Yesterday’s K Street Confidential column in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Birnbaum seems to have ignited a brushfire in the blogosphere. Birnbaum’s subject for the day was the fact that candidates for the U.S. Senate – unlike anyone else at the federal level – still file their campaign reports on paper rather than electronically.

(This means weeks of delay in getting the information into a searchable format, and expending taxpayer funds to hand-input paper records from the campaigns into computer format. See my post from yesterday)

There’s a story in today’s New York Times about insurance giant AIG deftly avoiding New York state’s contribution limits by bundling their gifts to favored politicians through a network of little-known subsidiaries. The story brought back a flood of old memories for me; bundling through subsidiaries was one of the first tricks of the campaign finance game that I first observed in Alaska when I started tracking money in politics more than 20 years ago.

Here’s how it worked for AIG. New York State allows corporate contributions of up to $5,000. So back in 2003, when AIG wanted to give big money to Gov. George Pataki, for example, they wrote 18 checks on the same bank account – with consecutive check numbers – all listing different AIG subsidiaries as the donor. Grand total: $90,000 to the governor. (Click the attachment below for a chart showing the details.)

If you’ve got something to hide and you don’t want anyone to find it, hide it in plain view. That’s an old idea, closely akin to another old saying: If you can’t dazzle them with BS, bury them with paper. Both, sadly, apply today. For here we are in 2006 and the United States Senate – unlike everyone else – still files its campaign contributions on paper, as if the year were 1956 and computers were expensive and suspect.

Today the only things expensive and suspect are the Senate campaigns themselves. They’ll be collecting their last-minute campaign dollars from people whose identities won’t be known until weeks after the election is finished.

There’s an interesting story from Bloomberg News today on a shift toward Democrats in political giving this year by Wall Street. The story, by Michael Forsythe and George Stein, cites donation totals from 11 top securities firms, showing $3.1 million going to Democrats in this year’s congressional elections versus only $1.9 million to Republicans.

Bloomberg is certainly well plugged in on Wall Street and the story features interesting quotes from industry insiders. But if you read the story and got the impression that there’s been a real sea change on Wall Street, you’d be wrong.

Our friends over at the Center for Responsive Politics have launched a new project on their Capital Eye website featuring up-close profiles of the money in key congressional races. So far they’re highlighting a total of eight contests in Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia and Georgia – with more to come in the weeks ahead.

CRP has long been known as the best source on the web for money-and-politics information, but it’s mainly relied on data-heavy profiles that delineate the trends with lists, tables and pie charts. These new profiles put the numbers in context by combining them with old-fashioned reporting on the races.