House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called health insurers "the villains" in the unfolding story of the health care overhaul on Thursday, ratcheting up an anti-insurer theme trotted out by President Obama earlier this month and encouraged by other Democratic leaders in Congress.

"It is somewhat immoral what they are doing. Of course, they have been immoral all along how they have treated the people that they insure," MSNBC's Luke Russert quoted her as saying. "They are the villains in this."

Pelosi, of course, has accepted campaign contributions from said villains this year and in the past, as have most of her Democratic colleagues. Pelosi's campaign committee, for example, took $2,500 from AFLAC's political action committee on April 13. But she's not giving the money back just because she thinks the sources are immoral and villainous.

"As the Speaker's opposition to the health insurance companies being in charge of American's health care shows, there is no link between political contributions and positions on policy," said her spokesman Brendan Daly.

For the longest time, reporters and watchdog groups scanned House campaign finance reports almost exclusively to find out which special interests and big-name donors were funding the campaigns of powerful lawmakers.

The stories were in the receipts, in the suggestions of quids and quos.

But there has been a growing trend in recent years to look at the expenditure side of the ledger, whether for spending on Sarah Palin's sartorial splendor or Charles B. Rangel's lawyers and parking tickets.

It's not that the receipts don't make for good stories -- they continue to account for the bulk of campaign finance reporting -- but the checks campaigns write often make for better stories.