Republican Leader Boehner blogs about yet another example of the Democrats’ hypocrisy

The Republican-led Congress conducted bipartisan hearings and investigations following scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other corporate entities during the early part of this decade, in part to address public concerns about the possibility of unethical links between high-powered lawmakers and the powerful interests they were charged with overseeing. But the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress has no such track record. Under Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who once ironically pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, the House has stood flatfooted as scandals have erupted involving the trial lawyer industry and possible sweetheart deals between senior Democrats and mortgage lending giant Countrywide.

Speaker Pelosi and her committee chairs have refused to hold even a single hearing on the illegal kickback scandal that has embroiled the powerhouse trial lawyer firm formerly known as Milberg Weiss, despite assertions by the firm’s former chief (a major Democratic donor now serving a two-year prison sentence) that the criminal acts his firm engaged in are an “industry practice.” And this week, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) stated he has no plans to hold even a single oversight hearing to look into special “VIP” housing perks that Countrywide gave powerful congressional Democrats at the same time it was hiking mortgage rates on American families. House Republican leaders have formally requested bipartisan hearings on both matters.

Rep. Pelosi and others once said Congress had an obligation to hold oversight hearings to restore public confidence in the wake of major industry scandals, regardless of who might get burned. But that was then; this is now. Now settled into their majority, senior congressional Democrats have lost all traces of the investigatory zeal they demonstrated during the dark days of Enron and WorldCom. Instead they’re thumbing their noses at calls for oversight hearings on industry scandals involving the trial lawyer industry and Countrywide.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself why Democrats are not investigating scandals involving the trial lawyer industry and Countrywide…

It’s obvious that we’re heading for a showdown between Senate Democrats and ‘Big Oil’. The Senate is ratcheting things up with their (non) energy plan. Here’s a few details of their non-plan:

The Democrats’ energy package also would:

• Make oil and gas price gouging a federal crime, with stiff penalties of up to $5 million during a presidentially declared energy emergency.
• Authorize the Justice Department to bring charges of price fixing against countries that belong to the OPEC oil cartel.
• Require traders to put up more collateral in the energy futures markets to curb speculation.

This isn’t productive. Then again, the Democrats have been unproductive for the most part since retaking the majority. (I’m thankful for that because their agenda is radical.) As I said here, increasing taxes on oil companies while preventing them from producing more oil here at home is counterproductive.

The only thing it’s good for is to have Democrats thump their chests and say ‘We’re punishing evil big oil’. It apparently isn’t important that they’ve done nothing to be part of the solution. In fact, it apparently isn’t that important that they’re part of the problem.

People are looking for solutions. The Democrats’ plan (I’m using the term loosely) isn’t a solution; it’s a political ploy. If Republicans keep pushing Newt’s plan, they’ll quickly be seen as having a solution. If Republicans are seen as having the solution, they’ll get a big fundraising lift and in the polls.

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Marc Ambinder is reporting something that’s sure to bother King Obama:

Matt Burns, the spokesman for the GOP convention in St. Paul e-mails to say that the RNC’s convention office in St. Paul has received numerous telephone calls in the last few hours from people who identify themselves as Clinton supporters asking how they can help Sen. McCain.

So much for disaffected Hillary people making their way back to the Democratic side, huh? This is Obama’s nightmare scenario.

H/T: Gateway Pundit

Based on this St. Cloud Times editorial, written by James Mogen, pro-growth capitalism is now part of the far right. Here’s how Mr. Mogen arrives at that conclusion:

Continuing to use her office for campaign activities, Rep. Michele Bachmann recently touted her support from the right-wing radical organization Club for Growth on her congressional Web site. The club is a far right-wing group made up of Wall Street financiers. You may be familiar with the group for its negative ads in 2004.

Instead of denouncing extreme groups like them, Bachmann is proud of its support and is now taking direction from the club. After the club demanded that representatives submit to their “key votes,” Bachmann opposed the recently passed farm bill, which promises to bring major support for area farmers, environmental initiatives and hungry children and families.

CFG is a “right-wing radical organization”? Based on what criteria? Mr. Mogen doesn’t give us the criteria by which he arrived at that conclusion. Instead, this is typical of his ‘logic’:

This group, like Bachmann, is far more conservative than the Minnesotans she is supposed to represent.

In fact, the club has been known to go after moderates who vote their district. The club’s support for Bachmann illustrates her own far-right positions are out of line with those of the 6th District.

Saying that Rep. Bachmann is “far more conservative than the district” she’s supposed to represent doesn’t make sense. If this were true, how did she get elected? Mr. Mogen certainly can’t honestly say that Rep. Bachmann ran as a squishy moderate, either. Anytime I hear someone speaking with this type of certitude, I worry because there isn’t room for differing perspectives.

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Lost in the discussion about what the Golden Child’s motivation was in talking about his uncle…um, great-uncle…um…grandfather liberating Auschwitz…um…Buchenwald is how intellectually curious Sen. Obama is while challenging his decisionmaking and understanding of Iraq. Here’s how Sen. McCain accomplished that:

“Sen. Obama has been to Iraq once, a little over two years ago he went and he has never seized the opportunity except in a hearing to meet with Gen. [David] Petraeus,” McCain said at a campaign event in Reno, Nevada. “My friends, this is about leadership and learning.”

