There were seventy-five votes in the House of Representatives against defunding ACORN. What if we put up a list of names and whether or not there are in-district ACORN offices. We get this:

2/3 of the votes against defunding ACORN have ACORN offices in their districts.

1/3 do not have offices in the districts.

Congressman Delahunt has no ACORN office in his district, but has one so very close that we can consider him in the yes camp.

Oh, and several of the Congressmen and a good number of congressional staff members are in Bertha Lewis’s contacts list. We’ll get to them later.

See the chart below the fold.

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If you want an indication of just how radical the Democrats in Congress have become, consider the vote on H.R. 3221. The legislation, which I wrote about yesterday, shuts down all private lenders for higher education student loans, requires that colleges and universities adhere to a new federal bureaucracy, creates a new Green Schools Czar, and hints that any school not complying will see its students denied federal student loans.

Last year, Congress passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (ECASLA). The bill passed in the House 388-21, including 221-0 among Democrats. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent. President Bush signed it. The legislation was a bi-partisan piece of legislation that allowed private sector involvement in student loans without a new federal bureaucracy.

This year, the Republican substitute to HR 3221 would extend ECASLA programs through 2014 and create a commission to develop a new private sector model for student lending. The amendment failed 165-265. 257 Democrats unanimously voted no.

Final passage of HR 3221 was 253-171. 4 Democrats voted no, 6 Republicans vote aye.

The Democrats have now rejected the same legislation they unanimously supported last year in favor of a new, expansive federal bureaucracy.

Moderate Democrats in the Senate need to consider this. The legislation is opposed by many major colleges and universities. Senators Johnson, Nelson, Casey, and Gillibrand are on notice. And hopefully Charlie Crist’s errand boy, George LeMieux, is paying attention.

I don’t know, psychologically, what it is that compels a man like Barack Obama to systematically throw under the bus every person who helps him. But he has done it again.

This will have devastating reprecussions for the House Democrats. Having pushed as hard as they could to get Cap and Trade passed in the House, the United States Senate has blocked consideration of the legislation until, at best, next year.

In a just released memo from the White House that was actually prepared months ago, turns out the White House knows cap and trade will amount to a massive tax increase on middle class families.

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”

Barack Obama has known since November of last year just how devastating his cap and trade legislation would be and he didn’t bother telling Congress.

But what is more troubling is that he knew how much harm to the economy cap and trade would do in a recessionary period and he still chose to pursue the policy.

What does that tell you? The man, facing a devastated economy, chose to pursue a policy he knew would hurt it even more.

Whoever is President of the United States is not dumb. You cannot be dumb and win the Presidency. But you can be malicious and you can lack good judgment. I am beginning to think Barack Obama has both characteristics.

It’s time for Democrats to start issuing an apology or two of their own.

They’ve spent the past week clamoring for Congressman Joe Wilson’s apology, even though the President has accepted his apology, twice now.

While Democrats will not let up on Wilson, one person who needs to not just apologize, but step down, is Congressman Charlie Rangel. Revelations continue to show that he has ignored the country’s tax laws, which, as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he is responsible for writing.

The Congressman continues to show his disregard for the law, and he should apologize, in addition to stepping down from his chairman position.

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Friday it will launch a series of district-specific radio ads targeting vulnerable Republicans who voted against President Obama’s controversial war supplemental package.

As a matter of national security in years past Republicans have shown tremendous support for similar measures, however last week they voted en bloc against the $106 billion appropriations bill.

The Democratic Leadership and the DCCC would be content to let the public believe Republicans were “playing politics” with the troops, having voted against the emergency legislation out of pure spite for the president.

Over 100 Republicans voted for the bill when the first iteration—before the $83.5 billion bill mushroomed—reached the floor of the House several weeks ago. But after the Democratic Leadership rewrote the bill to include billions in funding for lawmakers’ pet projects, including an additional $5 billion in funding for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), virtually all Republicans defected, accusing the Democrats of lacing the emergency war-funding bill with billions of extraneous pork barrel spending.

If a global bailout is to be to debated and funded, it surely does not belong in a war appropriations bill. Democrats know this, just like they knew bailout-averse Republicans would, instinctively, vote against any such measure. And then they realized they had the upper-hand, they held the coveted “you’re-playing-politics-with-the-troops” card.

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The House Appropriations Committee today debated what to do with terrorists currently detained at Guantanamo. Since President Obama is committed to closing the detention center, they must be sent somewhere. And for Congressman Schiff at least, the obvious answer is to guarantee them ‘fair trials’ in the United States.

You might think it should be obvious that terrorists should not be given the same rights as the troops who defend us from them. But then again, you might think there’d be no reason to resettle terrorists in the U.S., or to give them welfare benefits. You’d be wrong:

Republicans are trying several tactics to prevent detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from reaching the United States, introducing legislation aimed at stopping the transfer of terrorists and offering amendments to an emergency war funding bill to deny funding for closing the facility…

Several GOP lawmakers on Thursday introduced the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act, which prohibits the Obama administration from transferring or releasing any suspected terrorist detainees at Guantanamo to any state without express approval from the state’s governor and legislature. The legislation also demands the administration certify to Congress that certain requirements have been met…

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Democrats in Congress are set to draft another ’stimulus’ package — one that will waste hundreds of billions of dollars on projects that were too sketchy to make it into their first trillion dollar spending bill. They would have you believe that just like the pork-filled first bill was justified, so is this boondoggle. But it looks more like Democrats are simply too panicked about the slow pace of ‘recovery,’ so they’re looking to throw more of your money at the problem:

Democratic House members say they have less time to wait for signs of economic recovery than President Barack Obama , a conflict of timing that lawmakers say has become increasingly evident in their dealings with the White House…

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