Category: White House

We Are F%$#ed

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It appears that according to Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, nothing can be done with the largest majorities in a generation:

This is the emerging talking point from the White House and Congessional leadership: It is a mathematical impossiblity that Dems will ever be able to get anything done without cooperation from Republicans.

Ignoring the fate of supermajority requirements for ordinary business (see taxes, raising, budget, California, f%$#ed), the voters hate weakness.

They hate it even more when you are the ones who are supposed to be in charge.

Why bother voting for a Democrat when they are unwilling to do anything, because the tiny minority in the corner is saying nasty things.

Let me refer you, once again to Josh Marshall’s bitch slap theory of electoral politics:

Let’s call it the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry’s military service record and label him a liar. But that’s only part of what’s going on.

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.

In a post-9/11 environment, obviously, this question of strength, toughness or resolve is particularly salient. That, of course, is why so much of this debate is about war and military service in the first place.

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.

Demonstrating Kerry’s unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he’s made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

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.

This is certainly what Bush’s father did to Michael Dukakis and, sadly, it is what Bush himself did, to a great degree, to Al Gore.

In other ways, Bush’s bully-boy campaign tactics play to his strengths, albeit unstated and unlovely ones. Many of the polls of the president have shown that while people don’t necessarily agree with the specific policies he’s pursued abroad many also intuitively believe that there’s no one who will hit back harder. There’s some of that ‘he may be a son-of-a-bitch but he’s our son-of-a-bitch’ quality to the president’s support on national security issues.

This meta-message behind the president’s attacks on Kerry’s war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels.

All the silly little political orgasms over who stood and who didn’t at the SOTU speech, or how Barack Obama came off better in his tête-à-tête with Republicans does not matter.

If you cannot be trusted to fight for yourself , you cannot be trusted to fight for us.

Are these guys trying to lose both houses in 2010?

OK, I Didn’t Live Blog the SOTU

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Though thankfully, because of my Eastern European Jewish heritage, I have no hangover.

That being said, I watched, and drank every time he cock-punched the DFH’s,* so most of my thoughts are probably not that valuable, or coherent.

That being said, he did call for the repeal of the Military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, and now Valerie Jarrett is saying that he is, “committed to getting it done.”

Now, let’s see what happens when Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman get all pissy about it.

See video (11:35, and the interview with Jarret starts at about 3:05, and the exchange on DADT is at about 10:45)

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

Oh, For Pete’s Sake!!!!

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Well, I’m listening to Olbermann, and Barack Hoover, or maybe it’s Herbert Obama, I’m not sure which, is suggesting his latest bold initiative: A domestic spending freeze, which means that, with inflation, it’s a domestic spending cut.

So, is actually trying to screw up the economy and get a Republican House, Senate and White House in 2012?

Unemployment is still rising, and he’s so eager to pander to Republicans, who would hate him even if he were white, that he’s determined to play Herbert Hoover, and cut the budget in the middle of a recession.

I’m beginning to think that he’s actually Mitch McConnell’s evil twin.

[on edit]


Original Courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, with typography by mdaisey

This has been confirmed by the Washington Post, and Maddow had White House advisor Jared Bernstein on, he said that they won’t freez/cut everything, just the bad and wasteful stuff ………… During a recession……… With unemployment still climbing ……………

And they are going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff because it works so f%$#ing well in Congress today.

Seriously, I have to evoke Samuel Jackson from pulp fiction again, because the idea that they will “only” cut the wasteful stuff projects the idea that they are trying to f%$# me like a bitch because they think that I am stupid.

Hell, it’s an insult to the intelligence of Sarah Palin.

Obama Proposes a Return to Glass Steagall

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Click for full size


First Photo of Volker and Obama Together in Months

Or something very much like that.

The changes proposed are very significant, or at least they appear to be significant.

Among snap shot of the provisions are:

  • Commercial banks would be prohibited from trading on their own behalf, so called proprietary trading.
  • Commercial banks would, “would no longer be allowed to engage in trading unrelated to their customers’ interests.”
  • Commercial banks would be prohibited from investing in or advising hedge funds or private-equity firms.
  • Extending the current cap of 10% of US federally insured deposits to non-insured assets.

I think that the first thing to note here is that Barack Obama has had this in his back pocket for some time, not because he wanted to do this, but because there might come a time where he needed to, and following the Coakley debacle in Massachusetts, he felt that he had to do this

A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that, “Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street.” A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote.

