Joined at the hip, reports Will Bunch, shedding light on why the good senator seems intent on investigating the NFL and the Patriots spying scandal:

They noted that the longtime GOP stalwart’s No. 2 source of campaign funds in recent years has been none other than employees of Comcast Corp. and their families, linked to at least $153,600 in donations going back to 1989. That’s significant because Philadelphia-based Comcast has been engaged in a protracted war with the NFL over an issue that has nothing to do with New England and spying but is worth millions of dollars: Whether the cable giant can and should charge its consumers extra money to view the NFL Network.

Good find, but if you dig a little deeper…it’s even worse than that.

Look again at the list, and see who Specter’s No. 1 source of campaign contributions has been — by far. That would the law firm — also based here in Philly but with a large D.C. presence — of Blank Rome LLC, now a growing lobbying powerhouse. Since 1989, partner and employees and family members from Blank Rome have donated $358, 483 to Specter’s political kitty, dwarfing all others.

And who is one of Blank Rome’s largest lobbying clients? That would be Comcast Corp., which according to publicly available U.S. Senate disclosure records has paid some $600,000 in fees to Blank Rome since 2004 to lobby Congress on a variety of issues. The first issue that’s listed is “a la carte pricing” for cable channels — linked to the very issues that Comcast and the NFL Network are fighting over. …

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Now, the Patriots’ surprising loss last night means that Specter can’t undercut a perfect season with a Senate hearing. And so rather than give up his fight, Specter went on WIP this morning with a whole new allegation, that New England may have been spying on his beloved Eagles when they beat them in the January 2005 Super Bowl:

Were the Eagles cheated out of a Super Bowl victory? That’s the first question Sen. Arlen Specter hopes to be asking the NFL today, he stated unequivocally this morning on WIP radio (610 AM).”Absolutely, that’s going to be my lead question, Angelo,” he said to sports-talk host Angelo Cataldi.

As a former district attorney, you’d think Specter would know better than to go public with an unfounded change, based on the circumstantial evidence that if it happened in 2007 it must have happened in 2005. If you simply took Specter at face value, and assumed his passion for grilling the NFL in his official Senate capacity is the passion of a jilted fan, that alone would be an outrageous abuse of his authority.

But the truth is much worse, because Specter’s interest in this issue dovetails far too closely with those of his two largest contributors, whose employees have given his campaign more than half a million dollars to keep him in office. I believe if there’s any Senate hearing involving the NFL and Arlen Specter, it ought to be the Senate Ethics Committee, looking at a potential link to these donors.