Moe Lane

A colleague of mine pointed out an interesting wrinkle in this stunning news that Rep. Barney Frank (D, MA-04) has actually loaned his campaign $200K – which is, by the way, not the sign of a confident campaign – to wit, that the next 200K that Barney Frank raises goes back to him.  Not the campaign; him.

Ever want to buy a chairman of the House Financial Services Committee?  Now’s your chance!  And it’s a fire sale, folks: whether or not Barney keeps his job as Congressman in November, he’s not exactly expecting to be the Financial Chair after January.  So if you want to make a deal, now’s the time…

Moe Lane

PS: Or you could donate to Sean Bielat.  OK, so they’re not exactly trying to draw from the same financial sources.

Via DaTechGuy and Fleming and Hayes comes forty-five seconds of amusement.  For those without video access, the video below shows Sean Bielat (Barney Frank’s challenger in MA-04) being (badly) heckled by an onlooker.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWmLAqYjvLg&feature=player_embedded

Turns out that said heckler was Frank’s SO James Ready, who you might remember from the pot bust thing, or perhaps the yelling at ophthalmologists thing.   Sean Bielat, of course, you know from the suddenly giving Barney Frank a real race for a change thing. (more…)

Sean is running against Barney Frank, and any other year that might be a daunting prospect. This being 2010, and it’s sufficiently worrisome to Frank that he’s bringing in Bill Clinton to campaign for him. We talked to Sean about this, and other aspects of the race:

Sean’s website is here. Keep an eye on this race; it’s got the right combination of a serious candidate, bad national and local conditions, and an incumbent who a little too used to being in power…

Moe Lane (Crosspost)

It’s almost as if he doesn’t like people actually treating him as some sort of elected official, instead of His Excellency, Baron Massachusetts-Four.

(Via @BrianFaughnan)

How dare that commoner object to having what he said be corrected by his betters! Didn’t he know who he was talking to?

Moe Lane

PS: I almost imagine that Article I, Section 9 is beginning to grate upon certain of our legislators. To effectively have the thing, but not the name of the thing itself…

Crossposted to RedState.

(Via Protein Wisdom) How fortunate the subjects* of MA-04 are to have as their overlord someone who can make certain that the collective pain of an automotive company bailout ends up collectively pains everybody else but them:

Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) won a stay of execution on Thursday for a General Motors plant in his district that the automaker had announced it would close.

No other lawmaker has managed to halt the GM ax. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Frank oversees the government’s bailout program, known as TARP. Frank’s staff said the lawmaker spokes with GM CEO Fritz Henderson on Wednesday and convinced him to keep the Norton, Mass. plant open for at least 14 months.

GM announced Monday in its bankruptcy and restructuring plans it would close of nine of its plants and idle three others. The automaker said it would also shutter three service and parts operations by the end of the year — one of which is in Frank’s district.

Bad luck for the folks in the yet-to-be-determined plant that thought that their jobs were safe, and now have to lose them because MA-04′s subjects are special – more accurately, because their overlord is special – but I’m sure that the Democrats will find a suitably Republican district to punish.  After all, once you’ve decided that some animals are more equal than others, why not go whole hog, as it were?

Moe Lane

PS: This would be the time where I would suggest that the subjects of MA-04 should make the decision that they want to be citizens, again: only, I can’t quite make myself believe that there’s any chance that the suggestion would work.

*That should be an insult that would start fights in bars in this country; but it’s not.  Alas.

Crossposted to RedState.

The question being, “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?”

More here, and H/T Instapundit. I hope that the guy wasn’t actually expecting a substantive answer: there’s no way that Rep. Frank is going to admit that his party has been merrily contributing to our current mortgage disaster… and there’s no way that he’s going to give a definitive “no” to that question, either.  When you’ve been in Congress as long as Frank has, you learn to obfuscate, prevaricate, insinuate, and get irate when asked unfortunately pointed questions like that.

But, hey, his constituents and supporters are the types who’ll groove to hearing about right-wing deregulation conspiracies anyway, so I guess that he’s got a pretty good shtick going there.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.