I don’t think that until Tuesday, Obama understood how tremendously pissed off the voters are about the bank bailout, and the bonuses, so chalk one up for my hope that if Coakley lost, Obama would get a clue.

Of course, it still has to go through the banking committees, where the Republicans will be unified against it, and where many of the Blue Dog and New Dem corporatist pukes sit, because it’s a good place to raise money from.

His proposals will only work if Obama kicks ass and takes name in Congress, otherwise, they will remain in committee for a long time, or be watered down to the point on meaninglessness.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
†Or perhaps leaving a loophole for the Calamari bankers is considered to be a feature, rather than a bug. Summers and Geithner still work for him after all.

Full text of statement after break:

The Obama-Volcker remarks in full:

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

SUBJECT: ADDITIONAL REFORMS TO THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

THE DIPLOMATIC RECEPTION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:39 A.M. EST, THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2010

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning, everybody. I just had a very productive meeting with two members of my Economic Recovery Advisory Board: Paul Volcker, who is the former chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and Bill Donaldson, previously the head of the SEC. And I deeply appreciate the counsel of these two leaders and the board, that they’ve offered as we have dealt with a broad array of very difficult economic challenges.

Now over the past two years more than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs in the deepest recession our country has known in generations. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t hear from folks who are hurting. And every day we are working to put our economy back on track and put America back to work.

But even as we dig our way out of this deep hole, it’s important that we not lose sight of what led us into this mess in the first place. This economic crisis began as a financial crisis when banks and financial institutions took huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses. When the dust settled and this binge of irresponsibility was over, several of the world’s oldest and largest financial institutions had collapsed or were on the verge of doing so. Markets plummeted, credit dried up, and jobs were vanishing by hundreds of thousands each month. We were on the precipice — precipice of a second Great Depression.

And to avoid this calamity, the American people, who were already struggling in their own right, were forced to rescue financial firms facing crisis largely of their own creation. And that rescue, undertaken by the previous administration, was deeply offensive, but it was a necessary thing to do, and it succeeded in stabilizing financial systems and helping to avert that depression.

Since that time, over the past year, my administration has recovered most of what the federal government provided the banks. And last week I proposed a fee to be paid by the largest financial firms in order to recover every last dime.

But that’s not all we have to do. We have to enact common-sense reforms that will protect American taxpayers and the American economy from future crises as well.

For while the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it’s still operating under the same rules that led to its near collapse.

These are rules that allowed firms to act contrary to the interests of customers, to conceal their exposure to debt through complex financial dealings, to benefit from taxpayer-insured deposits while making speculative investments, and to take on risks so vast that they posed threats to the entire system. That’s why we are seeking reforms to protect consumers.

We intend to close loopholes that allowed big financial firms to trade risky financial products, like credit-default swaps and other derivatives, without oversight; to identify system-wide risks that could cause a meltdown; to strengthen capital and liquidity requirements, to make the system more stable, and to ensure that the failure of any large firm does not take the entire economy down with it.

Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.

Now, limits on the risks major financial firms can take are central to the reforms that I have proposed. They are central to the legislation that has passed the House, under the leadership of Chairman Barney Frank, and that we’re working to pass in the Senate, under the leadership of Chairman Chris Dodd.

As part of these efforts, today, I’m proposing two additional reforms that I believe will strengthen the financial system while preventing future crises.

First, we should no longer allow banks to stray too far from their central mission of serving their customers. In recent years, too many financial firms have put taxpayer money at risk by operating hedge funds and private equity funds and making riskier investments, to reap a quick reward.

And these firms have taken these risks while benefitting from special financial privileges that are reserved only for banks. Our government provides deposit insurance and other safeguards and guarantees to firms that operate banks.

We do so because a stable and reliable banking system promotes sustained growth and because we learned how dangerous the failure of that system can be during the Great Depression. But these privileges were not created to bestow banks operating hedge funds or private equity funds with an unfair advantage.

When banks benefit from the safety net that taxpayers provide, which includes lower-cost capital, it is not appropriate for them to turn around and use that cheap money to trade for profit. And that is especially true when this kind of trading often puts banks in direct conflict with their customers’ interests.

The fact is, these kinds of trading operations can create enormous and costly risks, endangering the entire bank if things go wrong.

