CQ Politics reports the latest lobbying scandal, centered on the infamous John Murtha, but featuring the kind of bipartsanship otherwise missing from the current Congress.

More than 100 House members (42 Republicans and 62 Democrats – JDZ) secured earmarks in a major spending bill for clients of a single lobbying firm — The PMA Group — known for its close ties to John P. Murtha, the congressman in charge of Pentagon appropriations.

“It shows you how good they were,” said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “The sheer coordination of that would take an army to finish.”

PMA’s offices have been raided, and the firm closed its political action committee last week amid reports that the FBI is investigating possibly illegal campaign contributions to Murtha and other lawmakers. …

In the spending bill managed by Murtha, the fiscal 2008 Defense appropriation, 104 House members got earmarks for projects sought by PMA clients, according to Congressional Quarterly’s analysis of a database constructed by Ashdown’s group.

Those House members, plus a handful of senators, combined to route nearly $300 million in public money to clients of PMA through that one law (PL 110-116). …

PMA’s founder, Paul Magliocchetti, is a former House Appropriations Committee aide who has a long-running relationship with Murtha, D-Pa., the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Murtha, who used to boast that his middle initial stands for “power,” carved out $38.1 million for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 defense spending law, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Indiana Rep. Peter J. Visclosky , who serves on Murtha’s subcommittee and additionally is chairman of the subcommittee that allocates money for the Pentagon’s nuclear programs, earmarked $23.8 million for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 defense spending bill.

His former chief of staff, Richard Kaelin, lobbies for PMA, as does Melissa Koloszar, a former top aide to defense appropriator James P. Moran , D-Va.

Moran sponsored $10.8 million for PMA clients, and Rep. Norm Dicks , D-Wash., another member of the subcommittee, sponsored $12.1 million. …

Of the 104 lawmakers who lent their names to earmark requests for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 Pentagon spending law, 91 have, since 2001, received campaign money linked to PMA, either from its political action committee or its employees.

HuffPo:

Appearing on the Chris Matthews Show Sunday, Bob Woodward offered a rather cryptic prediction of scandal that will plague the Obama White House.

“This may be tantalizing but vague,” said the Washington Post scribe. “I don’t think the nanny or household tax problems and so forth are over for the Obama administration…”

Matthews pressed ever so slightly for more information, but Woodward did not oblige: “I say it’s not over.”

0:23 video

Ross Douthat, in the Atlantic, is less than sympathetic.

You stay classy, John Edwards:

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife’s cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Also, he made a point of telling Woodruff that he remained the son of a mill worker throughout the entire affair.

It looks like they won’t have Flem Snopes to kick around anymore.

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Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers reveals that his father’s buddy PFC Ralph Ignatowski, in the course of the battle for Iwo Jima, was captured by the Japanese, who pulled him into one of their caves.

Over the course of three days, the Japanese tortured the unlucky private.

When his body was eventually discovered, fellow marines found that his fingernails had been pulled out, his tongue cut out, his ears cut off, his eyes gouged out, his teeth smashed in, his arms broken, and his genitalia cut off and stuffed into his mouth, before he had been bayoneted to death.

Do you think the War Department in 1945 told his mother and father in Milwaukee exactly what happened to their son Ralph?

In the past, the practice of telling families that their soldier had died instantly, in the course of performing a vital military mission, was universal. No one was going to tell some mom and dad back home that their son’s death was a meaningless accident, or a grieving widow that her husband died screaming.

Death occurs commonly in war, and not all soldiers’ deaths are beautiful, painless, or even intentional. Accidental casualties from friendly fire have always occurred. The outcome of the American Civil War might possibly have been different, if General Thomas Jonathan Jackson had not been mortally wounded by fire from a North Carolina Regiment in the closing hours of the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863.

Did Stonewall Jackson’s widow demand an investigation or insist that those unfortunate North Carolinians should be punished? Did General Lee conduct a formal inquiry to determine who exactly was to blame? They did not. People used to be mature enough to recognize that unfortunate accidents occur in war.

The conniving opportunists of the MSM are clearly intelligent enough to know all this perfectly well, but the accidental death of Corporal Pat Tillman was deliberately publicized and manufactured into a large-scale scandal by the press specifically in order to damage the American military and undermine its efforts in the war in the Middle East. The Tillman family has behaved disgracefully as well, demonstrating a complete absence of both the character and patriotism which distinguished their son.

Now the US Military is responding to all this unseemly melodrama by delivering up the required victims for public sacrifice.

Thanks to our utterly corrupt media, and one selfish and not-very-sensible family, henceforth we can count on reliable reportage of exactly what happened to US casualties reaching their loved ones on the homefront.

“Yes, Mrs. Smith, your son Joey was burned to death by napalm. No, his death was excruciatingly painful and took a very, very long time. I’m sorry, as it happened, his unit was assigned to undertake a futile attack on a target which ultimately proved to be of no military value, and our own air units mistakenly bombed them. We’re very sorry.”

Dick Morris offers a little advice that George W. Bush, his White House team, and the Justice Department would be wise to take to to heart.

When will the Bush administration grow some guts? Except for its resolute — read: stubborn — position on Iraq, the White House seems incapable of standing up for itself and battling for its point of view. The Democratic assault on the administration over the dismissal of United States attorneys is the most fabricated and phony of scandals, but the Bush people offer only craven apologies, half-hearted defenses, and concessions. Instead, they should stand up to the Democrats and defend the conduct of their own Justice Department.

There is no question that the attorney general and the president can dismiss United States attorneys at any time and for any reason. We do not have civil servant U.S. attorneys but maintain the process of presidential appointment for a very good reason: We consider who prosecutes whom and for what to be a question of public policy that should reflect the president’s priorities and objectives. When a U.S. attorney chooses to go light in prosecuting voter fraud and political corruption, it is completely understandable and totally legitimate for a president and an attorney general to decide to fire him or her and appoint a replacement who will do so.

The Democratic attempt to attack Bush for exercising his presidential power to dismiss employees who serve at his pleasure smacks of nothing so much as the trumped-up grounds for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Back then, radical Republicans tried to oust him for failing to obey the Tenure of Office Act, which they passed, barring him from firing members of his Cabinet (in this case, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton) without Senate approval. Soon after Johnson’s acquittal, the Supreme Court invalidated the Tenure of Office Act, in effect affirming Johnson’s position.

But instead of loudly asserting its view that voter fraud is, indeed, worthy of prosecution and that U.S. attorneys who treat such cases lightly need to go find new jobs, the Bush administration acts, for all the world, like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. All Republican supporters of the administration can do is to point to Bill Clinton’s replacement of U.S. attorneys when he took office. Because the president and the attorney general insist on acting guilty, the rest of the country has no difficulty in assuming that they are.

Bush, Rove, Gonzales and Co. should explain why the U.S. attorneys were dismissed by emphasizing the importance of the cases they were refusing to prosecute. By doing so, they can turn the Democratic attacks on them into demands to go easy on fraudulent voting. A good sense of public relations — and some courage — could turn this issue against the Democrats for blocking Bush’s efforts to crack down on the criminals he wanted prosecuted.

Read the whole thing.