If the Democrats perceive a cheap-shot risk, they should respond with substance: make the raped-in-Iraq-by-contractors/rescued-from-the-company-by-a-Congressman employee of Halliburton/KBR a national story, forbid federal contractors from using arbitration provisions, and bar Halliburton/KBR from federal contracts.

Payback is a bitch

Looks like the soaring rhetoric the democrats produced vowing to create an ethical congress and promising to drain the corrupt congressional swamp were lofty words with no substance behind them.

Apparently banks like countrywide are evil unless and until they are found to have been bribing democratic politicians. After they bribe democratic politicians the banks a paragons of virtue, always to be trusted, never to be investigated.

Both cases are the exact same thing: the majority party telling the minority party that it can’t hold a hearing on something it wants to investigate. You have to be seriously in the tank for one party or the other to perceive a difference.

Steve: For example?Funny how hardcore partisans have a way of forgetting how, for example, the Democrats were forced to hold a hearing on the Downing Street Memo in the Capitol basement because the majority not only refused to let them in the hearing room, but wouldn’t give them so much as a conference room.The purpose of my post was not a tu quoque, however, because I am genuinely disappointed to see the Democrats acting as childishly in the majority as the Republicans did.The voters take note of such things.

When the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee can’t do a vote related to its job of oversight and reform, on a domestic issue, you try and say it’s just like a “hearing” that was… unofficial in the first place and thus not owed any Congressional space at all?

Not official business and political theater (as a “hearing” always is), compared to a vote on the very business of a properly constituted committee, as if the two things were not just comparable but equivalent?

Very non-partisan, I guess.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren’t present.

Towns’ action came after repeated public ridicule from the leading Republican on the committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), over Towns’s failure to launch an investigation into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIPs.

I fail to see what the problem is. They could just hold their “sessions” in some storage room in the basement with no lights or microphones….

Cheers,

Steve: The purpose of my post was not a tu quoque, however, because I am genuinely disappointed to see the Democrats acting as childishly in the majority as the Republicans did. The voters take note of such things.

Well, the dems acted just as childishly before ’92, too, and they got thrown out. Prediction: The dems will get thrown out again and replaced by repubs, who will act just as childishly.

Was this really the reason the DEMS went into the basement?

Funny how hardcore partisans have a way of forgetting how, for example, the Democrats were forced to hold a hearing on the Downing Street Memo in the Capitol basement because the majority not only refused to let them in the hearing room, but wouldn’t give them so much as a conference room.

The purpose of my post was not a tu quoque, however, because I am genuinely disappointed to see the Democrats acting as childishly in the majority as the Republicans did. The voters take note of such things.

“I should have changed my stupid lock
I should have made you leave your key
If I had known for just one moment
You’d be back to bother me”

Andrew J. Lazarus: The VIP stuff is just a distraction. I think I have a VIP-type Mortgage (not from Countrywide) simply because, like highly-compensated politicians, I have an excellent FICO score. I’m willing to change my mind if someone shows me that Countrywide gave Congressmen a better deal than other top-credit customers, and so far, I don’t think there is any such evidence.

Uh, no, so far there’s no evidence, and Towns and Company want to make sure there never is any evidence. If you read the Hill story, it says that Towns wants to wait until Eric Holder’s Justice Department completes its investigation of this matter. And you know how long these investigations can take…

Towns’s office said in a statement the locks were changed on Republicans “because they don’t know how to behave their place.”

Fixed that for you Mr. Town.

And if there’s no evidence – and no one has suggested any impropriety besides the wingnuts at the Journal, NYT, and Mother Jones – there’s no need to investigate! Case closed!

This is the same crap the Republican majority pulled for all those years.

For example?

You owe an aplogoy to nursery schools all over the country.

Reputed to clock in at around 2,000 pages of dense legalese, they will propound that ‘it must be passed in a great big all fired hurry’, and anyone who wants to read it or change it before voting ( or, worse yet, vote AGAINST it ! ) is ‘an obstructionist racist who is just trying to make President Obama fail because he’s black’.