A junior staff member (since fired) working from home placed a secret House of Representatives Ethics report on a publicly accessible internet site, and someone then shared the document with the Washington Post.

Since the great bulk of the scandalous information involved democrats, the Post was understandably appalled, and was certainly not going to be found commending the leaker, but, alas! the story was now out there, and the Post was obliged to report it.

The leaked document was a 22-page “Committee on Standards Weekly Summary Report” which contained short summaries of ethics panel investigations of the conduct of 19 congressmen and a number of staff members. It also mentioned 14 congressmen whose conduct was under review by the new Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent body empowered to initiate investigations and make recommendations to the ethics committee. The conduct of some members of congress was “under review” by both ethics bodies.

12 of 19 names were graciously released by the Post, including those of Charles Rangel (D – 15 NY), Maxine Waters (D – 35 CA), Jane Harman (D – 36 CA), Laura Richardson (D – 37 CA), John Murtha (D – 12 PA), Peter Visclosky (D- 1 IN), James Moran (D- 8 VA), Norm Dicks (D – 6 WA), Marcy Kaptur (D – 9 OH), Devin Nunes (R – 21 CA), C.W. Bill Young (R – 10 FL), and Todd Tiahrt (R – 4 KS). Rep. Sam Graves (R – 6 MO) was apparently exonerated, while the ethics committee suspended its investigation of Alan B. Mollohan (D – 1 WV) at the request of the Justice Department which is conducting its own investigation of the Congressman.

Statement by Chairman & Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct – pdf

Washington Post story

Don Surber posted some news agency’s account.

Peggy Noonan is feeling a bit depressed today contemplating 1990 unreadable pages costing $2.24 million dollars a word.

While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

Now we know, at least vaguely, what was behind the accusations against the CIA made in that June 26th letter from seven democrat House members.

After some months on the job, Leon Panetta learned of an inactive, never really implemented but potentially controversial, CIA program, initiated in the direct aftermath of 9/11, which proposed assassinating some important al Qaeda leaders. It would appear that such shenanigans were too Jack Bauer for the Bush Administration, so despite ink being spilled, findings being drafted, and probably warrior spooks training with silenced pistols off somewhere in the Virginia woods, nothing real ever came of any of this.

But good little Leon felt obliged to tattle anyway, and seven democrats thought the opportunity to play Gotcha! with the Agency was too good to miss. Ergo, the famous letter of June 26th. The Sunday Times dutifully clocked in yesterday with a deeply-troubled, chin-stroking article about the perfidy of Dick Cheney in concealing such dastardly doings.

The Wall Street Journal today actually supplies a lot more of the substance.

A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. ...

One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt “to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding,” meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.

The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the finding, and that the CIA effort wasn’t so much a program as “many ideas suggested over the course of years.” It hadn’t come close to fruition, he added. ...

(A) small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

“It was straight out of the movies,” one of the former intelligence officials said. “It was like: Let’s kill them all.”

The former official said he had been told that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn’t support such an operation. The effort appeared to die out after about six months, he said. ...

(I)n September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorized assassinations of specified targets on the spot.

One draft cable, later scrapped, authorized officers on the ground to “kill on sight” certain al Qaeda targets, according to one person who saw it. The context of the memo suggested it was designed for the most senior leaders in al Qaeda, this person said.

Eventually Mr. Bush issued the finding that authorized the capturing of several top al Qaeda leaders, and allowed officers to kill the targets if capturing proved too dangerous or risky.

Lawmakers first learned specifics of the CIA initiative the day after Mr. Panetta did, when he briefed them on it for 45 minutes.

What is really going on here is an attempt to gratify the democrat party’s bolshevik base with a little more witch hunting for Bush-Cheney war crimes, combined with the same party’s Congressional efforts to grab micromanagement control of US Intelligence operations.

Sensible people, and even Christopher Hitchens, have argued for some time that the battle with Congress over the CIA was lost long ago. It is past time to abolish the current agency, sell that campus at Langley for a football stadium, and establish a brand new unfettered agency operating covertly and free of Congressional oversight out of anonymous offices.

Anna Eshoo (Calif.), John Tierney (Mass.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), and Adam Smith (Wash.) reopened Congressional democrats’ attacks on the CIA, releasing yesterday a letter dated June 26th directly contradicting CIA Director Leon Panetta and asserting that “significant actions” were concealed from Congress and charging the CIA with misleading Congress.

The ball is now in Leon Panetta’s court, and I think his response will be interesting.

The Politico:

A letter released late Wednesday by six (actually 7 – JDZ) Democratic House members claims that Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta testified that “top CIA officials have concealed significant actions… and misled” members of Congress since 2001 — a claim the CIA is contesting.

The letter did not specify what actions were concealed, or how members of Congress were misled.

In it, the Democrats demanded that Panetta correct a statement he issued on May 15 – just after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of misleading her during the Bush years about the agency’s use of waterboarding techniques – stating that it is not the CIA’s “policy or practice to mislead Congress.”

Steve Chapman, writing in Reason, notes that Congress just proved all over again that our elected representatives never believe in letting the Bill of Rights get in the way of saving Americans from themselves.

(T)he tobacco regulation bill recently passed by Congress indicates that the spirit of liberty is even scarcer than usual in the halls of government.

What motivates advocates of stricter tobacco regulation is the unassailable assurance that they are not only completely right but that their opponents are a) wrong and b) evil. This invigorating certitude makes it possible to justify almost anything that punishes cigarette companies, even if it does no actual good—or does actual harm.

One of the main purposes of the new law is to reduce the number of smokers in the name of improving “public health.” This is a skillful use of language to confuse rather than enlighten.

An individual decision to take up cigarettes is a private event, not a public one, and its health effects are almost entirely confined to the individual making the choice. ...
Cigarette makers are forbidden to use color in ads in any publication whose readership is less than 85 percent adult. They are barred from using music in audio ads. They are not allowed to use pictures in video ads. They may not put product names on race cars, lighters, caps, or T-shirts. From all this, you almost forget the fleeting passage in the Constitution that says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

When it gets in a mood to regulate, Congress doesn’t like to trouble itself with nuisances like the First Amendment. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for Massachusetts to ban outdoor ads within 1,000 feet of any schools and playgrounds. So what does this law do? It bans outdoor ads within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds.

The Court said the Massachusetts law was intolerable because it choked off communication about a legal activity. “In some geographical areas,” complained Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “these regulations would constitute nearly a complete ban on the communication of truthful information about smokeless tobacco and cigars to adult consumers.”

But to anti-smoking zealots, that effect is not a bug but a feature. The only problem they have with imposing “nearly a complete ban” is the “nearly” part.

Read the whole thing.

