The Ghost of Abramoff Present.

As pointed out by Holden (of First Draft), over at Eschaton , today

" What will those same anchors (referring to CNN coverage of Sen Johnson's illness) say when Jack Abramoff takes out Thad Cochran?"

TPMmuckraker
Email: Abramoff Associate Urged Funds for GOP Sen. Who "Never Said No"
By Paul Kiel
December 14, 2006, 3:07 PM

Washington runs on money -- no one understood that better than Jack Abramoff, who built his empire directing huge volumes of sometimes clean, sometimes dirty money from interest groups to politicians (and directed political favors back the other way).

Another man who understands the maxim is Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), a senior lawmaker who has helped control the flow of billions of dollars from his seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee for many years....

An email obtained by TPMmuckraker and never before published provides perhaps the best example of a lobbyist hitting up his colleagues for donations to a friendly lawmaker. In it, one of Abramoff's lobbyists makes a strong pitch for contributions to Cochran in the midst of his 2002 re-election campaign because "Sen. Cochran's office [had] never said 'no'" to the Mississippi Choctaw -- the casino-owning tribe that was one of Abramoff's prime clients since the beginning of his lobbying career.