The good folks over at Talking Points Memo need some help in making a Pentagon's military analyst's documents more transparent. Pitch in.

We've written fairly often about unbelievable situation over the Federal Election Commission. Always regarded as a toothless watchdog even in the best of days, since there's been a partisan stalemate over new appointments, it's been totally neutered. 

Now, Paul Kiel reports that the Bush Administration has offered a so-called compromise. The most controverisal nominee -- Spakovsky --  remains a nominee, and an administration spokesperson told the The New York Times that they would accept a separate vote on him. In the meantime, the administration has submitted a new nominee to replace FEC Chair David Mason, one of the two setting commissioners.

Our good friends over at Talking Points Memo have announced the first annual Golden Duke Awards, an end of the year, reader-nominated, scandal contest. We want to urge you to send in your nominations,!

TPM named the contest for former congressman and now federal inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the center of what Josh Marshall called the "iconic modern political scandal: you've got bribery, sex, national security, and just cartoonish ridiculousness writ large."  His team is inviting readers to nominate their favorite political crook or bamboozler in six categories: best testimonial train wreck, outstanding achievement for improbable forgetfulness, outstanding achievement in corruption-based chutzpa, best local scandal, best scandal - sex or carnality related, and best scandal, general interest. Send in your nominations by December 14. 

TPM has compiled an impressive panel of judges, including Susie Bright, John Dean, Hendrik Hertzberg, Dahlia Lithwick and Matthew Yglesias.  On December 18, TPM will announce the nominees and the winners on December 31.  

Josh Marshall's intrepid pursuit of truth and justice (and yeah, of corruption in high places too) is really unparalleled in the blogosphere. Today he provides a nifty summary of the all the corruption scandals in Congress this year. Read it and keep digging.

And we thought that the last Congress was the most corrupt in recent memory!

It was interesting to see how various bloggers and organizations used the Web last night to engage their networks around the President's State of the Union Speech, beyond their usual blogging. Here are few that showed up on my radar screen -- some of them more Web 2.0 in their approach than others. I must have missed a lot because this list isn't very large nor, frankly, for the most part, very innovative.

Josh Marshall's effort -- calling for video responses to the SOTU -- was the most interesting effort that I saw. Pretty innovative and he got some very fun responses.

We're delighted to be noticed by some of the folks on the cutting edge of online citizen journalism and old fashioned investigative muckraking. As we were getting our act together we followed, in particular, the development of Josh Marshall's TPM Muckraker site. In fact one our initial "projects" - which has become our daily feature "In Broad Daylight" - was actually hatched before the Daily Muck. But he got out the door faster than we did!  We don't mind the competition and I doubt he does either. Others, like David Sirota, have a similar feature, and we all have a slightly different take on the news we glean.   

And we're intrigued by groups like Muckraked! that turn up some really good stuff.  I mentioned this morning to our staff that I'd like to develop a list of investigative bloggers and organizations (like Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting) that do this kind of shoe-leather reporting. When we have it, we'll be glad to share it. In the meantime, check out Bill Allison's blog roll for the places he checks into every day.