George W. Bush may have been a bit of an idiot to allow liberal elements of the Intelligence Community to damage his administration with leaks of high-level national security information and the Plamegame disinformation operation, but one does have to admire the fact that Bush scrupulously followed what he (I think erroneously) believed to be the rules and never whined about what his opponents were doing to him.

The CIA had a lot better reason to do some leaking this time: to correct the historical record after Barack Obama and congressional democrats chose to use counter-terrorism interrogations as an alleged atrocity useful for indicting their Republican predecessors.

But the spooks are not playing with gentlemanly George W. Bush this time. Demonstrate that Nancy Pelosi was lying her head off, and out come the democrat senatorial thugs to cry foul.

The Politico has the story.

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Asked whether the CIA was seeking political cover by releasing the documents, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said: “Sure it is.”

George Will makes an excellent argument. Let’s hope the Supreme Court intervenes.

[T]he Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) is unconstitutional.

By enacting it, Congress did not in any meaningful sense make a law. Rather, it made executive branch officials into legislators. Congress said to the executive branch, in effect: “Here is $700 billion. You say you will use some of it to buy up banks’ ‘troubled assets.’ But if you prefer to do anything else with the money—even, say, subsidize automobile companies—well, whatever.”

FreedomWorks, a Washington-based libertarian advocacy organization, argues that EESA violates “the nondelegation doctrine.” Although the text does not spell it out, the Constitution’s logic and structure—particularly the separation of powers—imply limits on the size and kind of discretion that Congress may confer on the executive branch.

The Vesting Clause of Article I says, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in” Congress. All. Therefore, none shall be vested elsewhere. Gary Lawson of Boston University’s School of Law suggests a thought experiment:

Suppose Congress passes the Goodness and Niceness Act. Section 1 outlaws all transactions involving, no matter how tangentially, interstate commerce that do not promote goodness and niceness. Section 2 says the president shall define the statute’s meaning with regulations that define and promote goodness and niceness and specify penalties for violations.

Surely this would be incompatible with the Vesting Clause. Where would the Goodness and Niceness Act really be written? In Congress? No, in the executive branch. Lawson says that nothing in the Constitution’s enumeration of powers authorizes Congress to enact such a statute. The only power conferred on Congress by the Commerce Clause is to regulate. The Goodness and Niceness Act does not itself regulate, it just identifies a regulator.

The Constitution empowers Congress to make laws “necessary and proper” for carrying into execution federal purposes. But if gargantuan grants of discretion are necessary, are the purposes proper? Indeed, such designs should be considered presumptively improper. What, then, about the Goodness and Niceness Act, which, as Lawson says, delegates all practical decision-making power to the president? What about EESA? ...

As government grows, legislative power, and with it accountability, must shrink. The nation has had 535 national legislators for almost half a century. During that time the federal government’s business—or, more precisely, its busy-ness—has probably grown at least twenty-fold. Vast grants of discretion to the executive branch by Congress, such as EESA, may be necessary—if America is going to have constant governmental hyperkinesis. If Washington is going to do the sort of things that EESA enables—erasing the distinction between public and private sectors; licensing uncircumscribed executive branch conscription of, and experimentation with, the nation’s resources.

Since the New Deal era, few laws have been invalidated on the ground that they improperly delegated legislative powers. And Chief Justice John Marshall did say that the “precise boundary” of the power to “make” or the power to “execute” the law “is a subject of delicate and difficult inquiry.” Still, surely sometimes the judiciary must adjudicate such boundary disputes.

The Supreme Court has said: “That Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the president is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution.” And the court has said that properly delegated discretion must come with “an intelligible principle” and must “clearly delineate” a policy that limits the discretion. EESA flunks that test.

A security guard at the Fairfield home of AIG Financial Products executive Douglas Poling reasoning with demonstrators, who are being egged on by the press

Elections have consequences. One conspicuous consequence of the last election is angry mobs at the front doors of suburban Connecticut homes. As if they were living in some Third World country, American executives in Fairfield County now need to protect their families with bodyguards.

AIG employees and their families became victims of mass hatred and were placed in real physical danger by deliberate policy crafted at the highest levels of the Government of the United States.

The Obama Administration and the corrupt democrat congress have cynically chosen to advance their socialist agenda by the left’s traditional tactic of divisive agitation.

Paul Kengor, at American Thinker, puts the AIG show trial into perspective.

“We must teach our children to hate,” Vladimir Lenin instructed his education commissars. The Bolshevik godfather declared that hatred was not only “the basis of communism” but “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Class envy has been a defining staple of the left for centuries, from the frenzied mobs leaping around the French guillotines to the Soviets to, well, the new masses circling AIG executives today. ...

Historically, this behavior is both foreign and antithetical to the American experience. Unfortunately, modern Americans don’t understand their founding and the nation’s core principles—our educational system doesn’t teach those things. Thus, they are now voting, and behaving, in kind. And we are now witnessing our own homegrown socialist movement in action, inspired by hate.

Some Americans, whipped into poisonous hatred by their elected representatives, have literally called for death for AIG executives, and one U.S. senator openly requested that these businesspeople commit suicide.

Liberals in Congress, from Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Chris Dodd, plus a wild gaggle of unleashed central planners in the House, have conducted a show trial of AIG executives, with the larger purpose of placing American free enterprise in the dock. ...

As members of Congress target the likes of AIG chief executive Edward Liddy, mobs target the homes of AIG employees in Connecticut. ...

AIG workers are being demonized, noted the Times; they are hiring bodyguards. And it isn’t only AIG. Merrill Lynch is dealing with similar assaults.

And that’s just the start. It’s only a matter of public exposure until another group of private-sector “reptiles”—Lenin’s word—is identified for the proletariat. Congress and the White House will be happy to call out the next group of kulaks. ...

[T]he mob wants someone’s head on a platter—now. Time to eat the rich. Perhaps our dear leader, President Obama, can go to Connecticut to play the role of healer, addressing the faithful, calming their fears, a political sermon on the mount. Blessed would be the peacemaker.

But not yet—for now, this hate is just too excellent, too perfect for advancing the agenda of the leftist ideologues and envy-mongers running the republic.

Who’s to blame? The American people are to blame. I’m tired of the populist nonsense from talk-radio on how Americans “deserve better than this.” They do? Why? They voted for this. Obama is being Obama. Pelosi is being Pelosi. Schumer is being Schumer. The American people cast the ballots.

You reap what you sow. Enjoy the hate, America. You elected it.

Read the whole thing.

Charles Krauthammer puts into perspective the scale of the AIG bonuses which have occasioned such histrionics in Washington. Targeting executives as overpaid is a handy way of diverting the public’s attention from the really significant looting going on at the hands of Congress itself.

A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and $165 million.

That’s $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. ...

[A] contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress summarily cancels contracts?

