I’ve generally been supportive of Chris Dodd. I think that he has been good on civil rights, particularly in his pushing back against torture and the PATRIOT act.
Additionally, I think that he was hung out to dry by Obama and Geithner over AIG.
Further, he was remarkably refreshing about why he dropped out of the Senate race.
Thus, Dodd proves that the only thing more corrupt than a congressperson whoring for a campaign donations to get re-elected congressperson not seeking re-election, whoring for a job.
Well, Governor, for both parties is still to close to call, but for Senator, Alexi Giannoulias is the Democratic Nominee, and Mark Kirk is the ‘Phant nominee.
Unfortunately, Mr. Giannoulias last job, his current one is as state treasurer, was as vice president of his family’s bank, Broadway bank, which appears to be circling the drain.
So the Dems just nominated someone who will be campaigned against as a corrupt banker……………This is like when the LaRuchians won the nominations a few years back, which put Republicans in just about every state wide office.
Well, if the banks problems get worse, I hear that Martha Coakley is looking for something to do.
It’s wrong on a number of levels, not the least of which is that we are going to have a double dip recession anyway, because, between new defaults in residential and commercial real estate and the increase in oil prices, the so-called recovery that we have seen won’t happen.
The bigger point though is the reason that Bernanke leaving the post would rattle the financial markets is because that they feel that if they screw up royally, then Bernanke will bail them out by pumping money into the system or slashing rates.
Wall Street is looking at a “Bernanke put,” which much like his predecessor’s “Greenspan put,” (both described at the same link) create moral hazard and encourage risk taking.
At this point, I think that the only chance that he won’t be reappointed lies with the accusations by Senator Jim Bunning and Darryl Issa that Bernanke is lying about his involvement in the AIG fiasco, and relying on those two lying chowder-heads is not something that I am particularly sanguine about.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D[INO]-AR) will oppose Dem efforts to move health care legislation through Congress using budget reconciliation, hurting Dems’ chances for using the controversial parliamentary maneuver to pass a reform bill.
“I am opposed to and will fight against any attempts to push through changes to the Senate health insurance reform legislation by using budget reconciliation tactics that would allow the Senate to pass a package of changes to our original bill with 51 votes,” Lincoln said in a statement on Tuesday. “I have successfully fought for transparency throughout Senate deliberations on health care, and I will continue to do so.”
“I will not accept any last-minute efforts to force changes to health insurance reform issues through budget reconciliation, and neither will Arkansans. We have worked too long and too hard on this reform effort – we need to get it right,” she said.
By “We”, of xourse, she means “her”, and she does not want a process that diminishes her ability to f%$# with people’s lives, because she wants someone kissing her ass.
Matthew Yglesias is right when he calls out the Senate “centrists”, and notes that they “seem prepared to resume their customary role as the villains whose consistently egomaniacal and self-destructive behavior has badly damaged the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.”
I am writing to ask you to vote against reappointing Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Additionally, I am requesting that you support a filibuster of his nomination.
While I believe that he is a very talented economist, I believe that his outlook, and his prior performance, make him unsuited for continued service in this position.
First, and most importantly, he has made it clear that he will not move on unemployment if it means moving away from a 2% inflation target by the Federal Reserve.
His statements saying that his goal was to preserve, “the anchoring of inflation expectations,” is simply dangerous and wrong in the midst of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
By expressly stating that he will choose to ignore the 2nd mission of the Federal, the maintenance of full employment, he has shown himself to be ideologically unsuited to the post.
Given that unemployment is at 10% by the U-3 measure, or 17.3% by the more representative U-6 measure, and there is little if any indication that there will be significant improvement in the jobless rate this year, this is short sighted and destructive.
Additionally, his fierce opposition to reforms of the financial system, particularly his opposition to the Financial Consumer Protection Agency (FCPA) shows that he is out of touch with the need to protect consumers from predatory institutions marketing dishonest financial instruments.
His suggestion that the Federal Reserve would fulfill this role, when it had that role pre-crisis, and refused to act on credible evidence of fraud and deception, is simply nonsense.
This is further compounded by his position on transparency at the Federal Reserve, where he is clearly stonewalling every effort for investigators to understand the nature of the financial meltdown of 2008.
The unwillingness to come clean on the failures that might have happened at the Federal Reserve Board and the regional banks means that there will be no meaningful disclosure, and without disclosure, no lessons will be learned, and this cycle will be repeated, particularly given his record of being an enthusiastic cheerleader for the housing bubble, and the associated dodgy mortgage bubble, before they popped.
The primary argument for his reappointment is that if he is not reappointed, it will somehow shake the financial markets, and trigger another disaster.
This analysis assumes two things:
That he has been thoroughly captured by Wall Street, and so the large investment banks are demanding that he kept to serve their interests, and not those of the people.