We simply cannot accept a system in which hedge funds or private- equity firms inside banks can place huge, risky bets that are subsidized by taxpayers and that could pose a conflict of interest. And we cannot accept a system in which shareholders make money on these operations if a bank wins, but taxpayers foot the bill if a bank loses.

It’s for these reasons that I’m proposing a simple and common- sense reform, which we’re calling the Volcker rule, after this tall guy behind me. Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest or sponsor hedge funds, private-equity funds or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers. If financial firms want to trade for profit, that’s something they’re free to do. Indeed, doing so responsibly is a good thing for the markets and the economy. But these firms should not be allowed to run these hedge funds and private equities — funds while running a bank backed by the American people.

In addition, as part of our efforts to protect against future crises, I’m also proposing that we prevent the further consolidation of our financial system. There has long been a deposit cap in place to guard against too much risk being concentrated in a single bank. The same principle should apply to wider forms of funding employed by large financial institutions in today’s economy. The American people will not be served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms. That’s not good for consumers; it’s not good for the economy. And through this policy, that is an outcome we will avoid.

And my message to members of Congress of both parties is that we have to get this done. And my message to leaders of the financial industry is to work with us, and not against us, on needed reforms. I welcome constructive input from folks in the financial sector. But what we’ve seen so far in recent weeks is an army of industry lobbyists from Wall Street descending on Capitol Hill to try and block basic and common-sense rules of the road that would protect our economy and the American people.

So if these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have. And my resolve is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices in some of the very firms fighting reform; when I see soaring profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms claiming that they can’t lend more to small businesses, they can’t keep credit- card rates low, they can’t pay a fee to refund taxpayers for the bailout without passing on the cost to shareholders or customers. That’s the claims they’re making.

It’s exactly this kind of irresponsibility that makes clear reform is necessary.

Now, we’ve come through a terrible crisis. The American people have paid a very high price. We simply cannot return to business as usual. That’s why we’re going to ensure that Wall Street pays back the American people for the bailout. That’s why we’re going to rein in the excess and abuse that nearly brought down our financial system. That’s why we’re going to pass these reforms into law.

There is a Point Where Obama Moves Beyond “Looking Ahead,” and Becomes a Co-Conspirator

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Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guantánamo, and concludes that it is likely that they were tortured to death, and almost certain that there is a pervasive and ongoing coverup of the details of their deaths:

……… Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

The law, both US and international, is clear here: covering up a war crime is a war crime.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

(emphasis mine)

This is well into the territory of the SNL phony news report that anti-Apartheid activist Stephen Biko had died in custody as the result of his hunger strike, and please ignore the skull fracture, which was a result of a good faith effort by the authorities attempt to force feed him roast beef through his skull.

It is clear that there is a pervasive and ongoing cover-up of this affair within the military. It’s also clear that it is large enough that political appointees within the Department of Defense have to be giving their tacit approval of a continuing deception.

Whoever this individual is, they are, as I noted earlier, guilty of war crimes.

With the appearance of Horton’s story on the web, and Keith Olbermann’s show, everyone in the military and civilian chains of command at the Pentagon and the White House has to be aware of these issues.

If immediate action, by which I mean an independent investigation, is not taken to uncover the facts, and then these individuals, including Barack Obama, are war criminals.

I understand that the Obama administration finds investigating what appears to be a multiple cases of torturing people to death to be politically inconvenient, but political inconvenience does not excuse law breaking.

Best Prediction for 2010

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Bruce Krasting, retired finance guy, makes his predictions, and while most are pretty safe, thinks like ‘Phants pick up seats, but Dems retain majorities, and Boeing delivers a pitifully small number of Dreamliners, one is completely off the wall, and I mean that in a good way:

  • Tim Geithner will resign as Treasury Secretary. Sheila Bair will replace him.

My inclination on reading this was to go all Poppy Bush, and say, “Not gonna happen,” but based on recent events, I need to add a qualifier, and say, “Not gonna happen before November 2,” the day of the general election.

I think that Barack Obama really believes that Geithner and Summers are the best people for the job, and he believes that the American people believe this too, and it’s going to take a big clue stick, something like House Speaker David Boehner, to convince him otherwise.

I tend to agree that a change in party control is unlikely, but I think that there will be significant losses by the Dems, on the order of 30-35 seats, which will put the House in the 1981-83 dynamic, where the Democrats nominally controlled the house, but the Republicans could always peel away enough Dems to get their way.

