But commuters are not Ray LaHood’s political base. Reporters are, and fortunately for us, he’s sticking around. LaHood, sometimes at risk to his standing in his party, is not afraid of the consequences of saying what everyone knows but nobody in power wants to say.

For reporters in need of a Republican to express his displeasure with the Bush administration, Congressional leaders or his colleagues, LaHood, a former junior high school teacher turned congressional aide, has been the go-to lawmaker.

LaHood’s propensity to say what everyone else in Washington thinks but won’t say on the record could give the Obama administration a headache. He might become that guy Democrats love when Republicans are in charge and Republicans love when Democrats are in charge.

His willingness to speak up also might adversely effect his close friendship with incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who likely will be charged with maintaining discipline among cabinet secretaries. If a dead fish ends up on LaHood’s plate in the White House Mess, he will know he’s heading back to Peoria for good.

After President-elect Barack Obama fills out his cabinet appointments, he will turn to appointing new leadership for the government agencies with the power to regulate industry—a process that will likely bring an end to what has become known as the Bush administration’s “war on science.”

President Bush’s appointees at environmental and health regulatory agencies have let ideology trump scientific and statistical analysis, critics allege. His picks for top posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have faced a steady stream of complaints from Democrats, public interest groups and scientists themselves.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Obama has signaled throughout the campaign season and during the transition that he plans to break from the Bush mold. In appointing Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary on Monday, Obama said, “His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action.”

In response to a series of question from a grassroots organization called ScienceDebate2008, Obama, the presidential candidate, vowed to “restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

The group, whose members included Chu, is dedicated to raising awareness of science and technology policy issues.

Obama’s emphasis is understandable Examples of unscientific decision-making over the last eight years have not been hard to find.

EPA has lost several lawsuits because it has poorly controlled mercury, smog and other pollutants and refused to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s third EPA chief, has ignored EPA scientists and, last year, he blocked California from enacting its own greenhouse gas motor vehicle emission standards. The state has sued EPA in federal court.

In 2007, the White House came under fire for editing a CDC report on the effect global warming would have on public health.

James Holsinger, Bush’s second-term nominee to become surgeon general, was blocked by the Senate because of a position paper he wrote for the United Methodist Church that he wrote arguing that male homosexuality was unnatural and unhealthy. “When the complementarity of the sexes is breached,” he wrote in 1990 “injuries and diseases may occur.”

Democrats have criticized the FDA under Bush for everything from salmonella outbreaks to lack of oversight of drug companies. Earlier this year, when FDA officials told Congress that Bush’s budget was sufficient even though Democrats were offering more money, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) let FDA chief Andrew von Eschenbach have it.

“[Y]ou’re not the first fella I’ve had to skin for not doing his job and coming up here and defending an indefensible situation,” Dingell said. “I want to maintain my respect for you but I can’t maintain my respect for you if you keep toe dancing around the hard facts that curse you with the inability to do your job because you don’t have resources.”

So far among the science-oriented agencies, only a new EPA administrator has been chosen. On Monday, Obama announced he’d like the job to go to Lisa Jackson, chief of staff for New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and the state’s former top environmental official.

Jackson and the rest of Obama’s environmental team won wide praise among scientists and liberal bloggers for the pick.

“Today’s appointments suggest a new dawn for America’s role as a leader in research and innovation to address the world’s great challenges,” wrote Shawn Lawrence Otto, the CEO of ScienceDebate2008, a grassroots group that tried to inject discussion of science policy in the election. “We were founded by scientist-statesmen, their voice is what has always made us great, and frankly, it’s good to see it back in the policy process,” he wrote.

Some advocates want Obama to elevate his science advisor, the appointee who will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to cabinet rank much like the national security advisor. In past administrations, this position has gone to physicists, and whether Obama departs from that mold remains to be seen.

