The Washington Wire's Erik Smith trudged through the electronic filings at the Public Disclosure Commission to follow the money through 40 political committees created by Democratic political consulting firm Moxie Media.

Moxie, Smith writes, is setting up a shell game to hide the source of the money, typically unions, doing independent expenditures on behalf of Democratic candidates:

Most of those political committees don't exist except as a piece of paper in a filing cabinet. The officers are the same in every case—Lisa MacLean and Henry Underhill of Moxie Media. The main thing they seem to do is to write checks from one account to the next.

The primary purpose of the shell game appears to be to avoid disclosing to voters where the money comes from.

Smith's piece, which tracks $2.7 million in spending is a must read.

Moxie, of course, is already the subject of a scheme involving a fake conservative political committee that was set up to oust a moderate Democratic state senator, Sen. Jean Berkey, that labor didn't like.