House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer and Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Daniel Maffei, in a letter today to President Barack Obama, expressed their “growing concern” over the closings of GM and Chrysler dealerships. Moreover, the three congressional Democrats say they want to hear a “compelling justification” how closing healthy dealerships will improve the ailing automakers’ fiscal situation. The three were asking their Capitol Hill colleagues to sign their letter today.

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Rasmussen finds 58% of Americans believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos endangers the national security of the United States.

Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

Other findings:

• Americans don’t want an investigation of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. Only 28% think the Obama administration should do any further investigating of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects, 58% are opposed. Democrats are evenly divided over whether further investigation is necessary. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either major party are against more investigating.

• Just 42% of all voters say terrorism suspects were tortured by the United States, unchanged from October 2007. Most Democrats (54%) and a plurality of unaffiliated voters (46%) believe the United States did torture terrorism suspects. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republican voters do not believe torture was used.

No wonder President Obama is now backing away from investigating the Bush Administration.

No, I don’t have any updates to the FBI investigation of former Congressman Mahoney (D, FL-16) and whether he used campaign funds to pay off one of his mistresses, sorry. That’s going to be a quiet kind of story until the FBI finishes said investigation; after all, Mahoney was brutally sacrificed to the media gods by the Democratic Party desperate to have that story not derail their 2008 Congressional campaign. People who may find themselves accused of anything similar, please note: don’t count on a payback for your loyalty - even if you happen to be innocent, which Mahoney was almost certainly not.

Which brings me to my next point. Rahm Emanuel. Name was linked to Mahoney’s back then - something about sanitizing the record - but nobody in the media was interested in pushing on that for very long. But now that Rep. Emanuel is COS Emanuel, and now that we’re reminded that Emanuel’s a Freddie Mac guy who entered into lucrative contracts on the DCCC’s behalf with his landlord’s polling firm (it’s claimed that it was a complete coincidence that he wasn’t paying rent), one does have to ask: what, exactly, did Rahm Emanuel have to do with Tim Mahoney’s little payoff problem?

And can we get an answer under oath? I only ask because there’s been an awful lot of Democrats Behaving Badly stories in the news lately.

Moe Lane

Crossposted at Moe Lane.