Well then, it looks like Virginia has three Senators. This from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Before every election, the Post-Gazette routinely sends letters to the candidates seeking material for the Voters Guide. Back in March, as part of that process for the primary, the newspaper sent a letter to Rick Santorum at his home address, at least the one that he claims. Back from Penn Hills came the letter with a sticker from the U.S. Postal Service checked as “Not Deliverable As Addressed — Unable To Forward.”

That is all you need to know about the nasty dispute between the Republican Sen. Santorum and his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., in the November election. The whole thing is rooted in one inconvenient fact for Sen. Santorum: He doesn’t live here anymore.

This controversy has been going on for some time and now it is really bubbling over. It also raises ethical questions about Rick Santorum and what kind of person he is to use an entire state like this.

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• TPM Muckraker reports (via the Washington Post) that Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), already under fire for his relationships with crooked characters Jack Abramoff and Brent Wilkes, "has been paying for babysitters out of his campaign till". Doolittle has spent $5,881 of his PAC money on child care costs since 2001. At least that’s better than Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) who used his PAC to pay for groceries and Starbucks.
• Hotline On Call Blog posts a quote from Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL)  pillorying the Senate for their profligant additions to the emergency supplemental bill. "Any calls from the Senate for an across-the-board cut to make room for a bloated supplemental will be met by a busy signal in the House. The House will not join a shell-game spending spree with taxpayer dollars."
• The aforementioned Sen. Santorum seems to be in trouble again. Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) has filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that two former staffers for Santorum "violated several provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)." I feel that someone should keep a tally of which legislator receives the most filed complaints against them by CREW in a given year.
• The Los Angeles Times reports that Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA), once an aspiring screenwriter, "will return $23,000 he received for a screenplay option from a Hollywood producer who pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding dozens of people into investing in a bogus television series about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security." This happens to be one of the funnier tales of influence buying in the current Congress but it leaves one question. Why didn’t Rohrabacher sell his conservative themed script to his buddy Jack Abramoff, former movie producer? Abramoff produced the unbelievably bad conservative movie "Red Scorpion", why couldn’t he help make Rohrabacher’s tale of a grizzled war veteran who goes into Baja California with a stereotypical liberal straw man and hijinks ensue. I guess the answer is that if you want to make a wretched movie like that you need to have the backing of the secret intelligence service of an oppressive regime.

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• Will Bunch reports in the Philadelphia Daily News, “A faith-based Philadelphia group at the center of a flap over whether tax-exempt religious groups are aiding the re-election campaign of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum has won more than $250,000 in federal grant money pushed for by Santorum over the last three years.” The group, the Urban Family Council, participated in a training session held by the ad-hoc group Pennsylvania Pastors Network, “which pushed a church-based get-out-the-vote drive for November.” Santorum addressed the meeting by video and spoke about stopping same-sex marriage raising questions about the political purposes of the tax-exempt group.

• The New York Times reports on the auction of jailed ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham’s goods. The auction netted $94,625 or, “about two-thirds of the $150,000 that the military contractors who gave the items to Mr. Cunningham as bribes reportedly paid for them.” TPM Muckraker has the full list of items and what they sold for in their document collection. The San Diego Union-Tribune has the pictures of the auction that even includes bidding paddles with the face of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert glued on.

• Adam Kidan and Jack Abramoff will be subpoenaed by the defense in the Gus Boulis murder case, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In 2001, Boulis was ambushed and slain in his car following a bitter, months-long sale of his SunCruz casino lines to Kidan and Abramoff. Anthony Moscatiello and two associates, hired to provide security for the casino boat line, were indicted in Boulis’ murder last year. Moscatiello was hired by Kidan and Kidan “has not been eliminated as a suspect in the murder case”.