“Having that person at place at the table will signal to the public that science is back in the process rather than sidelined and that’s been a theme that Obama has sounded during the campaign,” Mary Woolley, the president of Research America, a research advocacy group, said.

Centers for Disease Control
The Washington Post reported last month that Obama is unlikely to keep Julie Gerberding, the embattled CDC chief. Several names have been floated to take Gerberding’s place.

They include Jeffrey Koplan, a member of Obama’s transition team charged with reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services; Bill Corr, the executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids; and Nicole Lurie, a public health expert at the RAND Corporation. Corr has worked on Capitol Hill and served as chief of staff at HHS. Lurie served as the deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS from 1998 to 2001.

For science advocates, the most important criterion for the next CDC chief is that he or she restore intellectual rigor to the policy-making process and insert the agency into the administration’s internal debates about how to combat climate change.

“We need CDC to become engaged in the federal climate science program,” said Rick Piltz, the founder of Climate Science Watch. “They’ve never been a player as it pertains to how public health is affected by climate change. [CDC needs] a focused program of research and assessment.”

Food and Drug Administration

Last week, a leading House Democrat encouraged Obama to clean house at the FDA.

“The current FDA senior management blocked clinical trials, drove dedicated medical professionals out of the agency, and lined their pockets with outrageous bonuses,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote to Obama last week. “A new Commissioner or Interim Commissioner must bring the Agency back to the forefront of science, integrity, and transparency.”

During the campaign, Obama vowed to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. Giving the FDA new authority to regulate tobacco would vastly expand its power. While Stupak severely criticized Bush’s FDA chief, von Eschenbach, a spokesman from Stupak’s office said he had not pressed Obama to nominate anyone in particular.

The candidate’s FDA administrators, according to news reports, include Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steve Nissen and Joshua Sharfstein, the chief of Baltimore’s publichealth department.

Another possibility is Harold Varmus, the former National Institute of Health director and a Nobel Prize winner. He is now the CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and a member of the Obama transition team.

The biggest challenge for the next FDA administrator “is regaining the public’s trust,” said Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter who is now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Weiss says that FDA has lost the public’s confidence during the past several years after drug related scandals and food safety crises.

One avenue Obama could take, Wisee suggested, is to depart from the tradition that the FDA chief is a medical doctor.

“Obama could break that mold with someone who doesn’t have a conventional background that might be more relevant to the modern FDA,” Weiss said, adding that a candidate might have expertise in the law or food safety issues.

Surgeon General

The surgeon general spot is rife with potential for missteps. President Ronald Reagan’s appointee, C. Everett Koop, was controversial among liberals at first for his views on homosexuality but eventually won their grudging respect and alienated some on the right for waging war on HIV-AIDS and smoking. President Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, whose off-hand comment about masturbation drew heaps of criticism from Capitol Hill and forced her resignation.

Under the Bush administration, the surgeon general has been relegated to a bit player in public health debates, especially in Bush’s second term. Not only does the office not have a permanent occupant, but former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a heart surgeon by training, became the White House’s chief health advisor.

The office can elevate its stature in an Obama administration depending on who is appointed to the job, but Woolley would like to see more resources directed to the nation’s top doctor.

“The new surgeon general [should be] equipped with a real office rather than just an assistant or two and an office [to have a] bigger impact,” she said.

In an interview with Fox Sports, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, joked about naming Dr. J, the basketball star Julius Erving, as surgeon general. Obama is more likely to consider the Emanuel household for a highly qualified candidate for one of the government’s public health posts.

Emmanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the nation’s leading bio-ethicists, is an oft-mentioned candidate for a presidential appointment.

Another possibility is that a “Friend of Barack”, or FOB, could end up as the nation’s next surgeon general. Eric Whitaker was a graduate student at Harvard’s public health school when Obama attended the law school. Whitaker became the chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health and worked at the University of Chicago’s Hospital with Michelle Obama.

So far, Whitaker has let it be known that he wants to serve in the administration, but not just yet.

