Thursday various & sundry

The House "ethics" committee has closed its investigation on swamp monster/poor baby (!) Eric Massa, just as the scandal is starting to gather steam, causing some to wonder what the Democratic leadership is afraid of. The question of the hour -- What did Nancy know and when did she know it? From this morning's WaPo:

Joe Racalto, Massa's chief of staff, was uneasy that Massa, 50, was living with several young, unmarried male staffers and using sexually explicit language with them, one source said. But what finally prompted him to call Pelosi's director of member services, the source said, was a lunch date that Massa made with a congressional aide in his 20s who worked in the office of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

According to a person briefed on the call, Racalto was concerned that the lunch followed a pattern by Massa -- who is married and has two children -- of trying to spend time alone with young gay men with no ostensible work purpose. Racalto, according to this person, also alerted Frank's chief of staff. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the matter. [. . .]

Republicans signaled Wednesday that they wanted the inquiry to continue, despite Massa's departure. Senior Republicans in the House said the public deserves to know whether Democratic leaders were aware of the allegations of Massa's misconduct longer than they have acknowledged and whether they failed to act to protect junior staffers.

Perspective from Mark Impomeni of RedState:

Many junior staffers in congressional offices are young people, fresh out of college. Although they are not children, they are deserving of protection from sex starved congressmen who seek to use their high position to score a bit more than campaign contributions.

In other words, even if there's no more to it than what Massa has already admitted, these weren't victimless acts. (How did this creep get elected, anyway? Oh, never mind.)


In other news, a mixed message from our Campaigner in Chief:

With ObamaCare struggling to survive, Barack Obama has two messages for the American people. First, the time for talk is over. Second … he’s coming to every town he can to talk about how the time for talk is over. Not that this is a new message, mind you; whether the subject is energy independence, global warming, health care, Porkulus, or Porkulus again, Obama wants us to know that the time for talk is over.

Okay, not really a mixed message. He means the time for disagreeing with him is over, though there never really was a time for that. And the time for him to stop talking is, apparently, never.

I can't slog through another Obama speech but I got a laugh out of the first few seconds of this video from yesterday:

There's been a lot of discussion about government over the last several months, and let's face it: people have lost faith in government. They had lost faith in government before I ran and its been getting worse. President Lincoln said that the legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot do at all or do so well by themselves. That pretty much sums up my attitude: you let people do for themselves what they can do for themselves, and then if there's some things we do better together, we should do 'em together.

Emphasis added.

Don't know why he's even bothering, though, since Madame Speaker says she has the votes to pass Obamacare. Jim Geraghty thinks not:

So her plan is to what, sit around and give nervous House Democrats a lot of time to change their minds? Give those House offices more time to be inundated with calls from irate constituents? Give those Blue Dogs and red-district Democrats more time to think about how they're effectively ending their careers?

Betsy wonders:

If you were a Democratic House member and you heard Pelosi's total lie or Slaughter's extra-constitutional daydreams, would you be encouraged to believe in any promise this bunch gave you about anything?

How bad is Obama's “Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force”? Its views and goals are indistinguishable from those of the radical greens. Read Frank Miniter's NRO piece.

Opposition to the Obama agenda lives and thrives. Next up, lobby your representatives on March 16th.


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