While celebrating the Democrats’ takeover of Congress on election night 2006, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi promised the American people “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.” A leaked report from the House Ethics Committee is causing heartburn throughout Washington today. According to the memo, dozens of House members are under investigation.

According to the report, several Democrats (Norm Dicks, Peter Visclosky, Jim Moran and Marcy Kaptur) on a key Appropriations committee are under investigation, as is the committee’s chairman Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA). In another revelation, the Ethics Committee suspended an investigation of Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) at the request of the Justice Department. The Washington Post reports, “the department’s request … suggests that the case continues to draw the attention of federal investigators, who often ask that the House and Senate ethics panels refrain from taking action against members whom the department is already investigating.”

You can add two more names to the list. Yesterday, the House Ethics Committee voted to launch investigations of Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Laura Richardson (D-CA). It also took action on an investigation of Missouri Republican Sam Graves – voting to end the Graves’ probe “after finding no ethical violations.” We’re still waiting for any action in response to the tax evasion charges against Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who chairs the House committee responsible for writing the nation’s tax laws.

Yesterday, on the steps of the Capitol, Nancy Pelosi and her liberal colleagues unveiled their healthcare plan, H.R. 3962. Here are my thoughts on what transpired at the press conference, and the content of the bill.

• Pelosi’s press conference was an hour long, and only people on her personal “RSVP list” were allowed to attend. Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) said, “The striking thing that occurred today is when the Speaker had her announcement and unveiled their public option, she did so on public grounds in the West Front of the Capitol and frankly denied access to the public.”
• The thirty Democratic members with Pelosi at the press conference did not answer a single question from the press.
• The bill has had an extra thousand pages of statist policy added, making it nearly 2,000 pages long. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, said, “So how much takeover can you cram into 2,000 pages? By comparison, the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, which costs us $800 billion annually was less than 300 pages long.” What is hidden in the Pelosi bill?
• Members of Congress are not required to enroll in the government plan. The bill says that members can enroll in the public option if they want. Don’t expect any of them to do this, however.
• A 2.5 percent tax on medical devices will also be passed on to Americans. Taxes on hearing aids, heart valves and wheelchairs will all increase and will hurt Americans regardless of income.
• Under this version, working-class families will face higher health care premiums. Millions of Americans will also lose their current plans and senior citizens will see Medicare cut by $500 billion.

The House will be voting on this bill soon, so I strongly encourage you to contact your representatives at 202-224-3121. Call even if you have already done so, and share your thoughts with your elected representatives. The liberals in Washington are trying to transform the United States in their Big Government image. Now is the time to make your voice heard.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday that Republican senators are prepared to filibuster the government-run public option and that on this vote there is no compromise.

You may recall that Olympia Snowe voted for the Baucus bill in committee in order to “keep the discussion going.” Yesterday, in a shot across the bow of Snowe and other “moderates,” McConnell said, “I think it’s appropriate to make the point at the outset that a vote … on the motion to proceed to this bill [to end the filibuster of the public option] will be treated as a vote on the merits of the bill.” Let me explain why.

This bill can’t be stopped by just Republicans. They have only 40 votes in the Senate – that is not enough to sustain a filibuster. Socialized medicine will pass or fail depending on what a handful of “moderate” Democrats do. If they vote with Harry Reid to let the bill come to the Senate floor, it will pass — period. The senators who most likely will control the fate of ObamaCare are:

• Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) — (501) 375-2993
• Mark Pryor (D-AR) — (501) 324-6336
• Joe Lieberman (I-CT) — (860) 549-8463
• Evan Bayh (D-IN) — (317) 554-0750
• Mary Landrieu (D-LA) — (225) 389-0395
• Max Baucus (D-MT) — (406) 657-6790
• Jon Tester (D-MT) — (406) 449-5401
• Kent Conrad (D-ND) — (701) 258-4648
• Byron Dorgan (D-ND) — (701) 250-4618
• Ben Nelson (D-NE) — (402) 441-4600
• Tim Johnson (D-SD) — (605) 332-8896
• Jim Webb (D-VA) — (804) 771-2221
• Mark Warner (D-VA) — (804) 739-0247

If you live in any of these states, be certain to call your senators and share your thoughts with them.

Today’s Washington Times reports that the Obama White House has “quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.” As a candidate Barack Obama said he would crack down on “the disproportionate influence of lobbyists and special interest.”

But according to the Times report, the Obama White House, which we were told would be “the most open and transparent administration in history,” is promising major donors “access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.” One top donor was given access to the Oval Office – as a birthday present. Another donor and his family got to use the White House bowling alley. Other big givers get to watch movies with the Obamas in the White House theater.