Another Chicagoan under consideration, according to the Chicago Tribune is, Dr. Gail Rosseau, Rosseau is chief of surgery at the Neurologic and Orthopedic Institute of Chicago and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical Center.

Obama has plenty of allies in the scientific community, but political appointments requiring a background in science and medicine are among the toughest to fill.

“Among the biggest burdens with appointments in these fields are federal salaries. Many scientists are not personally wealthy and have to take pay cuts to work in government,” Cal Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College who is an expert in the appointment process, said.

Scientists are also less likely to go to Washington because of “the risk or fear of falling behind as basic science moves steadily forward,” he said.

But because these agencies have been under political and budgetary constraints for the past eight years, Mackenzie also said that the chance to turn the agencies around and be a part of the Obama administration could attract enough competent candidates to provide Obama with a choice.

Betsy Markey and Jared Polis (Flickr: Betsy Markey/Jared Polis for Congress)

Colorado Democrats Betsy Markey and Jared Polis have not been sworn into Congress yet, but they are already shaping up to be different kinds of lawmaker.

Three days after her election, Markey visited a Super Wal-Mart in Sterling to shake hands with voters. Soon after, she embarked on a “listening tour” of the eastern Colorado congressional district she’ll represent beginning Jan. 20.

This week, Polis attended an issues conference at Harvard University for newly elected members of Congress.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The two freshmen Democrats’ travel choices following their elections in November underscore the different challenges each will face in winning reelection in 2010.

Markey won in Colorado’s conservative 4th Congressional District, defeating Republican incumbent Marilyn Musgrave. Polis easily won the 2nd Congressional seat formerly held by Mark Udall, who was elected to the Senate.

Because he won in a Democratic-leaning district and faces no serious challenger in 2010, Polis is free to play more of an insider’s game in Washington. By contrast, Markey’s listening tour marked the beginning of her reelection campaign.

“The difference in the districts’ makeup means that Markey has to focus on the middle of her constituency [in] looking toward the [2010] general election; Polis needs only to focus on the middle of his party [and] a potential primary [fight],” David Rohde, a Duke University political scientist, said.

The two future House members’ different electoral challenges were reflected in their quests for committee appointments.

When he arrived in Washington for a week-long orientation in mid-November, Polis asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for a spot on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. The panel of roughly 50 includes party leaders, committee chairs, the party’s vote counters, members selected to represent different geographical regions and Pelosi’s allies. Its members decide who gets assigned to which committee.

Polis and another freshman Democrat, Debbie Halvorson of Illinois, were tapped to serve on the committee.

“It’s a great opportunity to … get to know many of the [party's] senior members and represent the voice of the incoming class,” Polis said between lectures this week on the federal budget and defense policy at Harvard.

“There are only so many ways for a freshman to get involved and to be in the thick of things. I’m honored that the speaker chose me.”

Polis also wants to serve on committees that would balance the needs of his district with his own interests. Those committees include Financial Services, Education and Labor, International Relations, Small Business, and Natural Resources.

Markey told House Democratic leaders that she wanted a seat on the House Agriculture Committee. She also asked to serve on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the largest panel in the House, and the Energy and Commerce Committee. The selections will be announced next month.

It is unlikely that she or any other first-term lawmaker will serve on Energy and Commerce because it is considered an “exclusive committee.” Members of such committees  — five of the House’s 20 committees and three select committees — cannot serve on another panel.

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Markey said in a phone interview, adding that showing an early interest in one of the A-list committees could help her in the future.

During orientation week, Polis and Markey were among the 50 newly elected members — 31 Democrats and 19 Republicans (two races remain undecided) — who took a crash course on the inner workings of Congress. They were briefed on such matters as how to purchase computers and other supplies for their new offices, as well as on how a bill becomes law. They also were inundated with the resumes of thousands of job seekers. Markey said she had so much material from orientation week that she shipped a box of papers back to Colorado.

