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The Democrat Train Wreck Continues: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle Watch The Wheels Fall Off

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: "THE HOLLOW PROMISE REFORM ACT"

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The House's new Democratic majority is flirting with disaster as it guts key provisions of the strict lobbying reform it promised voters last November. Rebellious lawmakers, worried about their own career path, fought their leaders to defeat tighter restrictions on the sleazy, revolving-door culture by which members of Congress move on from an apprenticeship of merely serving the people to real Washington money as insider lobbyists.

"What you are telling me is I cut off my profession," one Democrat, Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, complained in baldly defending the vox pop-to-riches scheme.

Such crass considerations defeated a proposal to make congressional alumni wait two years, not the current one year, before lobbying old colleagues. Now the rebels have even bigger game - the "bundling" proposal to make power lobbyists disclose the outsized campaign funds they raise from individual clients and package as one big donation.

This vital reform, like the revolving-door pledge, was a part of the "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act" fervidly promised by Democrats last year in denouncing the quid-pro-quo corruption that saw a few leading Republicans driven from office and on to prison.

Full Story:"The Hollow Promise Reform Act"

LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL: "MURTHA'S MISSTEP"

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The Pennsylvania Democrat tarnishes the party's image and nearly receives a reprimand playing 'earmark' politics.

WITH DEMOCRATS like Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't need Republicans. After Pelosi promised that Democrats would preside over "the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress," Murtha, whom Pelosi unsuccessfully pushed for majority leader, described a Democratic lobbying reform proposal as "total crap." (He graciously added, however, that he'd support the legislation because "that's what Nancy wants.")

Murtha's latest gift to Pelosi is a confrontation in which he allegedly told Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who had opposed one of Murtha's pet projects, that "I hope you don't have any earmarks in the defense appropriation bill because they are gone, and you will not get any earmarks now and forever." Rogers, a former FBI agent, asserted that Murtha had turned the House floor into an episode of "The Sopranos," and he filed a resolution accusinghis colleague of violating House rules. On Tuesday, the resolution was tabled on a largely party-line vote, but not before Democrats were put excruciatingly on the defensive on what Pelosi has made a signature issue. Expect Republicans to continue making "Sopranos" jokes.

Full Story:"Murtha's Misstep"

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: "RECENT HEADLINES THREATEN EDWARDS' MAIN CAMPAIGN THEME"

By: Carla Marinucci

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Democrat John Edwards has eloquently established his credentials as an advocate for the poor with a presidential campaign focused on the devastating effects of poverty in America. But the former North Carolina senator's populist drive has hit a series of troubling land mines: a pair of $400 haircuts, a $500,000 paycheck from a hedge fund, and now a $55,000 payday for a speech on poverty to students at UC Davis.

The problem now facing the Democratic presidential candidate is whether the pileup of headlines, including the latest regarding hefty fees from university speeches reported Monday by The Chronicle, threatens to obliterate Edwards' dominant campaign theme. The former senator, who has been portrayed as the champion of the poor and the son of a humble mill worker, now faces the possibility that voters will have a different image: that of a millionaire trial lawyer who talks one way and lives another.

Full Story:"Recent Headlines Threaten Edwards' Main Campaign Theme"