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DEL.ICIO.USQuestioning pork is vital in lean times
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Painful though these budget times are for legislators who, whether Democrat or Republican, much prefer to be showering the bounties of your labors on those they deem more worthy, there is much to be said for occasional hardship.
It prompts the serious to ask the questions that are brushed aside when Georgians are working, times are good and the public till is filled to excess.
At budget hearings under the Gold Dome this week, Jay Neal (R-LaFayette), a representative from the northwest corner of the state, one of the last true bastions of fiscal conservatism, asked a question of Department of Transportation Commissioner Gena L. Evans.
The commissioner had just finished a plea for more money and for a “new source of money” that is, most likely, a statewide 1 percent sales tax.
Speaking as a taxpayer looking at government from afar, Neal noted the message sent: “We understand times are tough and we have not done a good job” of solving transportation problems, but instead of adjusting, “we provide you less service and charge you more taxes.” That, he said, “is a tough sell.”
“We have shut down everything we can shut down,” replied Evans, citing travel, equipment and vehicle purchases, maintenance, and vacant and unfilled-position eliminations.
Earlier, Department of Juvenile Justice Commissioner Albert Murray was defending his bailiwick, noting that among the spending reductions is a wilderness program in Early County for troubled young males. As structured, its effectiveness is marginal, Murray said. To which, he got two questions from committee members. One questioned the decision because of its impact on a county he represented. The other wanted to know whether girls had a wilderness camp program, too.
State Rep. Ed Rynders (R-Albany) suggested that it’d be a good time to examine all programs and measure them as to their effectiveness. “In these tough budgetary times, now is the time we ought to look at every program, and if we are going to eliminate them, we should look at the data and determine their effectiveness.”
The purpose here is to make the point that spenders need the discipline of hard times, or of caps that limit the growth of government. Hard times permit, too, real insight into how bureaucrats and politicians govern when money’s free-flowing.
An example from Gov. Sonny Perdue and the DOT is a boondoggle rail project from Atlanta to Lovejoy that exists only because $83 million in federal money was earmarked. This proposed commuter rail line is a pork-barrel project kept alive because the money was earmarked and is therefore not available for actual congestion relief. It’s another reason, incidentally, to fear the proposed $825 billion “economic stimulus” program that’s about to dump money willy-nilly.
Perdue, prudently, did not divert $15.1 million in state money to the White Elephant — prompting U.S. Rep. David Scott (D-Atlanta) to go bonkers. “We have $119 million sitting there in the bank,” he said, urging reconsideration. “Communities around this nation would give their right arm to have that money.”
Evans said the department is “looking for” $83 million for commuter rail, implicitly inviting legislators to pony up.
We come now to the proposed 1 percent statewide sales tax, which would generate $74 billion over 20 years.
The burning question is: What do we buy, what actual, measurable congestion relief, do we get for $74 billion? An actual list of proposed purchases will come within weeks, she said. In total, though, the need is $250 billion, Evans said.
Hard times and short money should — combined with a plea for an additional $74 billion planned spending — produce a no-boondoggle project list that should stand up to honest cost-benefit analysis. But yet, commuter rail does survive, prompting the concern that every interest group’s wish list is the driving force behind the request for a new tax statewide.
Times are tough. People are out of work. Don’t take their money and buy them toys, and don’t take it to spend on programs that are marginally useful.
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By George W Bush
January 24, 2009 8:13 AM | Link to this
Hey, ever’body. Old Dubya here, writin’ in from Crawford.
My Dad told me that it was gonna be a letdown soons I left the Oval OFFice, but since it was my Dad, I paid him about as much attention as when that Harry Reid worm pretended he was gonna stand up to me on sumpin or other. Heh. But whaddya know about it, turns out the old gimp was right. Gimpy. Heh. I think I’ll call him that from now on, I’m pretty good with nicknames, but there aren’t any suckups hanging around, so I’ll have to start messin’ with the family.
So, Dad’ll be Old Gimpy, except when he hangs around that Clinton guy, and then he’s the New Lewinsky.
Mom will still be Mom, cause she’d wail the tar out of me if I made her mad. Heh hee hmmp heh. And Jenna will be Hot Tramp (I love that song!) and her sister will be Whatsername.
Laura is Old Stinky Drinky. No wait, better not say that. How about Froze Face? Nah, no good. Well, I’ll think of sumpin. Plenty of time on my hands, and the hell if you think I’m clearing any more of that brush. I’m my own man now. Suck on that, Turd Blossom.
By 1984
January 24, 2009 8:18 AM | Link to this
I’m partying like it’s 1999. Obama is our president. My job is done, and I now enjoy my well-earned vacation. However, I have to reveal my true political partisanship: I’m a conservative. I only blogged liberal because it’s easier to do comedy from the left. I pretended to be a democrat for the jokes, man. That offended Bookman, not as a blogger, but as a clown.