All was not drudgery, though. The freshmen Democrats dined with House Democratic and Republican leaders in the Capitol’s Statutory Hall and participated in a college-dorm-like lottery to choose their offices. Polis landed in 501 Cannon, while Markey will work out of an office on the second floor of the Longworth building.

The new members also had an opportunity to attend the issues conference at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Roughly 40 members did, according to a Kennedy School spokesman.

“I was going to go, but I didn’t feel I really had the time to get there,” said Markey when asked about her decision to return to Colorado. “I wanted to do the county tours, and I felt there was not that much time, with Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays. … “It’s more important for me to listen to people in my district rather than some professors at Harvard.”

On her listening tour, Markey has met with sugar-beet growers, health care professionals and local government officials to has had discussions on the farm bill, wind power and rural health issues.

Polis, meanwhile, was at Harvard listening to discussions on intelligence issues, the federal budget and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This morning, [the topics were] intelligence and bioterrorism, budget problems. The first two sessions were kind of downers,” Polis said jokingly on Wednesday.

Students read, work on crossword and Sudoku puzzles, text-message and email on hand-held devices and listen to music as they wait up to an hour to cast their first votes in a presidential election.

While there were enough working voting machines in polling stations at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, there was a shortage of poll workers to process the hundreds of first-time voters.

Still, the majority of students remained in good humor. “I’m more excited for the process as a whole than as an individual,” said Jeremy Springman, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, who said she was voting for Sen. Barack Obama. “I’ll wait, everyone seems to be chilling.”

At the Pittsburgh campus, former Pittsburgh Steeler great Franco Harris — whom few students probably recognized — visited the polling place and urged students to stick out the long wait.

At Central Catholic High School, which is near Carnegie Mellon University’s campus, students waited, without complaint, for 75 minutes to cast their votes. Obama campaign volunteers handed out bottles of water and encouraged them to stay in line. More poll workers arrived in mid-afternoon, which cut waiting time to about 30 minutes.  Obama campaign organizers said they expected a crush of students after classes end.

Dorian Adeyemi, 20, a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, said the long lines were “a testament to how exciting people are to vote,” adding that he made up his mind last night to vote for Sen. John McCain because of his views on economic policy.

Sen. John McCain also made an appearance in the state. Republicans strategists believe that capturing Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes is McCain’s only path to the White House on Tuesday. But recent polls show Obama has a 10-point lead.

Democrats hope to swamp McCain in Philadelphia and its suburbs, while holding their own in the more rural western part of the state, en route to an Obama victory and possibly a pick-up of one congressional seat.

Sen. Clinton visited Obama volunteers in Mt. Lebanon, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh. “I’m hopeful and optimistic,” she told reporters at the Mt. Lebanon Obama campaign headquarters after firing up the volunteers. “But I don’t want to take anything for granted. We’ve worked too hard and come too far to take anything for granted.”

McCain flew into an airport in Moon Township, just outside Pittsburgh, for a mid-afternoon rally with Republicans in an airport hangar. The event lasted about 20 minutes.

Speaking to a crowd of roughly 2,500, McCain slammed Obama on taxes, energy policy and the war in Iraq. Since incorporating “Joe the Plumber” into his stump speeches, McCain has taken to identifying all Joe’s by their profession or last name, including  “Joe the Lieberman,” the independent Connecticut senator traveling with McCain, and “Joe the Biden.”

Bill Clinton appeared at what he said was his 40th campaign event on behalf of for Obama, stopping at McDowell High School. As is his custom, the former president began with a trip down memory lane, recalling this time his visit to Erie after the 1992 convention in New York City. Then he briefly mentioned his party’s poor recent track record in running for the White House (Democrats have only won the presidency twice since 1968), followed by an analysis of why that’s about to change.

“The country is in a terrible mess again, but this is a much more diverse country,” Clinton said. “It’s not a more liberal country; it’s a more communitarian country. We had enough of their ‘on your own,’ we’re going forward together.”

