Undercover Journalism

Another benefit not available to you and me: "The News Corporation paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed. During that time, Securities and Exchange Commission records show, the News Corporation's domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion."

John McCain, who regularly campaigns against special interests, has more lobbyists in his campaign than any other 2008 contender, Tom Edsall reports.

Hillary may have done a nifty star turn in a Sopranos spoof, but Peggy Noonan thinks she's got a ways to go:

"Hillary Clinton doesn't have to prove she's a man. She has to prove she's a woman.

"She doesn't have to prove to people that she's tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn't have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she is not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark.

"This is the woman credited with starting and naming the War Room. Her staff has nicknamed her 'The Warrior.' Get in her way and she'd squish you like a bug. This has been her reputation for 20 years. And it is her big problem. People want a president to be strong but not hard."

Amid the Bloomberg blather, the New Republic's Michelle Cottle wonders about the coverage being drawn by his predecessor:

"Congratulations to New York City Mayor Michael Boomberg! This week, by changing his party affiliation from Republican to Independent and touching off a storm of speculation about his possible plans to mount a third-party bid for president, the diminutive multibillionaire entrepreneur turned self-financed pol officially knocked off Rudy Giuliani as the reigning king of New York provincialist chutzpah.

"It has been bad enough lo these many months watching Rudy strut around arguing that he is qualified to run the greatest nation on the planet by simple dint of the fact that he was mayor when New York suffered its most horrifying catastrophe of modern times. We get it: He lived through September 11. He rallied the troops and denounced the bad guys and generally supplied a strong, strident Daddy figure at a time when the Big Apple was scared and bleeding. Of course, there are those who've suggested that Rudy showed a shocking lack of foresight by headquartering the city's emergency response center in the one landmark already known to be a terrorist target. Or that he could have been more on the ball about preparing the city's emergency responders to handle catastrophes by seeing to it that, say, their communications equipment was up to snuff. But why split hairs?

"Also in the interest of fairness, I suppose we could go back and parse Rudy's entire record to determine if, on the whole, his pugilistic, divisive . . . approach to leadership was worth whatever concrete gains he made in cleaning up the city. But, let's face it. He's not running on his overall record. (And who can blame him: Pro gun control? Pro illegal immigrant? Pro choice? Pro gay rights? That kind of platform is more likely to get him stoned by the base than nominated.) He's running as the tough-guy candidate, the man who, when anyone dares question his bomb-'em-all foreign policy impulses, begins quivering with self-righteous outrage and demands a retraction based on the fact that, on September 11, He Was There!"

A reality check, from Ryan Sager in the New York Sun:

"The Pew survey . . . shows that while Mayor Bloomberg has rather good name recognition -- 65%, which is better than Mitt Romney (62%), Joe Biden (58%), Fred Thompson (51%), or Bill Richardson (48%) -- he's still got a low ceiling of potential support for his run for president.