Moe Lane

Just saying. This should have gone to the Democrats; but, well, there’s that pesky albatross. May Nancy Pelosi stay House Minority Leader, well, forever.

Moe Lane

PS: Almost forgot.

This is the most important point to note from PPP’s gulping report of a double-digit collapse of Elizabeth Colbert Busch’s chances in SC-01 (Mark Sanford went from -9 to +1 over Busch in two weeks, and the more Republican the likely voter electorate gets in the next two days, the better it looks for Sanford):

If SC-1 voters went to the polls on Tuesday and voted for the candidate they personally liked better, Colbert Busch would be the definite winner. That’s why Sanford’s campaign has tried to shift the focus toward national Democrats who are unpopular in the district, and that’s been a key in helping him to make this race competitive again. Nancy Pelosi has a 24/61 approval rating in SC-1 and although voters don’t like Sanford, they do like him better than Pelosi by a 53/37 margin. President Obama doesn’t fare a whole lot better in the district. His approval is 39/54, and voters say they have a higher opinion of Sanford than him by a 48/44 spread.

(more…)

Surely the National Journal is asking a rhetorical question here, yes?

When Mark Sanford debated a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in his South Carolina race last week, it was a replay of a tried-and-true Republican strategy: Demonize Pelosi and wrap her like a stone around your opponent’s neck.

The tactic can be effective, torn from a well-worn playbook that dates from nearly a decade ago. But it does beg a question: Why isn’t Speaker John Boehner targeted in the same way by Democrats?

(more…)

Barack Obama (H/T: Hot Air Headlines):

“Realistically, I could get a whole lot more done if Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House,” he said as the [Calfiornian] crowd applauded.

Moe Lane:

…Which is why Nancy Pelosi is no longer Speaker of the House.

[pause]

That’s it.

Moe Lane

I admit it, I admit it: I’m kind of conflicted, here.

Disgraced pol Anthony Weiner is potentially climbing back into politics after recently spending more than $100,000 on campaign consulting and polling — and sources tell Page Six that one person he’s looking to prove wrong about him is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who urged him to resign in 2011. “Weiner is still fuming over his downfall, and he blames Nancy Pelosi,” said a source. After Weiner’s sexting scandal, he announced he was going to get psychological treatment and take a leave from the House, but Pelosi released a statement calling for him to resign after he’d informed her of his plan to deal with the situation.

(Via JMF & Instapundit)

On the one hand, I don’t want to encourage anybody to think that they should be allowed to avoid responsibility for their own actions, which is what Anthony Weiner is trying to do here. On the other hand, pretty much everything can be ‘blamed’ on Nancy Pelosi, from why the Democrats didn’t take the House back to why FISA was reauthorized.  On the gripping hand, Nancy Pelosi was right.  If Weiner had tried to brazen it out he’d have lost anyway.

So I dunno.

Moe Lane

PS: The NY Post does so love its headlines.

That’s the only possible explanation for her making this statement.

[House MINORITY Leader Nancy] Pelosi appeared conflicted over whether it was acceptable for the administration to simply disappear American citizens, a term that had previously been used as a verb only outside the United States.

“It depends on the situation,” she said. “Maybe it depends on the timing, because that’s right — it’s all about timing, imminence. What is it that could be in jeopardy if people know that happened at this time? I just don’t know.”

Oh, she knows.  She totally knows.  But there’s a limit to Nancy Pelosi’s sadism, after all.  Or at least Pelosi understands that the antiwar movement will be useful to the Democrats again once the GOP wins the White House.  Even a whipped dog can serve its master. (more…)

And this is why Nancy Pelosi will STAY House Minority Leader.

It’s because of incredibly tin-eared statements like this.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she opposes a cut in congressional pay because it would diminish the dignity of lawmakers’ jobs.