Barack Obama Lobbies for Tax on Elderly and Labor Unions

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Yes, Barack Obama is finally taking a stand in the healthcare bill, and he is lobbying for a tax on high cost healthcare plans, as opposed to a tax on the wealthy. This means that older people, who have to pay more for health insurance, and labor unions, who literally shed blood for their health care, are getting completely screwed.

It’s also horrifically bad policy:

  • It will target a much larger swath of the population than is promised.
  • It will do little to reign in healthcare costs, just look at the Health Savings Account debacle, and the “Rand study from the 1970s found that higher co-pays and deductibles led patients to limit medically necessary care as much as wasteful care, possibly leading to more costly health-care needs later.”
  • Much of the tax revenue from this is from the completely delusional assumption that the money taken out of insurance will be returned to employees as wages by their employers.

Seriously, I knew that we had elected a center-right Democrat as president, but I am surprised that we apparently elected a Republican.

Unsurprisingly, Obama is getting some pushback from the liberals in the House, most notably Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who is saying that this clusterf%$# is his baby now, and he needs to work to make the bill better, and that this tax proposal violates Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on the middle class.

Of course, whenever a politician promises not to raise taxes on the middle class, he’s lying.

Talk About the Odd Couple

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I’m talking about Jane Hamsher Grover Norquis. who have jointly penned a letter calling for the Attorney General to investigate Rahm Emanuel’s activities at Freddie Mac, as well as his role while in congress in obstructing investigations there, with the likely goal of pushing any revelations about his activities beyond the 10 year statute of activities.

Her bill of particulars:

  • That while on the board at Freddie Mac, Emanuel signed off regarding gross financial irregularities.
  • Participating in actions by Freddie Mac to make illegal in-kind contributions to politicians in the form of hosting fundraisers, including one Rahm Emanuel.
  • Writing a law allowing the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) to fire its inspector general by dissolving the organization and replacing it, as well as the the Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB), with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
    • It should be noted that the Obama administration has refused to appoint a new IG to its successor organization, and the Obama administration has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Freddie claiming that, the report from the fired IG was “commercial information”.

Now, I understand that Grover Norquist is an bad guy, but you get coverage by getting a diverse coverage for such things, as Hamshire makes clear when she looks at some similar efforts, such as the CAF letter to delay confirmation of Bernanke until there was an audit of the Fed, which was signed by a diverse group of people including, Chris Bowers, Dean Baker, Mark Calabria, James Kenneth Galbraith, Matt Kibbe, Grover Norquist, Phyllis Schlafly (WTF?!?!?), Robert Weissman, and John Whitehead. (Neanderthals in italics)

I’ve always known that Rahm is intellectually corrupt, his actions. During the Obama and Clinton administrations, as well as his time head of the DCCC show a real hostility to anything but the most corporate of corporatist Democrats, and he has always exhibited a tremendous hostility to liberals.

Now appears that he may be legally corrupt too, but I don’t think that Obama would get rid of him short of an indictment, because the President thinks that he needs Rahm to keep the DFHs* in line.

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies
Full letter after break:

December 23, 2009

Attorney General of the United States of America
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Holder:

We write to demand an immediate investigation into the activities of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. We believe there is an abundant public record which establishes that the actions of the White House have blocked any investigation into his activities while on the board of Freddie Mac from 2000-2001, and facilitated the cover up of potential malfeasance until the 10-year statute of limitations has run out.

The purpose of this letter is to connect the dots to establish both the conduct of Mr. Emanuel and those working with him to thwart inquiry, and to support your acting speedily so that the statute of limitations does not run out before the Justice Department is able to empanel a grand jury.

The New York Times reports that the administration is negotiating to double the commitments to Fannie and Freddie for a total of $800 billion by December 31, in order to avoid the congressional approval that would be needed after that date. But there currently is no Inspector General exercising independent oversight of these entities. Acting Inspector General Ed Kelly was stripped of his authority earlier this year by the Justice Department, relying on a loophole in a bill Mr. Emanuel cosponsored and pushed through Congress shortly before he left for the White House. This effectively ended Mr. Kelly’s investigation into what happened at Fannie and Freddie.

Since that time, despite multiple warnings by Congress that having no independent Inspector General for a federal agency that oversees $6 trillion in mortgages is a serious oversight, the White House has not appointed one.

