If I'm not mistaken, this new story about Tom DeLay's junket to the Marianas back in the late 1990s is pretty much the same story we read in the late 1990s.

(Just to be clear and fair: The reporter with the byline on the ABC report -- Brian Ross -- is one of the journalists who reported on the story back at the time.)

This is the case where DeLay and his family got a luxe trip to a resort in Saipan so he could help make the US territory safe for sweatshop labor.

Don't get me wrong. It stinks to high heaven.

But the resurrection of this story does seem to suggest that we're in that phase of the battle where all the stuff that was long written up about DeLay, but routinely ignored, is getting written up again. And now we're shocked, shocked that this hustler has been polluting the people's House with his neo-Tammany shenanigans.