McCain’s convention chair gets tossed after Newsweek reported that he’d lobbied for the Burmese dictatorship.

McCain’s pretty tight with a lot of lobbyists, isn’t he?

Women’s Voices Women’s Votes has another “unfortunate coincidence” in the timing of its voter registration mailings, this time in West Virginia.

Joe Lieberman is out there touting the alleged endorsement of Obama by Hamas as reason to vote for John McCain.

What does it mean that government domestic spying is up but counterterrorism prosecutions are down?

Larry Bartles sits down at the TPMCafe Table for One this week. His new book is Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. He introduces its theme of the political impact of the growing gap between rich and poor in his first post at Cafe.

In case you missed it over the weekend, one of the military judges at Gitmo has disqualified the general overseeing the military commissions there from any further participation in the Hamdan case because of his efforts to politicize the process.

At TPMmuckraker, we’ve compiled a timeline, based on the judge’s ruling, of the efforts by the general, Thomas Hartmann, former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, and other officials to game the system and squelch complaints about their own conduct.

As I noted in this post over the weekend, buried in that DOD document dump on the compromised cable show ‘military analysts’ was a fun little email in which someone (the sender’s name is redacted) wrote attacking Rajiv Chandrasekaran, an assistant managing editor at the Post and author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City for having the temerity to do a week of guest posts at TPMCafe “a super-liberal blog … edited by Bush-bashing uber-liberal Josh Marshall …” In particular, they were steamed at his responding to a Post OpEd defending the occupation by legendary Bush hack Dan Senor.

In any case, that was mainly good for laughs and fun for us here at TPM. But it’s got us to thinking there are probably other little nuggets buried in that document that either got missed by the Times reporters or simply didn’t rise to the level of getting included in their big piece. But the topic is one that can shed a lot of light on how these folks saw the different networks, which hosts and reporters were more receptive to getting played, what the different strategies were. I suspect there’s a lot of interesting stuff buried in there.

So we’re setting up a research thread over at TPMmuckraker where we’re asking readers to break off chunks of the document dump and then report in our comments section on what they find. Join us.

Bloomberg has a good rundown today of the constraints facing Hillary Clinton if she tries to recoup the $11.4 million she’s loaned to her campaign. A number of readers have had questions about how the loan repayment would work and the rules and regs associated with personal campaign loans, and this piece should answer most of those.

Let me touch on one other aspect to this. A lot of attention has, legitimately, been focused on the fact that Bill is an indirect conduit for money to her campaign. His speaking or consulting fees can ultimately find their way to Hillary’s campaign coffers in the form of those personal loans from the Clintons. One campaign finance expert interviewed last week said “the Clintons have effectively bypassed campaign finance reform in a manner that’s ingenious — using Bill Clinton effectively as a front for the fundraising.”

But there’s another point to be made on these Clinton loans that relates to the pre-existing concerns about a First Lady succeeding her husband to the Presidency. The Clintons’ personal fortune is a direct result of their political careers. One of the trappings of the office in this day and age is the celebrity attendant to it — and the money-making opportunities that affords. Their lucrative outside endeavors — book publishing, speaking engagements and consulting — would not have been possible had he not been President (and to a lesser degree, were she not a senator).

The Clintons are taking $11.4 million made as a result of being in public office and plowing it back into retaking that office. The campaign acknowledges that Hillary only made about $11 million from her Senate salary and book deals, so at least a fraction of the loan came from joint assets contributed by Bill, although regardless of how much Bill technically contributed, the remaining fortune is what gives her the luxury of ponying up $11 million. If $11 million was all they had, you can bet they wouldn’t have loaned that much to the campaign.

Without that $11.4 million, Hillary’s campaign would very likely have run out of money to compete in Indiana and North Carolina. It’s possible that she would have been forced to withdraw from the race already were it not for that money — money they had available by virtue primarily of Bill having been President.

There is, it seems to me, a qualitative difference between this kind of self-financing and the more traditional kind, where an independently wealthy candidate seeks to leverage his or her personal fortune to win political office. It’s also different than lending one’s name and celebrity to one’s son’s campaign, to name another recent example. In essence, they are using the trappings of the office once out of office to get back into office. That is the sort of self-perpetuation of power that we associate with dynasties.

In some ways, it misses the point to heap this all at the feet of the Clintons. It’s the result of a series of political and social changes — longer life spans have lengthened the period of the post-presidency, First Lady’s can and will have their own professional and political lives, celebrity has become its own currency — that the Clintons aren’t directly responsible for and which the founders could hardly have anticipated.

Still, the effect is undemocratic, and it’s troubling that we don’t seem to recognize it as such.

An AFSCME official tells TPM Election Central that the union will put “real money” into pro-Hillary ads in the remaining primary states.

I hadn’t seen much of the Vito Fossella story since late last week. So I hadn’t seen that Fossella’s secret life was much more involved then I’d realized. At first I’d thought that Fossella had simply had an extramarital affair in which he’d fathered a child — not the most unusual story. And it actually struck me as a point in his favor that he was actually trying to be a father in his daughter’s life — something I still think is a point in his favor. Remember, part of what tripped him up was that he’d told the arresting officers in his DWI arrest that he was going to visit his daughter, who was sick. He probably could have weathered having a female friend bail him out of jail. Explaining what he meant by visiting his daughter was a bit more difficult.

Later of course it turned out that this wasn’t an affair that was in the past: Fossella had an on-going relationship Laura Fay, the retired Air Force Colonel who mothered his child.

What I hadn’t realized was that Fossella was juggling at a level usually reserved for the plot lines of thoroughly incredible hollywood movies.

Not only was Fossella keeping his wife and family in the dark about his girlfriend and child in Northern Virginia. He was also keeping his girlfriend and child in Northern Virginia in the dark that he was still married and had a family in New York.

According to the Daily News, which has basically owned this story, Fossella had told Fay that he was separated from his wife. And it wasn’t until Fay saw a draft of his press release apologizing for the incident that she realized that he was actually still married.