That he is simply indispensable, and as Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
If there are lessons to be learned from Alan Greenspan’s disastrous tenure, it is that the “Greenspan Put”, where the expectation of bailout created moral hazard that led to reckless behavior, and that the “Rock Star” Fed Chair is to be avoided at all cost.
In a private meeting in the Capitol just now, a dozen or more House liberals bluntly told Nancy Pelosi that there was no chance that they would vote to pass the Senate bill in its current form — making it all but certain that House Dems won’t opt for this approach, a top House liberal tells me.
“We cannot support the Senate bill — period,” is the message that liberals delivered to the Speaker, Dem Rep Raul Grijalva told me in an interview just now.
Some had hoped Pelosi would push liberals to get in line behind this approach, in hopes of expediting reform, but that didn’t appear to happen in this meeting. Pelosi mostly listened, Grijalva said, adding: “We didn’t get any declarative statement from her.”
You know, coddling Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, etc. and sh%$ing on the liberals, in both the House and the Senate can only take you so far.
Notwithstanding the protestations of beltway boyz wannabees like Steve Benen, Matthew Yglesias, and Kevin Drum, it’s not the liberals who are at risk.
They have a coherent system of beliefs, and they can honestly sell their decisions, as opposed to the Blue Dog and New Dems, who keep saying how we have to protect the insurance companies, and the liberals generally come from safer districts anyway.
One of the things that people forget about 1994 is that it was the Conservadems who got voted out.
Josh Marshall got a letter from an anonymous staffer, and while the whole letter is profoundly disturbing, the excerpt that Mr. Marshall put before the break is f%$#ing terrifying:
The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.
This is a recipe for disaster for the Democratic party, and by extension, for the country, because people want politicians to stand for something, even if it’s wrong, and the Republicans waiting in the wings are far less moderate than Bush/Cheney/Rove.
Think about that: Republicans in power who would make us fondly remember the moderation of George W. Bush.
In the aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, a lot of people are wondering what the hell happened.
The talking heads inside the Beltway are sure that it’s because Obama is too Librul™, of course, but I think that Josh Marshall talked about the core problem in August of 2004.
Let’s call it the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.
It goes something like this.
………
Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really — a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they’re tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.
………
One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.
………
Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.
………
Only now, it isn’t the Republicans bitch slapping anyone. It’s the Democrats who bitch slap themselves.
And can I say this? F*ck the Democrats. They couldn’t get s%$# done with 60 seats, why the hell would I care if they have 59? F%$# them seriously we deserve to lose Congress this year. And don’t bitch and whine about it either how much has changed since we took over in 2006? Ain’t s%$# as far as I can tell. We capitulated to Bush, then capitulated to Republicans and now are just capitulating to ourselves.
F%$# it dude, I mean Republicans get whatever the f%$# they want with 50 seats and we can’t do f%$# all we deserve to lose
(“%$#” mine, “*” original)
Fundamentally, when we look at what is going on in DC, it looks like no one in the Senate or the White House is even trying to make substantive change. (Pelosi, at least, creates the appearance that she is trying to do something)
What’s more, among the DC Dems, there has been near constant bitch slapping of the Party Base, whether it’s the capitulation on the public option, the labor union insurance surtax, or the constant drum beat of how “the left” hates the Democratic Party because they want to primary DINOs (Democrat In Name Only) who have safe seats.
The central campaign platform of the Republican Party is that government can’t do anything. The Democratic Party seems to try very hard to prove them right.
I was right with my prediction, and that sucks. Normally I’m wrong.
For the optimists, refer to my earlier take on potential positives of Coakley losing, (the bullet points toward the end of the post) but for me, this just sucks.
Two words: Budget Reconciliation.
Jon Stewart captures the essence of what is wrong with both candidate Coakley (first 5½ minutes), and the Democratic Party (after).
So, Chris Dodd, after a disastrous run for the Presidency, and 2 banking scandals, one of which was created by Tim Geithner, acknowledged reality, and announced that he was not running for reelection.
The question would then be how would this change his positions on banking reform?
One possibility is that, no longer needing the campaign donations, he would get harder on banks, and the other would be that he would go easier on banks, because he would be looking for post-Senate employment.
This isn’t just a “rearranging deck chairs” thing. If the agency is not independent, then it will be attached to another agency, most likely Treasury, which is largely an arm of the banks by design, and they will have no control over the budget and personnel requests.
So, Chris Dodd is well on his way to getting a high paying gig with a bank, or a law firm for the banks.
It’s depressing. He was my 1st or 2nd choice in the 2008 primaries, but much like Edwards, it appears that he has feet of clay.
