Congress smoking cash.

It’s turning out to be quite the day for fiscal revelations. The latest is Pete Visclosky (D-IN), who is celebrating his recent drop in campaign contributions with a request to use what he has remaining for his upcoming legal… expenses:

Visclosky wants to dip into fundraising to pay legal fees

Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) is seeking to confirm that he can reach into his $900,000 campaign war chest to pay his legal fees arising from an FBI investigation of his campaign fundraising.

In a March letter to the Federal Election Commission released Monday, the treasurer of Visclosky’s campaign is seeking an advisory opinion allowing the use of campaign funds to pay expenses relating to the FBI’s investigation of contributions from the PMA Group and its clients.

See also here (via Instapundit).  It’s turning out to be a month for this sort of thing. Visclosky, Thompson, Feinstein, Dodd, Moran, Durbin, Pelosi (with a nod to Harman), Summers, Rattner, Murtha… get the point?  Because we can keep going: that list barely touches the House, not to mention the executive branch. Continue reading Congress smoking cash.

Obama’s Organizing for America targets… Evan Bayh.

No, you’re not misremembering. Bayh’s a Democrat.

Fresh from their general campaign last Saturday of utterly failing to convincing Congress to do anything, Organizing for America is now engaged in regional spamming of their email lists to go after of individual legislators considered either hostile or insufficiently favorable to the President’s plan to saddle the next three generations with even more crushing, unnecessary debt. This is primarily targeting Republicans: in fact, based on admittedly extremely limited communications with other people who might get spammed, I’m concluding OFA is not generically targeting Democrats. But they did go after Evan Bayh:

OFA sent an email to Indiana residents on Wednesday asking them to phone Republican Rep. Steve Buyer, Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and Democratic Sen. Bayh to let them “know where you stand on President Obama’s budget.”

Bayh has been one of the Democratic party’s most outspoken members against President Obama’s spending, penning recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to outline his opposition to the $410 billion omnibus bill the Obama signed. He also announced he leading a 15-member working group of moderate Senate Democrats last week. Bayh said the group was informally called “the practical caucus.”

Bayh, of course, is hated by progressives – it’s one of his more endearing traits, really – and he’s certainly been on the administration’s radar since he announced his so-called “Gang of Fifteen.” While supposedly there were no public problems between the White House and the centrist Democrats over this unwillingness of the latter to blindly follow the former over the cliff*, it’s not really a secret that President Obama likes to have deniable proxies do his dirty work for him**. Which is probably why Bayh is scheduled to be personally targeted by Moveon.org, Campaign for America’s Future, USAction, and the rest of the usual suspects: apostasy is always the worst of sins to the True Believer.

Speaking as a Republican, I wholeheartedly support this activity, and think that it should be encouraged. Although I think that there are limits.

Moe Lane

*Note that they might still do it anyway.

**Eric Flint, in writing of Henry Clay in 1824: The Arkansas War:

Granted, Clay had always been a rough political fighter, even if he wore gloves. Porter had admired that trait in times past, and he wouldn’t have objected if the gloves came off. The problem was that Henry was doing the opposite as time went on. He was adding more gloves at the same time his blows were getting lower.

Crossposted to RedState.

So why did you vote for the AIG payoffs, Rep Kanjorski (D, IN-11)? [Actually, PA-11]

[UPDATE] Yeah, let me fix this.
[UPDATE the second.] Not much to fix at all, really. Just a state and a readjustment of how much money he took off of PMA. Whew!
[UPDATE the third.] And hi, Instapundit readers. Never mind the first two updates; they were mostly to fix a snide aside that doesn’t affect the main point. My karmic backlash of the day, clearly.

You’re ever-so-angry about this, to be sure:

…but you voted for the debt bill that your fellow-Democrat Senator Dodd loaded down with a loophole permitting these payments. If you’re so concerned, why didn’t you actually do something about it at the time? After all, you voted against the first stimulus bill, which I believe didn’t have this provision in it; so wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the version of the debt bill that did have AIG exemptions was more attractive to you?
Continue reading So why did you vote for the AIG payoffs, Rep Kanjorski (D, IN-11)? [Actually, PA-11]