Even worse are the clever schemes now being cooked up in Congress to retrieve the money by means of some retroactive confiscatory tax. The common law is pretty clear about the impermissibility of ex post facto legislation and bills of attainder. They also happen to be specifically prohibited by the Constitution. We’re going to overturn that for $165 million?

Nor has the president behaved much better. He too has been out there trying to lead the mob. ...

It is time for the president to state the obvious: This recession is not caused by excessive executive compensation in government-controlled companies. The economy has been sinking because of a lack of credit, stemming from a general lack of confidence, stemming from the lack of a plan to detoxify the major lending institutions, mainly the banks, which, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, is where the money used to be.

Michael Graham, at the Boston Herald, observes that the 4th District of Massachusetts’ representative in the House has a lot more to do with the current financial mess than AIG does.

The only thing more painful than watching 180 billion tax dollars swirl down the AIG drainpipe is listening to Barney Frank bloviate about it.

I don’t know The World’s Most Expensive Legislator personally, but I hear he’s quite a cut-up at cocktail parties. However, as legislator and politician, he is an unmitigated disaster. Frank combines the economic success of AIG, the business ethics of Enron and the personal accountability of Ruth Madoff.

Frank began his career opposing Reaganomics, an opposition that stubbornly resisted 25 years of nearly constant economic growth. In the 1990s, Frank sat on the Banking Committee regulating Fannie Mae, even as his then-partner, Herb Moses, worked as a Fannie exec.

Is it a coincidence that Frank has been a die-hard advocate for expanding Freddie/Fannie at any cost?

Since at least 2002, Frank fought an ever-growing drumbeat of calls to slow down the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac train wreck.

In 2003, he famously said that Freddie and Fannie were “not in a crisis,” that they were “fundamentally sound financially.” He repeated that expert testimony in 2005, all the while rejecting the argument that the taxpayers were responsible for Freddie and Fannie’s bills.

And in 2007, he actually proposed raising the caps on Fannie/Freddie’s portfolios – exposing taxpayers to even more risk – and then dumping the new money into (drum roll, please) even more subprime mortgages.

Less than a year later, the Fannie/subprime/derivatives catastrophe was upon us. And the cheerleader for all three? Our Barney.

Which is why it so astonishes that anyone takes him seriously as the self-declared watchdog of Wall Street. Please, Barney, just shut up.

And the spending just keeps going. Having just passed the $787 billion so-called Stimulus Package, democrat commissars on Capitol Hill are next turning their attention to an Omnibus Spending Bill, which as Newsmax reports, will contain more earmarks than ever before. The Saturnalia of Spending continues.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.

“We need earmark reform,” Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. “And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”

President Barack Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that’s riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.

The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.

Byron York reminds readers of Congressional democrats posing as deficit hawks back when George W. Bush was in the White House. Now that they have control of Congress and the White House they are using the recession as a pretext for a budgetary blowout calculated to make the Great Society look like a Presbyterian picnic. Americans will be paying for Obama’s first month in office for a generation.

Back in 2006, when Democrats were hoping to win control of the House and Senate, party leaders worked themselves into a righteous outrage over the issue of out-of-control federal spending. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the Republican budget “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” because it increased the amount of U.S. debt held by foreign countries. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of going on “an unprecedented and dangerous borrowing spree” and declared GOP leadership “the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of our country … no other president or Congress even comes close.”

You won’t find too many defenders of George W. Bush’s record on spending these days, even among Republicans. But a check of historical tables compiled by the Office of Management and Budget shows that the spending that so distressed Pelosi and Reid seems downright modest today. After beginning with a Clinton-era surplus of $128 billion in fiscal year 2001, the Bush administration racked up deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $378 billion in 2003, $413 billion in 2004, $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006, $162 billion in 2007, and $410 billion in 2008.

The current administration would kill to have such small numbers. President Barack Obama is unveiling his budget this week, and, in addition to the inherited Bush deficit, he’s adding his own spending at an astonishing pace, projecting annual deficits well beyond $1 trillion in the near future, and, in the rosiest possible scenario, a $533 billion deficit in 2013, the last year of Obama’s first term.

And what about the national debt? It increased from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in the Bush years, leading to dramatically higher interest costs. “We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” Pelosi said in 2007. “That’s fiscal irresponsibility.”

Now, under Obama, the national debt — and the interest payments — will increase at a far faster rate than during the Bush years.

“We thought the Bush deficits were big at the time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told me this week as he prepared to attend Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit. “But this is going to make the previous administration look like rank amateurs. We could be adding multiple trillions to the national debt in the first year.”

At some point last week, the sheer velocity of Obama’s spending proposals began to overwhelm even experienced Washington hands. In the span of four days, we saw the signing of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the rollout of a $275 billion housing proposal, discussion of Congress’s remaining appropriations bills (about $400 billion) and word of a vaguely-defined financial stabilization plan that could ultimately cost $2 trillion. When representatives of GM and Chrysler said they might need $21 billion more to survive, it seemed like small beer.

The Capitol Hill offices of many congressmen and senators don’t even have a copy! If you need top get hold of a copy, Paul Bedard advises, ask a lobbyist.

We’re receiving E-mails from Capitol Hill staffers expressing frustration that they can’t get a copy of the stimulus bill agreed to last night at a price of $789 billion. What’s more, staffers are complaining about who does have a copy: K Street lobbyists. E-mails one key Democratic staffer: “K Street has the bill, or chunks of it, already, and the congressional offices don’t.

Moreover, the press is having problems reporting because a number of versions of the bill are floating around out there.

[T]he Hill is getting calls from the press (because it’s leaking out) asking us to confirm or talk about what we know—but we can’t do that because we haven’t seen the bill. Anyway, peeps up here are sort of a combo of confused and like, ‘Is this really happening?’” Reporters pressing for details, meanwhile, are getting different numbers from different offices, especially when seeking the details of specific programs.

Worse, there seem to be several different versions of what was agreed upon, with some officials circulating older versions of the package that seems to still be developing.

Isn’t it wonderful having democrats in charge of the federal purse? If you went down to the port, shanghai’d 525 drunken sailors and put them in charge of legislation, it would not be much different.

Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before. – Rahm Emanuel

The Wall Street Journal quotes the democrat White House Chief of Staff’s dictum in explaining what the democrat’s so-called stimulus package is all about.

Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic “stimulus,” but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm’s point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

Read the whole thing. You and your children and your grandchildren will be paying for it.

Rasmussen Reports finds Congress breaking new ground in voter unpopularity.

If they could vote to keep or replace the entire Congress, 59% of voters would like to throw them all out and start over again. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 17% would vote to keep the current legislators in office.

The framers missed the boat when they overlooked establishing a suitable procedure.

John Steele Gordon identifies the guilty parties behind the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac collapse.

