Rarely do you see such a strong statement from the Ethics Committee against one of their own, let alone a referral to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

The FEC is hopelessly broken at this stage, but the Senate Ethics Committee appears to have taken its role seriously, and they aren’t going to bury the report just because Ensign would rather run and hide than face up to his actions. They cannot fully disclose the materials gathered over the course of the investigation, but the public statement has the potential to be damning. And they could choose to make a referral to the Justice Department for criminal charges as well.

      Imagine voting on a ballot initiative and knowing that everyone who didn’t show up at the polls still got to vote—because their votes would be counted as “No.” That’s the process for airline and railway workers when they vote on whether to join a union. The election results are tallied not by [...]

ProPublica has done a comparison of the House and Senate stimulus packages which shows in stark fashion the degree to which the Senate bill steals from the poor to give to the affluent. The Senate bill gives more in tax cuts to the upper middle class–in the form of the AMT patch and the house flipping subsidy–than they give in all the programs targeted to the poor.

We really shouldn’t be calling the Senate stimulus bill the Collins-Nelson compromise bill. We ought to be calling it the Grassley-Isakson-Coburn-Collins-Bad Nelson bill, to memorialize where all the stupid comes from in the bill.