Federal Election Commission

Rudy Giuliani has just filed to set up a presidential exploratory committee with the Federal Election Commission, ABC News is reporting.

This should, for now, put to rest speculation about whether Giuliani's recent establishment of an exploratory committee at the state level meant that he was somehow less than serious about running for president.

-- Josh Benson

Out of debates and down in the polls, Ned Lamont is now accusing Joe Lieberman not only of enabling Bush on the war in Iraq but of creating a nearly $400,000 "slush fund" of petty cash expenditures. Lamont's campaign is filing a formal complaint with the FEC. (Complaint after the jump.)

"Only an 18 year career politician could dump almost $400,000 in cash into an election and try to call it petty cash," said Lamont's campaign manager, Tom Swan, in a statement.  read more »

Lamont has used a mere $500 of petty cash, according to the the campaign, although the candidate has pumped millions of his own money into the campaign. I'm waiting to hear from Lieberman's campaign, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that their response will include the word "desperation."

--Jason Horowitz

I experienced a little frisson of excitement this morning when a quick crawl through the Federal Election Commission website turned up a presidential fund-raising committee for one Hillary Rodham Clinton. Was this the smoking gun? The proof that reporters have been looking for?

As I suspected -- and an FEC spokesperson confirmed -- it was, in fact, the work of some overzealous "Draft Hillary" types who had gone ahead and registered the committee. The committee has not raised any money. But it got me wondering which other possible-potential-theoretical presidential contenders have inspired (or is it "inspired"?) drafters to go out and register them for presidential bids -- and which ones have not.

So herewith a list of the lucky proto-candidates with presidential committees (and apparently draft teams) and those without...

The Presidential Committee'd: * Virginia Senator George Allen * Wisconsin senator and favorite insurgent-Democrat-son Russ Feingold * Ex-NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani * Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice * Former Virginia Governor and chosen Anti-Hillary Democratic contender Mark Warner The Presidential Committee-less: * Indiana Senator Evan Bayh * Delaware Senator and 1988 presidential contender Joseph Biden * Kansas Senator Sam Brownback * Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist * Almost-President Al Gore * Arizona Senator and 2000 presidential hopeful John McCain * New York Governor George Pataki * New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson * Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney * Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack -- Lizzy Ratner

For all the chatter about Hillary-as-lightning rod, her name doesn't seem to work any better as a fundraising tool on the anti-war left than it does on the (mostly fabled) Clinton-hating Right. Stop Her Now, the most professional of the anti-Hillary operations, is now in debt. And the campaign of Jonathan Tasini, the liberal Clinton Senate challenger, had a remarkably poor first two months of fundraising, considering the wide attention he got on places like DailyKos and other energy centers of the Left.

He raised $24,236 from just 22 donors, according to his report to the Federal Elections Commission. (That's about $500 more than Stop Her Now raised, actually.) Barbara Ehrenreich maxed out. Lawrence Lessig chipped in. There was certainly no out-pouring of small-dollar Web support.

Tasini told me when he launched his campaign, "If there's a base of [financial and volunteer] support within about 30 to 60 days, I think this campaign has legs and is going to get off the ground.... This may not touch an nerve and then we're not going to be able to do it. We'll see."

Does 22 donors count as touching a nerve?

We don't quite know what to make of this vaguely sourced Philadelphia Daily News story, which leads with the news that "The Rev. Al Sharpton is the subject of a federal criminal investigation."

In the next breath, the story tells us that it's not the Philadelphia corruption investigation in which Sharpton briefly figured as a bit player.  read more »

And if it's a criminal investigation, that means it can't be the ongoing Federal Elections Commission probe. Hmm.

Does John Kerry understand that winning the Democratic nomination is the beginning, not the end, of  read more »

Every time Congress attempts to pass anothercampaign-finance reform bill, it tries to bring to life  read more »