• The Washington Post looks deeper into the activities of MZM and Duke Cunningham as the Pentagon prepares to look for earmarks that Cunningham may have written for MZM:
  

  "…prosecutors said that in fiscal 2003 legislation, the congressman, who was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, set aside, or earmarked, $6.3 million for work to be done ‘to benefit’ the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), created in 2002. …

   

   

  In 2004, three MZM employees served as staff consultants to the presidential commission investigating prewar Iraq intelligence, which was run by federal Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). One of the three was retired Lt. Gen. James C. King, who then was a senior vice president of MZM for national security. King, who before joining MZM had been director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, played a consultant’s role in the establishment of CIFA in 2002 before MZM received its first contracts from that agency.

   

  The Silberman-Robb commission report in 2005 recommended that CIFA play a bigger role in the government’s counterterrorism activities.”

  Silberman denies that King and the other two MZM employees played any role in recommending a bigger role for CIFA.

• MSNBC reports that Abramoff associate David Safavian is headed to court today for a pretrial hearing.

• The Christian Science Monitor provides yet another story that ethics reform is stalling in Congress. Norm Ornstein says, “Some members are pulling the blanket over their heads and hoping the storm will pass. For others, there is also a genuine belief that if you just jump in a spasm of reaction, you could do some things detrimental to a good deliberative process.”

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A month after saying that he was canceling regular meetings with lobbyists the Washington Post reports that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) continues to meet “with many of the same lobbyists at the same time and on the same day of the week,” as he previously did. The meetings, which are designed for strategy and to raise money for Santorum’s re-election bid, were held at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters and at the offices of the Heritage Foundation, a non-profit conservative think-tank. Santorum is also facing criticism for using money from his political action committee to pay for 160 visits to coffee shops around his house, and numerous trips to fast food restaurants, and grocery stores. His campaign manager, Virginia Davis, justifies the use of PAC money to purchase coffee by stating that PACs “can be expensive to maintain”.

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A group of Senators are aiming to make lawmakers pay their fair share when they fly in corporate jets, according to the New York Times. Current rules stipulate that lawmakers must reimburse the cost for private jet travel at the commercial first class rate, which is significantly lower than the actual rate for private jet travel. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Rick Santorum (R-PA), and Barack Obama (D-IL) are proposing legislation that would force lawmakers to pay the actual rater for the private jet travel. Obama sees private jet travel “as a way to circumvent the limits on so-called soft money campaign contributions.”

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Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) filed an ethics complaint in the Senate Ethics Committee against Sen. Rick Santorum for receiving a loan from a private bank, whose “policy is to lend money only to its "affluent" investors, which the senator is not.” According to the Philadelphia Daily News, CREW “alleges that the mortgage from Philadelphia Trust Co. is a gift in violation of Senate Rule 35, which says that senators can receive loans or other banking services only on terms ‘generally available to the public.’”

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An investigative report into Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum’s finances reveals that he has received a home loan from a campaign contributor and used money from his political action committee in a variety of questionable ways. According to the report, published in full in the American Prospect and partially in the Philadelphia Daily News, Santorum received a second mortgage on his Herndon, Virginia mansion from Philadelphia Trust Company, “a new private bank catering to ‘affluent investors and institutions’”. The loan to Santorum is questionable because the bank’s policy is to only offer loans to clients with investment assets of $250,000 or more, a sum that Santorum does not come close to reporting in his annual personal financial filings. Santorum and his leadership PAC received $24,000 from Philadelphia Trust Company’s executives and directors. The use of funds by Santorum’s leadership PAC is also a source of intrigue. The PACs filings show numerous charges at grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and coffee shops – out of the ordinary charges for a PAC that is intended to donate money to other Republican’s campaigns.

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The Washington Post reports that Senate Republicans and Democrats have both ended their practice of meeting with lobbyists on a regular basis.  Democrats previously met with sympathetic lobbyists every other Monday to plot strategy and to keep the lobbyists informed of the party’s plans.  Republicans, led by Sen. Rick Santorum, met with lobbyists every other Tuesday and will cease to hold these meetings – “at least for now.”  Both parties had already stopped handing out job listings at these meetings although the Republicans stopped more recently than Democrats.

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