President Barack Obama will campaign Sunday in Massachusetts for the Democratic candidate in a close race to fill the seat held by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
State Attorney General Martha Coakley is trying to hold off a surge by Republican state Senator Scott Brown in recent opinion polls before the Jan. 19 vote. The campaign, in a state dominated by Democrats, will affect Obama’s ability to move legislation through the Senate and is becoming an early test of his party’s prospects in November’s congressional elections.
Let me be clear, if Coakly loses in what is one of the three bluest states in the nation it is a disaster, and her failure will rest firmly on the head of “no gutsdrama Obama”.
Barack Obama has, for reasons that appear unclear to me, decided that the way to govern with the largest legislative majorities in something like 30 years, is to campaign against his base, and try to make nice with the VisigothsRepublicans, who are having none of it.
Fundamentally, the problem is that he campaigned on “change”, and he is remarkably supportive of the status quo, and it’s pissing off Republicans and demoralizing Democrats.
I think that she is going to lose, though my prognostic abilities have been shown to be lacking.
That’s not a good thing, though, off the top of my head, but if you want to look at silver linings there are a few:
Obama might realize that maybe he was elected to be a Democrat who changes things, and better that he learn it now, as opposed to November when the whole House and 1/3 of the Senate is up for reelection.
Of course, the “very serious people” in DC will use it as an excuse to tell Obama that he needs to go on a Jihad against the DFH’s*, and Obama, being Obama, will likely believe the Beltway Boyz.
Martha Coakley is a deeply and profoundly bad person (though better than any Republican who might be a Senator because her policy won’t quite be flat out primeval). She has always been an amazingly overzealous prosecutor, who will do her best to continue to overcrowd prisons as a legislator.
Just look at her prosecution of Louise Woodward, Ray and Shirley Souza, and her actions with regard to the Amirault case, where prosecutors basically coerced testimony out of children in yet another of those “false memory” cases of counselor malpractice.
Something gets passed through reconciliation, which cuts Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Blanch Lincoln out of the loop.
Of course, Barack Obama will try to bring Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Blanch Lincoln back into the process, so it may not turn out well either.
I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that I am right about the election.
No, that’s not how it works: When you get a subpoena, you don’t provide information that you deem “relevant” or appropriate, you turn over what they are demanding. That’s the definition of a subpoena, and so you turn over what is demanded.
All documents in the possession, custody, or control of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, relating to AIG credit default swap counterparty payments, the decision to compensate AIGs credit default swap counterparties at par, and public disclosure of the counterparty payments, including:
Emails, phone logs, and meeting notes of the following people: Timothy Geithner, Stephen Friedman, Thomas Baxter, and Sarah Dahlgren;
Term sheets, including drafts, relating to AIG’s payments to its CDS counterparties; and
Emails, phone logs, and meeting notes relating to public disclosure of AIG’s payments to its CDS counterparties, including disclosure to the SEC.
(emphasis mine)
I think (hope) that Geithner is screwed. This specifically includes Geithner’s emails and phone logs as well.
If they disclose, he gets shown to be hip deep in a possibly illegal bailout, or completely incompetent, and if they stonewall, he has no credibility.
Unfortunately, I see Geithner’s trajectory mirroring that of Rumsfeld: He only gets fired only after a disastrous mid-term election.
The normal part is a Boston Globe poll that has Democratic candidate Martha Coakleyholding a solid 15 point lead over Republican Scott Brown, which is unsurprising in this solidly blue state, but Public Policy Polling shows Brown with a 1 point lead, indicating that the real issue here is whether or not the Democrats can mobilize a thoroughly demoralized base.
The difference here has to be the criteria for likely voters.
As an incumbent, polling below 50% in terms of how people vote is a near death sentence, when your unfavorable rating is over 1½ times your favorable rating, you are in Dick Cheney territory.
The problem is not what he has done, but what he hasn’t done.
Notwithstanding the arcane rules of the Senate, his constituents expect him to kick ass and get things done, and he hasn’t. He’s been a wimp, though I think that this was largely at the request of the Obama administration, which wanted insurance company and pharma support for something called healthcare.
So, now he’s screwed, and won’t be a Senator in February of 1011, just like Chris Dodd, who got shafted by Obama and His Evil Minions™ in almost exactly the same way.
If the poll numbers weren’t bad enough, the merry band of at Politico have released a book, Game Change, in which they have the following quote from Harry Reid:
He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately. Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.
(emphasis mine)
So now we have a quote, an accurate one since Reid has apologized for it, where he sounds like a country club racist.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Now, I take anything from Darrell Issa with a grain of salt, he’s a liar, and one of the rather more corrupt Republican members of Congress, but seeing as how House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank is saying that this is “Troubling,” and he wants hearings, and both Edolphus Towns, Chairman, and Elijah Cummings, member, of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, have been screaming about getting a hearing about this, it seems that Frank may get his wish.
