Sen. Ted Stevens released a statement in which he declares his innocence and vows to fight the charges. He also stepped down his posts as ranking member of both the Commerce Committee and the Appropriations Committee.

For some background on Sen. Stevens, I wanted to point out the utility of Sunlight's Lawmaker Profile, which you can access through the front page of our web site. I was just toying around with Sen. Stevens' profile and got this telling image of a cloud of his top ten career contributors:

$88,000 from VECO, the company that he is alleged to have received gifts from, and which he is said to have done favors for.

You can also dig into his personal finances, earmarks, and contracts through this tool.

On Monday, the New York Observer installed the new version of Sunlight's Lawmaker Profiler on their politics section. They even made an ad for it. Scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand sidebar and you'll see the ad, and link to LP.

This new tool from Sunlight -- the Lawmaker Profiler -- offers, on a single Web page, data from multiple sources that provide in-depth, at-a-glance information on the actions of and influences on every member of Congress. It can be tailored to your Congressional delegation.

This is now available for anyone to use. You can find another version of it on MinnPost, and still another one on this blog. Let us know and we'll let you know how to install it too.