March 31, 2009

James Carville Conjures Up Reactions in People's Minds, Too

This post courtesy of husband-dude:

That "brilliant" James Carville is at it again. After being thoroughly routed and humiliatingly drubbed after an ill-advised and ad-hominem attack on Rush Limbaugh - he has now decided Sarah Palin needs the same treatment.

“Her name conjures up all kinds of reactions in people’s minds,” Carville told me, adding that her association with the campaign will be used to portray the GOP as hidebound and to alienate moderates. “She’s an uncomfortable figure for a lot of Republicans,” Carville says. “They want to move beyond her. We like her.”

Well, James - unlike your Democrat base that can't distinguish between that talentless hack Tina Fey and reality, we like her. So in the spirit of mutual antipathy, your name conjures up all sorts of images with us also.

Keep up the good work James!

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Government Controlling YOUR Salary?

For those of you who cheered when Congress moved to enact a retroactive 90% tax on bonus recipients at AIG (despite the fact that Congress and the President both approved those bonuses in the "stimulus" bill), perhaps you'd like to cheer this as well:

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the "Pay for Performance Act of 2009," would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to "prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards," according to the bill's language. That includes regular pay, bonuses -- everything -- paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is "unreasonable" or "excessive." And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate "the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates."

The bill passed the Financial Services Committee last week, 38 to 22, on a nearly party-line vote. (All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans, with the exception of Reps. Ed Royce of California and Walter Jones of North Carolina, voted against it.)

That's right: if you work for a company that received TARP funds, your salary could be regulated by the government. It doesn't matter if your the CEO, CIO, or the guy in the mailroom - Timothy "Tax Cheat" Geithner would have the authority to decide how much you should make. Nice, eh? Looks like the evil CEOs aren't the only ones on government's list.

Obama wants to nationalize the banks and it looks like he has plans for nationalizing the business sector - and it seems as though he has support amongst his minions in Congress. A man with absolutely no experience in the private sector, let alone running a car manufacturer, is now the de facto CEO of GM. What's next? Where will it end?

"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases." - Thomas Jefferson.

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March 30, 2009

AIG Execs 'Encouraged' to Donate to Chris Dodd

Connecticut's other senator sure has had a rough time of it lately, and it doesn't look as though things will get easier any time soon.

To add to the growing list of scandals involving the former presidential candidate, AIG's financial products CEO Joseph Cassano got the word out to other company executives (and their spouses) that Dodd was in need of campaign funds. From the Washington Times:

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was "next in line" to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would "have the opportunity to set the committee's agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

"Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority's leadership," Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

Mr. Dodd's campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

An interesting little tidbit, considering Dodd's role in keeping AIG bonuses from going bye-bye via the "stimulus" bill. Supposedly Timothy "Tax Cheat" Geithner's office had a hand in it too, but Dodd's the one with egg all over his face, especially after denying knowing anything about what is known as the Dodd amendment to the bill.

Oh, and another little tidbit, in case you didn't hear: Dodd's wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, "served as an 'outside' director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG."

Nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is that little thing called "conflict of interest."

The 2010 election should be interesting. Perhaps Dodd might want to see if his Irish cottage is comfortable year-round.

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Congress Contemplates Mandatory ‘Voluntary’ Service

Over at FSM today:

A bill titled HR 1388: The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, otherwise known as the "GIVE Act," has already passed the House by a vote of 321-105. The legislation would fund volunteer organizations, and would also recruit additional participants in AmeriCorps, as well as create new government volunteer organizations including a Clean Energy Corps, Education Corps, Healthy Futures Corps, Veterans Service Corps, and an expanded National Civilian Community Corps for disaster relief and energy conservation. Michelle Malkin has much more.
Read it here.

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Day Laborers for Sale

Tired of having to run around to find day laborers for your construction job? Worry no more!

Tasteless, yes. Funny, YES!

Click here to watch.

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March 27, 2009

The Clown Car Junta - Barney Frank

This post courtesy of husband-dude:

As one of our elected leaders who is bringing us "hope and change" we have Barney Frank. Since 1981, he has been reelected no less than 13 times to the House of Representatives! How about that change?

Barney Frank's initial appeal to the voters was his resistance to Reagonomics - in other words he was against the 25 years of growth and prosperity this country has enjoyed - and through his tireless efforts with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares a good deal of the responsibility for derailing the economy.
The Representative from Massachusetts has a reputation among Capitol Hill staffers as one of the most eloquent and brilliant speakers of the House, so in his own words, I present Barney Frank!

"And I think there is too much bloviating around from politicians."

From the AP, here's a fine example of bloviating as Barney Frank tries his hand at racial demagogery!

Frank said Monday that Republican criticism of Democrats over the nation's housing crisis is a veiled attacked on the poor that's racially motivated....
"They get to take things out on poor people," Frank said to a mortgage foreclosure symposium in Boston. "Let's be honest: The fact that some of the poor people are black doesn't hurt them either, from their standpoint. This is an effort, I believe, to appeal to a kind of anger in people."

"But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency."

But of course, there never was a problem to begin with. Frank blithely shut down any effort to regulate the mortgage finance lenders by the Bush administration because he was worried about the risk to the taxpayer! Because you see, while Fannie and Freddie were privately owned, they were protected financially by the government. What a public policy fiasco that turned into!

I don't know what's socially healthy about letting social revanchism drive Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the brink of insolvency at a cost of $200 billion to the taxpayer. After all, that money in the U.S. treasury comes from you and me. Was that the risk he was worried about?

And here is Barney Frank engaging in the calling the kettle black on CNBC.

“It seems to me that politicians ought to use the same words as other people.”

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