted a fair shake at felling a giant in Alaskan politics — something that would be much tougher if they chased Stevens on his home turf.

Okay, turns out there’s a back-story to the new Celine Dion song that’s been chosen as Hillary’s official campaign song.

It was first written for a TV ad campaign for Air Canada airlines.

How did we not learn about this sooner?

From Newsday …

Rudolph Giuliani’s membership on an elite Iraq study panel came to an abrupt end last spring after he failed to show up for a single official meeting of the group, causing the panel’s top Republican to give him a stark choice: either attend the meetings or quit, several sources said.

Giuliani left the Iraq Study Group last May after just two months, walking away from a chance to make up for his lack of foreign policy credentials on the top issue in the 2008 race, the Iraq war.

He cited “previous time commitments” in a letter explaining his decision to quit, and a look at his schedule suggests why — the sessions at times conflicted with Giuliani’s lucrative speaking tour that garnered him $11.4 million in 14 months.

That’s the kind of story that ends a campaign, especially one like Rudy’s based on standing up to terrorism and hanging tough in Iraq. And that’s probably why the campaign put out this statement, which Jonah Goldberg posted at The Corner …

As someone considered a potential presidential candidate, the Mayor didn’t want the group’s work to become a political football. That, coupled with time restraints led to his decision.

But wait. If being a presidential candidate was the issue, why’d Rudy accept the appointment in the first place? And did the possibility of running for president make him blow off all the meetings? Was he informally recusing himself? C’mon. In any case, the statement concedes that ‘time restraints’ (does he mean ‘constraints’?) were an issue. So he’s not even really denying the claim.

So Rudy’s running on terrorism and Iraq. But he got booted off a congressionally-mandated blue ribbon panel because he couldn’t be bothered to show up for the meetings. It conflicted with his for-a-price speaking gigs. Like I said, it’s the kind of story that ends campaigns.

Grand jury probe nets Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) fishing buddy.

David Rieff reacts to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s case for values in American foreign policy:

Anne-Marie may be right (I am not at all sure) that values play a particularly important role in the American national psyche, but psycho-history is not history, just as self-love is not real love.

The rest is here.

I suggested in the post below that Rudy’s flaking on the Iraq Study Group is the kind of thing that ends campaigns. And a number of readers have written in either to say that it’s not that big a deal, or that the press won’t touch it or that there are a bunch of other things that should do his candidacy greater damage.

Sure. But things that tank campaigns are seldom the things that are really that big a deal. It’s the little facts that puncture the premise of a candidate’s campaign. It is the the question that can’t quite be answered. The story that sticks.

So take Rudy. His whole campaign is about him as Mr. War on Terror. (He’s certainly not running on social policy since he disagrees with most of his constituency on those issues. ) But the upshot of this little story is that Rudy’s real priority is money. He literally doesn’t have time for finding a solution to the problem we face in Iraq. Couldn’t make the meetings.

Again, is it that big a deal? Certainly worse things have happened. Rudy was still in his buckraking phase. I guess the Iraq Study Group got on well enough without him. (After all, Rudy doesn’t really have any experience or knowledge about foreign policy.)

But how does Rudy respond if one of his opponents raises this in a debate after Rudy goes on one of his tough-guy-9/11 save-the-word-from-the-arabs tears?

I think this sticks to him like tar. Not because it’s the worst thing in the world. Not because it’s the most important thing about him or his campaign. But because it’s like bubble gum on the shoe of his signature issue. Pick your metaphor, a pin to his balloon. A can trailing after his car. Whatever. It will stick in people’s minds and it hits him where he’s supposed to be strongest. He cares so much about the Iraq War he couldn’t bother to reschedule a few rubber chicken speeches. It’s just a matter of which of his opponents throws the first gob.

If a newspaper breaks a story that by all rights should be damaging to Rudy’s “national security credentials,” and the rest of the media fails to pick up on it, did the story ever break at all?

President Bush isn’t willing to make the difficult decision in Iraq. We ask the question, “Is anybody else?” in today’s episode of TPMtv …

Late Update: For a transcript of today’s episode, click here.

We’ve long been suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, the prosecutor who led the still-growing Duke Cunningham investigation.

Well, here’s more grist for the mill. An email released last week shows that purgemeister Kyle Sampson was hours away from asking the president to fire Lam not because she wouldn’t resign, but because she wanted more time on the job to handle her very important prosecutions.