Like housebreakers waiting until Saturday night when American adults would be out for the evening, Nancy Pelosi and the House democrats, joined among Republicans only by former Representative William (“office cooler full of cash”) Jefferson’s replacement Joseph Cao (“R” — 2 LA), narrowly passed the labrynthine multi-trillion dollar bill proposing to nationalize health care in America 220-215.

The New York Times called it “their defining social policy achievement.”

I think it defines them alright, as socialists, collectivists, liars, frauds, and thieves.

Stephen Green speaks bitterly for the rest of us:

How do you cure high unemployment and sluggish growth?

Proven methods include reducing regulation and lowering taxes.

So it comes as no surprise that the House has just approved one of (if not the) biggest increases in taxes and regulation after virtually zero debate and in the middle of a weekend night when almost no one is paying attention.

They’re cowards. Shrewd cowards, but cowards still. …

Which is the greater number: Pages in the bill the House just passed, or the minutes spent debating it?

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.

Ultra-left Michigan democrat Congressman John Conyers is derisive of the very idea that representatives ought to read the Health Care Reform Bill nationalizing 16% of the American economy and undoubtedly resulting in the federal government assuming the power of making life or death choices affecting countless numbers of Americans.

I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?

0:36 video

They wouldn’t understand it anyway, is the point Conyers is making.

Isn’t it wonderful that so many Americans decided to put this kind of power into the hands of representatives so responsible?

Pam Geller points out rightly that if this feel-good piece of House legislation introduced by Linda Sanchez back in April passes, all you have to do is offend someone and you can go to prison.

This law is unconstitutional, a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It destroys the basic tenets of the Constitution. The left is ripping it to shreds. You can view the bill here.

This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

That this is even being proposed speaks volumes as to how far America has fallen. Here is the language in the bill:

a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

‘(b) As used in this section-

‘(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received;

‘(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.’.

What this means?

U.S. House of Representatives would make it a felony to offend someone online.

A felony.

Under this new law you would not just be slapped on the wrist and have to pay a fine.

You would go to big boy prison.

And, my, oh my, the democrats did not like that, and they don’t want you to hear about it.

The Hill reports on democrat efforts to stonewall and obfuscate.

In the bowels of the Capitol Visitor Center, members of the (House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations) gathered behind locked doors on Thursday morning to begin a series of hearings on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

What began as a remarkably quiet and secretive hearing had, within a matter of hours, exploded into a political brawl over intelligence matters and national security.

Despite the weeks-long furor over how the Central Intelligence Agency came to use enhanced interrogation techniques, and what members of Congress were told about their development and implementation, the committee’s first hearing on the issue during the 111th Congress almost came and went without notice. The hearing was announced publicly but was not open to the public.

According to Republicans, that was by design.

“Democrats weren’t sure what they were going to get,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), ranking Republican on the Intelligence panel, referring to information on the merits of enhanced interrogation techniques. “Now that they know what they’ve got, they don’t want to talk about it.”

The hearing was publicly described only as a subcommittee hearing on “Interrogations.” A committee spokeswoman would not comment on whether the development and use of controversial interrogation tactics were discussed.

But Republicans on the panel said that not only did the use of interrogation techniques come up Thursday, but that the data shared about those techniques proved they had led to valuable information that in some instances prevented terrorist attacks.

Hoekstra did not attend the hearing, but said he later spoke with Republicans on the subcommittee who did. He said he came away with even more proof that the enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA proved effective.

“I think the people who were at the hearing, in my opinion, clearly indicated that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked,” Hoekstra said.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a member of the subcommittee who attended the hearing, concurred with Hoekstra.

“The hearing did address the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been much in the news lately,” Kline said, noting that he was intentionally choosing his words carefully in observance of the committee rules and the nature of the information presented.

“Based on what I heard and the documents I have seen, I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots,” Kline said.

Neither Hoekstra nor Kline revealed details about the specifics of what they were told Thursday or the identity of the briefers.

Democrats lambasted their Republican counterparts for discussing the information that was provided behind locked doors.

