Not surprisingly, the flow of congressional campaign contributions has dramatically shifted since the mid-term elections, with the majority Democrats now on par with Republicans.

Another thread to follow in the U.S. attorney scandal:

The U.S. attorney position in Alaska opened Jan. 23, 2006, when Timothy Burgess left to become a U.S. district judge. His first assistant, Deborah Smith, was named acting U.S. attorney that day. U.S. attorneys are typically nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. Traditionally, Alaska’s two U.S. senators send the names of one or more Alaskans to the White House for consideration. Sen. Murkowski said her clear choice was Smith, a career prosecutor who started out in the federal prosecutor’s office in Anchorage in 1982 and worked in Boston and Washington.

Sen. Stevens wouldn’t reveal his choices.

After submitting Smith’s name, Murkowski said in a telephone interview, her legislative director periodically called the White House during the first part of 2006 to check the status of the nomination.

“We’d get these vague, ‘Oh, we’re still working on it, still working on it,’ ” Murkowski said. “So it gets to the point where you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this has been a heck of a long time. What is happening?’ And so the response to my inquiry is, ‘We still haven’t, there’s some issues,’ and ultimately what we got back was, ‘The picks were not acceptable by the White House,’ and yet no explanation as to why they’re not acceptable.”

When she was in Alaska for the August 2006 recess, Murkowski’s Blackberry vibrated with a message. It was her chief aide in Alaska, Mary Hughes, citing a media report that Nelson Cohen had been named interim U.S. attorney.

“You just think, ‘It can’t be, wait.’ There was no consulting, no process, no nothing. That’s where I was certainly caught blindsided,” Murkowski said.

Stevens, himself a former federal prosecutor in Alaska, was enraged. “I am just furious at the way the attorney general handled this,” he said at the time.

In an interview at his office in the Federal Building last week, Cohen said he was unaware of all the political forces that resulted in his appointment. But he knew his boss, [Mary Beth] Buchanan, was well-connected, and it was she who told him about the opening in Alaska.

Mary Beth Buchanan is the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh and preceded Michael Battle as head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She is on the list of folks that Rep. John Conyers is seeking to interview as part of his committee’s ongoing investigation.

So here’s a question for Conyers’ crew to ask: Why was Cohen’s appointment so important to the White House that it bypassed both of Alaska’s Republican senators?

As we move forward in the US Attorney scandal this week, remember this name: Bradley J. Schlozman.

Stay tuned.

As Adam Liptak describes in this article (TimesSelect, sub. req.), John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’, is now trying for a commutation of his twenty year prison sentence for serving as a soldier in the Taliban militia. In what must be to Lindh a rather unfunny irony, the folks who ended up in the administration’s alternative gulag justice system actually ended up getting off a lot easier than he did — though of course they had to spend a considerable period of time at Gitmo, which ain’t nuthin’.

Yaser Hamdi, who held both Saudi and American citizenship, was never charged with any crime, though he was picked up along with Lindh. And he was allowed to return to Saudi Arabia in return for relinquishing his US citizenship and agreeing to some travel restrictions. He’s a free man in Saudi Arabia today.

David Hicks, an Australian citizen, recently cut a deal for nine months incarceration after admitting to much more serious charges than those against Lindh. He’ll be back in Australia by the end of the year.

It’s hard for me to imagine any Justice Department or president in the near future lifting a finger for this guy, Lindh. And he’s certainly not the only guy rotting away in federal prison for questionable reasons. But let me just go on the record saying I’ve always found this sentence, in a word, disgusting.

I was surprised at the time that it happened at all. At some point not long after 9/11 I was talking with my friend Juliet Eilperin at what I think was a party for the opening of Salon.com’s new office in Washington, DC. And we made a bet. My wager was that by the time the Lindh case came to a real conclusion he’d end up serving little if any time in prison. She took the other side. And I think we came up with some number of years over and under which she or I would collect.

Clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about. And I can’t remember now whether she ever got a chance to collect.

I was shocked when I later heard that he’d agreed to a twenty year prison sentence. Not that he had much choice, mind you. Otherwise, he looked likely to draw a life term. And I thought I remembered — though Liptak doesn’t mention it, so perhaps not — that the idea of a death sentence was even batted around. (For reasons which remain unexplained, he’s recently been transferred to the SuperMax federal prison in Colorado where the most dangerous and unredeemable offenders are sent to rot into isolation-induced insanity.)

This guy was simply a victim of Fox News justice, a paroxysm of jingoism that the justice system is supposed to resist and counter rather than enforce. This isn’t to romanticize the guy. Like a lot of other losers and goofballs who slip into cults and extremist groups, I’m sure he was a real piece of work, at least at the time. Perhaps he still is. But the evidence that he had ever committed an act that actually transgressed against a real American law was meager at best.

Perhaps a short term of imprisonment was in order for, at least in theory, serving in a paramilitary in active combat against the US military. But not twenty years in prison.

Today’s Must Read: getting the big picture of the administration’s effort to suppress the minority vote.

Yeltsin dies.

Certainly a contradictory figure. But it’s hard for me to see where he won’t be one of those figures whose positive moments, even if brief and episodic, were profound enough in their importance to outweigh the longer periods of lassitude, corruption and drift.

ARG: Bush rockin’ at 33%.

David Broder mangles the facts in order to describe Reid’s war stance as an “embarrassment” to the Dems.

Senate Dems start the drumbeat for the resignation of another administration official — General Services Administration Chief Lurita Doan.

A soldier in Iraq echoes the treachery of Harry Reid, says war can’t be won.