He was supposed to show up and sign bats and balls, but the owner of the show after the Republican Senator from Kentucky voted against the auto bailout.
Heh.
Category: Congress
Election Update
Well, the canvassing board has ruled, and both the missing Minneapolis ballots and the wrongfully rejected absentee ballots, which may total in excess of 1500, will be counter.
It’s a big win for the Franken campaign.
Needless to say, Norm Coleman and His Evil Minions™ are freaking out over this, and they have gone to court to prevent counting the ballots, because they are good Republicans, and a good ‘Phant thinks that counting votes is communist.
When You Get Blasted as Know Nothing Ideologues by Dick Cheney…
It’s official we are bizarro world:
Bush personally lobbied recalcitrant Senate Republicans after Vice President Dick Cheney failed to round up support Wednesday during a contentious two-hour meeting.
“If we don’t do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever,” Cheney told them, according to a Senate Republican aide, evoking the president whose inaction is widely blamed for helping trigger the Great Depression in the early 1930s.
Dick Cheney was right…I can’t believe that I said that.
Election Update
In Minnesota, it looks like there were twice as many improperly rejected absentee ballots as previously thought, so in addition to the challenges, we now have something on the order of 2,000 wrongly rejected absentee ballots.
here is the part that I do not get:
The fate of those ballots is hotly contested but unclear.
On Friday, the state canvassing board, made up of four judges and the secretary of state, will decide whether to count the votes on those ballots that election judges mistakenly didn’t count on Election Day.
If they were legal votes, why shouldn’t they be counted?
Is there something in the finer points of MN election laws that I don’t get?
This is Going to Get Ugly
Well, it appears that the Republicans have successfully filibustered the auto bailout, with the aid of Max Baucus (DINO-MT), though to be fair to Baucus, his objection was to a particularly egregious tax loophole, the SILO (Sale-In Lease-Out), which basically allowed municipal transit agencies to sell their rolling stock, and lease it back, so that companies could get undeserved tax breaks for a cash payments to said agencies.
As to the Republicans, it comes down to two things, they have transplants in their states, and they want to break the UAW.
I expect to see the Big e (Big 2½) and the transplants to start having problems with their suppliers withing a week, because if I were supplying parts to an automaker right now, I’d be demanding cash on delivery, not 90 or 120 days net.
This will get ugly, and if Harry Reid had any balls, he would make the Republicans actually stand up and talk, and not just throw up his hands when he loses the vote.
Is Cerberus Pulling a Scam on the Congress With Chrysler?
I think that the most detailed analysis of this is by Dan Gerstein, who is a a political communications consultant, and was, “Communications director to Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and as a senior adviser on his vice presidential and presidential campaigns,” so we know that he’s a professional liar (that’s what a political communications consultant is), and that he associates with people with no sense of decency (Lieberman), so it should be read with that caveat, but his explanation of just how Cerberus is taking the taxpayer to the cleaners is the clearest and most concise explanation. (I’ll have alternate links below)
The issues:
- Cerberus is chock full of Republican Party apparachicks, including Former Bush Secretary of the Treasury John Snow, who personally lobbied Hank Paulson to, “Salvage Cerberus’s investments in Detroit,” additional politically connected lobbyiests and corporate officers include:
- Bush I VP Dan Quayle
- Former Sen. John Breaux (a Dem, but very much a DINO)
- Former Bush legislative liaison David Hobbs
- Uber-Lobbyist Billy J. Cooper
- Arnold I. Havens, a former general counsel of the Treasury Department
- Christopher A. Smith, former chief of staff in the Treasury
- Conservative estimates are the Cerberus manages somewhere around $30 billion, so they have the wherewithal to float a loan to Chrysler.
- I think that the likely truth is that they don’t want to back Chrysler. They bought it from Mercedes Benz in the hopes of a quick sale to GM, classic flip and flee. Certainly the reports that they are trying for a quick sale to a Chinese auto manufacturer supports this.