“I don’t think we should do it; I think we should respect the work we do,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”

Now, put aside for the moment the fact that the woman who said this had been making money hand over fist via legal insider trading when she was Speaker of the House, back in the day.  What makes Nancy Pelosi think that anybody – anybody – is really concerned about whether or not Members of Congress (or the people who work for them) have any dignity?  People hate Congress, and the people who work for Congress: currently, cockroaches tie Congress for popularity.  And a lot of this is due to, hey, Nancy Pelosi! – Because four years of running the House into the ground can do that to public perceptions.

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This was considered a problem?

No, really: when asked a question about the debt ceiling/so-called “fiscal cliff” today Nancy Pelosi decided to respond by talking about how she was on the side of the Eleventh Amendment.  For those of you who need reminding, that’s the one that limits the ability of federal courts to permit private citizens in one state from suing other states as a whole (they can still sue private citizens in other states).

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

Anyway, this embrace of federalism by the House Minority Leader would be great – after all, I don’t particularly want, say, Californian eco-freaks suing Texas over its oil production; and probably neither do most of the people reading this – except that I don’t believe Nancy Pelosi for a second. She’d downright love to get that tool in the progressive toolbox, frankly. (more…)

Reports are in that Nancy Pelosi will stay on as House Minority Leader and Steve Israel as DCCC chair, despite the fact that neither could ever quite manage to translate a Democratic registration advantage of +6 in 2012 into more than… hold on; let me check… six House seats, net. At best.  Which is in its way a shame: I was personally planning to speed her way out the door by thanking Nancy for all her hard work in reauthorizing FISA under the very noses of the very progressives who urged her to stay on and…

Actually, I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi plans to do.  I know that this is the point in the script where the Democrats are supposed to come up with their Big Plan to take the House of Representatives back, but the last two years have pretty much demonstrated that the former Speaker doesn’t particular ability to overcome the obstacles associated with her fall from power.  She’s just been sort of… there.

Oh, well, not really my problem.

…until I realized that she was just going for shock value, in order to try to get back some relevance.  Seriously: if somebody is telling you that the Democrats are going to retake the House this year, you need to make him or her sit down and show you the races, show why the Democrat will win… and show you why all those races that the Republicans are scheduled to win aren’t relevant.

Look, I expect the Democrats to gain seats.  In the single digits, because they’re going to be offset by a bunch of lost seats, too.  Anybody thinks that’s wrong, they’re going to have to catalog the state of the 435 House races.  This can be done – see here, here, and here – but note that those guys are all more or less saying the same thing that I am.

Yes, yes, I know: the real number is much larger.  But note the use of the word confirmed: that term was not chosen at random.  Observe, from this story about incumbent House Democrats sensibly avoiding their dues to the DCCC, thus saving their precious campaign money to save their own seats:

As of June 30, 64 Democrats — around one-third of the entire caucus — hadn’t paid anything to the DCCC, according to a party document provided to POLITICO. Another 109 members had paid only a portion of what they owe in dues, which are calculated based on seniority and committee assignments.

There are 191 House Members. Subtract the 64 who haven’t paid any dues to the DCCC and 109 for those who have only paid a portion of them, that leaves 18 Members of Congress who have paid their dues in full. And, since it is reasonable to equate “anybody who throws money down the DCCC rat-hole while Nancy Pelosi is still House Minority Leader” with “fool” it then follows that AT LEAST eighteen members of the current Democratic House Caucus are self-confessed idiots.

That’s logic, that is.

Moe Lane

Hardly a surprise on either score: after all, I’ve been telling people for years that Nancy Pelosi knew all about the waterboarding all along. So did Glenn Reynolds.  So did, in fact, did a lot of other people. So the news (via Mark Thiessen) that a new book is out claiming that then-House Intelligence Ranking Member Nancy Pelosi and then-House Intelligence chair Porter Goss were fully briefed by the CIA on waterboarding as an interrogation technique in 2002 is not a surprise.  If true, it’s very, very damning – the book is claiming that Pelosi declined to protest the waterboarding at all, while raising objections to another procedure (which implies that this old claim that she couldn’t protest is, well, another lie) – but not a surprise.

Interestingly, it may actually be more than a he-said, she-said moment here: (more…)