Nuts you say? Rep. Alan Grayson is accusing blogger Angie Langley (http://www.mycongressmanisnuts.com/) of lying to federal elections officials and requests that she be fined and imprisoned for five years. Her lie, according to Grayson, is that she claims to be one of his constituents.

Grayson, D-Fla., is asking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation into mycongressmanisnuts.com launched by Langley (a Republican activist) that parodies his own re-election site (http://congressmanwithguts.com/).

Ms. Langley has deliberately masqueraded as a constituent of mine, in order to try to create the false appearance that she speaks for constituents who don’t support me,” Grayson writes in his complaint. “[She] has chosen a name for her committee that is utterly tasteless and juvenile.”

Honestly Rep. Grayson. Don’t you have better things to do, like help govern the country?

She has every right to her opinion, just as you do. Just like when you called a female adviser to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke a “whore”  or when you call the current health care system a “holocaust in America.” The health care system is broken in this county, no doubt, and it does need reform. But even the coldest insurance executives aren’t leading the insured to death camps. They want to maximize profits.

What we need is national leadership to change the motivation of insurance companies from the current for profit model to one of providing coverage for all Americans.  Let’s hope the reform bill gives us a start on that goal.

Charles Rangel should know by now the two truths about our political system.

Republicans have their sex scandals.

Democrats have their tax scandals.

This has been proven time and time again. All these politicians have to do is to perform a little research of history to find out where the potholes are, and simply avoid them. But no, they have to prove that they will handle it differently, or maybe they just think they won’t get caught because they will be “smarter” about it.

Well, if that’s the kind of “smarts” leading the House Ways and Means Committee, then we might be in trouble.

The House Ethics Committee announced on Thursday that it had expanded its investigation into a series of questionable financial dealings made by Representative Rangel.

Now, maybe it’s just sloppy bookkeeping on Rangels part, as he has stated before,  and not a case worthy of suspension or resignation.  After all, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had his problems, since deemed not worthy of pursuing any further. Maybe the same for Rangel.

But, Mr. Rangel has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee since last year after The New York Times reported that he rented four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem for thousands of dollars a month below market value, which some Congressional ethics experts say could be a violation of a rule forbidding members to accept gifts worth more than $100.

He subsequently disclosed that he owed more than $10,000 in back taxes because he had failed to report more than $70,000 in rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic.

That sounds like more than sloppy bookkeeping to me. I think I would remember that I had a villa in the Dominican Republic.

But, the problem at a minimum is perception of course, and if Rangel really has declared all of his “sins”, and if it truly is just carelessness, maybe it will burn out over time. And the reality is that our politicians do get breaks the rest of us don’t. Maybe not as many now as in the past, but who knows? Creativity for getting around the rules in Washington is an art mastered by many.

The Republicans are doing their part of course to keep the pressure on.

Republican House leader John Boehner of Ohio says that:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi should insist that Chairman Rangel step aside until the ethics committee completes its work. What more has to happen before Speaker Pelosi does the right thing?”

My question is, what more has to happen before all of our politicians do the right thing? We are looking for leadership and governance, not bickering and FudSlinging.

The House of Representatives today voted today to cut funding for ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The Senate did the same earlier in the week. Now the measures will be reconciled, and most likely passed.

Well, when you (ACORN) offer ways to set-up a brothel so that you won’t get caught by the IRS, you get what you deserve, and that will result in your government grant money going away, and an investigation, and maybe somebody going to jail.

Honestly, when will all of these groups wake up to the fact that helping people should be the true goal, not teaching people how to scam the system. We all have been scammed enough, haven’t we?

The video footage was recorded and posted online by James O’Keefe, a conservative activist. He was joined on the video by another conservative, Hannah Giles, who posed as the prostitute in the filmmakers’ undercover sting.

The video shows the pair approaching two women working at the ACORN Baltimore office and asking them for advice on how to set up a prostitution ring involving more than a dozen underage girls from El Salvador.

In the video, one of the ACORN workers suggests that Giles refer to herself as a “performing artist” on tax forms and declare some of the girls as dependents to receive child tax credits.

“Stop saying prostitution,” the woman, identified by the filmmaker as an ACORN tax expert, tells Giles. The other woman tells them, “You want to keep them clean … make sure they go to school.”

And we thought all we had to worry about was Death Panels and government getting its hands on Medicare.