CBS’s Mark Knoller reports that President Obama has held 23 fundraisers in his first nine months in office – that’s nearly four times as many as George W. Bush held in his first nine months.

Responding to the Washington Times report, RNC Chairman Michael Steele said, “Bill Clinton turned the White House into a hotel and coffee shop. Now President Obama has turned the White House into a full service resort complete with amenities for the highest Democrat bidder. The seriousness of this issue requires an immediate investigation… Candidate Obama pledged to clean up the muddy waters of Washington, but President Obama has jumped in head first.”

On Monday, Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid announced a grand compromise on healthcare “reform” legislation. To please the leftwing base of his party, Reid’s bill would include a government-run public option – the first step toward socialized medicine in America. That’s not my opinion, but Barney Franks’. To attract the votes of moderate Democrats, Reid announced that his plan would allow states to opt-out of the public option.

The state legislature would have to vote on legislation to opt-out, and the governor would have to sign the opt-out bill. But here’s the catch: There is no opting-out of the taxes to pay for this new $1 trillion entitlement program. All the taxes and penalties would remain in effect, so citizens of states that opt-out would still end up paying for a program they can’t access. As Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said, “the big [liberal] states will [opt-in] and the rest of us will end up paying for their excesses.” Remember what happened to the conservative governors who tried to “opt-out” of the stimulus money?

Last night on MSNBC, leftwing radical Ed Schultz was effusive with praise for Harry Reid’s “opt-out” deception. Schultz stated flatly what drives liberal politics: get constituents hooked on government programs and you have a guaranteed voting base. Schultz said of the public option:

“This is a great move by the Democrats. …Once you give it [the public option] to them, they don’t want to give it up. That’s the way it’s gonna be. I think this is a great move by Harry Reid. The public option is a public option. And it is – it is – the first step toward single payer [socialized medicine]. That’s what we progressives want. This is just the road to get there.”

It couldn’t be clearer than that. Liberal politicians and leftwing progressives are taking us down the road toward socialism, toward confiscatory tax rates, even bigger government, greater spending and more debt.

Your freedom is at stake. The standard of living you have enjoyed will be denied to your children and grandchildren if this new trillion-dollar entitlement program passes. And the quality of healthcare that is available today will be destroyed if government gets involved.

Compared to other proposals the administration has thrown at the American people this past year, the home buyer tax credit was not bad. Unfortunately, the government could not even effectively run this program.

New home buyers would receive up to $8,000 in tax credits under the plan. The money was supposed to be available for first-time buyers who bought a primary residence after April 9, 2008, and only individuals making less than $75,000 or couples making less than $150,000 would be eligible. However, during a Ways and Means oversight subcommittee hearing yesterday, House members were informed that thousands of fraudulent claims were made.

The Treasury Department said that at least 19,000 filers who had not bought homes claimed $139 million in tax credits and were in turn reimbursed. An additional 74,000 tax-credit claims, totaling $500 million, could become invalid because of previous home ownership. Even more surprising, 500 people under the age of 18, including a 4-year-old child, had their names on applications for the credit, which has no minimum-age requirement according to federal officials. Evidently some adults used a child’s name as the purchaser of the home because they were ineligible to receive the credit due to their incomes.

Many of these fraudulent claims occurred before the IRS had updated their computer programs. If they had done this correctly, the program would have automatically checked the claims to ensure that they were valid based on the information submitted.

When added up, the total potential waste of your tax money from fraudulent home-credits could be upwards of $639 million. This is the same government that wants to take over our entire healthcare system! We have seen the government’s ineptitude in recent months with cash-for-clunkers, a behind schedule H1N1 flu vaccination and now this. When will liberals in Washington learn that government isn’t the solution to every problem? As my former boss Ronald Reagan correctly said, “Government is the problem.”

Who would have thought that the candidate who promised to transcend partisanship, who promised to unite the nation under the banner of “hope and change” and who rode into Washington with a herd of new donkeys would bear such a striking resemblance to Richard Nixon?

In recent weeks, the White House has decided to fire back against its critics and opponents. To a degree, that’s normal and expected. Politics is a contact sport, after all. But this White House and its allies – with some personnel taking inspiration from communist dictators – have gone way beyond what is normal or expected.

Calling critics “un-American,” threatening businesses with regulatory retribution and punitive taxation, literally locking committee doors and locking out the press is way beyond normal. It is, as House Republican Leader John Boehner said, “flat-out despicable.”  I’m pleased to report that in the past few days, there have been some positive developments.

