That Barney Frank...He's a Funny Guy

I was up early this morning doing some work and C-SPAN was running yesterday's House Financial Services Committee hearings with the boys from the Big Three. One of the members, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, kicked off an exchange that made me chuckle.

She was prefacing her question with a statement about how attached we are to our vehicles and how her family had nicknames for their cars (mine did, too, I guess...we had the White Elephant and the Brown Bomber). One of her family's cars growing up, belonging to her father was "the chick magnet."

Remembering about Chairman Frank's orientation, she offered a joking apology to which he replied, "It's not something I would ever want to drive."

A Sentence You Don't Want Yourself to Be Referred In

It's been a rough year for poor, soon-to-be-former Staten Island Congressman, Vito Fossella (R).

He was pulled over for DUI in VA last spring, but that's when his troubles really started. Asked by the cops where he was going, he said he was on his way to visit his sick daughter, nearby.

Problem...as far as everyone else knew, his family was up in New York.

Oops.

Vito was keeping a little snack in the cupboard.

His trial was yesterday.

Neither Mr. Fossella’s wife, Mary Pat Fossella, nor his mistress, Laura Fay, were in the courtroom.

Republican Party Seal?

House Republicans pulled a nice little stunt yesterday.

After Madame Speaker decided to call it quits for the traditional August recess, they still wanted to talk about energy.

Problem is that she had it cut...the lights, mics and even CSPAN were cut out, but the Party of Lincoln stayed on the floor for several hours.

With Democrats out of the chamber fuming, the Republicans were left there to play with themselves.

They finally gave up several hours later, to cheers and a "USA!" chant from the gallery, singing God Bless America.

Indeed...

The Sun Doesn't Shine on the Same Dog's Ass Everyday

But US Rep Charles Rangel (D-NY) has not seen a ray of light all week long.

First, the New York Times blew his cover last week on having four rent-controlled apartments in a nice Harlem building. This situation ranges somewhere between unethical and illegal.

(A story came out today that he's getting rid of the one used for campaign office space.)

This morning, the Washington Post goes after the House icon for soliciting donations for the future academic home of his papers...from businesses with interest in front of his committee!

As usual, the surprise would be if things like this didn't happen, but the timing just seems unfortunate for this sharpest dressed of Congressmen.

Barney Frank...One Cool Dude

This morning, the New York Times ran a front page article about one of my favorite members of the US Congress, Barney Frank (D-MA).

And I write that without a drip of sarcasm.

Frank is the most well-known homosexual in Congress, the poster child for contemporary liberalism, a man with biting wit and one of the smartest dudes in that joint.

I don't always agree with where he comes down on certain things, but the guy is one of the real true-believers in there and I pity the fool who tries to challenge his grasp of what he's talking about. (Frank is the chairman of the Financial Services Committee and the article is about his working for a deal to help out people being hurt during this housing crunch/crisis.)

They cite someone from the White House who just calls him 'scary smart.'

Below, I pulled out some of his funnier lines from the article....

MARCH 11 “Mr. Speaker, a parliamentary inquiry. Mr. Speaker, is blatant hypocrisy a violation of the rules of the House?”

Responding to Republican complaints that Democrats had extended the voting period for 15 minutes to win approval of a bill creating an independent House ethics office. In 2003, the Republicans once extended the voting period for three hours to get their desired outcome.

NOV. 7, 2007 “I am grateful for the obscurity of the opposition’s argument.”

In a debate over the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a bill to prohibit discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation.

JULY 18, 2006 “So, apparently, same-sex marriage is the V8 juice of America.”

During a debate over a “marriage protection” amendment, Mr. Frank said he did not understand Republican arguments that gay marriages would undermine traditional marriages, as if happily married men in Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Mississippi, learning that same-sex marriage was legal in Massachusetts, would smack themselves in the head and declare, “Wow, I could have married a guy.”

SEPT. 11, 1986 “I am afraid that this bill is becoming the legislative equivalent to crack. It’s going to give people a short-term high, but it is going to be dangerous in the long run to the system and expensive to boot.”

During debate on a bill authorizing $4 billion for the war on drugs, and allowing the military to protect the nation’s borders from drug traffickers.

MARCH 6, 1984 “Well, if this is a Christian nation, how come some poor Jew has to get up at 5:30 in the morning to preside over the House of Representatives?”

