Meanwhile, Lieberman has taken in more than $1.4 million from PACs and more than $500,000 from individuals living within an hour driving distance of the U.S. Capitol, who each contributed at least $200...

In February, two prominent Washington Republican lobbyists, Craig Fuller and H.P. Goldfield, hosted a fund-raising dinner for Lieberman that raised eyebrows after conservative political columnist Robert Novak reported on the event....

Lieberman plans to tap his Beltway sources again on Tuesday at a fund-raising event off Capitol Hill....

Lieberman raised more than $8.9 million by the end of June, drawing substantial support from the legal profession, securities and investment industry, real estate, health professionals and insurance companies.

His top corporate contributors were Lehman Brothers, United Technologies, Purdue Pharma, Aetna, UBS AG, Hartford Financial Services, Irell & Manella, Citigroup, Sempra Energy and Guardsmark, according to opensecrets.org, a non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group.

GOP for Lieberman

Republican money is starting to pour into Connecticut for Democrat Sen. Joseph Lieberman, running as an independent against multimillionaire anti-war candidate Ned Lamont, the Democrat nominee.

Private commitments to Lieberman by Republican contributors coincided with announcement of a Nov. 1 fundraiser at the Manhattan townhouse of Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York. Co-chairing the event is another New York Republican, former Sen. Alfonse D'Amato. Lieberman has pledged to remain in the Senate Democrat caucus even if elected as an independent.

Not all the movement is related to the GOP political offensive. In Connecticut, the nasty Senate race between insurgent Democratic nominee Ned Lamont against Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is now running as an independent after losing the primary, appears to have spilled over on the three critically important House races in the state.

Lieberman has been leading Lamont in the polls, thanks to Republican and independent support, and key Democrats say they are increasingly worried about the party's prospects of carrying the GOP districts held now by Reps. Johnson, Chris Shays and Rob Simmons.

The Washington Post's editorial page endorsed Sen. Joe Lieberman for re-election in his third-party Connecticut U.S. Senate race on Sunday, saying that even though he lost the Democratic primary -- and Republican leaders are now backing him -- his victory in November would still be the best thing for his party.

The Post, like Lieberman, is a strong backer of the Iraq war. Lieberman lost to an antiwar candidate, Ned Lamont....

Just as the Post editorial page was endorsing the pro-war candidate in Connecticut, the paper's front page carried a report that painted the war in the worst possible light. It opened, "The war in Iraq has become the primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers are increasing faster than the United States and its allies are eliminating the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document....

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.