"You're in charge of communications for a congressional campaign. Your candidate is frugal, perhaps to a fault, and doesn't want to spend a penny of the hard-won dollars he gained by working the phones. You need a poll, but he doesn't want to pay for one.

"There's a local state Senate candidate who's getting ready to go into the field. Granted, the state Senate district isn't an exact match for the congressional district, but it's about 2/3 of the same territory, so, if you squint and tilt your head just so, you might be able to think you see results that would be somewhere near the ballpark of a real poll.

"So you piggyback on the local state Senate candidate's poll -- you buy a couple of questions. And it shows that, in that part of the congressional district that overlaps with the state senate district, you're competitive with the congressman you're challenging.

"Now, here's the question -- now that you've got this data back, a) is it useful to you at all, b) if so, how? and c) would you ever, in a million years, release it to the public as evidence that you're competitive with the congressman you're challenging, without acknowledging right up front that the data is based on a survey sample that was compiled for someone else's survey, and that it doesn't include all portions of the congressional district?

"New York 23" ... Them's fightin' words.

These days, whether you're a conservative activist, or a Republican Party official, saying "New York 23" out loud leads to a shortening of breath, a quickening of the pulse, and a tightening of the muscles. Heads whip around to see who said it, and in what context -- friend, or foe?

With less than a week to go before the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District, tempers are flaring on the campaign trail -- and fingers are being pointed in, and at, a big white building at 320 First Street SE.

Why in the world would a powerful former committee chairman and current ranking Republican of a committee as powerful as Energy and Commerce want to throw away his House clout, only to become the most junior member of the United States Senate, ranking behind even Roland W. Burris and Al Franken?

That's the question that has Capitol Hill veterans scratching their heads as they read about Texas Republican Joe L Barton's possible interest in making a play for the U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has signalled plans to resign the seat to focus on her contest with Texas Gov. Rick Perry for the 2010 Texas GOP nomination for governor.

CQ Politics' Greg Giroux has one idea -- under Texas's quirky law on special elections for U.S. Senate seats, Barton could make the run without having to give up his House seat.

What started with a trickle on the morning of July 31 — one article in a small, local newspaper — had by that afternoon swelled into a raging torrent, with major play in left- wing blogs like the HuffingtonPost, DailyKos, and TPMMuckraker, then coverage in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico.

That same afternoon, a House committee chairman was promising a show trial — scratch that, “investigation” — tailor-made for the fall ratings sweep period, and nearly-naked left-wingers were protesting outside the Washington, D.C., offices of one of the nation’s premier corporate grass-roots lobbyists.

This deluge now threatens not just the continued existence of one boutique lobbying firm, but the ability of members of a political minority to exercise their First Amendment rights to petition their government.

Last week, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello — a freshman elected in a 2008 upset of longtime Virginia conservative Democrat-turned-more conservative Republican Virgil H. Goode Jr. — was on the receiving end of six letters urging opposition to the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill.

What's inside this chart is thoroughly disgusting.

It's the new CQPolitics House Race Ratings map -- the first take by CQ's in-house experts on the lay of the land for the 2010 campaigns for the 435 seats up for grabs in the House of Representatives.

"Up for grabs," of course, is a euphemism. According to the CQ Politics analysis, unless some bolt out of nowhere strikes, 335 of the 435 seats are considered "safe" for the incumbent.

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.

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.

Is Rep. John P. "The P is for Power" Murtha about to become the new Tom DeLay?

He will if Rep. Pete Sessions and the National Republican Congressional Committee have anything to say about it.

DeLay, of course, became the face of Republican congressional corruption in the 2006 cycle.

Though DeLay himself has never been convicted of anything -- and continues to maintain his innocence as federal and state prosecutions against him move forward at a glacial pace -- several of his former aides and lobbying allies pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff lobbying corruption scandal.

Later this week, government watchdog groups led by Democracy 21 are expected to issue a joint call for a probe by the House Committee on Standards on Official Conduct -- regularly referred to as the ethics committee -- into the relationship between campaign contributions by executives, allies, and clients of the now-defunct PMA Group lobbying firm on the one hand, and earmarked appropriations on the other.

The watchdog groups are following up on the investigation surrounding the PMA Group and, reportedly, three key lawmakers closely tied to it -- Reps. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., Peter J. Visclosky, D-Ind., and James P. Moran, D-Va..

In doing so, they are echoing calls by Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who seven times has offered a privileged resolution calling for just an investigation, much to the consternation of House Democratic leaders.

Interestingly, under House rules that were in existence until 1997, the outside groups could have filed an actual complaint with the ethics panel itself.

CQPolitics' own Jeff Stein has a blockbuster piece today reporting that U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, was secretly recorded by the National Security Agency promising to take an official action in exchange for help achieving a personal political ambition.

According to Stein's piece, the wiretap reveals a conversation between Harman and a suspected Israeli agent that took place in the context of the 2006 elections, in which the Democrats ousted the Republicans from control of the U.S. House.

The transcript reportedly shows Harman promising that she would try to get the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. In exchange, the suspected Israeli agent allegedly promised to lobby California Democrat Nancy Pelosi -- just months from being elected Speaker of the House -- to appoint Harman to chair of the House Intelligence Committee.