Mr. Frank, in an interview describing his reaction when Representative Marjorie S. Holt, Republican of Maryland, declared America to be a Christian nation during an all-night debate over school prayer. Mr. Frank, who is Jewish, was presiding as the speaker pro tem.

"I'm a God-Fearing, Church-Going, NRA Member and I'm Proud of It"

Hahaha. Just kidding.

But that's what Matt Shaner, an otherwise boring, cookie-cutter Republican in PA is using in a new mailer for his upcoming PA 5th District Congressional primary.

He's trying to cash in on the Bittergate mojo.

Tip of the had to Mark Ambinder for this one.

Matt Taibbi Calls the Dems to Task

Over the last year or so, I've really started to enjoy Matt Taibbi's writing in Rolling Stone. Over the summer, I read a book he wrote about the 2004 campaign and he seems to be the closest thing to a HST fix I'll get this season.

Anyway, this week, he calls Congressional Democrats out on their cynical behavior since the 2006 election.

Anyone who even remotely paid attention to that campaign knows that the Democrats had a strategy (orchestrated primarily by now-Madame Speaker and former Clintonista, Rahm Emanuel) to promise some progress on getting out of Iraq. That's not debatable and at the time they were making the claims, they had access to enough intelligence to know that it was either not feasible or wise.

So they haven't done shit for all you saps who voted for them. Rather, they're now talking about how they have to wait until after the next election, when perhaps a more reasonable President is in office.

That's basically the article in a nutshell and I could not agree more. But I'd actually take the argument a bit further.

While Hillary and Barack have rightly noted that presumable GOP nominee McCain has stated that we could have some presence in Iraq for 100 years (not unlike our continuing presence in, say, West Germany or South Korea), at least the old coot is being honest with you.

Say what you will about the so-called warmongers on the right. They'll tell you that they intend to blow the balls off of any towelhead that gets in their way and, darnit, they go out and try do it no matter what.

A good portion of the national Democrats, though, have co-opted the anti-war position because it's politically expedient and gives them more window dressing with which to attack the GOP when they have no intent on spending any of their political capital to make good on their promises.

It's at least debatable which position is worse.

Voices of Reason

Race-baiting bigot Al Sharpton was in the nation's capitol today speaking to another beacon of reason, John Conyers, and the House Judiciary Committee about the Jena Six incident.

My opinions on this pretty much line up with the National Review's take on it today...the incident is ugly on a number of fronts. The white students who started tempting trouble by hanging a noose on the tree down there in Louisiana should have been punished more harshly. Their lenient treatment by school administrators has to be interpreted as somewhere between awful insensitivity on one end of the spectrum and a racist relic of the old south on the other.

But for Sharpton and others to turn the hoodlums who beat the snot out of a white kid later as some sort of 21st century Rosa Parks is just more of the dishonesty we have come to expect from this charlatan. It's also well-within-character for the idiot Chairman from Michigan, whose primary legislative move each year is to press again for slavery reparations.

The larger problem with all of this, of course, is the Reverend Who Cried Wolf (I had to substitute nouns there, of course) syndrome. Because knuckleheads like Sharpton are always eager to superimpose Klansman hoods onto almost any cross-racial story, it's hard to have an open public discussion of actual racial wrongdoings in this country.

Doritos Social Science

There's a neat opinion piece in the Washington Times I thought I would direct you to.

Capitalizing on the success of Michael Moore's Sicko, a Congressional committee (which incidentally would have no jurisdiction over the legislation that some of the testimony was clearly intended to act as support for).

They had two Harvard professors, David Himmelstein and Elizabeth Warren, present evidence that about half of all bankruptcies are medical-related.

Now if the inference that one might draw from reading that headline were true, we would really have to consider the possibility that something needs to be tweaked here.

Problem is, of course, it depends on how you define "medical."

The distinguished professors include gambling problems, birth and adoption.  While these most certainly can at times be related to, or one in the same as a medical problem, it's undoubtedly deceptive to just lump them in without some sort of explanation.

Are You Crying?

It's a busy day out here in the salt mines, but Politico's top story today is rather amusing.

It's about how it's considered to be somewhat manly to cry in public life.

Crying makes a statement about how deeply you care about certain issues.

In the opinion of this man, it sure does make a statement!

Be not confused. The insertion of 'considered' above was done carefully.

It used to be considered cool to wear parachute pants, too.