Undercover In The Rotunda

John Ensign got the stakeout treatment yesterday, but the Senator wasn't all that forthcoming:

Confronted by the CNN team today, Ensign denied that he'd violated ethics rules.

"You can just see our statements on that," he said. "I think it's pretty clear. I said in the past I recommended him for jobs, just like I recommended a lot of people. But we absolutely did nothing except for comply exactly with what the ethics laws and the ethics rules of the Senate state. We were very careful."

Bash asked Ensign if he'd considered resigning.

"I am focused on doing my work," he said. "I'm gonna continue to focus on doing my work."

Ensign also said that he and his office "will cooperate with any official inquiries."

I would say that it's embarrassing for any politician to be subject to a stakeout. You don't look like the most innocent man that way. And it's good to see the cable nets doing some legitimate news-gathering. In fact, this resembles nothing so much as what Mike Stark's been doing on Capitol Hill for months now, confronting Republicans as they move around Washington. But Ensign got off pretty easily here. None of the core problems discussed in the New York Times piece were really given a full airing. It's hard to get all of that out in an impromptu interview, but the reporters could have been a bit more prepared.

YKos '07: 3 People Who Changed The Congress

I'm in a session with S.R. Siddarth (a.k.a. "Macaca"), Lane Hudson (who broke the Mark Foley story) and Mike Stark (provocateur, George Allen bugbear, and blogger). One moment was EXTREMELY revelatory. A traditional media guy asked a question, claiming that the Ryan Lizza article in The New Republic set the table for the George Allen incidents (the Lizza article was great, but it wasn't exactly front-page news to most Americans). The reporter then said, "Well you can't just go up to George Allen and ask him about his racist past," when that's EXACTLY what Stark did throughout the campaign. There's this risk aversion by reporters to "make" news through holding elected officials accountable, that bloggers simply don't have. Until that moment, the "Daou triangle" will never be closed. Instead, the media wants to play "he said/she said" rather than refereeing on the side of truth.

Lane Hudson also mentioned something about the NSA using National Security letters to investigate Democratic donors. I didn't know about that, but we did learn yesterday that the IRS is tracking political information.

WASHINGTON – As it hunted down tax scofflaws, the Internal Revenue Service collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the IRS, said the practice was an “outrageous violation of the public trust” that could undermine the agency’s credibility.

IRS officials acknowledged that party affiliation information was routinely collected by a vendor for several months. They told the vendor last month to screen the information out.

“The bottom line is that we have never used this information,” said John Lipold, an IRS spokesman. “There are strict laws in place that forbid it.”

Oh, that settles it. There are LAWS in place. We've never seen this Administration break LAWS.

Hudson's point is well-made, though. So many stories slip through the cracks unless they are pushed forward by the blogs.