Nope. Stay behind the rope. You're not on the list.

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and its associated sites are gaining greater recognition every day for their aggressive reporting of the many political scandals in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. The TPM team is "building the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like" according to the Columbia Journalism Review. It is definitely a "must-read" site for me nearly every day. They have not been kind to some of the leaders over at the Justice Department over the past year, but they have been accurate and more than fair in their coverage.

They've done so well that the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs has taken a stupid, punitive action that demonstrates how much they got under people's skin. They removed TPM from their automatic e-mail press release notification system. Not a big deal really, the folks at TPM can still get the info of the department's Web site, just a little later than other reporters. But the reason the Public Affairs staff gave for the e-mail removal is absurd and ... once again, shows how petty this administration can be. Paul Kiel writes:

"I asked one of our TPM research hounds, Andrew Berger, to call their Office of Public Affairs every day until we got back on their distribution list -- or until we got an explanation. He started his mission last Monday. Finally, today, we got our answer, one that will strike TPMm readers as vintage Bush DoJ. They just don't have room for our email address on the distribution list:

"Mr. Berger, I appreciated your desire to be in tune with DOJ press releases, however, unfortunately I am not able to add you to our distribution list. As you may realize we have a lot of requests to be put on our media lists and we simply are not able to put everyone on the list. We do however have all our press releases on our website and update them the minute they are released so I would suggest looking there. You can also always call us with press inquiries. Thanks again for your interest.
Sincerely,
Jamie Hais, Press Assistant
Office of Public Affairs, Department of Justice"

They just couldn't fit one more little e-mail address into that bulging address database and risk blowing up their computer system. Maybe they should call the Geek Squad.