Remember Senator Mitch McConnell's efforts to shield the Republican Senator who put an anonymous hold on S.223, a bill to require electronic disclosure of Senators' campaign finance reports, even though McConnell is on the record in support of transparency? Well, it's just gotten stranger.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans intervened on behalf of a put-upon, impoverished, and under-represented constituency: Big Oil. They blocked a measure that would have provided $32 billion in incentives for renewable energy via a tax on oil companies -- with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his over $450,000 in life campaign donations from the oil industry at the helm.

Today, the Sunlight Foundation unveiled WhatsMcConnellHiding.com and a billboard in Louisville. (Katie will blog more on this later.)

The Baltimore Sun joins in in calling out Sen. Mitch McConnell and his fellow obstructors for standing in the way of a bill to require Senators to file campaign finance disclosure forms electronically. Electronic disclosure would be a fast, inexpensive way to give voters better access to information about who was giving how much to their Senators (and whether they were getting anything in return).

The Louisville Courier-Journal, no friend to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), blasts the longtime opponent of campaign finance reform for saying one thing and doing another: praising campaign finance transparency as the corrective on money in politics, then blocking legislation that would create that very transparency. The Journal expresses its considerable displeasure...

Well, well. Sen. Mitch McConnell (aka Big Money Mitch) perhaps the most ardent opponent of any kind of campaign finance reform in Congress is out there breaking fundraising records for his 2008 re-election bid. Eighteen months out from election day and he's already got $6 million in his campaign war chest.

The Courier-Journal in Louisville penned this editorial Friday, the day of McConnell's $2.1 million fundraiser with President Bush, saying Big Money Mitch's "political career has been based on the primacy of money" and this:

He long ago became one of the legendary money grubbers in modern American politics, in order to buy TV time for commercials that demean, disgrace and ultimately defeat his opponents.

The commercial banking and credit card industry has no better friend in Congress than Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY). They've given him $535,000 in campaign contributions, and he's given them legislation that boosts their profit margins and makes life harder for Americans struggling to get out of debt. So, we're rolling out a campaign to put McConnell on notice, and hope you'll join us: he needs to put the interests of voters ahead of his biggest campaign contributors.