At the heart of the problem is Congress and its deeply corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress was equally at the heart of the savings and loan disaster 20 years ago and, obviously, learned nothing from it. (For a history of what led to the savings and loan collapse, see here.)

Fannie and Freddie, two of the largest publicly traded financial institutions on earth, are headquartered in Washington, D.C., where the next-largest non-governmental financial institution is probably a local credit union. Big financial companies are headquartered in New York and other cities where capitalism is practiced. That should tell you a lot about Freddie and Fannie: they were political to their fingertips.

Being “government sponsored entities,” they were able to borrow at lower interest rates than other profit-seeking companies, had less regulation, had lower capital requirements, and had an “implied” guarantee on their huge debts. This was supposed to translate into more money available for mortgages, but was used instead to roll up big profits and, not so incidentally, big bonuses for their top management — which came not from the financial world but from the political one.

Franklin Raines, Fannie C.E.O. from 1999 to 2004, had been budget director in the Clinton White House. He cooked the books at Fannie to increase his compensation (more than $50 million). Jamie Gorelick, vice C.E.O., was number two at the Clinton Justice Department before going to Fannie Mae. She made $26 million. Jim Johnson, a perennial Washington big-foot, was chairman from 1991 to 1998. He too, according to an official government report, cooked the books to increase his compensation and failed to publicly reveal how much he received.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been giving chapter and verse for years on why this was a disaster waiting to happen (Pulitzer Prize judges, please note). The Bush administration tried way back in 2003 to change the system. It got nowhere. Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, frequently noted the danger of Fannie and Freddie’s weak capitalization. He was ignored. Congressman Mike Oxley, then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill in 2005 to correct the situation. Lobbyists from Fannie and Freddie succeeded in gutting it to the point that Rep. Oxley pulled the bill.

Why were Fannie and Freddie so successful at maintaining the status quo? Check it out.

Senator Chris Dodd — formerly ranking member and now chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, with oversight over Freddie and Fannie — recently said on Bloomberg Television: “I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years.”

Excuse me? Just where the hell were you, Senator? Oh, right. You were standing in line at the bank in order to deposit the political contributions Fannie and Freddie were lavishing upon you. At least they got their money’s worth — until the party ended and the American people got the bill.

Members of Congress — aided and abetted by their many waterbearers in the media — wonder why their collective approval rating is about on par with colon cancer’s. The reason is simple enough: Congress is the sick man of Washington; a textbook example of the truism that institutions tend to evolve in ways that benefit their elites, at the expense of the people they were created to serve.

Gasoline is $4+ a gallon. It takes over $70 to fill-up my car, and around $10 more to put some gas in the plastic jerrican for the lawnmower.

Congressional Republicans want to pass a bill to do something about this by freeing up more domestic production. They have the votes, but democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to allow a vote, has adjourned the House of Representatives for a five-week vacation, and turned the lights off in the Capitol in an effort to evict Republicans who have stayed on the floor in protest.

As Patrick Ruffin notes, a watershed has occurred in which Republicans are succeeding in mobilizing a grassroots protest effort using the Internet.

The prime tool for organizing currently is Twitter free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates, known as “tweets,” text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Sign the petition.

1:38 Call Congress Back video

“F for Failure” coming to a town near you.

1:17 video

Lord knows, I don’t often agree with ultra-left blogger Glenn Greenwald about anything, but what do you know? Even the most unlikely of occurrences are possible in this best of all possible worlds.

Here’s Glenn responding to the recent Rasmussen Poll finding national approval of Congress to have fallen to an all-time low of 9% by concluding the democrat House majority is safe in perpetuity and it’s time for moonbats to turn on the democrat party leadership and start defeating any democrat congressmen discernibly to the right of Leon Trotsky.

That’ll learn ‘em. And those democrat leaders will then start obediently toeing the Party Line (and I don’t mean the democrat party line).

Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a “D” after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive—and much that is negative—many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.

As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and—given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America—it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.

The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control—specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?

As long as they know that progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do, then it will only be rational for congressional Democrats to ignore progressives and move as far to the right as they can. With the blind, unconditional support of Democrats securely in their back pocket, Democratic leaders will quite rationally conclude that the optimal way to increase their own power, to transform more Republican districts into Blue Dog Democratic seats, and thereby make themselves more secure in their leadership positions, is to move their caucus to the right. Because the principal concern of Democratic leaders is to maintain and increase their own power, they will always do what they perceive is most effective in achieving that goal, which right now means moving their caucus to the right to protect their Blue Dogs and elect new ones.

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control—and the change in direction—that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, “Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House.” The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus—the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats—the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

The linchpin for that destructive strategy is uncritical progressive support for congressional Democrats. That is what ensures that Democratic leaders will continue to pursue a rightward-moving strategy as the key to consolidating their own power. Right now, when it comes time to decide whether to capitulate to the demands of the right, Beltway Democrats think: “If we capitulate, that is one less issue the GOP can use to harm our Blue Dogs.” And they have no countervailing consideration to weigh against that, because they perceive—accurately—that there is no cost to capitulating, only benefits from doing so, because progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do. That is the strategic calculus that must change if the behavior of Democrats in Congress is to change.

Democratic leaders must learn that they cannot increase their majority in Congress by trampling on the political values of their own base.

Let’s hope the entire nutroots base, responds to Glenn in the manner of Molly Bloom:

I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Rasmussen reports:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

t’s just a shame that there is no Republican leadership whatsoever out there to offer a meaningful alternative.

Don Surber observes Congress cannot run a restaurant, but it still wants to run America’s $2 trillion-a-year health care industry.

Via Bird Dog.

Investors Business Daily finds a key part of the problem is right here at home.

As President Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask the House of Saud to open the oil spigots a bit wider, Congress showed once again how clueless it is when it comes to energy policy.

Underscoring its failure to grasp the nature of our current problems, the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday refused to end its moratorium on oil shale development in Colorado.

“If we are really serious about reducing pain at the pump,” Colorado’s senior senator, Republican Wayne Allard, said, “this is a vote that would make a difference in people’s lives.” He’s right.

But the shale proposal went down to defeat with Allard and 13 other Republican members in favor and 15 Democrats opposed. Once again, Democrats were on the wrong side, opting to keep oil in the ground and punish you with higher prices as a result.

This was no minor thing. Estimates put the amount of oil locked in shale in both Canada and the U.S. at more than 1 trillion barrels. Pulling out even a tenth of that would quadruple our current reserves.

This is the same Congress that refuses to allow drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which holds up to 20 billion barrels of crude, or offshore, where another 30 billion await.

Meanwhile, Brazil — which recently made a major oil discovery almost in sight of Rio’s beaches — announced that it has leased 80% of the world’s deep-sea offshore oil rigs. In other words, Brazil unlike the U.S., isn’t dithering as prices soar. It’s drilling. ...

