I contacted Frank Cillusso, the director of the HSPI at George Washington University, who tells me that Nidal Hasan has no affiliation with the HSPI or with George Washington University, at all. “[Hasan] has no role on the task force, other than the fact that he attended these meetings as an audience member, as did hundreds of others.” Hasan’s name appears on the list of participants only because he provided the HSPI with an RSVP, indicating his attendance. Cillusso told me, “We always record RSVPs and publish them as a matter of transparency, and will continue to do so.”

Annie Lowery at Foreign Policy does the same yeoman work.

There is now literally nothing left of Corsi’s report. Nothing at all. Will he retract it and issue the full and frank apology that his readers deserve? Or will, instead, the smear linger, in the hope of being picked up by Glenn Beck?

Mr. Rove, the architect of President Bush’s election victories, has been telling Republican benefactors across the country that giving to official Republican Party fund-raising committees will not be enough this year, according to people familiar with his pitch over the past few months.

“They said Mr. Rove has regularly expressed concern that Democrat-leaning organizations such as MoveOn.org and labor unions could swamp the Republican Party’s money machine and overwhelm the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican.

“To counter that wave, Mr. Rove has been asking elite Republican fund-raisers to pour their millions of dollars into non-party groups like Freedom’s Watch, which is gearing up to spend tens of millions of dollars to help elect conservatives — primarily Republicans — to Congress and the White House.

GOP contributors don’t seem to need much convincing. Donations to federally focused conservative “527” organizations — tax-exempt groups not permitted to advocate for individual candidates but allowed to attack their positions on specific issues — totaled more than $43 million through June, according the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit campaign-finance watchdog. That’s up from roughly $21 million by the same point in 2004.

The question remains: can one of these groups locate an issue — Swift-Boat-style — with the power to sway elections?