But Silverstein finds plenty to ponder when it comes to SIWP’s finances. The group has little to show for $88,000 it has spent out of the $110,000 it has raised — some $40,000 of which went to unspecified “contract labor” from 2002 to 2004.

Goodman and Kazeminy were last linked doing good deeds after an apartment building Goodman owns burned last December. Each was reported to have put $50,000 into a fund for victims of the fire, only to have those gifts overshadowed by an anonymous $1 million donation.

But Kazeminy and Goodman won’t return Silverstein’s calls about SIWP, so his questions about where the group’s money went may stay unanswered unless the Internal Revenue Service investigates, finds fault and makes an enforcement action public. Silverstein concludes:

… the foundation has raised and spent about $100,000 but has done, as far as I can tell, virtually nothing to honor the victims of 9/11 or to “remind the world…that it cannot be allowed to happen again.”

So what exactly is the purpose of this IRS-approved non-profit organization?

One version of the rumor held that editors at the paper discouraged the story, but when I phoned McEnroe earlier this week to ask about that, he vehemently denied it. “That’s not true at all,” he told me. “Whoever is telling you that doesn’t have a clue. No editor has ever dissuaded us from the work Tony and I do, with respect to any subject.”

So is there a story in the works about the alleged Coleman/Kazeminy ties? McEnroe refused to say, offering only that “We’re still working on a lot of interesting information.”

I visited Neiman Marcus myself earlier this week to see if any of the salesmen in their menswear department were willing to discuss the matter, and was promptly told by a staffer that no one there could discuss client information and that the reporters who have been coming around lately were “jeopardizing our jobs.” The individual I spoke to would not comment on a report I’d heard that sales staff there had been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Ken Silverstein, the Harper’s magazine’s Washington editor who broke the Suitgate story two weeks ago, posted this update about the matter — and about Norm Coleman’s role in promulgating it by refusing to address the question initially — on Wednesday.

Imagine if you were covering the baseball playoffs and you wrote that there was massive speculation about who was going to win. It’s manifestly moronic because you’re writing about a scheduled event that is going to take place on a known timeline. You’re contributing nothing. It’s the opposite of news; any useful public information is entirely missing. But that’s the way the press bubble operates. Not only do reporters write about what they’re talking about, but they’re writing about each other. Notice the passive construction in these stories about “rampant speculation” and ask yourself, “Who’s doing the speculating?” It’s the reporters who are; most voters, being sane people, might think about it for a second but then they move on to the next thing in their day.

Yes, we’re guilty as charged. Read the whole thing.