Earlier in the day, Clinton stumped for Rep. John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat in some political trouble because of his remarks that parts of western Pennsylvania are “racist” and “redneck.”

Flickr: nshepard

As Republican charges of “fraud” and Democratic claims of “voter suppression” have escalated in the home stretch of the presidential election campaign, liberal activists have started blasting Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential team’s “voter protection” effort for not doing enough to ensure that all Democratic votes are going to be counted on Election Day.

Many activists say that voting machines have been demonstrated as vulnerable to tampering, and when there is no paper trail of the votes cast, problems are possible. These advocates are worried that Obama’s campaign is not doing enough to make sure that the electronic voting machines are properly calibrated — so that a vote cast for Obama goes to Obama.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

They are also concerned that the Obama campaign’s legal effort has been not been aggressive enough. They point to Pennsylvania, where the NAACP sued to force the Democratic-controlled state government to provide paper ballots where electronic voting machines have failed. The NAACP won the suit — but the Obama campaign never joined in.

Liberal bloggers talk about how Obama could do more to publicize voting problems — like technical glitches in voting machines and GOP efforts to hold down turnout — in the same way it has countered Republican-generated smears and robocalls.

“I remain not just exceedingly skeptical,” the voter protection blogger Brad Friedman wrote in his blog, Bradblog, last week, “but downright furious at the party’s brazen willingness to allow millions of votes to go either uncounted, incorrectly recorded or recorded in such a way that is 100 percent unverifiable by any human being,”

“They need to get over their tortured thinking that discussing these issues somehow depresses turnout,” Friedman wrote in an email, “There is zero evidence for that thinking.”

Obama’s chief election law attorney, Bob Bauer, disagrees with that argument. Bauer says that evidence from the 2004 election demonstrates that highlighting problems with voting machinery and voter suppression turns off Democratic voters.

“It’s never helpful if the environment is filled with hyperbole about false claims.” Bauer said in a phone interview Thursday, “Voters don’t want to hear it. We’re not going to fall for [the Republicans’] public-relations bait. But if they take a concrete action we will respond to it.”

Bauer maintains that the Obama campaign has moved quickly to respond to technical problems with voting equipment and quell any efforts to deceive voters.

For example, in northern Nevada, Bauer said, many Latino voters had received calls telling them that they could vote by phone. The Obama campaign responded to set the record straight.

When voting machines used in early voting started flipping Obama votes to McCain recently, lawyers from the campaign’s Machine Task Force were dispatched to West Virginia to make sure the machines were properly calibrated.

The Obama campaign, however, has not held a single pres0s conference to highlight these issues.

Bauer and other lawyers close to the campaign, however, said that the campaign’s voter protection effort is more aggressive, more robust and started earlier than that of the Kerry campaign four years ago.

The Obama team has more than 100 paid staffers and full-time volunteers working on voter protection, according to a memorandum sent last week to members of Congress from the Democratic National Committee’s staff attorney, Justin Levitt.

In addition, since the Obama campaign asserts that voter protection is as much a public-relations battle as a legal one, Bauer and the DNC outside counsel, Joseph Sandler, have hired Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist, as a spokeswoman.

“[Sen. John] Kerry had amassed a pretty large operation himself in terms of having lawyers out there ready to pounce,” said Kenneth Gross, a campaign finance and election law attorney at Skadden, Arps. “Whatever Kerry had, is that much more sophisticated and that much more vibrant…. They are poised to bring action if there are irregularities on Election Day.”

Like Kerry four years ago, the Obama campaign hired a “voter protection coordinator.” This staffer, usually a lawyer, works with field organizers to help register and educate voters, consults with local and state officials to identify potential problems and implements a lawyer recruitment program to get volunteers out to the polls on Election Day.

