Unfortunately, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is not among those indicted, but the AP reports that the indictments hit close to home for the Texas lawmaker. April Castro has this to write:

Three people and eight corporations — including Sears and Cracker Barrel — were indicted Tuesday in an alleged scheme to make illegal campaign contributions through a political action committee formed by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

DeLay, a Texas Republican, was not charged.

The grand jury has been investigating whether $2.5 million in corporate funds were used illegally to help Republican candidates win elections in 2002 that gave the GOP a majority in the Texas House for the first time since Reconstruction. The GOP later used its majority to redraw Texas' congressional districts to favor Republican candidates.

Texas law prohibits the use of corporate money for political activity.

DeLay was not questioned or subpoenaed as part of the grand jury investigation.

Those charged included three men connected to DeLay's PAC, Texans for a Republican Majority: John Colyandro, James Ellis and Warren RoBold.

[...]

Ellis heads DeLay's national fund-raising committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, which helped establish the Texas PAC. Colyandro is former executive director of Texans for a Republican Majority, and RoBold is a Washington fund-raiser who helped raise money for DeLay's PACs.

This all reaks of illegality, and I hope the national media picks up this story. If this isn't on the front page of all the major papers tomorrow and in the evening broadcasts tonight, I'm not sure if there could be any better proof of the media's bias to the right.

Imagine if the fundraising arm of Nancy Pelosi's PAC were caught laundering funds but her California cronies made sure she wasn't indicted. The nation would be outrages, every radio talkshow host from Anchorage to Miami would be screaming for a resignation and the Democratic leadership in the House would crumble. The fact of the matter is that the media are completely complicit in this sham of a trial, and if they fail to report on this story in a major way (which they probably will), their unfair slant will be that much more apparent to those who follow goings on around the media.

My feeling is this: if the right wing can create a story in their top-down blogosphere--which isn't true--that the media ends up taking as a fact, we can take a real story and make the media pay attention to it. Let everyone you know about this article, pass it on to all of the other blogs, make sure that editors in your local papers see this; Tom DeLay must be made to pay for setting up a PAC that launders money.

We can force the media to deal with this story just like we forced them to pay attention to the Trent Lott debacle. Now that we've already taken down a Senate Majority Leader, let's take down a House Majority Leader!