We recognize that these are extremely serious accusations, but the stonewalling by Mr. Emanuel and the White House has left us with no other redress. A 2003 report by Freddie Mac’s regulator indicated that Freddie Mac executives had informed the board of their intention to misstate the earnings to insure their own bonuses during the time Mr. Emanuel was a director. But the White House refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request from the Chicago Tribune for those board minutes on the grounds that Freddie Mac was a “commercial” entity, even though it was wholly owned by the government at the time the request was made.

If the Treasury approves the $800 billion commitment to Fannie and Freddie by the end of the year, it will mean that under the influence of Rahm Emanuel, the White House is moving a trillion-dollar slush fund into corruption-riddled companies with no oversight in place. This will allow Fannie and Freddie to continue to purchase more toxic assets from banks, acting as a back-door increase of the TARP without congressional approval.

Before the White House commits any more money to Fannie and Freddie, we call on the Public Integrity Section in the Justice Department to begin an investigation into the cause of Fannie and Freddie’s conservatorship, into Rahm Emanuel’s activities on the board of Freddie Mac (including any violations of his fiduciary duties to shareholders), into the decision-making behind the continued vacancy of Fannie and Freddie’s Inspector General post, and into potential public corruption by Rahm Emanuel in connection with his time in Congress, in the White House, and on the board of Freddie Mac.

We also call for the immediate appointment of an Inspector General with a complete remit to go after this information.

We both come from differing political ideologies. One of us is the conservative head of a transparency foundation, and the other is the publisher of a liberal political blog. But we make common cause today out of grave concern for the future of our country in the wake of corruption-riddled bailouts. These bailouts continue to rob Main Street to benefit Wall Street, and, because of that, we together demand the resignation of Mr. Emanuel, a man who has steadfastly worked to obstruct both oversight and inquiry into the matter. Rahm Emanuel’s conflicts of interest render him far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the President of the United States.

We will lay out the details further below, and are available at your earliest convenience to meet with you directly.

Sincerely,

Did Nancy Pelosi Just Call Barack Obama a Bitch?

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Why yes, I think that she did just call Barack Obama a bitch.

On a slightly more precise level, what she has said is that if Barack Obama wants Democrats in the house to support him on Afghanistan, that Pelosi will not use her position as speaker to whip votes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said President Barack Obama must press his own arguments for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan because she won’t ask House Democrats to pay for the military escalation.

“The president is going to have to make his case,” Pelosi told reporters today in Washington.

The speaker said persuading House Democrats to approve a $106 billion spending bill in June to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was “definitely” the hardest vote of her tenure as speaker. She said she told Democrats her request for their support was the last time “I would ever ask them to vote for it.”

House Democratic leaders will provide briefings on funds for the additional troops, and members “will have the information” they need to make a decision, she said. “But this, for members, is a vote of conscience.”

I’m sure Steny Hoyer, 2nd in command as House Majority Leader, will continue to whip the vote, but this is a big deal.

I expect the bill to pass anyway, since the Republicans will always vote pro war, but much like during our private little war in South East Asia in 1968, it’s the Democrats who are opposing it, and much like that private little war in South East Asia in 1968, they are correct in their opposition to the this private little war in South Asia.

Corruption Update: Another Bailout for Bob Rubin’s Old Firm

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Seriously. The fact that the IRS, or let’s be clear about, Timothy Geithner’s Department of the Treasury is allowing Citi to get an additional $32 billion in tax breaks so that it can repay the TARP more quickly:

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to long-standing tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and a few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.

By way of comparison, the government invested $45 billion in Citi, which has, through various means, converted into common stock at above market valuations.

So, it now appears that we are paying Citi to pay us back the TARP money, $32 billion in tax deductions, so that they can pay back the $20 billion that is still owed as debt, overpay their next CEO.

With the top corporate tax rate at 35%, this translates to about us paying them $11.2 billion to get back our $20 billion, which was earning us 8%, or $1.6 billion a year……Lovely deal, huh?

I’m calling corruption on this.

I’m not sure if anyone in the White House is personally getting rich on this, but, much like the recently deceased Yegor Gaidar in Russia, they are creating and maintaining a corrupt system.

I’m sure, like Gaidar, they see themselves as heroic, but they are looting the United States.