Bookman believes that people are disposable. Pregnant? Abort. Married? Divorce. He leads his liberal hoards down a path of pure hedonism; lighting the way with his red clown nose like some fluteless and fruitless pied piper.
Take heart, because Obama will eventually do or say something that will turn the liberal hoards against him; maybe he’ll claim he’s more popular than the Jonas Brothers. Maybe he’ll talk about how white quarterbacks are bred more for math than passing. Or maybe he’ll just let the country know what a bunch of p-holes we all are. (He meant a-holes).
But that day will come, my friends, and that’s when I’ll be ready to blog igod back into the national ipod; (and lets stop using our irods everytime we see a hot ibod).
Conservatism: Lets put igod back into our ipods
Make God a mixtape.
By 1984
January 24, 2009 8:18 AM | Link to this
I’m partying like it’s 1999. Obama is our president. My job is done, and I now enjoy my well-earned vacation. However, I have to reveal my true political partisanship: I’m a conservative. I only blogged liberal because it’s easier to do comedy from the left. I pretended to be a democrat for the jokes, man. That offended Bookman, not as a blogger, but as a clown.
Bookman believes that people are disposable. Pregnant? Abort. Married? Divorce. He leads his liberal hoards down a path of pure hedonism; lighting the way with his red clown nose like some fluteless and fruitless pied piper.
Take heart, because Obama will eventually do or say something that will turn the liberal hoards against him; maybe he’ll claim he’s more popular than the Jonas Brothers. Maybe he’ll talk about how white quarterbacks are bred more for math than passing. Or maybe he’ll just let the country know what a bunch of p-holes we all are. (He meant a-holes).
But that day will come, my friends, and that’s when I’ll be ready to blog igod back into the national ipod; (and lets stop using our irods everytime we see a hot ibod).
Conservatism: Lets put igod back into our ipods
Make God a mixtape.
By George W Bush
January 24, 2009 8:20 AM | Link to this
Oh yeah, I forgot why I was writin in the first place. I need everybody to remember how great I was at presidentin, so I’ll be checking in with my pal Jim, who I like to call Old Grumpy Smile, to remind people of all the great things I did.
First off, there’s….um….there’s….
……
……
Oh yeah, I got it. Do you remember how 9/11 happened, and then, later, it didn’t happen? That second part was all me.
By Churchill's MOM
January 24, 2009 8:42 AM | Link to this
Jim, Jim good thing you are retiring, Sara is writting a book and only wants a $11 million advance. She sure will be able to dress better after that. My husband said he would buy the book if it had a full frontal nude for a foldout. I guess I could live with that if it was tasteful..Well, Pearl is off today so I have to cook breakfast.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17873.html
By Redneck Convert
January 24, 2009 8:42 AM | Link to this
Well, seems to me we are headed the wrong way, what with the GA budget and the federal bailouts. We need to turn around and go right back to the late 1920s when you kept your money in your shoe on account of banks failing and if you got too old to work you moved in with your kids or went to the poorhouse. You didn’t see the guvmint come running with money to help out if you got in trouble on account of Bad Decisions and people come right out and called you trash if you didn’t have no money. And we kept Those People in their place.
Now me and Raghead get called all kind of names but you know we’re right. If your house falls down around your ears, well, that’s when you get hold of a hammer and saw and some lumber and start building. You don’t see people come running and saying they’ll get you a new house. Same goes for the GA and federal budget. We just need to let it all fall around our ears and start over. We need to forget about the librul schools and roads and stuff like that and just cut taxes some more. It’s for sure we don’t need another penny in sales tax.
So I want to see the lazy GA guvmint workers get kicked out and let the roads and bridges crumble and cut the schools back to maybe a month out of the year. But be sure to cut taxes some more. I agree with the Libraritarians on that. Sooner or later things will get back to normal. But while we’re waiting at least we’ll have cheap apples and pencils being sold on the street and the soup lines will be all over the place so you won’t have to waste money on lunch. Have a good weekend everybody.
By John Smith
January 24, 2009 8:48 AM | Link to this
This just small potatoes compared to the F22 and C17 waste that our congressmen are trying to keep alive. The union workers at Lockheed are 100 times worse than the UAW.
By catlady
January 24, 2009 8:50 AM | Link to this
One man’s pork is another man’s “necessity.”
I think a zero pork diet would be good about now. No new projects, and all old ones undergo an evaluation by a program other than the originating one. So, for example, that teen program in Early County is evaluated by someone in Agriculture, for example, who might be able to look with an unjaundiced eye at the data.
Go Fish could be evaluated by Corrections. See, when you are competing for the money you can spot all kinds of problems with a program of someone else’s.
Proposals that stand to directly benefit less than 20 counties would be automatically dropped. Like lights for ball fields or new band uniforms.
The only way you can have an adequate evaluation is to have no quid pro quo. Right now, we got lots of quids in this state. It is time to have competitive evaluations of programs.
Let’s admit we have too many boondoggles, such as graduation coaches, instructional coaches, Reading First, testing out the wazoo. Let’s also suspend all middle and high school sports in the state for a year or two. Get back to basics. Let kids win scholarships for their brains instead of their ability to run.
