Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut’s 3rd District, and her husband may be engaging in more than just marriage.

According to Human Events, federal campaign records show that, during the last four congressional election cycles, Congresswoman DeLauro’s campaign transferred $1.2 million to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the branch of the House Democrats that deals with fundraising and recruitment. During that same period of time, the DCCC engaged Stanley Greenberg, Ms. DeLauro’s husband, and his firm, for polling and other services pertinent to its political campaigns. Stanley Greenberg’s company was reportedly paid $1.9 million for services rendered to the DCCC. Note the incestuous cycle whereby Ms. DeLauro gives money to the Democratic party, which hires her husband, and, ultimately, gives the money back to Ms. DeLauro’s personal household.

For those who don’t know her, Ms. DeLauro is a powerful, liberal, close friend of Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader. Despite her position, the congresswoman is often difficult to follow when she speaks. In the video below, she responds to a question about why she was vacationing in Italy while her district was under water and without power following Tropical Storm Irene. Good luck.

While something here smells “rotten in Denmark,” stories such as this often evoke cynical responses, such as, “Everybody does it,” or “It’s hard to control who people are married to and what they do for a living,” or “It’s not illegal, it’s just unethical.”

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Liberals are already licking their wounds from the debt ceiling debate, wondering how it is that Republicans managed to get Democrats to abandon tax increases and shift the terms to spending cuts and entitlement reforms.

Though there are many conservatives who are critical of the bill that House Speaker John Boehner passed, and worried about splits within the Tea Party, the fact is that the left feels it lost the deal as well as the debate.

EPA/Stefan Zaklin

The left did lose–or, more precisely, it lost more than conservatives did–partly because it has failed to confront economic and financial reality.

In April, when Standard & Poor’s first warned of a possible downgrade in the U.S. credit rating, the White House reacted with denial. President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, said that S&P’s warning was a “political judgment” that didn’t deserve “too much weight.” (more…)

The always enjoybable Byron York has this (funny?) piece in today’s Washington Examiner:

Are you, by chance, a conservative? A Republican? Did you vote for John McCain last November, as well as the GOP candidate in your local congressional race?

If your answer to these question is yes, then you are very, very strange — and perhaps not even fully American. At the very least, you’re not one of the rest of us.

If you don’t believe it, just read “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans,” a new report by Democracy Corps, the political research firm run by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stanley Greenberg.

“The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America,” write Carville and Greenberg. Conservative Republicans, according to the Democracy Corps research, don’t trust Barack Obama; are scared by the speed with which the president and Democrats in Congress are attempting to enact new programs; don’t like government takeovers of business; and believe that many of their fellow Americans don’t fully appreciate the threat posed by the Democratic agenda.

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