“I am absolutely shocked that members of the Intelligence committee who attended a closed-door hearing… then walked out that hearing – early, by the way – and characterized anything that happened in that hearing,” said Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairwoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “My understanding is that’s a violation of the rules. It may be more than that.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said, “Members on both sides need to watch what they say.”

Both Schakowsky and Reyes accused GOP members of playing politics with national security.

“I think they are playing a very dangerous game when it comes to the discussion of matters that were sensitive enough to be part of a closed hearing,” Schakowsky said.

Asked about the validity of Republican contentions that information shared in Thursday’s hearing showed the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques, Schakowsky said she could not comment on what was discussed at a closed hearing.

Reyes responded by saying he did not attend the entire hearing.

“I wasn’t at the whole hearing,” Reyes said. “As the chairman my view is we need to get the facts about how the enhanced interrogation techniques came about, not just the results.”

CQ Politics reports the latest lobbying scandal, centered on the infamous John Murtha, but featuring the kind of bipartsanship otherwise missing from the current Congress.

More than 100 House members (42 Republicans and 62 Democrats – JDZ) secured earmarks in a major spending bill for clients of a single lobbying firm — The PMA Group — known for its close ties to John P. Murtha, the congressman in charge of Pentagon appropriations.

“It shows you how good they were,” said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “The sheer coordination of that would take an army to finish.”

PMA’s offices have been raided, and the firm closed its political action committee last week amid reports that the FBI is investigating possibly illegal campaign contributions to Murtha and other lawmakers. …

In the spending bill managed by Murtha, the fiscal 2008 Defense appropriation, 104 House members got earmarks for projects sought by PMA clients, according to Congressional Quarterly’s analysis of a database constructed by Ashdown’s group.

Those House members, plus a handful of senators, combined to route nearly $300 million in public money to clients of PMA through that one law (PL 110-116). …

PMA’s founder, Paul Magliocchetti, is a former House Appropriations Committee aide who has a long-running relationship with Murtha, D-Pa., the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Murtha, who used to boast that his middle initial stands for “power,” carved out $38.1 million for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 defense spending law, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Indiana Rep. Peter J. Visclosky , who serves on Murtha’s subcommittee and additionally is chairman of the subcommittee that allocates money for the Pentagon’s nuclear programs, earmarked $23.8 million for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 defense spending bill.

His former chief of staff, Richard Kaelin, lobbies for PMA, as does Melissa Koloszar, a former top aide to defense appropriator James P. Moran , D-Va.

Moran sponsored $10.8 million for PMA clients, and Rep. Norm Dicks , D-Wash., another member of the subcommittee, sponsored $12.1 million. …

Of the 104 lawmakers who lent their names to earmark requests for PMA clients in the fiscal 2008 Pentagon spending law, 91 have, since 2001, received campaign money linked to PMA, either from its political action committee or its employees.

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.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine this week had a feature by Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiling Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and discussing Cole’s uphill task this year.

Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. …

Many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.” …

Many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

Tom Cole, however, thinks the situation is not hopeless.

Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”

But Wallace-Wells believes the GOP coalition and platform are in serious trouble.

Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us.

In other words, he is repeating the conventional viewpoint that the Reagan coalition of anti-communist neocons, religious and social conservatives, and economic conservatives has fallen apart.

I think it’s more the case that the Republican coalition, under George W. Bush, has fallen into disarray for lack of articulate and firmly principled leadership.

Bush is so inarticulate that it isn’t easy at all to identify a coherent Bush philosophy, but it seems clear that he has always been a moderate on Government, and is in many ways a liberal (resembling Woodrow Wilson) in foreign policy. Bush’s so-called conservatism has generally consisted of a manifest rejection of the consensus of the elect as articulated in the elite media outlets, which is widely recognized as an expression of a visceral animosity on Bush’s part to his own native elite culture.

Therein really consists his unforgivable sin from the point of view of the Establishment left. And Bush’s folly has proven to be his willingness to provoke their ultimate degree of wrath in the absence of an effective ability to fight them in public debate or within government.

