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POPSDems Feel Michael Moore's Wrath But then things get interesting -- in building his indictment against the ill-fated marriage of Wall Street and Washington, Moore zeroes in less on Phil Gramm or other GOP string-pullers than he does on White House economic adviser Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Sen. Chris Dodd. Especially Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Moore gets an on-camera interview with the mortgage officer who handled the special VIP loans provided to Dodd and other big names, which have dogged Dodd's reelection bid. Dodd had appeared to be clawing his way back onto safer political ground in recent months, as he filled in for the dying Ted Kennedy as chair of the Senate health committee. But if "Capitalism" packs them in in Wallingford and Danbury, watch out.
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POPSReid: Teddy's death "going to help us" Amazing man. Kennedy's death, in Reid's opinion, is to the Dems benefit and Dodd and/or Harkin ('whichever one wants it can have it') will fill Kennedy's chairmanship. Congress at it's finest. s/off!!!
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POPSDodd, Conrad told deals were sweetened These join the ranks of Rangel and Jefferson among others. Oh! that our representatives were held to the same standards and ethics as the rest of us. If all were investigated, would any be left standing?
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POPSEliminationism on parade: Coulter, Joe the Plumber, and military chaplains' leader wish for deaths As noted in the Newsweek story, last fall - as the presidential election was heating up, retired Colonel E.H. "Jim" Ammerman, in the official September 2008 newsletter of his Department of Defense approved chaplain endorsing agency, published a letter which suggested, per the advice of a fabricated Abraham Lincoln quote, that four US Senators should be be "arrested, quickly tried and hanged!!!"... The alleged crime ? - voting against a Senate bill that would have established English as the official language of the United States. Newsweek did not reveal the names of the four senators. But a May 20, 2009 Huffington Post story by Military Religious Freedom Foundation Senior Researcher Chris Rodda does: Democratic Party senators Dodd, Biden, Clinton, and Obama.
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POPSHealth care bill has lots of PORK · Subsidize community projects like building jungle gyms in parks. "Some of these programs may have value, but this is the wrong bill at the wrong time," Enzi said. "With our nation's health and economy at stake, this bill must not turn into a Christmas list for every partisan interest group in Washington." On a side note, I can't wait until Connecticut voters exile Sen. Chris Dodd to his Irish cottage next year.
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POPS Let's Play Dumbass-Nation, Shall We?
Then, the realtor has to find the buyers, in this case ‘the needy’. People who ‘need’ a home, but can’t afford to buy one on their own. Never mind how one actually qualifies as ‘needy’, or whether if someone who is simply ‘wanty’ makes the cut. (I never could figure the distinction between ‘needy’ and ‘wanty’. Maybe it should be a question for the Miss U.S.A. Pageant.) Let’s just assume that one has to offer proof that they need a home and are deficiently qualified to get the home that they are completely unqualified to buy. Hmmm…this sounds vaguely familiar. Haven’t we seen this sort of thing just recently? I’m thinking Freddie Mac…Fannie Mae…Chris Dodd…Barney Frank…Pelosi-Reid Disease…. And could any of this plan in Riverside possibly have anything to do with the $25 Billion of taxpayer dollars Diane Feinstein gave to the FDIC…days before she awarded that very lucrative contract to her husband’s firm, C.B. Richard Ellis to dispose of foreclosed homes?
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POPSCongress Should Wear T-Shirts with Endorsements Lawmakers should fork over all campaign contributions received from TARP-taking banks. These institutions doled out $114 million in the past year for lobbying and campaign contributions, according to CRP. Add that to the $50 million in AIG bonuses already returned by recipients, and we could put this whole bonus kerfuffle to rest. It turns out the $114 million was money well spent. It bought the banks $295.2 billion in TARP money, a return of more than 258,000 percent. Who needs off-balance-sheet vehicles when the government can provide that kind of return on investment?
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POPSCongress Should Wear T-Shirts With Endorsements With Congress pounding away at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for more transparency, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatening to release the names of the AIG bonus recipients -- an invasion of privacy that has no relevance to anything -- isn’t it time Congress let a little sun shine in?
