Pelosi continues with her "Double Standard"

It has been a very interesting last two weeks. I took some vacation time to spend with my dad in Oklahoma and spend Thanksgiving with my mother in New Mexico. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. If you are like me, you probably ate too much as usual whether it was the traditional turkey or big and thick rib eye steaks like my family and I enjoyed. I think I am sufficiently recovered now from the holiday.

Speaking of "turkey's" can you believe what has been happening in regards to the appointment of a chairman for the House Intelligence committee? One would think that with a woman slated to become Speaker of the United States House of Representatives for the first time in its two hundred plus year history that Nancy Pelosi would be all too happy to appoint Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the committee, to the chairmanship. Instead Pelosi snubs Harman and indicates that she will appoint Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) as chairman implying that she considered him well qualified. For those of you who do not know this, Alcee Hastings was a Federal Judge for the Southern District of Florida from 1979 to 1989 (appointed to the bench by former President Jimmy Carter as the first black federal judge in Florida). He was accused of being part of a bribery scandal in 1981. According to an article on CNN.com, Hastings and Washington Lawyer William Border were accused of soliciting $150,000 in bribes in return for lenient sentences for two other men accused in a racketeering scheme. He was acquitted of the charges in court, however a panel of Federal appellate judges found that he had lied 15 times in his trial that resulted in the acquittal and therefore warranted impeachment for bribery and perjury. For those of you who do not know what perjury is, that is intentionally lying under oath. Someone who was a lawyer and a federal judge should have known better than to do that. The US House obliged in 1988 by voting 413-3 in favor of Articles of Impeachment to remove him from the bench. The following year he was convicted in the Senate and officially removed from the bench. The Senate, however did not take the step to bar him from ever holding office again (although it should have - hindsight is 20-20), and he was elected to the House in 1992. This is the man that Pelosi was considering to be Chairman over the committee that has access to some of our nations top secrets? Fortunately for Pelosi, the uproar over this has helped her to avoid another case of "foot and mouth" disease (i.e. open-mouth-insert-foot), as she recently announced that she will pass over Hastings in favor of Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), a Vietnam Army Veteran (Uurahh!), helicopter crew chief, gunner, Purple Heart Winner and former Border Patrol Agent turned Congressman (and he is from Texas-my adopted home state). He is considered less partisan than Hastings, hopefully he will do some good, but I won't hold my breath for it. I still don't understand why Pelosi passed over Harman and was considering Hastings in the first place - considering that Pelosi was one of the 413 House members (including new Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, John Conyers and Charles Rangel) that voted to impeach him. Harman and Pelosi have been at odds before, but to pass over the ranking Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee in favor of an impeached and disgraced federal judge who was found to have perjured himself (lied under oath) and took bribes in exchange for lesser sentences from his court, in effect selling justice, to lead the committee that oversees our nations spy agencies and has access to highly classified data is unforgivable and one more example of the "Double Standard" that Nancy Pelosi and most of our elected officials live by. It also is another example of how out of touch with common sense, decency, and the people our elected officials (and most of the members of my party - the Democrats) have become. Throw da' bums out!