Amusingly, Bush got away with his fundamentally happy-go-lucky approach right up until 2005 Hurricane Katrina. He seemed to be made of teflon. Media attacks simply bounced off him, and the American public in general indifferently shrugged off his malapropisms with a smile until along came New Orleans. The MSM was able to flood televisions screens with images of disaster while blaming them on Bush Administration incompetence and callousness. Blame for Katrina finally stuck.

Simultaneously, the disinformation operation conducted by disaffected elements of the Intelligence Community proceeded without White House interference or effective opposition. The passage of a couple of years proved adequate for the media echo chamber to persuade large portions of the public that “Bush lied.” There were no Iraqi WMD, and Bush knew it all along. He started the war “for the oil,” or to avenge Saddam Hussein’s attempt to assassinate his father.

The collapse of Bush Administration political activity coincided with a series of Republican Congressional scandals, and together produced the public perception of a failed and discredited GOP and the subsequent loss of both houses of Congress.

Bush’s failures seem to be amplified by the failures of the Conservative Movement. The Conservative Movement chose the time of Republican disarray to try mobilizing the base with a red meat issue. And what did they chose? Anti-illegal immigration. Anti-illegal immigration politics worked beautifully in transforming California into a firmly democrat stronghold. Why not take the same strategy, certain to alienate Hispanic voters, nationally?

Both George W. Bush and the current organized Conservative Movement demonstrably arrived at the 2008 primary campaign season without a defined candidate, a coherent strategy, or a clue.

The consequence was John McCain’s victory, produced by a combination of media bias and cross-over democrat voting in open primaries. Essentially, we are running the moderate democrat candidate this year as the Republican nominee.

If the Conservative Movement and the GOP does not return to the kind of politics practiced by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, to a politics based on a coherent and principled philosophy, to clearly articulated ideas, to a policy of winning elections by winning the long-term national debate, they are going to find the GOP stool has no leg to stand on at all.

There was obviously more going on behind the scenes that the powers that be are telling us. But whatever specific incident or event provoked the resignation, Alcee Hastings’ removal from a House role featuring this kind of responsibility is a very positive development.

CQ Politics:

Democrat Alcee L. Hastings of Florida abruptly resigned from the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday, citing increased activities as chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission and his work on the Rules Committee.

“Now, I will devote even more time to my continued work for the people of my congressional district by ratcheting up my work as chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, as a senior member of the House Rules Committee, and as co-chairman of Florida’s congressional delegation,” Hastings said in a statement released by his office. …

Hastings denied that his decision was related to being passed over for the chairmanship of the full Intelligence Committee in favor of Silvestre Reyes of Texas. Reyes was hand-picked to lead the panel by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California in January.

“He’s chosen to put a greater emphasis on other parts of his legislative portfolio,” spokesman David Goldenberg said.

It’s no secret, though, that Hastings has been brooding for some time over the move. In an interview with Congressional Quarterly in April, Hastings expressed some anger at “Democrats in high places” who made an issue — during his bid for the chairmanship — of the fact that he was impeached and removed from office as a federal judge in 1989 on corruption and perjury charges.

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.

Even the Washington Post draws the line at the shameful conduct of the democrat house leadership using bribes funded by the US Treasury to buy votes in favor of unconditional and irresponsible withdrawal.

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill — for whatever reason — will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget.

Rep. John Shadegg’s (R-AZ) office reports:

(On Wednesday), Congressman John Shadegg reintroduced the Enumerated Powers Act, a bill that highlights the importance of the Tenth Amendment and forces a continual reexamination of the role of the federal government.

“The Enumerated Powers Act would require Members of Congress to include an explicit statement of Constitutional authority into each bill that is introduced. It would hold Congress accountable for its actions,” said Shadegg.

The Tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

“According to the Tenth Amendment, the national government cannot expand its legislative authority into areas reserved to the States or the people,” said Shadegg. “It is a well-known fact that the size and scope of the federal government has exploded since the New Deal. Congress continues to operate without Constitutional restraint, creating costly and ineffective programs and blatantly ignoring the principles of federalism.”

We should be running this guy in 2008.