Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's political action committee reported giving $5,000 to Sen. David Vitter, R-La., the same week it accepted an identical amount from former Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi.

Pickering, like Vitter, is a conservative Christian Republican accused of having an extramarital affair linked to the "C Street" townhouse in Southeast Washington that is at the center of a spate of GOP sex scandals.

Pickering's otherwise dormant CHIP PAC made its first donation of the year to Haley's PAC on Aug. 15 -- four days after the governor gave to Vitter's 2010 re-election campaign -- according to a Sept. 20 filing with the Federal Election Commission. The two checks comprise all of the month's activities for Haley's PAC, which has just $13,281.37 in the bank and has made only one other contribution this year.

Is it just a coincidence?

Rob Miller has been inundated with cash since the man he's challenging, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., called President Obama a liar during a joint session of Congress last week.

Miller's collected about $900,000 in online donations through the contribution conduit ActBlue.com since Sept. 9, an unprecedented hydrogen moneybomb for an ActBlue candidate. But Miller and his new friends should know that money from Democratic donors across the country won't necessarily buy him the love of local voters.

The trend goes far beyond the phenomenon of El Tinklenberg, who swam in more than $800,000 in online contributions in the days immediately after Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said Obama and some members of Congress harbored anti-American beliefs. Aside from Tinklenberg, who lost, eight of the other top 10 House recipients whose profiles remain on ActBlue ended up losing in 2008.

Adrian Arroyo, the deputy communications director for ActBlue, says matching dollar figures to outcomes is "the wrong way to look at it." In Miller's case, he said, the flood of early money will help him build a campaign organization and keep the attention of national Democrats.

Jimmy Buffett occupies the No. 1 spot on Rep. John Hall's campaign playlist, as the second-term New York Democrat -- the onetime frontman for the band Orleans -- has scheduled a fundraiser for Buffett's Sept. 5 concert at the Nissan Pavilion in Northern Virginia.

But Buffett, who has given money in the past to Democratic candidates and causes -- including Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee -- hasn't ponied up for Hall in the past, according to a review of CQ MoneyLine records.

Perhaps Hall's fundraiser will spark a change in attitude.

Thanks to the Sunlight Foundation's indispensable "party time" Web site for info on the event.

How does a wealthy businessman turned congressman leverage his family's money to build political capital?

The answer for freshman Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., is a "joint fundraising committee" that has collected $204,000 from his immediate family and distributed the cash to more than 30 Democratic colleagues and political committees in amounts as large as $30,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $20,000 apiece to Reps. Dan Maffei, D-N.Y., and Betsy Markey, D-Colo.

Polis' parents combined to give $139,600 and his brother and sister chipped in another $64,600. The Denver Post provided the outlines of Polis' effort late last month.

Over the past five years, Rep. Bobby L. Rush has spent more than a tenth of his campaign's receipts on the church he founded, a tidy tithe totaling $152,777.

It's an example of how the campaign finance system allows candidates and office-holders to redirect funds to institutions they care about.

Other lawmakers have influenced their communities -- and preserved their legacies -- by setting up tax-exempt nonprofits, often in the defense and technology industries, to take advantage of federal grant, contract and earmark opportunities.

Rush's approach is different because a church is his center of operations and he concentrates on social services. But what his approach has in common with those of other lawmakers is the earmarking of tax dollars -- Rush earmarked nearly $700,000 for two related social services entities he helped establish.

Embattled Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y. has given more money to lawyers than he has raised this year, and fellow Democrats are taking the brunt of the financial hit.

Rangel is contributing far less to his colleagues from his heavy-hitting fundraising post as chairman of the tax-writing committee than he has in the past.

Rangel gave $189,478 to candidates, party committees and political action committees through the first half of this year, a 73.5 percent drop from the $715, 326 he doled out in the first half of the last non-election year.

In the first six months of 2007, Rangel gave $203,000 to Democratic colleagues and challengers in Republican-held districts. This year, the figure is $14,000. Back then, he had transferred $500,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is responsible for electing Democrats to the House. This year, he has given just $150,000.

The rapid atrophy of Rangel's once-legendary fundraising-and-contribution machine is almost certainly a testament to both the rising costs, in dollars and time, of defending himself against legal and ethical inquiries and of a chill among donors who know each dollar they give will go to a lawyer. It won't be long before it hurts his standing among House Democrats -- if it hasn't already.

The latest bread crumbs to drop come from the semi-annual report of Rangel's National Leadership Political Action Committee, which was filed with the Federal Election Commission Friday. It shows Rangel's legal bills cost his PAC $106, 133 in the first six months of this year, bringing the combined total for his two political committees to $829,810, or nearly $30,000 more than the $800,178 they raised between Jan. 1 and June 30. It also shows that he has all but stopped giving directly to colleagues.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called health insurers "the villains" in the unfolding story of the health care overhaul on Thursday, ratcheting up an anti-insurer theme trotted out by President Obama earlier this month and encouraged by other Democratic leaders in Congress.

"It is somewhat immoral what they are doing. Of course, they have been immoral all along how they have treated the people that they insure," MSNBC's Luke Russert quoted her as saying. "They are the villains in this."

Pelosi, of course, has accepted campaign contributions from said villains this year and in the past, as have most of her Democratic colleagues. Pelosi's campaign committee, for example, took $2,500 from AFLAC's political action committee on April 13. But she's not giving the money back just because she thinks the sources are immoral and villainous.

"As the Speaker's opposition to the health insurance companies being in charge of American's health care shows, there is no link between political contributions and positions on policy," said her spokesman Brendan Daly.

For the longest time, reporters and watchdog groups scanned House campaign finance reports almost exclusively to find out which special interests and big-name donors were funding the campaigns of powerful lawmakers.

The stories were in the receipts, in the suggestions of quids and quos.

But there has been a growing trend in recent years to look at the expenditure side of the ledger, whether for spending on Sarah Palin's sartorial splendor or Charles B. Rangel's lawyers and parking tickets.

It's not that the receipts don't make for good stories -- they continue to account for the bulk of campaign finance reporting -- but the checks campaigns write often make for better stories.