- A number of Congressmen, most notably Senator Grassley of Iowa, are demanding detailed information on the financial status of Cerberus, equity warrants being sort of like stock, but are not stock, since Chrysler is private.
- They also have 51% ownership of GMAC, the auto lending firm spun off from GM, which means that they are getting taxpayer money twice.
On the bright side, what just passed requires Cerberus to put up equity warrants in exchange for the loans, equity warrants are kind of like stocks, but only for private firms, which have no stock.
Your Daily Dose of Corruption
Well, it now appears that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is ‘Senate Candidate No. 5’ in l’affaire Blagojevich, which means that either someone on his staff was freelancing, or he is looking at prosecution too.
Also, the House Ethics Committee is expanding its investigation of Rep Charles Rangel, basically influence peddling, and feeding web design jobs to his son.
On the Republican side, FBI is looking into allegations that a Norm Coleman friend, Nasser Kazeminy, laundered money into Coleman’s pockets.
House Approves Auto Bailout
The $14 billion package still has to make it through the Senate, where a filibuster has been strongly implied, if not directly threatened.
Someone from Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, etc. should call the Senators in their states and tell them that if the big 3 go down, that their supply chain gets fracked too.
When I Hope that the New York Post is Right
Fredric Dicker of the New York Post is reporting that reports of Caroline Kennedy being an unlikely replacement for Hillary Clinton in the Senate.
There are two reasons given, the first being that Caroline is at best lukewarm for the job, and the 2nd is that Patterson does not think she has the fire in the belly for the job.
I tend to believe both of these assessments. Caroline is, for a Kennedy at least, intensely private and not particularly assertive.
Additionally, there is the dynastic issue, and Caroline Kennedy has not ever held, or run for, political office, and shows no indications of any real qualifications for the job beyond her last name.
My suggestion to Governor Patterson, and it is his choice alone, would be to appoint, I’m not joking here, Elliot Spitzer. It guarantees you of two things:
- You get a real fighter in there.
- He won’t be running for reelection in the 2010 special election.
Election Update
Well, first some definitive news, Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy has beaten Steve Stivers in Ohio’s 15th district. She was behind on election night, but the provisional ballots came from her electoral stronghold, the certified vote has her winning by 2411 votes.
On the other hand it looks like Republican John Fleming has defeated Democrat Paul Carmouche by just 356 votes in LA-4.
Things are still up in the air in Minnesota, with the Franken campaign withdrawing more challenges, and Minneapolis has
called off the search for the missing ballots, and will just report what was counted on election day.
As always, it should come down to the challenges in Minnesota.
Yet More Bad Ideas from the Pension Sector
Well, it appears that those companies that still have traditional pension plans want Congress to give them a waiver so that they do not have to make contributions during this downturn.
They think that it will be too much of a burden, and it may force them to cancel these plans altogether.
Hmmmm….It seems that this problem started when they went with highly aggressive investment plans in order to minimize their contributions, and then they got caught in the dotcom bubble…..And after that, they wanted more liberal rules so it wouldn’t be a burden.
Basically, they are saying that they don’t want to buy when the market is down….which is half of the classic investment goal “buy low and sell high” as I understand it….So they are asking for permission to piss their money down the drain with a poor investment policy.
Note that GM, has largely moved out of equities, and so were largely insulated from the downturn….I would also note that this strategy also reduces the costs of managing the funds.
Is it just me, or has every “innovation” in pensions and pension funds over the last 30 years had the effect of actually decreasing return on investment.
That’s kind of like the rest of the financial sector: You get sold a bill of goods by an investment bank, and they get lost of fees, and you get the hole in the doughnut.
Deal Near on Auto Bailout
So, it looks a deal for a bailout of the Big 3 (Big 2½) auto makers is near, and once again, the Democrats have folded like a bunch of overcooked broccoli, agreeing to take the money from the fuel economy program that Congress had passed earlier.
Yeah, like you have to go and make nice to the lamest duck in the White House in my lifetime.
This is stupid, standing up to Bush and His Evil Minions™ is not only the right thing morally, but it is a win politically.