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POPSWe have, sadly, been corrupted. I have to say, the worst allegation I've heard about Chris Dodd is not that he's in the pocket of banks and insurers--financial companies naturally seek to curry favor with the Senate Banking Committee, but I don't really see the case that he's sold us out for his benefit. No, the more damning case is that the Senate Banking Committee was basically non-functional in the early part of the crisis, because Dodd was running for president. Even if early action could have saved us money and pain later--and that's a big if--I recently heard a plausible case made that such action was made impossible by his presidential campaign. But somehow, no one finds that offensive, or even notable.
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POPSRules For Democrats Are Just Different… For Some Reason What happens if the Democrat President nominates you for Treasury Secretary (the guy in charge of the IRS), and you get caught not paying your taxes? You get confirmed, and your power is continually expanded. What happens if you’re the Democrat Governor of Kansas, and you get caught cheating on your taxes? You get named to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. What happens if the adult daughter of the Democrat vice president is videotaped snorting coke, or the adult son of a Democrat Vice president is busted for drug possession? The MSM suddenly decide that the “children” of politicians are off-limits. Sorry, Bristol, Jenna, and Barbara.
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POPSWhy Is Rick Wagoner Fired and Nancy Pelosi Still Working? Just off the top of my head, how about Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and everybody at the Department of Education? How about firing all the former Weathermen, like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, whose university salaries are subsidized by the taxpayer? Nearly every university in the country accepts government money. Is there any industry in America more in need of some "restructuring" than academia? What's Berkeley's "business plan" to stop turning out graduates who hate America?
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POPSSEN. DODD'S CAVALCADE OF SCANDAL IT'S been a rotten year for Chris Dodd. Time and again, the Connecticut senator has been caught both doing favors for heavy hitters and receiving them -- and then lying about it.
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POPSSen. Sam Caligiuri vs. Sen. Chris Dodd in 2010? A graduate of Boston College, Caligiuri also holds a master's degree from Yale University and a law degree from Catholic University. He once served as an attorney in the mid-1990s at the state Capitol under then-Gov. John G. Rowland of Waterbury. There was no immediate response from Dodd's office. Former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons is also thinking about running against Dodd, and he recently told Capitol Watch that he will be making a decision by the Ides of March.
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POPS Obama and Liberals Shouldn’t Be “Shocked” "Our elected officials are feigning shock over schemes that they themselves have overseen,” said Ed Martin, the organization’s president. “While it’s a clever PR stunt in the face of sharply declining approval ratings, two-faced politicians are not helping the American economy—and, more importantly, the American people—recover.” The ad also criticizes Congressional liberals for voting to spend $1 billion per hour and passing legislation without reading the full text of the bills video (:40) http://www.americanissuesproject.org/.
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POPSCongress owes more than blatant hypocrisy Frank, Dodd, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer could not be more sanctimonious in blaming the Bush administration for lack of regulations. Starting with the Community Redevelopment Act during the Carter administration, Democrats have chipped away at every regulation standing in the way of giving mortgages to people who could never afford to repay them. It turns out that these worthless mortgages are the root cause of our economic problems.
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POPS Cheap Political Theater by Thomas Sowell . . . . including commonsense standards for making home loans. Politicians and bureaucrats micro-managing the mortgage sector of the economy is precisely how today's economic disaster began. Why anyone would think that their micro-managing the automobile industry, or executive pay across a wide sweep of other industries, is likely to make things better in the economy is a mystery. The real point is to pander to envy and resentment against people who make a lot of money. Envy is always referred to by its political alias, "social justice." But to put the lives of the wives and children of executives at risk for the sake of Beltway grandstanding shows how low our political saviors have sunk. We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us-- This political theater is in one sense cheap beyond words. In another sense, it is costly beyond words.
