Moe Lane

The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these.  This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were profiting unduly from legal insider trading*.  I call it ‘legal’ not in the sense that there was nothing wrong with said insider trading; I call it ‘legal’ because Congress exempted itself from the rules that the rest of us have to follow. The distinction is important.  It’s perfectly legal for, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein to buy into a biostock company just before the company picks up a fat government subsidy check, even if she knew about it ahead of time.  That’s the problem.

Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO.  Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO, right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa got somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal.  And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans.  By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it. (more…)

Allahpundit of Hot Air, upon seeing the unique spin coming from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office over news that Madame-No-Longer-Speaker is thinking of retiring:

Pelosi’s spokesman denies it, calling it “wishful thinking on the part of a right-wing blog” even though the story’s based on a quote from, er, her own daughter.

Orginal story here. Honestly, it’s not entirely unlikely that Nancy Pelosi is just now discovering why most former Speakers resign after their falls from power; Washington DC can be a cruel place. Not that my sympathy is anything except detached, of course, given the amount of debt that this woman has dumped on my kids…

[UPDATE: I've had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map.  There's been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy.  Fair enough.]

I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio redistricting map has failed miserably. That means that [a map similiar to] the map proposed earlier will now take effect: to summarize, it’s expected to result in a 12R/4D map.  Two Republicans and two Democrats (one of whom is Dennis Kuchinich) will compete against each other in primaries; a D versus R race will take place under conditions favorable to the latter; and they carved out another majority-minority seat to keep the VRA happy.  I called this result ‘subtle’ at the time; I see no reason why I should change that adjective, unless it’s to replace it with ‘successful.’ (more…)

So.  Roll Call notes this:

In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several hours with top Democratic leaders, and Pelosi invited them to speak publicly on their perspectives on economic growth.

What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.

The problem here is not that what Pelosi did here was illegal.  The Roll Call article is right: it’s actually not.

(more…)

http://weaselzippers.us/2011/12/05/pelosi-on-second-thought-maybe-i-dont-have-any-dirt-on-gingrich/

For those who missed it:

• Last Friday Nancy Pelosi told Talking Points Memo that she had all sorts of investigative dirt available on current GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich. Specifically, “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”
• So… Newt Gingrich responded today by thanking Pelosi for the early Christmas present and noting “…if she’s suggesting she’s going to use material that she developed while she was on the ethics committee, that is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House and I would hope that members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it.”
• Annnnnd now we’re being told (via Weasel Zippers) – it would be cruel* of me to use the word ‘frantically’ – that what the former Speaker of the House really meant by her comments to TPM was that there was plenty of public record information about Newt Gingrich available. Not that there was any private dirt. Nope. Not at all.
• Representative Pelosi then went on to reveal that the Red Sox had won the 2004 World Series and that Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been indicted on felony charges.

(more…)

Seriously, what the hell was he going to say?

President Obama on Saturday said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was a great House Speaker and that she will get that job back after the 2012 elections.

“I’m facing defeat in 2012 because I let this walking disaster walk all over me while she threw away what might have very well been the greatest lopsided partisan divide in American history since the New Deal?” Or “The Democratic party leadership have sworn a death oath to set blood ninja upon this woman rather than let her be Speaker of the House again?” Or even “Agreeing to being here seemed like such a good idea, before my usual blind rage towards Nancy Pelosi kicked in?” – Because while all of those statements may be accurate*, they aren’t exactly what you’d call politic. (more…)

I hate giving the House Minority Leader credit for wit – hey, I’m a partisan hack, remember? – but this was pretty funny.

In an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, Pelosi said she will “absolutely” vote yes on the compromise package, even though she agreed with one colleagues’ characterization of it as a “Satan sandwich.”

“It probably is – with some Satan fries on the side,” Pelosi said.

Via Hot Air.

Moe Lane

PS: Speaker Boehner gets off a good one, too:

After the vote, which could come as early as tonight, where does the speaker expect to be tomorrow morning?

“Hopefully hiding somewhere,” he said.

To be fair, it’s not like Pelosi has all that many caucus members available that she can just throw one away because of a potential sex scandal*.  Besides, she already threw Weiner to the wolves; what do people want, blood?  So, no calling for Wu to resign… yet.

