Moe Lane

Rep. Jeff Flake (R, AZ) spent a week on an uninhabited tropical island this summer doing survival-type activities: the Hill has the story and his journal.  It’s pretty interesting stuff; while his week was almost without incident, this sort of thing isn’t exactly easy to do, and Rep. Flake wasn’t bad at writing about it.

I think that this trip will gather a little more notice than Flake really expects, if only for the photo:

Certainly the writer of the Hill article approved: it’s not every day that the phrase “tanned and sculpted torso” appears in that publication.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Democratic Party’s more important than your little, piddling districts, you see. And much more important than your principles.

They actually sent that out as the header of an email, in response to Rep. Flake’s latest attempt to get some sort of accountability in place over earmarks and internal corruption:

As the House prepared to vote this week on Republican Rep. Jeff Flake’s push for an ethics investigation involving Rep. John Murtha and other senior appropriators, Democratic leaders sent an unmistakable message to their members:

“Don’t be a Flake.”

That was the subject line of an e-mail that staffers for first- and second-term Democrats received Tuesday from Rep. Chris Van Hollen, assistant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The message said that Democrats would once again be “voting to table another Flake resolution” — and it made clear that leadership would have its eyes on any Democrats even thinking about defecting.

This is all political, of course – well, it’s all political on the Democratic side.  The long-term Democratic Congressmen (most of whom have never really recovered from the psychological trauma of losing the House in 1994) have precisely zero interest in turning off the spigots, now that their mouths are underneath them again; and the new crop of Democratic Congressmen are well aware that it’s going to take at least ten years for them to turn into long-term Democratic Congressmen, and they don’t really have ten years.  And that the long-term Congressmen don’t really care if a few Blue-in-Red districts flip back next year.  And that the only thing keeping Democrats together in Congress is…

Well, I’m sure that there’s something. In the meantime, marvel at a situation where wanting accountability makes you a partisan ‘flake.’ A definition that I am absolutely certain bemused such long-term members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy as Democracy 21, Common Cause, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG*.

Moe Lane

*H/T Instapundit.

Crossposted to RedState.

I mention this not so much because she’s unique – she isn’t, especially among Democrats – but because she has her eye on higher office these days.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) has made it clear that she may launch a primary challenge against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), whom McCarthy deems too conservative to represent one of the most liberal states in the country.

But McCarthy may have a problem of her own to clear up before she sets her sights on higher office. McCarthy’s top contributor this cycle is the now-defunct PMA Group.

Via Instapundit. The article goes on to note that McCarthy helped block an ethics probe into PMA’s shenanigans (presumably, the one of the ones initiated by Republican Jeff Flake). Say what you like about now-Senator Gillibrand, but her name is conspicuously absent from this list…

Crossposted to RedState.

As you know, it’s in response to the PMA meltdown/outrage (see here for some background posts):

Rep. Flake targets earmarks amidst PMA controversy
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the House’s most vocal critic of pork barrel spending, is trying to shake the ethics committee into action on the link between earmarks and campaign contributors.

Flake has seized on the public corruption investigation of PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying force that has disintegrated in the wake of an FBI probe into fraudulent campaign donations to numerous members of Congress.

In the past 24 hours, Flake has highlighted earmarks in the omnibus appropriations bill for PMA clients, written a scathing op-ed to The New York Times about Congress’s pay-to-play practices and offered a privileged resolution on the House floor that would force the House ethics panel to scrutinize the connection between earmarks and campaign cash and report back to the full body in two months.

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