The big deal here is that the NY Fed took over negotiations, and paid off AIG’s swaps at 100¢ on the dollar, which is pretty much unheard of, and at the time that this information was being suppressed, Geithner was already the nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury:
This episode suggests that the NY Fed – and Geithner, then a nominee for Secretary of the Treasury – were worried about any political fallout from the swap payments. When the details were released months later (and after Geithner was confirmed as Treasury Secretary), critics alleged that Geithner had failed to negotiate a better deal for the swap payments with the Wall Street firms.
They perpetuated a fraud upon the American public and on Congress, because little Timmy wanted to be SecTreas.
Geithner was front and center in making sure that the swaps were paid off at face value, so the attempt to suppress the date was either because he was covering his own ass., or because he was incompetent and uninvolved, and the Fed bureaucracy bailed him out because they saw him as being the Fed’s Bitch*.
FWIW, I think that this was all part of the campaign by the bureaucracy of the Fed to make Geithner Secretary of the Treasury, though Felix Salmon has a point when he says that the completely over the top culture of secrecy at the central bank was has always been a flaw in the culture of the institution: Independence does not equal secrecy, though the Fed always has seen it that way.
David Dayen at FDL makes the cogent point that even if the payouts were legal, it appears that the cover-up was not legal.
Between Summers and Geithner, it appears that President Obama has made the exact same mistake that one George W. Bush did: Instead of filling his administration’s most important posts with his own people, he reached back to prior admins (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) and loaded up on incompetent retreads.
(emphasis mine)
One thing is certain though, that the case for auditing the Federal Reserve has been made much stronger by the most recent scandal.
*A good bet, since the history shows that Timothy Geithner has been the bitch of anything remotely close to a bank or a brokerage his entire career.
Encouraged by a group of influential New York Democrats, Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman from Tennessee, is weighing a bid to unseat Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand in this fall’s Democratic primary, according to three people who have spoken with him.
Mr. Ford, 39, who moved to New York three years ago, has told friends that he will decide whether to run in the next 45 days. The discussions between Mr. Ford and top Democratic donors reflect the dissatisfaction of some prominent party members with Ms. Gillibrand, who has yet to win over key constituencies, especially in New York City.
Let’s be clear what they mean when they say, “especially in New York City”: they mean that they think that they might have a chance because Harold Ford is black.
Since losing his race for the Senate in 2006, Ford has been a mouthpiece for the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) what is going on here is that the powers that be in New York, well, the DINO ones, have been “disappointed” in Gillibrand, because, as she has moved from a very conservative congressional district to a rather liberal state as her constituency, her positions have changed:
Some of the donors who have urged Mr. Ford to consider a run expressed alarm as Ms. Gillibrand, who as a congresswoman represented a conservative upstate district, has abandoned some of her previous positions on issues like gun control and immigration as she prepares to run statewide. Several executives interested in a Ford candidacy said that Ms. Gillibrand’s positions echoed Mr. Schumer’s and that the state needed a second independent voice in the Senate.
What they are saying here is that they don’t want a real Democrat here, they want a corporate whore, and that is what Harold Ford is.
Most of the opposition to Gillibrand in the New York Democratic party comes from people who think that she is too conservative for the party and for the state, but the people mentioned here, like “Financier Steven Rattner,” who ran the auto bailout until an influence buying scandal forced him out.
I’m not a fan of Gillibrand, but Harold Ford? What they hell are they thinking?
He’s leaving because he believes that it’s an uphill fight for him to win the election:
Polling in Connecticut suggested that Mr. Dodd had been hurt both by his association with Countrywide and by criticism for his role in legislation that appeared to clear the way for bonuses to be paid to executives of American International Group, the insurance firm that received a government bailout. (Last month, Kenneth R. Feinberg, who is charged with monitoring pay at companies that received taxpayer bailout funds, imposed pay limits for A.I.G.’s top executives.)
Republicans had viewed the Countrywide loans and the A.I.G. bonuses as potentially powerful weapons in the campaign.…………”
His spending a year in Iowa to run for President, and the Countrywide loan deal, which he was personally unaware of, hurt him, but what really hurt him was the AIG bonus scandal, where the Obama and His Evil Minions™, most notably Timothy Geithner, strong armed him into including a section in the relevant bill to allow the obscene bonuses, and then refused to admit the truth for weeks, leaving Dodd twisting in the wind. (See here, here, and here…………Note that the first link has my prediction that, “Geithner will be gone by June,” so much for my powers of prediction)
[on edit]I forgot to note that Connecticut Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal (D) has announced that he will run, and is now the presumptive favorite in the heavily blue Nutmeg State.
Unfortunately, Mr. Giannoulias last job, his current one is as state treasurer, was as vice president of his family’s bank, Broadway bank, which 
Harold Ford, of the deeply corrupt Ford political clan in Tennesee is