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POPSComrade Obama Clinton administration when it imposed affirmative action standards on lending practices. For this, we have to thank Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and the woebegone Harry Reid. These are the ones Obama can thank for his inheritance. Frankly, they should all be in jail. Using Bush as a scapegoat is getting boring particularly when federal revenues actually reached all-time highs during his tenure. Anyone for tax cuts?! Anyone? Anyone at all? Clearly Obama is making a bad situation much worse. The Dow is more concerned with what lies in the future under Comrade Obama than with what happened under President Bush. It understands when a politician is far more interested in the redistribution of wealth than in the creation of it. Worse still, he uses beguiling rhetoric to dupe his audience and to camouflage the enormous disparity between what he says and the aspirations ostensibly entertained.
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POPSAdministration Enabled Bonuses So They Could Stoke Populist Outrage? I mean, I spent a long time to having people try to be — change it. And obviously they came. And the alternative was losing the amendment. And I didn’t think we should do that at all. BLITZER: Who asked you at the Treasury Department to do it? DODD: Well, they were people, obviously, coming and negotiating with the staffs back and forth. And I don’t know their names specifically, it was at a staff level, people were talking about it. Gee, would this be the same Treasury Department from the same administration that were “shaking with outrage” over these very bonuses? Dodd’s a liar, but he’s not the only one in this debacle. A conspiratorially-minded person might conclude that the administration deliberately enabled the bonuses so they could stoke populist outrage and push through more of their anti-business agenda. H/T suitably flip
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POPSDon't Let Our Tax Money go to Undeserved Executive Bonuses! Like many Americans I’m outraged over AIG’s recent announcement that they will use our bailout money to pay over $400 million in bonuses for their staff and executives. We have invested over $170 billion in this corporation, and taxpayers now own over 80% of the company as a whole. I’m encouraged by President Obama’s recent calls for the Treasury to use ‘all legal options’ to block these extravagant bonuses. I also know that several members of both chambers of Congress – including Senator Dodd and Representative Frank who chair relevant committees - are considering measures that would stop the bonuses from being paid, and more importantly that might prevent these sort of debacles in the future. I want to know I can count on you to publicly support the best ideas for getting our money back, and preventing these problems in the future. Sincerely,
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POPSWhy Not Appoint Chris Dodd As Gift Czar? I was at Hillsdale College last week, and one of the young ladies said this would have been a totally cheesy present if you'd been given it by your boyfriend. Yet the government of the world's superpower thinks you need better "attention to detail" and an "eye on the ball" to ensure you don't give discount DVDs of E.T. and Lawrence Of Arabia to the head of government of your closest ally (and principal military partner in Afghanistan), especially when he has deteriorating eyesight and doesn't watch movies. That's not a "detail" — unless you're as narcissistically self-absorbed as the British now think the Obama crowd are.
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POPSObama’s New Deputy Treasury Secretary Tells Him "Thanks, But No Thanks" Geithner has been criticized for staffing his department too slowly as it grapples with a banking crisis that has crippled the economy. Uncertainty about Treasury staff also has unnerved financial markets. Five weeks into his tenure, he has yet to name a single top deputy or assistant secretary. This has left Treasury with too few people authorized to make decisions or represent the department in meetings with stakeholders. The department has been meeting with members of the financial services industry as it oversees the government’s $700 billion financial bailout and other parts of President Barack Obama’s financial stabilization plan. At a Senate hearing Thursday about failed insurance giant American International Group Inc. — which has received four separate bailouts totaling more than $170 billion — Sen. Chris Dodd said he had asked Treasury for someone to appear, but that no one was available.
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POPS The Obama Democrats: By The Numbers $1,000,000: the estimated amount of donations by Denise Rich, wife of fugitive Marc Rich, to Democrat interests and the William J. Clinton Foundation $12,000,000: the amount of TARP money provided to community bank OneUnited despite the fact that it did not qualify for funds, It turns out that Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), a key contributor to the Fannie Mae meltdown, just happens to be married to one of the bank's ex-directors. $2,000,000,000: ($2 billion) the approximate amount of money that House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) is earmarking related to his son's lobbying efforts $3,700,000,000: ($3.7 billion) not to be outdone, this is the estimated value of various defense contracts awarded to a company controlled by the husband of Rep. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)
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