As Curt Weldon’s troubles continue to mount, his campaign has released an ad that takes a predictable route and warns that if elected Joe Sestak would raise taxes. Echoing a theme raised in one of his direct mailers, the ad hits Sestak for spending, “thirty years away from our region.” Where has he been these past thirty years? Serving in the US Navy, not surprisingly the ad does not mention this fact. Watch the ad here.

The already-tight race between GOP Rep. Curt Weldon and Dem challenger Joe Sestak just got a heck of a lot tighter. McClatchy Newspapers is reporting that the Justice Department is probing whether Weldon traded political influence in exchange for lucrative lobbying contracts for his daughter. TPMmuckraker's Paul Kiel provides much needed context and backstory here.

In a tough new mailing, GOP Rep Curt Weldon is slamming Dem challenger Joe Sestak for not living in Pennsylvania for the "past three decades":

title="Weldon Mailer Clipping" width="551" height="145" />

So where has Sestak been all this time, anyway? Answer: In the Navy. No mention of that in the flyer, incidentally.

Bill Clinton stumped for Dem candidate Joe Sestak on Thursday at a campaign rally at the Valley Forge Military Academy. As if Clinton’s presence wasn’t sign enough of how serious the Democratic party is taking the race in PA’s 7^th, Clinton flatly stated, “I will not make a single stop in this campaign season that means more to me than this one—not one.” Clinton did not mention Curt Weldon, but had plenty to say about the national Republican leadership. Criticizing a “radical, right-wing ideology”, Clinton stated,

“If you have an ideology, you know the answer already, so the evidence becomes irrelevant…That’s why they govern and campaign by attack -- assertion and attack -- because evidence and argument are the enemies of ideology. And there are serious consequences to this, and you see them in Iraq, you see them in Afghanistan, you see them on stem-cell research.

For a full roundup of the speech see local blog, PA-7 Watch.

Is GOP Rep Curt Weldon in trouble? The first nonpartisan poll conducted on the race between Weldon and Dem challenger Joe Sestak finds that the two candidates are in a statistical dead heat, with Sestak leading Weldon 44%-43%. But the Weldon camp dismissed the numbers in the Franklin & Marshall College Keystone Poll, pointing out that a recent poll done by a Republican firm had Weldon up 52%-33%. But a Sestak senior adviser chalks up the new numbers to the fact that "nobody campaigns harder than Joe Sestak."

In his web column for Time, Joe Klein profiles the race in PA’s 7^th district between Curt Weldon and his democratic challenger Joe Sestak.  The article features some standard analysis of the tough fight that Weldon is facing, but what jumps out is a quote attributed to an unnamed colleague of Weldon’s from the House.  According to this souce, Weldon, “can be absolutely brilliant…but there’s also a slightly unhinged quality to him.”  Klein goes on to list the “slightly” abnormal statements and positions staked out by Weldon over the last few years, they include his insistence—along with Rick Santorum—that we have found Iraq’s WMDs and that the Pentagon Unit “Able Danger” identified Mohammed Atta years before the 9/11 attacks.  The article also has Weldon bragging that he has, “been to every major American disaster in the last 20 years.”  Insert your own Bush joke here.

Joe Sestak -- the Dem taking on GOP Rep./International Man of Mystery Curt Weldon -- has just launched his first ad. It doesn't once mention Weldon -- but it does stress very strongly that Sestak is an "Admiral"...and a "Democrat." No running from party labels in this ad.

This is kind of fun. The three most endangered GOP incumbents in Pennsylvania -- Mike Fitzpatrick, Jim Gerlach, and Curt Weldon -- are all competing with each other to prove their undying disloyalty to Bush. How? They're all pointing to what has become a bragging point in this campaign: their low scores in the party-loyalty ratings compiled by Congressional Quarterly. And the winner is...Fitzpatrick, who's apparently the third least loyal Republican among all 231 GOP House members.

A massive ad war is about to begin in the races in three contested Pennsylvania Congressional districts -- including the nationally watched race between GOP Rep. Curt Weldon and Dem challenger Joe Sestak. The National Republican Campaign Committee and its Dem counterpart have bought up an astoundingly high combined total of $16.1 million in campaign advertising for the three districts during the month leading up to the Nov. 7 election. More details on their buys after the jump.

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House GOP strategists are dumping huge sums of cash into the Northeast, in an effort to stave off electoral disaster in the region.

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Remember when Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) tried to score political points by slamming opponent Joe Sestak (D) for sending his daughter to an out-of-state hospital -- even though she was four and suffering from a malignant brain tumor? Journalists jumped on the ethically questionable attack.

Now Weldon's accused of something else -- and in the alternate reality of Washington politics, his latest transgression, while not anywhere near as reprehensible as the former episode, actually constitutes a genuine ethics violation.

What did Weldon do? He used the photo and bio from his House website on his campaign website. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party wrote the House ethics committee, saying it’s “an obvious campaign violation” because the materials are official House resources.

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Democrats Joe Sestak and Lois Murphy are gaining on their opponents, campaign finance reports show. Sestak, challenging Rep. Curt Weldon (R), raised $700,000 in the past quarter. Weldon raised only $400,000. Weldon’s 2004 Democratic challenger raised $24,000. Sestak has “nearly $1 million” on hand, according to his spokesman. Weldon has $1.14 million. "For a first-time candidate, it is very unusual to raise that kind of money, particularly against a longtime incumbent," Amy Walter, senior editor at the Cook Political Report told the Inquirer.

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Rep. Curt Weldon, who has been claiming for some time that there are WMD in Iraq, had plans to go find them himself. It was to be a “personal political mission,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. But Weldon’s source on all these conspiracy theories, a former Air Force special investigator Dave Gaubatz (profiled in the Times last week), didn’t like the congressman’s PR-oriented approach. Gaubatz wanted Weldon to alert the Defense Department; Weldon wanted to do the searching himself and keep it secret until they actually found something.

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Sen. Rick Santorum (R) is standing behind his assertion that prewar claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq have been proven by a partially declassified Defense Department report. The report, from April 2006, reveals that American forces found about 500 rounds of chemical-weapons shells containing “degraded” mustard or sarin nerve gas buried in Iraq. It does not suggest that the findings contradict the 2004 Defense Department report stating that Saddam Hussein had no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons program in the years leading up to the war in Iraq. Defense officials believe the shells were produced before the first Gulf War, for use in the 1988 war with Iran. Experts say nerve gas from the 1980s is probably not dangerous.

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