Nearly every top member of the Bush Administration’s homeland security team has gone through the revolving door and re-emerged as a private consultant, where they can be expected to make big bucks off their expertise and contacts.

He may not have stepped foot on U.S. soil for more than two decades, but billionaire Marc Rich manages to stay relevant.

The vultures are already circling. Rudy Giuliani is positioning his international law firm to get a stake in the proposed $700-billion bailout of Wall Street.

Sen. Barack Obama may be the only smoker running for president, but the occasional snapshot of him taking a puff has not endeared him to the powerful tobacco lobby.

How is Spitzer’s call girl related to former Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani?

It’s about the court, it would seem.

Sen. John McCain is doing well with many voters. However, some conservatives insist they wouldn’t vote for him should he get the Republican presidential nomination.

In politics, enemies need to be watched. However, it’s friends who can really cause trouble.

Failed Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani learned this the hard way. His one-time pal, Bernard Kerik, kept making the wrong kind of headlines, and Giuliani suffered a kind of guilt by association.

Sen. Barack Obama, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, now finds himself in the same boat.

Judith Regan may have published a book with no last chapter. It doesn’t make for good reading, but it would seem worth her while.

Celebrity support, always important in national campaigns, is likely to play an increasing role in the high-cost, heated presidential campaign of 2008.

When it comes to good-looking supporters, Barack Obama leads the pack, with Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, and George Clooney. And of course, there’s his powerhouse stumper, Oprah Winfrey.

Hillary Clinton is backed by a slightly older, more established, show business crowd which includes Chevy Chase, Danny DeVito, Rob Reiner and Steven Spielberg.

Thanks to Woodward, Bernstein and Deep Throat, the first rule of investigative journalism is “Follow The Money.”

The rule works for Muckety, too, especially when it comes to politics. Connections between politicians and their donors are always revealing.

A case in point: A story by Michael Cooper and Leslie Wayne in Thursday’s New York Times. It focused on the wealthy Paul E. Singer, a hedge-fund founder and backer of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid.

When it comes to Rudy Giuliani’s effort to win the Nascar vote, the national press corps just can’t resist stereotypes.

The latest sample comes from today’s Washington Post: “On Sunday, the Giuliani campaign came to the Homestead-Miami Speedway, past a handful of Confederate flags flying in the parking lot and beyond the Jack Daniel’s tent, to attend NASCAR’s Ford 400.”

There’s so much more to this picture than fast cars, bourbon and the Southern Cross.

There’s no question that the $100 million defamation lawsuit filed Tuesday by former books publisher Judith Regan has news value.

But the 70-page complaint also has literary value, as well.

Though it’s bogged down in places with legal terms, it’s still a Judith Regan style page-turner, complete with scenes of betrayal, confrontation and deception.

He claims he IS America in the title of his best-seller, I Am America (And So Can You!). So why is it so surprising that Stephen Colbert has announced he’s running for president?

For starters, Colbert is running only in South Carolina. And he’s a comedian.

What’s so funny about the 2008 presidential race?

Not much so far, unless you count Rudy Giuliani taking a cell phone call from his wife while he was giving a speech to members of the National Rifle Association, a moment that became a YouTube hit.

But, take heart; JibJab.com is back and making fun of the scary side of politics.

JibJab, you may remember, is the Internet humor site that produced the flash animation video, This Land is Your Land for the 2004 presidential race.

The video established the JibJab brand and significantly improved its fortunes.

The This Land video featured singing heads of George W. Bush and John Kerry dissing each other to the tune of the Woody Guthrie song.

When Curt Schilling takes to the mound in the American League
Championship series, he’ll be pitching for the Boston Red Sox against
the Cleveland Indians.

Off the field, Schilling is one of a relatively small group of baseball players who are willing to pitch for political candidates.

He campaigned for President Bush in 2004, and earlier this year, he
said he was backing Sen. John McCain of Arizona for the 2008
Republican presidential nomination. However, he added that if Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois were the Democratic candidate he would have a hard time choosing between the two men.

Two seasons have collided - the endless season of the presidential campaign and the shorter season of the baseball playoffs.

This means that presidential candidates have been showing up at the playoffs, most especially Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who was there front and center to see his beloved New York Yankees exit the playoffs in the first round.

These sporting appearances make sense. The politicos get a little TV airtime away from the coffee shops of New Hampshire and Iowa. And they associate themselves with a game that’s American as apple pie and steroids. (OK. They don’t stress the steroids.)

But there can be risks to rooting for a team, as it inevitably means rooting against another team. Giuliani have picked up some votes in New York, but the inhabitants of Red Sox Nation might not be able to forgive his connection to, in their opinions, an evil empire.

“Don’t tase me, bro!” immediately entered the national lexicon when university police in Florida zapped a protesting student with a Taser gun. His bleating cries have “become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon,” Wired says.

But the incident also substantially raised the profile of Taser International, makers of the police zappers. Company stock is skyrocketing on new orders and it has fended off dozens of wrongful-death lawsuits.

This week, the sheriff’s department of Jacksonville, Fla., purchased 450 new Taser X26s and the Cleveland police ordered 175 more. That was enough to push the stock price up 4.1% on Monday and another 1.34% on Tuesday. The stock is trading at its highest level in two years.

One of the most powerful and civic-minded families in western New York has a link to the company that issued one of the largest beef recalls in U.S. history.

Robert Gioia, a Buffalo businessman and philanthropist, is a former chairman of Topps Meat Company, which said Friday that it was going out of business because of a recall of 21.7 million pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with a potentially fatal strain of E. coli bacteria.

Thirty people in eight states have been sickened, legal action looms, and some wonder why the U.S. Agriculture Department didn’t warn consumers sooner.

Fred Thompson’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for president finally came last night, on The Tonight Show.

“You’ve been in the water for a while now,” host Jay Leno observed. “Are you starting to get a bit wrinkly?”

Thompson, 65, said his wrinkles did not come from water. “We’re where we need to be right now, and that’s one of the things I need to talk to you about,” he said. “I’m running for president of the United States.”