In Michigan, the campaign and the state party share the same attorney, Mary Ellen Gurewitz, an election law specialist with the Detroit firm of Sachs Waldman. Renee Paradis, a former attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice, is the campaign’s voter-protection coordinator.

Obama’s attorneys, in Michigan and elsewhere, say that more votes are lost to incompetence than fraud or suppression. But they are, nonetheless, trying to keep tabs on proactive suppression efforts.

Friedman, the blogger, disputes this. He says that one serious issue is with electronic voting machines that are prone to error, because there is no way to know whether a vote has been lost.

“They are making no effort to remove these machines,” Friedman said. “It’s exceedingly troubling.”

Ultimately, it won’t be clear whether the Obama campaign’s legal effort has been a success until Nov. 5. But Edward Foley, a law professor at the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University, remains concerned that in some states, like Pennsylvania, the lack of a paper trail could undermine the outcome of the election.

Lawyers in Michigan said they have identified trouble spots from previous elections. They say they have made sure that precincts are prepared to handle what is expected to be record turnout.

Efforts to make Election Day go more smoothly are expected to include: handing out sample ballots, dividing long lines alphabetically, posting easy-to-read signs and monitoring to ensure that voters are standing in the right place if a polling station includes more than one precinct.

In New Mexico, Ann Marie Puente, an official with the Travis County Democratic Party in Texas, is the Obama campaign’s voter protection coordinator. She has one deputy. Neither are lawyers but they are building a network of more than 600 out-of-state lawyers to help on Election Day.

In Colorado, the Obama campaign has set up a similar structure with Tim Karpoff, a lawyer from the University of Chicago who worked for Kerry in 2004, heading up the voter protection effort in Wisconsin.

In October, Obama campaign aides sent an email out, seeking volunteers for Spanish-speaking poll workers and watchers. As of Oct. 22, only a small portion of Denver’s polling stations had the requisite number of Spanish-speaking staffers as required by state law.

The campaign also asked for volunteers to head to various counties around the state with sizable Spanish-speaking communities.

As for litigation, Bauer has settled on a strategy of surgical legal strikes, while relying on liberal advocacy and civil-rights groups to stop any efforts to disenfranchise eligible voters.

Though not a hard and fast rule, Democrats expect to take legal action in states where Republicans control the election and voting processes; while Republicans expect to do the opposite.

“If your party is in control in that battleground state, the national campaign will leave it to the local officials,” Gross said. “If your person is not in power they start to get very anxious and paranoid.”

Bauer has won a suit in Michigan and in Montana last month. In Michigan, Republicans promised not to specifically challenge voters whose homes had been foreclosed. In Montana, a judge blocked the Montana’s Republican Party’s effort to declare thousands of voters ineligible.

In Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that citizens could register to vote and cast a ballot on the same day during the state’s early voting period. In Indiana, state Republicans failed to centralize early voting sites in a government building; state courts ruled that satellite centers for early voting will remain open.

The NAACP won its lawsuit in Pennsylvania and in Colorado, advocacy groups won a commitment from the Republican secretary of state not to purge voters from registration rolls. In New Mexico, the ACLU and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund have filed separate lawsuits alleging GOP-sponsored voter intimidation and suppression. They have not been resolved.

For a list of pending lawsuits across the country, go here.

“No question that the Republicans have put [up] a good bit of activity and tried at a very high level to run a challenge program at a very high level. If you take a look at [their] record of success, it is dismal,” Bauer said. “They have lost in every state where we have engaged with them.”

Friedman says the Obama campaign still needs to be more aggressive.

“They need to bring lawsuits loudly and immediately, dozens of them, wherever necessary,” he wrote in an email.

Bauer says he has made a conscious effort to fight the legal battles on his terms rather than McCain’s. He held several conference calls with reporters after Republicans accused the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and the Obama campaign of working together to register fraudulent voters.

