Longtime readers of this site know that the history of TPM is rather intertwined with the history of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal. In case you don't remember, that's the case where the state Republican party (almost certainly with the knowledge and probably with the cooperation of the national party) hired a phone bank to jam the phones of the Dems' and the local firefighters' GOTV phone banks.

The guy close to the center of the whole scam was the media operative/consultant hired to run the operation, Allen Raymond. And he's written a new tell-all book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.

Now, as you probably know, most tell-all books are more like tell-little or tell-nothing books. We've still got one reader still sulking because he was hounding us for days about why we weren't giving more attention to the Scott McClellan memoir non-bombshell. But I got word yesterday that Raymond's offering is the real deal. Our copy arrived at the office today. And upon a limited initial perusal the normally low-key and laconic Paul Kiel concludes that it is "awesome." So that's saying a lot.

As it happens, this is not surprising from what we've seen thus far of Raymond. Of all the phone-jam scammers, he was the only one who not only took his criminal justice lumps but seemed genuinely to want to wash his hands of the whole rotten business. The rest, as you'd expect, are back on the GOP payroll in most cases after a short pitstop in the can.

Raymond on his sojourn in the slammer: "After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."

Anyway, check out the book and we're working on getting Mr. Raymond over here to TPM to discuss the book and perhaps answer your questions.