Still, one point: no comment is fine, but no knowledge?  Tsk, tsk, tsk.

“I don’t have any comment on that at this time,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters as she left her Capitol office after a series of meetings with other congressional leaders on raising the debt ceiling. “I just really don’t know that much about it; I heard that there was some article in the paper.”

You know, it’d be nice if just once some of our elected officials would actually take the time to read up on this little topical stories that crop up from time to time.  I mean, it’s not every day that you get a media revelation where the positive spin is I had totally consensual sex with the one-third-my-age daughter of a long-time campaign contributor: I somehow suspect that the story was a popular topic of conversation around the Hill today.  Besides, it’s not like Nancy Pelosi has any input on the debt ceiling thing, anyway.  It should be safe for her to catch up on her email.

(more…)

This would be sad…

At Thursday’s White House meeting between President Obama and congressional leaders, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out in stark terms the awful economic repercussions of allowing the debt ceiling to lapse. Everyone in the room agreed that defaulting on U.S. debt would be disastrous and that something must be done. At that point, Nancy Pelosi asked: Why couldn’t the debt ceiling be decoupled from deficit reduction?

Her query, after so many weeks of reports and talks centered on deficit reduction tied to a debt ceiling deal, visibly surprised some leaders in the room, several Republican and Democratic sources say. Obama politely informed the House Minority Leader, those same sources say, that that train had left the station weeks ago.

…if it had happened to anybody else except the House Minority Leader.  As it is, it’s a glaring (or entertaining) reminder of why former Speakers of the House typically, you know, leave after they’ve been repudiated.  The woman has less power now than she did as House Minority Leader in 2005, when both Congress and the White House were held by Republicans; when a politician slips down from the pinnacle of power to his/her old position, that politician has by definition demonstrated an essential weakness.  Expecting other politicians not to note that, and act accordingly, is… foolish.

(more…)

Ed, upon news that House Democrats are discovering nobody cares about their input* (which is fully in keeping with House Democrats’ own behavior from 2007 to 2010):

“…what goes around, comes around.”

Ain’t that the truth.  They say that revenge is a dish that is best served cold.  I’ve long taken the position that revenge is a dish that is best served… served; the actual temperature can be to taste.

Moe Lane

*Even though they kept Nancy Pelosi as their leader!  Imagine that!

But before we get to the snark, let me correct both President Obama and The Hill, for the record: WE DID NOT HAVE A ‘DIVIDED’ HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES LAST YEAR. The tally was fluid, but was somewhere around 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans for most of the term of the 111th Congress; that works out to around 59% Democrats, 41% Republicans.  If that is ‘divided,’ then so is the 112th (55% Republicans, 45% Democrats).

But back to the matter at hand: Barack Obama has just doomed Nancy Pelosi’s career.  At least, I think that he did: like the Hill, I think that the below means that Barack Obama is saying that he thinks that Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House again.

“What can I say about Nancy Pelosi?” Obama told members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco on Thursday. “I think [she] will go down in history as one of the finest Speakers that we have ever had, and she is going to continue to be, in the future, one of the great Speakers that we’ve ever had.”

Hard to say, though: President Obama is notoriously inarticulate when he’s not in front of a Teleprompter. “[S]he is going to continue to be, in the future, one of the great Speakers that we’ve ever had?”  That’s not a quote, that’s a passage translated into English via Babelfish.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: It is hardly necessary to note that betting against President Obama’s predictions is, as one might say, a somewhat viable long-term strategy.  Fun to note, but hardly necessary.

It’s looking increasingly likely that Senate Democrats are unwilling to die on the hill of opposition to 4 billion dollars’ worth of cuts in the short-term emergency funding bill to supplement the continuing resolution that the Republicans had to pass in lieu of a proper budget that the Democrats refused to even offer last year – yes, that’s a bit of a run-on sentence.  It’s not my fault. – anyway, Reid doesn’t particularly want to play chicken on this one, particularly since the cuts are to things that the President pretended to be in favor of cutting anyway*.

However, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seems to have not gotten the memo, because she’s criticizing the cuts… and, by association, the President for suggesting them in the first place.  Such a criticism requires only the highest, most logical rebuttal:

Sit down, Nancy.
Shut up, Nancy.
When we want your opinion we’ll ask you, Nancy.

(more…)