It’s Friday. Enjoy this open thread…

A CBS affiliate in New York reported today about how Congressmen are using taxpayer dollars to lease extremely expensive luxury cars.

You may not realize it, but members of the House of Representatives can lease a car and have it paid for by you — the taxpayer. And it’s not just the car, but gas, registration, insurance … the works.

And as CBS 2 HD found out, there’s no limit on how much they can spend.

Congressman Charles Rangel was recently seen getting out of his Cadillac DeVille, which he leases for $774 per month. Then there was Congressman Jose Serrano, getting out of his Buick LaCrosse, which he leases for $317 per month. And how about this one: Congressman Gregory Meeks was recently seen waiting for Congressman John Conyers to step out of Meeks’ Lexus LS460, which Meeks leases for $998 per month.

This is actually not a new story. In fact, Mark and I wrote about this in Caucus of Corruption. We found that Democrats disproportionately chose luxury vehicles well above the average means of their constituents. Yet, public outrage doesn’t seem to last very long.

While it has not been a good week for Obama, this news doesn’t exactly make it a good week for Hillary.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was jolted Thursday by the defection of one of her longtime superdelegate supporters, a former national party chairman who urged fellow Democrats to “reject the old negative politics” and unify behind Barack Obama.

“A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue” a long, self-destructive Democratic campaign, Joe Andrew added in a letter designed to have an impact on the turbulent race nationally as well as in his home state of Indiana, site of a primary next week.

“A vote to continue this process is a vote that assists John McCain,” Andrew wrote.

Well, I say the process is going to continue. Hillary ain’t going to quit. Dick Morris believes Hillary knows she’s lost but is sticking in regardless.. but I’m not so sure. I think Hillary still believes she can pull it off.

Details over at our McCain blog…

I thought I’d lighten things up this morning and start a non-political open thread. Feel free to answer share with everyone what your favorite novel is.. IF you have different favorites for different genres, feel free to share.

Looks like Hillary’s put her foot in her mouth again… She’s now blasting Bush for not ending a project that was approved by her husband’s administration.

Hillary Clinton loves to tell the story about how the Chinese government bought a good American company in Indiana, laid off all its workers and moved its critical defense technology work to China.

It’s a story with a dramatic, political ending. Republican President George W. Bush could have stopped it, but he didn’t.

If she were president, Clinton says, she’d fight to protect those jobs. It’s just the kind of talk that’s helping her win support from working-class Democrats worried about their jobs and paychecks, not to mention their country’s security.

What Clinton never includes in the oft-repeated tale is the role that prominent Democrats played in selling the company and its technology to the Chinese. She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband’s administration.

What’s next, is Hillary going to blame President Bush for the Defense of Marriage Act? The assassination of President Kennedy?

Democrats are so hellbent on blaming President Bush for anything and everything it would be nice this campaign season for them to stop pointing fingers and blaming Bush for everything they think they can make a campaign issue of. But, that won’t happen. Democrats blame Bush for everything to cover up their own lack of leadership.

Of all the original Democratic candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had the least amount of experience. Obama has the least experience of any, hands down, yet he’s the frontrunner for the nomination… because of his “charisma.” The Democratic Party’s superficiality isn’t limited to presidential candidates though. In the race to fill the retiring Republican Tom Reynolds’ congressional seat, local Democratic leaders have endorsed a young political novice, apparently because of his charisma and the fact he is an Iraq war veteran.

Despite all gloom and doom predictions, our economy grew last quarter, albeit slightly, thus indicating that while the economy has slowed down, we have yet to enter into a recession. Of course, the technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, so, all you liberals hoping and praying for the economy to tank didn’t get what you wanted.

That said the report isn’t all good news. The real lingering question is what is Congress going to do to prevent a recession and speed up the economy again. Unfortunately, given that it is a presidential election year, I am not confident the Democratic Majority is even interested in doing anything that will move the economy in a positive direction. Their standard operating procedure is to propose crippling tax hikes, not more tax cuts — which brought our economy out of the Clintonian recession and into the longest record of economic growth in history.

This just hasn’t been the best of weeks for Obama.

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama is giving $2,300 in presidential campaign contributions to charity — money he got from Aiham Alsammarae, a dual U.S.-Iraqi citizen who posted more than $2.7 million in property to help spring Tony Rezko from jail.

Alsammarae, Iraq’s former electricity minister, gave to Obama’s presidential campaign six times in January, February and March.

“The contributions were made online,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said. Obama is giving them to charity “given the circumstances brought to light by recent news reports.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported in its Sunday editions about Alsammarae posting his Oak Brook mansion and two South Loop condominiums to help free Rezko — a onetime Obama political fund-raiser and patron — from jail earlier this month.

According to the report, Obama has had to rid himself of nearly $160,000 in Rezko-connected cash.

UPDATE: Ouch: Rezko Trial Witness Says Obama Attended Party for Auchi at Rezko’s Mansion

President Bush faulted the Democratic Congress for having done absolutely nothing about the the economy, energy, and housing bills.

“Many Americans are understandably anxious about issues affecting their pocketbook,” Bush said in a White House news conference, held outdoors in an unseasonably cold and windy Rose Garden. “They’re looking to their elected leaders in Congress for action. Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they’re getting is delay.”

Capitol Hill’s Democratic leaders said Bush was to blame for proposing policies that would worsen the problem, not help, and that it was their duty to reject them.

“His call this morning for Congress to act is disingenuous at best,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said of Bush. “Whether on energy policy, the housing crisis or our many other economic woes, this administration and its Republican allies in Congress offer nothing but the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place.”

Perhaps Harry Reid is too senile to realize this, but the Democrats are the majority party at the moment, so blaming Bush and the Republicans for no forward movement on those issues is just passing the buck when they’re the ones in control. Democrats claimed they would be leaders, but they’ve spent more time as the majority party in front of TV cameras than doing their job. Democrats have proven repeatedly that they are too incompetent to lead, and they try to compensate for their own failures by blaming Bush and the Republican Party.