Earlier this week, Tennessee’s soft-spoken senator, Lamar Alexander, went to the Senate floor and blasted the White House for compiling, as Nixon did, an “enemies list.”

This week, the White House made “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available to the Washington press pool for interviews regarding his plan for salary caps at bailed out banks and companies. But Fox News was locked out. The other network news chiefs were stunned. To their credit, they told the White House to let Fox in or none of them would show up. The White House backed down.

Politico reports today: “A White House effort to undermine conservative critics is generating backlash on Capitol Hill – and not just from Republicans.” Many moderate Democrats are increasingly concerned about the White House’s heavy-handed attacks on the Chamber of Commerce.

Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are essential to the survival of liberty. If every media outlet spouts the same “party line,” how is that any different than what the Soviets did with Pravda? But that seems to be exactly what this White House wants – to control the media as White House Communications Director Anita Dunn said.

We’re getting dangerously close to going down the slippery-slope toward a state-run media, the subject of my weekly Human Eventscolumn, which you can read here.

Hey!

Welcome to earfish.com!  If you’re new here, take a look around!  This is just a place to put my writings and share others writings regarding general politics.

The new EarFish website and design.

For those who’ve been around, I basically decided to move all the political posts off of my main site and on to its own website.  And this is it!  So far, this is only phase one.  Everything from my main site forwards to this domain now.  In the near future, my main site will relaunch with a new design (and a wicked logo!) as a site dedicated to web development, design, and online applications.

Speaking of web design and wicked logos, I designed this site!  Not completely, though; it’s based off of the White as Milk theme by Azeem Azeez, but any imagery you see was done by myself (including the logo!!).  This was really my first real logo and site design!

Please let me know what you think of the new design. And if there’s something you’d like to see on earfish.com, let me know in the comments.

From time to time, we share polling data with you that it is relevant to a hot topic and comes from a source we trust. We trust pollster Scott Rasmussen the most because he is the one of the most accurate pollsters in the business.

I mention this because the Washington Post released a poll yesterday that has been widely cited on Capitol Hill and gotten a lot of attention in other media outlets. The poll reportedly showed a major boost in public support for Barack Obama and healthcare reform. Here are the key findings:

• 57% of respondents approved of the president’s job performance.
• 57% support the government-run “public option” being part of the healthcare “reform” plan.
• Looking to the future, 51% of respondents plan to vote for Democrat candidates in the 2010 elections, while just 39% would back GOP candidates – a 12-point margin for the Democrats.

Well, there’s no polite way to put this, but the poll is garbage. The Post surveyed adults, one of the most inexact standards for polling. The problem with polling adults is that many of them aren’t registered to vote. They’re entitled to their opinions, but they don’t matter on Election Day. Polls of registered voters produce more conservative results than polls of adults, and polls of likely voters produce more conservative results than polls of registered voters.

Now, here’s the most absurd part of the Post poll: Just 20% of respondents were self-identified Republicans. Does anyone seriously believe that there is going to be a national election in which just one-fifth of the electorate are Republicans? Of course not. The Postwasn’t attempting to measure public opinion, it was attempting to manipulate it.

Scott Rasmussen polls likely voters (the folks who decide elections). Consider the difference:

• According to Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll, Obama’s approval rating stands at 47% favorable and 53% unfavorable among likely voters.
• On healthcare reform, just 42% of likely voters support the plan currently before Congress, while 54% oppose it.
• Looking ahead to the 2010 elections, Rasmussen finds that among likely voters, 42% support Republican candidates, while 37% support Democrats.

According to Emily Douglas, editor of The Nation, a leftwing magazine, Americans need to reduce consumption to save the planet, and the way to do that is to make things more expensive. Douglas toldCNSNews.com, “Yeah, I think things should be more expensive… If goods are more expensive, it stands to reason that Americans will buy less of them.”

To any rational person, Douglas’ idea is economic insanity. What she fails to appreciate is that there are jobs and families attached to the goods and services that people buy. But to many liberals, what is bad for the economy and your job is good for the environment. Unbelievably, her “logic” has become mainstream thinking in Washington.

According to the Heritage Foundation, in introducing his cap and trade bill in the Senate, John Kerry (D-MA) made this astounding statement: “The United States has already this year alone achieved a six percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.”

Kerry is conceding that a strong economy means increased carbon emissions. But, remember, consumption (economic activity) is bad. So, to meet the goal of his cap and trade bill – a 20% reduction in carbon emissions – we should make the recession three times as bad. How can government raise prices to stop consumption? Tax energy.

America’s struggling economy does not need one more tax, but that’s exactly what cap and trade is. You can read more about cap and trade in my weekly Human Events column.