The U.S. uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day. But only 8 million come from our own sources. That leaves a 13-million-barrel-a-day deficit that, at $126 a barrel, will cost us $600 billion to plug this year. That’s more than two-thirds of our total trade deficit.

Congress could reduce much of our oil shortfall by drilling for more on our own territory. This would lower prices and increase security. Yet, Congress seems dead set on doing the opposite.

With its failure to tap the vast supplies in ANWR and offshore, its passage of costly global-warming legislation and now its refusal to exploit our massive resources of oil shale, Congress has set us on a path to less energy, higher prices and weakened national security.

AP reports that the Justice Department has reminded Nancy Pelosi that the Executive Branch of the US Government has the ability to decline to enforce Congressional edicts which overstep the bounds of the separation of powers.

The operations of government require that members of the Executive Branch have the ability to discuss policy decision frankly, freely, and in privacy. Cynical Congressional fishing expeditions seeking material for political scandal-mongering over legitimate Executive Branch decisions (like the hiring or firing of US attorneys) ought to be refused cooperation.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday rejected referring the House’s contempt citations against two of President Bush’s top aides to a federal grand jury. Mukasey says they committed no crime.

Mukasey said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers were right in refusing to provide Congress White House documents or testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

“The department will not bring the congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers,” Mukasey wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The House voted two weeks ago to cite Bolten and Mukasey for contempt of Congress and seek a grand jury investigation. Most Republicans boycotted the vote.

Pelosi requested the grand jury investigation on Thursday and gave Mukasey a week to reply. She said the House would file a civil suit seeking seeking enforcment of the contempt citations if federal prosecutors declined to seek misdemeanor charges against Bolten and Miers.

Mukassey took only a day to get back to her. But he had earlier joined his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, in telling lawmakers they would refuse to refer any contempt citations to prosecutors because Bolten and Miers were acting at Bush’s instruction.

“It’s an ill wind that blows no good.”

Democratic control of Congress, at least, has evidently upgraded the cafeteria service California-style, with an emphasis on locally-grown, fresh ingredients, eclectic cuisine, and… fresh sushi!

But at least one Republican is trying to make a little political hay over the change in cuisine.

NBC:

The presidential race is not the only place where change is an issue.

Members of Congress returning to the Capitol this week are being confronted by transformational happenings that have shaken the building to its foundations: Democrats have hired a new company to run cafeteria services. Naturally, this has caused an outbreak of partisan skirmishing.

“I like real food,” proclaimed Republican leader John Boehner when asked about the new menu by a producer for another cable news outfit. “Food that I can pronounce the name of.”

Boehner is now forced to wrap his lips around such phrases as “broccoli rabe and shaved persimmon,” “balsamic glazed butternut squash,” and “calico pinto beans”...all on this afternoon’s menu, along with the downright patriotic “American Regional Yankee Pot Roast,” which, even Boehner would have to admit, kind of rolls right off the tongue. On Fridays, there is a real sushi bar tended by a bona fide Japanese sushi chef. Gone are such grade-school cafeteria specialties as Salisbury steak and fried chicken, slathered in gravy and served with a side of chips. Debate rages among regulars about the merits of the new offerings. One consensus downside: the prices have gone upscale right along with the fare.

The company that Nancy Pelosi and her people have hired has a mandate to “Go Green,” complete with a mission statement posted outside the cafeteria on an eco-friendly LCD screen and a requirement to buy carbon offsets. Boehner doesn’t think much of that either.

“It reminds me of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, when we had indulgences,” says Boehner of the offsets.

What are the democrats doing with their Congressional majority? Are they modifying the tax system to eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax trap which is soon going to be nailing middle-class Americans? No. Are they taking steps to prevent the impending bankruptcy of Social Security? No. Are they considering making individual health insurance policies tax deductable? No.

They’re too busy arguing about impeaching Dick Cheney and deciding on whether Rep. Barney Frank’s new Employment Non-Discrimination Act ought to include not only the homosexual but also the transgendered.

America doubtless owes Armenia a debt of gratitude for Cher, but it is otherwise difficult to understand why, at this particular time, when American relations with her Turkish ally are jeopardized by both Islamic fundamentalism and Kurdish nationalism, the House of Representatives finds it necessary to try to pass a resolution recognizing the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

Alec Mouhibian muses on all this, from an Armenian perspective, in the American Spectator:

I never thought the day would come. But here it is! Being an Armenian—like playing women’s basketball at Rutgers, losing money on Enron, and contracting AIDS in Africa before it—is now relevant and topical. Hell, yes. I feel so damn temporarily important, and I wouldn’t trade it for having sold steroids to sluggers or resisted arrest in Los Angeles or, for that matter, having rented storefront from Barney Frank. Bask, fellow Armenians! Bask. Ours is the world and all that’s in it—and, which is more, we’ll have a hairy son.

Lest you’ve been comatose or going to history class at Princeton, the source of the spotlight is Congress’s resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915 as “genocide.” Turkey still insists it was merely a transportation malfunction, in which 1.5 million Armenians mysteriously vanished as piles of human carcasses appeared in their place.

Observers may find the issue inherently dull at first sight. Be patient. You don’t want to miss the massive collateral amusement—whether it’s Islamic Turkey taking postmodern relativism to its logical conclusion, competitors in the victim business afraid of losing market-share, arch unilateralists waxing worrisome over the self-esteem of a pathetically dependent ally, or truth-trumpeting moralists suddenly blowing dry in the name of diplomacy. Progressives have a meta-political reason to like the Armenian issue: it always results in an equal distribution of hypocrisy.

Add a few drops of Bush blood and you get a media frenzy that far outdoes anything surrounding the issue in its cyclical past. Jon Stewart gave it two segments on the Daily Show.

Henry Waxman

Today’s attempt by the left (Atrios and TPM to whip up something to cry about concerns Rep. Darrell Issa noting the impracticality of Congressional democrats trying to take over the functions of the Executive Branch, by pointing out that democrat Inquisitor Henry Waxman would require Blackwater’s protection in Iraq to pursue his witchhunt against Blackwater.

Issa’s comment:

If Henry Waxman today wants to go to Iraq and do an investigation, Blackwater will be his support team. His protection team. Do you think he really wants to investigate directly?

0:41 video

The Zogby Poll finds George W. Bush is a trifle unpopular with a mere approval rating of 29%, but Congress is doing so much worse at 11% that one almost expects to see angry peasants with torches and pitchforks attacking the Capitol.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably has a higher public approval rating in the United States than the Reid/Pelosi Congress.

Gun Owners of America reports that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) have introduced a “Veterans Disarmament Bill,” which would expand the tactics used by the 1993 Brady Bill to disqualify Americans from gun ownership.