Again raising the issue of Obama’s willingness to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, McCain also said of the Illinois senator, “He wants to sit down with the president of Iran but hasn’t yet sat down with Gen. Petraeus, the leader of our troops in Iraq?”

I’d think that a minimal requirement for being commander-in-chief is learning firsthand what our guys are doing, especially in war zones. Another requirement would be understanding the consequences of the decisions he makes. We can only speculate on the damage Sen. Obama’s immediate troop withdrawal policy would have on the region, on the jihadists and on the Maliki government. What’s beyond speculation, though, is that removing our troops at the rate Sen. Obama is talking about would embolden the jihadists.

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The Republican Party isn’t the majority party here in Minnesota nor in our nation’s capital for a variety of reasons. I’d submit that the biggest reason why we aren’t the majority party is because we stopped being the party of ideas. Here in Minnesota, though, we’re taking corrective action, action that doesn’t rely on the state party.

Instead, what a group of activists have done is turned the MOB (Minnesota Organization of Bloggers) into the Activists’ News Network. Many of our state legislators stay in touch with what’s important to working class people by reading blogs like True North, Powerline, MDE, SCSUScholars, Let Freedom Ring, Ladies Logic and Shot In The Dark. Our House GOP leadership reads the blogs on a daily basis, as do their staff.

The House GOP Caucus has used this to stay in touch with what’s important with activists. That’s important because the activists/citizen journalists stay in touch with their neighbors, co-workers and friends. I can’t emphasize this point enough. If the GOP wants to return to majority status anytime soon, it has to start with listening to what the people are saying.

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Barack Obama is really acquiring a whiny tone to his statements. It isn’t appealing for the supposed unifier of all things political to have such a negative tone. This time, he’s whining that Hillary is stirring up trouble with the Florida delegation to the Democratic Convention. Here’s his latest whiny diatribe:

“The Clinton campaign has been stirring this up for fairly transparent reasons,” Obama told reporters on the plane from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Chicago, adding she had not done so earlier in the race when she did not need the delegates to win.

“Let’s not…pretend that we don’t know what’s going on. I mean this is, from their perspective, their last slender hope to make arguments about how they can win, and I understand that,” Obama said.

It’s rather slick that Sen. Obama didn’t talk about the legality of not seating the Florida delegation. that’s the last thing he wants to talk about. It appears as though winning is more important to Sen. Obama than is the potential disenfranchisement of almost 2 million voters. That’s a pretty partisan move for THE postpartisan candidate, isn’ it?

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I just wrote about Rep. Paul Kanjorski’s corruption. Now I find that he’s anti-capitalist, too:

The current high price of gas has led to a lot of crazy proposals from gas tax holidays to creating a tax deduction based upon energy consumption. But Rep. Paul Kanjorski’s (D-PA) may top them all in terms of its stupidity. From the Times Leader, Kanjorski’s plan would do the following:

• H.R. 5800 would tax industries’ windfall profits.
• The bill would set up a Reasonable Profits Board to determine when these companies’ profits are in excess, and then tax them on those windfall profits.
• As oil and gas companies’ windfall profits increase, so would the tax rate for those companies.
• Kanjorski said his legislation will encourage oil companies to lower prices to prevent them from receiving higher tax rates.

Here’s what the Tax Foundation said about Kanjorski’s economic model:

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Fred Thompson’s op-ed in this morning’s WSJ is just what conservatives need to hear at exactly the right time. Here’s one of Sen. Thompson’s reminders as to what’s possible when conservatives stick with their first principles:

The power of conservative principles is borne out in the most strong, prosperous and free country in the history of the world. In the U.S., basic constitutional government has been preserved, foreign tyrannies have been defeated, our failed welfare system was reformed, and the confiscatory income tax rates of a few decades ago have been substantially reduced. This may be why the party where most conservatives reside, the Republican Party, has won seven of the last 10 presidential elections.

Americans haven’t tired of having common sense applied to our nation’s most troubling problems. Instead, Americans have recognized that conservative principles haven’t been applied nearly often enough. I suspect that Americans have felt let down that today’s ‘conservatism’ isn’t Reaganite conservatism.

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Though Howard Dean wants all his problems to disappear, that won’t happen now that the Florida Democratic Party filed a lawsuit against the DNC for disenfranchising their voters. This comes just a day after Hillary threatened to take that fight straight to the Convention in Denver.

Florida’s history of discrimination against African Americans should force the national Democratic Party to count all of the state’s delegates at its national convention, a federal lawsuit filed Thursday claims.

The suit, filed by state Senate Democratic Leader Steve Geller and two other Democrats, claims that the federal Voting Rights Act prohibits the national party from stripping the state of its convention delegates.

The Civil Rights-era law requires the U.S. Justice Department to approve any significant voting change in Florida to make sure it doesn’t disenfranchise minority voters. Geller argues that includes the Democratic National Committee’s demand that Florida switch “from a state-run primary to party-run caucus system” to avoid losing its delegates.

“The purpose of this lawsuit is not to support one candidate over another; it’s to enforce one of the most basic tenets of our democracy: Count the votes as they were cast,” Geller said in announcing the lawsuit.

This isn’t the first time that the DNC has been accused of holding primaries that weren’t all that democratic. Gov. Ed Rendell made a similar accusation in late April:

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