Democratic Rep. John P. Murtha is in such deep trouble that for the first time in anyone’s memory, there are two Republicans facing off for the right to carry the GOP banner against him next year in Pennsylvania.

One is William Russell, (USA-Ret.), who took 42 percent of the vote against Murtha last year — despite raising and spending more than $3 million.

The new candidate is Tim Burns, who shared with me the first of a planned series of Web videos his campaign will be releasing in the coming months, leading up to the May 18 GOP primary.

Mary Lou Forbes passed away June 27.

She was my very first newspaper commentary editor.

She had taken over the Commentary section of The Washington Times in 1982, and she was kind enough to begin running pieces under my byline in 1986, courtesy of the op-ed marketing team at The Heritage Foundation.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's admission of an extramarital affair has knocked him out of the running for the GOP nomination for President in 2012. The question now is, whom has his withdrawal from the field most helped?

Answer: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

When Sanford resigns -- as he will most assuredly have to do -- the state's Lieutenant Governor, Andre Bauer, will ascend to the governorship.

Bauer, already an announced candidate for the GOP nomination next year, would become an incumbent running for election to a full term of his own in 2010.

Wags are already predicting the New York tabloid headlines for tomorrow's morning coverage of Mark Sanford's extraordinary admission of an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman.

The best I've heard so far -- from a friend who's a former journalist with two decades' experience in newsrooms -- is a play on the Argentina (and thus Evita Peron) connection: "He Cried for Her in Argentina."

Most readers (and an unforgivably large number of political operatives), aren't aware that in most newspapers, headlines aren't written by the reporters who write the stories. They're not even written by their editors. In most newspapers, headlines are written by brilliant people whose only job is to find ways to shrink complex story lines into six-word grabbers.

My favorite tabloid headline of all time was the one that ran over a story about a decapitated body found in a gentleman's club: "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

Mark Sanford isn't the first major American politician to become entangled with an "exotic" Argentine woman.

On October 7, 1974, two U.S. Park Police patrolmen pulled over a limousine at 2 AM. The car had been barreling down Independence Avenue, between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial, at 80 miles per hour with its headlights off.

Inside, they found a powerful member of Congress, a man who just two years earlier had competed for the Democratic nomination for the presidency -- Rep. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

My instant analysis:

What South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford looked like upon his return from Argentina and the revelation of his activities there. Click here

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A dozen years ago, the Christian Coalition was one of the most powerful and successful political organizations in the nation.

Founded by Pat Robertson in the wake of his more-successful-than-expected 1988 bid for the GOP presidential nomination, and midwifed to success by Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition was a critical element of the movement that helped Republicans recapture the House of Representatives in the 1994 mid-term elections, garnering the cover of TIME magazine in the process.

But in 1997, Reed left to open a consulting firm; his departure was followed in 2001 by that of Robertson himself.

At last -- a stumble by the vaunted White House political operation, and an opening for Republicans.

The stumble? This week's mishandling of the seduction of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

The opening? An opportunity to trap the Democrats in a corner.

The decision by Sen. John Ensign to resign his position as chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee -- the fourth-ranking position in the Senate GOP leadership structure -- opens a rung on the ladder for an ambitious Republican Senator looking to move up.

And it appears the slot may go to South Dakota's John Thune, who wasted no time today in working the phones to let his leadership and colleagues know of his interest in the job.

Falling dominoes often make for the most interesting ladder-climbing stories.

Thank your lucky stars you're not Tory Mazzola this week.

Mazzola is the communications director for Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign.

That means it's been his job to advise Ensign on how best to acknowledge to the world that Ensign has broken the most important vow he ever made.

In political communications, there are few circumstances more demanding or more threatening.

Having been close to the center of one or two of those kinds of white-hot media frenzies, I can safely say it's not a thing you'd want even your worst enemy to go through.

Two decisions late last week by by New Jersey GOP gubernatorial nominee Chris Christie offer clues to what may turn out to be a crucial campaign decision for him: Whom to nominate as his running mate, for the new post of lieutenant governor?

On June 11, Christie anointed 37-year-old first-term Assemblyman Jay Webber of Morris County to serve as chairman of the state's Republican Party.

Webber is a Ronald Reagan conservative -- so much so that several years ago he began organizing New Jersey Reagan Day, an annual celebration on the anniversary of Reagan's birth.

He is a graduate of Harvard Law, opposed to abortion, and has shown political courage -- enough to have challenged a senior Republican state senator in a primary in his first run for office.

Three days after the coup in the New York state Senate, two questions come to mind:

To the Republicans who now control the upper chamber -- to what end, exactly?

To the Democrats who lost power -- why are you trying so hard to reverse the coup?

It appears that in both cases, the answer is simple: As in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, the competing power centers are so used to doing everything they can to achieve power for power's sake, that they cannot break their habits and stop themselves -- regardless of whether or not controlling the state Senate actually serves their larger strategic purposes.

All politics is local, former House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill famously said.

National GOP strategists whose job it is to recapture the House of Representatives may be about to learn that lesson again -- the hard way.

That's because Monday's New York state Senate coup may lead to a new Democrat being sworn into Congress just in time for Labor Day.

The reason: the interests of New York Republicans don't necessarily coincide with national GOP concerns.

Contrary to what some of the early conclusion-jumpers on the Right seem to think, yesterday's coup in the New York Senate had nothing to do with same-sex marriage, and everything to do with broken commitments and one very rich man's determination to enforce an agreement.

If you want to understand what really happened, begin by reading this piece by Steve Kornacki of PolitickerNY.com.

Then read this essay by B. Thomas Golisano, the billionaire philanthropist, three-time Independent Party nominee for governor, and recent New York tax exile.

Golisano, you see, is the man who hatched the coup.

Republicans trying to figure out how to position themselves on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor had two lifelines thrown their way yesterday. The question is, will they have the wisdom necessary to use them?

Ever since the nomination was announced, Senate GOP leaders have recognized the corner into which Barack Obama painted them: Oppose Sotomayor at the risk of potentially crippling and permanent damage with the nation's ever-growing Hispanic voting bloc, or fail to oppose Sotomayor at the risk of a schism with the party's conservative base.

That latter risk was heightened earlier this week, when leading conservatives wrote to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, demanding that he start thinking about leading a filibuster against the nomination.

Is New York just a few short years away from becoming a larger Massachusetts?

Based on President Obama's nomination of New York Republican Congressman John McHugh to serve as Secretary of the Army, that may be exactly what his White House has in mind.

Massachusetts, with 10 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives -- each of which is represented by a Democrat -- is the largest state in the Union to be represented in the House by the members of only one political party.

That's the result of a brilliant 2002 gerrymander that passed the Democrat-dominated legislature over Republican Governor Jane Swift's veto.

That's the only lesson that can be drawn from yesterday's budget charade in the Illinois state house.

The brazenness of Illinois Democrats -- the party of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, Sen. Roland W. Burris, and (dare I say it?) President Obama -- reached a new nadir last night, as the Democrats who control the state House and Senate, unable to pass a full year's budget without massive job-killing and (more importantly to them) re-election-threatening tax hikes, decided instead to pass only a partial-year budget.

So instead of being done until the next budget year, House and Senate members will have to reassemble in January 2010 to pass a budget for the rest of the fiscal year.

Why enact a partial-year budget good through January 2010, and not, oh, say, August 2009, or October 2009?

What in the world is the Republican National Committee doing these days?

The killer instinct, the drive for the jugular, is a critical component of the makeup of a successful campaign communications operative.

But experience teaches that going for the throat isn't always the wisest strategy -- in fact, doing nothing but sitting quietly in the corner often ends up being the wisest strategy.