As many as a quarter to a third of returning Iraq veterans could be prohibited from owning firearms—based solely on a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder; Your ailing grandfather could have his entire gun collection seized, based only on a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s (and there goes the family inheritance); Your kid could be permanently banned from owning a gun, based on a diagnosis under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

J.R. Dunn is not so pessimistic about next year.

So we’ve got a candidate who is among the most radical ever to stand for the presidency. One who was furthermore at the very center of the most corrupt administration in modern history. Who has a lengthy trail of dubious (to put it mildly) deals and arrangements behind her. Whose record as a senator is conspicuous for lack of any serious accomplishment. Who is, above all, one of the most unappealing personalities to run for president in this or any other era.

According to reputable polling, 52% of the voters have gone on record to declare that they will never, under any circumstances, cast their vote for Hillary Clinton. The last time I looked, 48% was a losing number in the presidential sweepstakes.

You’d think that, under those conditions, the GOP would be aching to come to grips with Hillary. But you’d be wrong. According to the conservative commentariat, the election is over, a year and more ahead of time, and Hillary has it in the bag.

It’s a similar case with Congress. The Democrats, in control of both the House and the Senate, have astonished the world by getting even less done than the recent GOP Congress. None of their electoral promises have been kept. (Apart from raising the minimum wage, which took eight months, and an “ethics” bill distinguished only by the fact that it’s emptier than most such exercises – I’m surprised they didn’t add an earmark or two before they passed it.) Their greatest effort was put into trying to pass – not once, but twice – the immigrant amnesty act, possibly the most actively detested bill of the new century. The boast of the new Congress, run by some of the most ghastly personalities on the national stage (Pelosi, Murtha, Schumer, and Reid) is that they’ve done their best to undermine the Iraq war effort – not, historically, a stance to gain much in the way of a public following. (Trust me on that; I’ve checked.)

The numbers concur here as well. Confidence in the Congress bottomed out at14%, one the worst levels (the worst, did I hear someone say?) on record. Fool all the people all the time? This crew can scarcely fool themselves.

But we get the same response from conservative pundits – the Congress is lost. Forget about 2008; head for high ground, the deluge is coming. ...

Read the whole thing.

There have been several articles and editorials over the last few days referring to a recent deficit in the administration’s Counter-Terrorism surveillance program, and ongoiing Congressional attempts to remedy the problem.

Wall Street Journal 7/30 editorial

New York Times article 8/1

Yesterday (8/1), Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, in Newsweek, identified the source of the problem, and exposed the behind-the-scenes Congressional bickering going on right now.

A secret ruling by a federal judge has restricted the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas and prompted the Bush administration’s current push for “emergency” legislation to expand its wiretapping powers, according to a leading congressman and a legal source who has been briefed on the matter.

The order by a judge on the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court has never been publicly acknowledged by administration officials—and the details of it (including the identity of the judge who wrote it) remain highly classified. But the judge, in an order several months ago, apparently concluded that the administration had overstepped its legal authorities in conducting warrantless eavesdropping even under the scaled-back surveillance program that the White House first agreed to permit the FISA court to review earlier this year, said one lawyer who has been briefed on the order but who asked not to be publicly identified because of its sensitivity.

The first public reference to the order came obliquely this week from House Minority Leader John Boehner—one of a number of senior Republicans who have been leading the White House-backed campaign to persuade Congress to rush through an expanded eavesdropping measure before it leaves for August recess at the end of this week.

He and other GOP leaders have said that the country will be at a greater risk of a terrorist attack if Congress doesn’t act immediately—and they have accused Democrats of “playing politics” by balking at some of the provisions the administration is seeking.

“There’s been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States,” Boehner said on an interview with Fox News anchor Neal Cavuto.

“This means that our intelligence agencies are missing a wide swath of potential information that could help protect the American people,” Boehner added. “The Democrats have known about this for months.”

Boehner’s description of the scope of the ruling appears to focus on one key feature of the surveillance program—the large-scale tapping without warrants of telecommunications “switches” located in the United States; they are used to rout international calls even when both parties are overseas. But there are indications the ruling has in some instances interfered with the National Security Agency’s ability to intercept phone calls where one of the parties is in the United States, as well. ...

..last January, partly in a bid to quell criticism from Democrats and civil liberties groups, the administration agreed to submit the entire surveillance program to the FISA court for review. Much about the process has never been explained publicly. But at some point after the new program began, one of the FISA judges—who, by rotation, was assigned to review the program for periodic updates—concluded that some aspects of the warrantless eavesdropping program exceeded the NSA’s authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the basic 1978 law that governs eavesdropping of espionage and terrorist suspects, said the lawyer who had been briefed on the ruling. The judge refused to reauthorize the complete program in the way it had been previously approved by at least one earlier FISA judge, the lawyer said, adding that the secret decision was a “big deal” for the administration.

It was only after that ruling that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell this spring began urging Congress to pass an emergency “fix” that would clarify and specifically grant the NSA authority to tap switches based in the United States without review by the FISA court. The administration effort has accelerated in recent weeks—and won the support of key Democratic leaders—amid warnings from the intelligence community that the country is facing greater risk of a new terrorist attack due in large part to the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Congressional aides (who asked not to be identified talking about ongoing negotiations) said today that Democratic and Republican leaders of the intelligence committees met until late Tuesday night trying to reach an agreement on a short-term measure that would grant some of the enhanced authority—including the ability to tap telecommunications switches without warrants—that the administration is seeking. One stumbling block that has emerged: the administration’s insistence that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales be given an expanded role to oversee the program—a particularly controversial move at the moment, given new allegations that the embattled attorney general has misled Congress about legal disputes over the surveillance program. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said today in a statement that he has “become convinced that we must take some immediate but interim step” to expand surveillance, but that the administration proposal to grant Gonzales greater authority “is simply unacceptable.”

In a conference call with reporters today, Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lashed out at Democrats because they are resisting language in the administration proposal that would give Gonzales a new oversight role over the program. “The Democrats don’t trust anybody in the administration,” Bond said when asked about the objections to expanding Gonzales’s role. “They didn’t like Scooter Libby, they don’t like Karl Rove and most of all they don’t like President Bush. I don’t care who they like. We need to keep our country safe.”

But Bond declined to respond when asked if it was a federal judge who created the alleged intelligence “gap” in the first place. “I can’t comment on why this has occurred,” Bond said, after checking with an aide about whether he could respond to a question about a ruling by a FISA judge. “But the director of national intelligence [McConnell] has said we are significantly burdened in capturing foreign communications. It is a significant new burden.”

If the “Big Surprise” al Qaeda is promising comes to pass, one really would not want to be in the shoes of the judge responsible for throwing a monkey wrench into the American Intelligence Community’s efforts to capture the enemy’s communications, nor those of one of the Congressional democrats later found to have been playing political games while the threat drew near.