Lieberman and Obama, and the Shark that They Jumped

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Click for full size

This is one big shark that he jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

It appears that the excessive wankerage of Joseph Lieberman on healthcare has even gotten the Villagers, specifically nepotism affirmative action hire Luke Russert (video at link), and wannabe villager Ezra Klein to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, Joseph Lieberman is not acting out of moral conviction, but instead is acting out of a need for revenge.

When you have guys like this calling Joe Lieberman small and petty, and, well basically evil, Holy Joe has done more than jump a shark, he’s jumped the shark, specifically, he’s jumping C. Megalodon*.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are getting a clue on this, or that they understand that Joe just wants to turn the knife, and will keep pulling the football away, because his goal is to punish liberals for not recognizing his brilliance and moral superiority over the past 9 years.

Harry Reid, no doubt wanting to avoid Chris Dodd’s fate, where Dodd was hung out to dry by the administration for doing Geithner’s bidding and putting in a loophole on banker salaries, is now leaking like a seive, with sources who are clearly from his office saying that, Rahm Emanuel personally pressured Reid give in to Lieberman’s extortion. (See also here and here here)

As a result of this, 81% Of Dememocrats want Lieberman’s chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee pulled, which to my mind, would be a good thing, because the Senate Democrats would have to start learning to live with 50+ the Vice President to pass a bill, and people like Lieberman (and Lincoln and Baucus) would be told to go pound sand.

If you want any more evidence of bad faith, Lieberman admits that he’s flipped on the Medicare option because liberals like it:

And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.

(emphasis mine)

You see, it’s all about pissing off liberals. It does not matter if hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of lack of insurance, Lieberman wants to punish liberals.

Joe Lieberman is a venal sociopath.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Wanker of the Day

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Tim Fernholz.

He goes goes after Matt Taibbi on his latest article, which I called a jem, and Taibbi responds, basically blowing him out of the water, and acknowledging one minor error, confusing diplomat James Rubin, and Robert Rubin’s son Jamie Rubin, though only by calling the latter a diplomat, Jamie Rubin’s role in assembling the Obama financial team is correctly depicted.

If you want the short version, I would suggest that you review Felix Salmon’s take on this tête-à-tête, and Salmon’s take is the same as Taibbi’s: that Fernholz’s criticisms are largely conjured out of hysteria:

In other words, it’s worth cross-checking everything that Fernholz says against what Taibbi actually writes, because often Taibbi simply doesn’t say what Fernholz implies that he says.

All the schadenfreude over Fernholz’s attack on Taibbi is particularly weird since they seem to actually agree with each other. Here’s how Fernholz concludes….

….

This is quite astonishing. Fernholz is basically saying that Taibbi is right, and that not only is he right but that he will now and henceforth utterly overshadow anyone else who’s criticizing the Obama administration from the left. At the same time, however, despite Taibbi’s astonishing ability to encapsulate and personify the entire group of people who criticize the administration, he’s not even going to manage to “make a dent”, because he’s not going about his job in an evenhanded J-school manner.

Major wankerdom.

Matt Taibbi is clearly polemical writer, but he gets his facts right, and he does describe the truly sad state of affairs that is the Rubin/Summers/Geithner economic axis upon which the Obama administration spins.

Obama Doubles Down for Torture

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We have another resignation from the Obama Administration, Phil Carter, and it seems to flow from the same dynamics that had Greg Craig being forced to resign 2 weeks ago.

Mr. Carter was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, which meant that he was in charge of trying detainees, and was a vociferous opponent of both Bush’s kangaroo courts, the use of evidence derived from torture, and has also been very leery of the military commissions, though he does support the use of courts martial through the UCMJ.

Carter is denying that he is leaving for policy differences, but considering the actions of the Obama administration, which has been to use military commissions to ensure convictions when they might be in doubt through tainted (tortured) evidence, I do not take his statement at face value.

More on the Exit of Greg Graig, White House Counsel

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Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine have the full rundown, but the basic thesis is that Dick Cheney started saying bad things about Barack Obama when it started to become obvious that Cheney might be in legal jeopardy if Obama did not go all out to stop all investigations and public disclosures on law breaking by Bush and His Evil Minions™.

At Firedog Lake, Marcy Wheeler hits the nail on the head when she says, “I guess Dick Cheney is right–Obama can’t stand up to terrorists. Terrorists like Dick Cheney.”