But rather than engaging McCain’s “Honest and Open Election Committee,” led by former GOP Sens. John Danforth (Mo.) and Warren Rudman (N.H.), Bauer turned the tables on McCain’s campaign by calling on the U.S. attorney general to investigate links between McCain’s campaign and federal law enforcement officials.

In a letter sent to Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey on Oct. 20, Bauer asked that DOJ’s special prosecutor investigate “an emerging pattern of apparent unlawful coordination” between the McCain campaign, DOJ and Republican officials at the state level.

Four days later, Bauer sent Mukasey a letter asking him not to follow up on a White House request to intervene in Ohio and elsewhere to set up a system to challenge voters’ eligibility. Mukasey subsequently said he would not intervene.

In focusing on Mukasey, Bauer tied GOP efforts at encouraging state and federal officials to investigate voter registration fraud back to the Bush administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons, including their unwillingness to pursue voter fraud cases. A special prosecutor is examining whether DOJ officials violated federal criminal law.

Allen called on Collins earlier this week during a debate to stop airing an advertisement, not posted online, that raises questions about his commitment to Maine and the number of bills he has voted on in the House.

“Sen. Collins has started a personal attack ad against me that questions my work ethic, that questions my commitment. I am deeply offended by it; my family is offended by it as well,” Allen said during the debate.

“The point is, this is about commitment. Commitment about the job,” Collins said in response.

Most voters might think that how one votes is more important than how often one votes. But Collins has touted her perfect attendance record in her bid for a third term.

Let’s do the numbers.

Allen, who is married and has two children,  has missed 157 votes – 2 percent of roughly 7,500 votes cast – during his 12 years in the House.

Collins, who is single and has no children, has cast more than 3,700 consecutive votes during her 12 years in the Senate.

Allen missed votes to care for his wife, Diana, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and to attend relative’s funerals and weddings.

And he missed some votes in 2007 because of a fund-raising trip to California and, in previous years, to attend events in Maine and to go to the 1998 All-Star game in Boston with a lifelong friend.

AllenCollins has maintained a solid lead in all public opinion polls throughout the election cycle.

Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann stirred up a media storm Friday when she told MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Mathews” that “the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look — I wish they would — take a great look at the views of people in Congress and find out [if] they [are] pro-America or anti-America.”

Today, a spokesman for Bachmann had no suggestions as to which questions reporters should ask lawmakers to determine if they are pro- or anti-American. “You guys know what kinds of questions to ask,” Bachmann’s spokeswoman, Michelle Marsten, said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s not for us to decide.”

Asked which members of Congress the media should interview, Marsten said her boss had “no one in mind.”

Bachmann’s call for an inquiry into the patriotism of members of Congress, which spread rapidly in the liberal blogosphere, helped her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, to raise more than $650,000 over the weekend. A Democratic poll released last week showed Tinklenberg trailing Bachmann by just four percentage points, 42-38, in a race that until recently was considered safe for the incumbent.

Bachmann told a local TV station this morning that her remarks had been “misread.” While she has enjoyed a high-profile run as Republican spokesman in the fall campaign, her remarks on “Hardball” is the latest gaffe in a series of controversial statements that have marked her tenure in Congress.

Kucinich, who ran losing presidential bids in 2004 and 2008 and faced a stiff primary challenge earlier this year, drafted the legislation following a report in the Michigan Messenger that a Macomb County Republican Party official said he planned to gather lists of foreclosed homeowners to challenge their eligibility.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have since filed a lawsuit in federal court over the reported plans.

The tactic is a version of a practice known as “caging,” which allows political opponents to identify voters who might not meet proper residency requirements. Democrats and voting-rights activists argue that victims of foreclosure may still live in their homes, and that the tactic disproportionately affects poor and African-American voters. Republicans argue that the practice preserves the integrity of the ballot.

Kucinich’s bill is unlikely to get a hearing or consideration on the House floor, as Congress races to pass a $700 billion rescue package for Wall Street banks before recessing, until after the election.