The UAW is involved in all this too, but they are showing more backbone than the Dems, demanding a significant equity stake, and possibly a seat on the board of directors, for any concessions.
“Dollar” Bill Jefferson Loses
So, the election in Louisiana’s 2nd Congressional district went to a runoff, which was postponed because of a hurricane, and Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao has defeated Rep. William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson, the man who defined “cold cash” as$90,000.00 of bribe money in his freezer.
Good.
Election Update
So, we still have about 133 ballots missing in Minnesota, but now we have some twists, with the Coleman campaign claiming that they never existed, and election officials saying that they most certainly do exist. Given the circumstances, I’d go with the election officials:
Minneapolis elections chief Cindy Reichert explained yesterday that the ballots were placed in envelopes numbered 1 to 5 — and they’re missing the “1” envelope, probably still in storage at the warehouse. The precinct has obtained a waiver from the Secretary of State to keep their recount officially open while a thorough search goes on.
If envelope “5” were missing, Coleman and His Evil Minions™ might have a case, but not for envelopes 1, 2, 3, and 4.
This entire thing gets even crazier when you discover that elections officials just found another envelope of missing ballots, but only 12-20 uncounted absentee ballots, not the 133.
Franken campaign is saying that they are up by 4 votes, but considering how random things are when the count is this close, it’s really flipping a coin, I just hope that the coin isn’t “Two Face’s” coin, because if it’s Two Face, Norm “Two Face” Coleman wins.
No.
So, now we have reports that The Obama transition team is participating in talks between Treasury and Congress over the 2nd $350 billion installment of baulout money.
More accurately, frack no.
Not only has he shown himself incapable of fixing things, he has, through his incompetence and cronyism, consistently made things worse.
Not one cent where Paulson has control.
Quote of the Day
The ever entertaining Barney Frank:
“I’m a great fan of the president-elect, but I think it’s probably the case that he’s going to have to be more assertive than he’s been,” Frank said, addressing the Consumer Federation of America’s annual financial services conference. “And I know what he says is ‘Well, we only have one president at a time. My problem is, at a time of great crisis and [massive] mortgage foreclosures. … I am afraid that overstates the number of presidents.”
(emphasis mine)
I need to clean my screen now.
2010 Midterms Update
We now have rumors of more Republican retirements, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and George Voinovich of Ohio, though a spokesman for the latter denied this.
2010 Update
Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is running for reelection.
This is the man who contracted with the DC Madame to have himself put in diapers, and he’s running for reelection.
So, why the hell is Elliot Spitzer not governor of New York again?
Automaker Updates
Well, let’s be clear here, the problem is not just that people are not buying cars from the Big 3 (Big 2½), it’s that they are not buying cars from anyone.
Year over year, we have domestic sales filling by: GM ↓41%, Ford ↓30%, Chyrsler ↓47%, Toyota ↓34%, Honda ↓32%, Nissan ↓42%, and Hyundai ↓40%.
That is simply not sustainable, and with its lack of a foreign presence, Chrysler is clearly in the worst shape of the lot.
So, we now have the CEOS of the Big 3 (Big 2½) going before Congress and abasing themselves for operating cash, along with the obligatory promise to pay themselves $1/year.
The investment bankers did not do this, and they are still getting multimillion dollar bonuses.
Chrysler and GM are still saying that they need the money to function, though Ford is still saying that they just need a loan guarantee to in case one of the others goes belly up, and it sets up a cascade of bankruptcies among the parts suppliers.
Also, the amount of money has increased, from $25 billion to 34 billion…Which is still a lot less than the $7 trillion promised in one form or another to the Wall Street set.
Election Update
Well, in Minnesota, the Coleman campaign withdrew 650 ballot challenges in response to the withdrawal of challenges yesterday by the Franken campaign.
It will come down to the challenges and the excluded absentee ballots, but I think that Franken has a slight advantage.
Also, on a sad note, Tom McClintock (R) beat Charlie Brown (D) in Doolittle’s old district in California.
A heart breaker there…Less than 1800 votes out of about 360,000 cast.