Rich Lowry quips in a New York Post editorial gleefully observing Congressional democrats doing a fine job of discrediting themselves in the eyes of the public by a futile series of shamelessly partisan “investigations.” The leftwing nutroots are enjoying every minute of it, though.

(But) That’s not stopping congressional Democrats.

When not trying to force a pullout from Iraq, their main effort has been chasing Bush-administration scandals that loom large only in their fevered imaginations. Democrats consider this “change,” but it is really a toxic repeat of the Republican investigative onslaught against Bill Clinton in the 1990s and of the Democratic one against Ronald Reagan in the 1980s – in other words, business as usual when Congress confronts a hated presidential adversary.

The Democrats’ latest tactic is to give an implicit choice to Bush officials: They can either come to Capitol Hill to testify so Democrats can try to build a perjury case against them, or they can refuse – in which case Democrats will cite them for criminal contempt of Congress. Either path leads inexorably to Democratic calls for a special counsel. Democrats love the prospect of another couple of Patrick Fitzgeralds, drumming Bush officials out of public life with onerous legal bills for their trouble.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been a particular target, and why not? He’s so incapable of defending himself that, for grandstanding Democrats, cuffing him around is risk-free fun, like cruel kids pulling the wings off insects. ...

The new perjury accusation against him is based on testimony this past week in which he often was kept from saying two sentences in a row without being interrupted and called a liar. ...

Between the interruptions, the difficulty of discussing classified activities in public and Gonzales’ expository shortcomings, it all got garbled, but a well-intentioned person could understand his point. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democrats preferred to pretend that they had witnessed a flagrantly perjurious performance.

Gonzales is being tormented on another front, too – the firings of U.S. attorneys. Democrats can’t explain how the administration’s firing of U.S. attorneys who serve at its pleasure could be criminal, but apparently want to spend the rest of the Bush presidency hunting for evidence of this elusive wrongdoing. ...

This is a grave political miscalculation. Absent a Watergate-style smoking gun, or at least some plausible whiff of gunpowder, voters aren’t interested in scandal monomania. The only political effect of the investigative onslaught is to please the bloodthirsty Democratic “netroots” who are desperate for excuses to try to impeach Bush, while convincing voters that Washington is a disgusting cockpit of partisan rancor oblivious to their true concerns. There is a reason President Bush can be at 28 percent approval and still double Congress’ rating in some polls.

But Democrats can’t help themselves. They’ve held more than 600 oversight hearings so far, and these hearings are close to their only accomplishment. The Democratic majority brings to mind a paraphrase of the old saw about teaching: Those who can, legislate. Those who can’t, investigate.

Read the whole thing.

George W. Bush has a low approval rating, the latest Zogby Poll reports:

66 percent said Bush had done only a fair or poor job as president, with 34 percent ranking his performance as excellent or good.

But Congressional approval ratings have cratered, setting an all-time record low:

83 percent said Congress was doing a fair or poor job, just 14 percent rated it excellent or good.

Alexander M. Haig Jr. pulls no punches in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Donald Rumsfeld’s departure and the decision to pursue counterinsurgency in Iraq required fresh commanders. But the administration overlooked a new source of military talent in, of all places, the U.S. Senate. The Senate Majority Leader, for example, asserts that the war is lost and that Gen. Petraeus is detached from reality in Baghdad. He and other equally qualified lay military experts are busily setting dates certain for troop withdrawal, oblivious of the consequences. Some have questioned the constitutionality of such Congressional resolutions. I question their wisdom. We need a debate on how to win, not how to lose. That would be a good topic for the presidential candidates. It’s certainly not what they’re talking about now.

John Quincy Adams warned us against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” and some argue that the war on terror is just such a case. I disagree. On 9/11, the monster found us asleep at home and will continue to find us inadequately prepared unless we muster more strength and more wisdom. Unless we break with illusionary democracy mongering, inept handling of our military resources and self-defeating domestic political debates, we are in danger of becoming our own worst enemy.

And when domestic defeatism forces US withdrawal, and the religious fanatics spill oceans of innocent blood, the leftwing punditocracy will explain it is all the fault of George W. Bush for disturbing the peaceful idyll of Baathist dictatorship.

They’re very good at partisanship, but they’re doing so much of it these days that they are in danger of the public seeing through the whole thing.

AP:

The White House on Thursday pushed back against congressional investigations of the Bush administration and said lawmakers should spend more time passing bills to solve domestic problems.

In a constitutional showdown with Congress, the administration claimed executive privilege and rejected demands for White House documents about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

The House and Senate Judiciary committees have set a deadline of 10 a.m. next Monday for the White House to explain its basis for the claim.

The administration has not said when or if it will respond. Spokesman Scott Stanzel said Thursday the White House has received a many requests for information since Democrats took control of Congress in January and has turned over 200,000 pages of documents.

“They’ve launched over 300 investigations, had over 350 requests for documents and interviews and they have had over 600 oversight hearings in just about 100 days,” Stanzel said.

Democrats were dubious of the figures but did not offer their own.

Today’s Congress evidently provoked John Derbyshire to update John Betjeman’s Slough. The Corner’s link simply never produced anything for me. The lovely and talented Dr. Sanity, however, both linked and quoted it. My thanks to her.

Come, friendly bombs, fall on D.C.!
It’s not fit for humanity.
There’s nothing there but villainy.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to kingdom come
Those pillared halls of tedium—
Hired fools, hired crooks, hired liars, hired scum,
Hired words, hired breath.

Mess up this mess they call a town—
A seat for twenty million down
And rights to the incumbent’s crown
For twenty years.

...
And smash his desk of polished oak
(Paid for by honest working folk
Toiling ‘neath taxation’s yoke)
And make him yell.

Jules Crittenden takes the occasion of the failure of the Gonzalez No Confidence vote, Harry Reid’s 19% Favorable Rating, and the democrat Congress’s 27% Approval Rating (a 10 Year Low) to remind Americans that it is actually possible to be doing worse than George W. Bush.

Mark Tapscott says the unpopularity of both Republicans and democrats proves it’s time for a new Party.

Unidentified “US officials” leak to Britain’s Guardian.

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

“Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it’s a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces,” a senior US official in Baghdad warned. “They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]. ...

US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban’s campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.

Tehran’s strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.

The latest Gallup Poll finds

Congress Approval Down to 29%; Bush Approval Steady at 33%

Bill Kristol, in Time, thinks Congressional democrats are making a big political mistake by failing to control their insatiable appetite for American defeat.