(emphasis mine)

Change You Cannot Believe In

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Well, I think that it’s becoming clear that the reason that Barack Obama is relying on Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner and Lawrence Summers as the core of his economic team is not an accident.

Not only has his economic team been captured by Wall Street, but Barack Obama has been captured by Wall Street:

If the White House and congressional leaders get their way, the vaunted new oversight council charged with overseeing systemic risk in the financial markets will actually be a house organ of the Treasury Department, lacking the independence required to challenge decisions by government regulators, among others.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) last week tried to fix that, by offering an amendment in the House Financial Services Committee that would give the council an independent staff and independent source of funding. But he was forced to withdraw the amendment after it became clear that he wouldn’t get Chairman Barney Frank’s approval, said a source familiar with the committee’s deliberations.

Let’s be clear here, this council is supposed to review not just systemic risk, but also the behavior of the regulators:

As proposed by the Obama administration, the House bill calls for the council to be headed by the Treasury Secretary, who would pick his own staff from within the Treasury Department.

But not only is the council supposed to keep watch over firms and activities that pose a risk, it’s also supposed to oversee the work of other regulators in mitigating threats and supervise financial regulation as a whole, according to the bill’s language. In short, it has a mandate to watch over everything that could possibly endanger the financial system – including inaction and incompetence by regulators.

So, why are Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™ so absolutely determined to place the centerpiece of his regulatory reform thoroughly under the branch of the executive designed to be a lapdog for large banking interests?

I do not think that Barack Obama is that stupid, that is clear, though while a candidate, and now President, Barack Obama has always been a bit of a cipher.

The answer, I think, lies in his background.

Barack Obama is literally Chicago School, as in the University of Chicago, where he taught for 12 years, and his first “big name” economic advisor is Austan Goolsbee, who is faculty there, and I think that Barack Obama is clearly very devoted to the idea that the government must be held back to prevent it from interfering with economic “innovation”.

Simply put, he is enthralled by the vision of Chicago School economics, as conceived by Milton Friedman and given flesh by Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, and so he sees his primary role in economic reform to be ensuring that it is toothless and completely controlled by the large Wall Street banks.

When Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that, “The banks own the place,” he was referring to Congress, but it’s true of the White House.

They own Barack Obama too.

The Dan Quayle Theory of Presidential Protection

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You know, the one that goes, “If you make Dan Quayle your VP, then no one in their right mind will try to remove you from office for your role selling arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds to the Contras.”

Come to think of it, Ronald Reagan had a very similar policy…Thanks a lot, little Mikey Dukkakis.

In any case, I heard a leak that I hope is being motivated by the same dynamic.

I don’t know that it is, but I do know that when I heard this, I got that look on my face that my older brother says, “Looks like a cow that just stepped on its own udder.”

The leak is that the Obama administration is looking for a potential replacement for Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner have already begun.

Since the criticism of him is that he’s too close to the big banks and Wall Street, and too lenient on them as a result, the word on the street is that his replacement will be……

Wait for it………

Wait for it………

Wait for it………

Wait for it………

Wait for it………

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon:

As support for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wanes on Capitol Hill amid frustration with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is emerging as a potential replacement.

Sources tell The Post that a number of policy makers have begun mentioning Dimon as a successor to Geithner, whose standing in Washington has suffered because of the country’s high unemployment rate, the weakness of the dollar, the slow pace of the recovery and the government’s mounting deficit.

Great googly moogly.

Of Course It’s Rahm

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

The House Hispanic Caucus is blaming Rahm Emanuel for the efforts to completely exclude illegal aliens from the health care system.

While I understand the argument that illegals should not get taxpayer money, to the degree that they participate in the plan, it lowers the cost for the rest of us, so this is literally cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Rahm Emanuel, and the Obama White House, are shocked (see pic), shocked, to find that there are people accusing them of race baiting on this bill.

Well, it’s not surprising, Emanuel has been demagoguing the immigration issue, with the help of his DINO friend, and clay headed quarterback Heath Shuler for years.

It took a revolt of the House Hispanic Caucus to stop him last time.

Rahm Emanuel’s modus operandi has always been to sh%$ on Democratic core constituencies wherever possible, and this has Rahm’s fingerprints all over it.

What’s more, looking at a time-line of his career, it’s pretty clear that if Rahm wants it, it’s bad for the Democrats.