When last seen before election day 2006, the Democratic Party seemed the very soul of moderation. And they stayed the course for the next two months…

But in the past few weeks, the Democrats have gone wild. The mushy domestic agenda is quickly disappearing beneath a tide of antiwar agitation in Congress. Joe Biden is leading the way, seeking to have as one of the first acts of the new Democratic Senate a nonbinding resolution condemning a troop increase in Iraq. Others want action, not just words. On the presidential side of the party, Hillary Clinton has gone at breakneck speed from being a mild critic of the war to calling for a legislated troop cap and threatening to cut off funds for the Iraqi army. Obama and John Edwards are cheerfully one-upping her by demanding a firm schedule for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. What happened?

In part, an accelerated presidential race, with its own dynamic. In part, the fact of congressional majority status, which has its own dynamic too. But in largest part, Bush. He crossed up the Democrats. They expected him to stay the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey course in Iraq. Or, they thought, he might accede to the Iraq Study Group, admit errors and lead us to gradual defeat. Neither would have required Democrats to do anything much except lament the lamentable situation into which Bush had got us. Instead, Bush replaced Rumsfeld, rejected the Iraq Study Group’s slow-motion-withdrawal option and chose to try a new strategy for victory, backed by a troop surge. The Democrats were genuinely shocked that Bush wouldn’t behave as if the war was lost.

What’s more, the Democratic presidential race was beginning, and the candidates were under pressure to do more than express generalized disapproval of Bush. And so for the past three weeks, Democrats have been outdoing one another in lambasting Bush and—as they see it—his war.

But in politics, as in life, exercises in competitive indignation can get out of hand. Biden got rolling his resolution disapproving of the surge—but without thinking through the counterattack that would be opened up. Now, as the troops begin to enter the theater, Republicans can ask whether the main effect of these merely symbolic resolutions isn’t to undermine the chances of Americans succeeding and to encourage our enemies. Similarly, the idea of a legislated cap on troop strength had seemed a good way to show real commitment to the antiwar cause. Yet actually explaining why 137,000 troops in Iraq was fine but increasing the number to 160,000 should be prohibited—when the new commander wanted those reinforcements and said they were necessary to give the new strategy a chance of success—that isn’t so easy.

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page thinks the outgoing 109th Congress managed to do a few things right in its closing session.

One of the items the Journal mentioned gave me pause. Apparently, Congress opened 8.3 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling. The thought came to mind: It was closed? When? By what specific legislation? And following what debate? I have no idea. But everywhere one looks in today’s America, whatever it may be, it’s currently illegal, forbidden, verboten. And the opportunity to do anything will require special legislation.

It’s been a long time, I expect, since somebody took a cigarette, asked for permission to light up, and received the once-common reply: “It’s a free country.”

The Stiletto is listening to noises from the nation’s capitol:

Hear That? It’s The Sound Of Dem Campaign Promises Being Broken

Here’s a round-up of recent headlines that makes it clear that The Party With No Plan has no plans to keep its campaign promises:

” Dems Won’t Find Enacting 9/11 Ideas Easy: Remember how Pelosi & Co. was going to implement every single one of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations? Well, forget it. For one thing, many of the recommendations fall outside the purview of Congress.

” Democrats Split On How Far To Go With Ethics Law: After months of yammering about the “culture of corruption” on the other side of the aisle, Dems are dancing as fast as they can away from their promise of a “complete overhaul” of Congressional ethics rules. For one thing, there are no plans to curtail earmarks.

A college classmate this morning sent me a link to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s somewhat premature attempt at dancing on American Conservatism’s grave.

Dionne is not entirely wrong, of course. He notes correctly that George W. Bush never was a real conservative in the Goldwater, Reagan, or Gingrich sense. But, personally, I wouldn’t waste my time constructing elaborate theories about Hamiltonian “big-government conservatism,” or using “government as a means to achieve conservative ends.” It’s really much simpler than that. George W. Bush is simply an old-fashioned garden variety practical politician (what we used to call an Eisenhower Republican), bringing to his Presidency his family’s traditional flexibility in governing, flavored with just enough red-state populism and Republican impulses to secure the GOP base’s support.

The American left has remained mobilized and afflicted with a paranoid sense of wrong ever since their favorite son’s sexual scandals metastasized into perjury and impeachment. Disappointment with the outcome of the 2000 election and US military actions following 9/11 have continued to keep the left as angry and active as a nest of red ants thoroughly poked with a stick. The larger part of George W. Bush’s perceived conservatism really amounts to mere reciprocated animosity.

Dionne is not inaccurate in describing this Congress.

The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.

Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.

The Republican Senatorial majority unfortunately includes a number of liberal Republican-in-name-only senators, and has been effectively paralysed by joys-of-incumbency induced timidity and the democrats’ willingness to abuse the filibuster.

Dionne contends that the repeal of the death tax failed “because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.” Rubbish! There certainly is a majority in this country in favor of not taxing away a family’s assets simply because someone has died.

Poll after poll proves it.

a 1999 poll by Worthlin Worldwide found 70 percent of voters favoring a phase-out of the estate tax.—A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent of voters supporting elimination of the inheritance tax.—A 2001 CBS News/New York Times poll also found 71 percent of people opposing imposition of an estate tax at death.

Dionne would like to believe that libertarian versus traditionalist divisions are in the process of splitting the right on issues like immigration and stem cell research. Sorry, Mr. Dionne. It’s true that I disagree strongly with Michelle Malkin and Victor Davis Hanson about immigration, but our differences do not materially diminish my admiration and respect for those two traditionalists, nor are they likely to persuade Michelle, Victor, or myself to start voting for democrats. I don’t have a problem with stem cell research myself (being irreligious), but I believe President Bush was quite right to veto spending the tax dollars of religious people funding things they find morally repugnant. Let’s just finance this kind of research privately. There’s no shortage of rich atheists or leftists.

Dionne is off-base looking for a conservative split over religious issues these days. I’ve had plenty of differences within the Conservative Movement with religious traditionalists in days gone by, but there is no particular Religious Right agenda we libertarians have a major problem with today. I do have problems with organs of the left, like the ACLU, waging intolerant campaigns to eradicate any form of private religious expression in the public space, eliminating religious symbols, or persecuting the Boy Scouts for political incorrectness. In short, I expect most of us making up what Dionne calls the “big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives” are likely to continue to vote with the ordinary hometown Americans rather than with the coastal community of fashion indefinitely on into the misty future.

He’s right in saying this Congress is a disaster, and many of its members deserve to be defeated. I’ve said the same thing repeatedly myself. But what will lose in November will not be conservative principles, but the exact opposite. The losers will be the unprincipled, the compromisers and trimmers, and the opportunists.

The Conservative Movement, Mr. Dionne, has experienced setbacks and electoral defeats before. Those of us who lived through the Goldwater campaign of 1964 are not especially perturbed by the prospect of this coming November. We will be back.
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Hat tip to Steve Wagenseil.