Let’s admit that there are some programs that are desirable, such as school nurses, that we may not have the money for.
No more additional taxes of any kind, until the house is in order. No more additional debt taken on till the other bills are paid off.
By ron
January 24, 2009 8:50 AM | Link to this
Good morning,I’m very much afraid that we are going to redefine what pork really is in the near future.All of the coming stimulus package will be pork.Every last cent.
The main street economy is in a shambles,brought on by a banking crisis if immense proportion.There are now so many people out of work and so many consumers not spending that there is hardly an economy left.I don’t see how this is going to be repaired by shoving money into pork barrell projects.
On a personal level I don’t see how I could borrow my way out of debt unless I were involved in some Ponzi scheme whereby I continue to borrow and repay with borrowed money util I die.People have tried that with their credit cards and now the entire bill is due.A limit has been reached.This country is going to run out of creditors if it hasn’t already.
It’s time to say no more new taxes.Cut until you reach equilibrium.If state government and the national government has to be cut in half,then do it.Individual people have to make these hard choices everyday and they’re makng them.It’s time that elected representatives made these choices also.Returning the American economy to the false levels it once rested at should not even be an option.
It’s time to rein in the economy,find out exactly at what level it can sustain itself and stay there until it’s stable.Read my lips,new taxes are only going to postpone the enevitable crash.
By Ted Haggard
January 24, 2009 8:52 AM | Link to this
Disgraced evangelical leader Ted Haggard’s former church disclosed Friday that the gay sex scandal that caused his downfall extends to a young male church volunteer who reported having a sexual relationship with Haggard — a revelation that comes as Haggard tries to repair his public image.
Brady Boyd, who succeeded Haggard as senior pastor of the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, told The Associated Press that the man came forward to church officials in late 2006 shortly after a Denver male prostitute claimed to have had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with Haggard.
Boyd said an “overwhelming pool of evidence” pointed to an “inappropriate, consensual sexual relationship” that “went on for a long period of time … it wasn’t a one-time act.” Boyd said the man was in his early 20s at the time. He said he was certain the man was of legal age when it began.
Reached Friday night, Haggard declined to comment and said all interviews would have to be arranged through a publicist for HBO, which is airing a documentary about him this month.
Boyd said the church reached a legal settlement to pay the man for counseling and college tuition, with one condition being that none of the parties involved discuss the matter publicly.
Boyd said a Colorado Springs TV station reached him Thursday to say the young man was planning to provide a detailed report of his relationship with Haggard to the station. Boyd said the church preferred to keep the matter private, but it was the man’s decision to go public.
The disclosure comes as Haggard, 52, is about to give a series of high-profile interviews to promote the cable documentary about his time in exile. He is scheduled to appear on CNN’s Larry King Live on Thursday, the date of the documentary’s premiere, and already has taped “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
In early 2007, New Life Church disclosed that an investigation uncovered new evidence that Haggard engaged in “sordid conversation” and “improper relationships” — but didn’t go into detail. Earlier, a church board member had said there was no evidence that Haggard had sexual relations with anyone but Mike Jones, the former male prostitute.
Haggard confessed to undisclosed “sexual immorality” after Jones’ allegations and resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and from New Life Church, where he faced being fired.
Anticipating criticism of the settlement with the former church volunteer, Boyd said Friday that it was in the best interests of all involved. He would not name the volunteer or the settlement amount.
“It wasn’t at all a settlement to make him be quiet or not tell his story,” Boyd said. “Our desire was to help him. Here was a young man who wanted to get on with his life. We considered it more compassionate assistance — certainly not hush money. I know what’s what everyone will want to say because that’s the most salacious thing to say, but that’s not at all what it was.”
He said that “secondarily, it’s not great for our church either” that the story be told. Boyd said Haggard knew about the settlement two years ago.
In a letter e-mailed Friday to New Life Church members, Boyd said of the settlement and agreement not to talk: “This decision was made not as an attempt to conceal wrongdoings, but to protect him from those who would seek to exploit him. His actions now suggest that he has changed his mind.”
The letter said the church “received reports of a number of incidents of inappropriate behavior” after Haggard’s fall. “In each case, we have tried our very best to do the right thing each time, including disciplinary action when appropriate.”
Boyd said the “inappropriate behavior” referred to the man who was the volunteer involved with Haggard. After Haggard’s fall, another church staff member resigned after admitting to what was described as “sexual misconduct.”
Boyd said the church will not take action against the man if he tells his story in the press.
“We have legal standing to do that, but not the desire to,” he said.
Boyd said he had spoken to the man once and came away with the impression that he was speaking out because of the documentary. “I think what caused this young man to be a bit aggravated was Ted being seen as a victim, when he himself had experienced a great deal of hurt,” Boyd said. “I seriously doubt this man would have come forward if the documentary had not been made.”
A spokeswoman for the documentary, “The Trials of Ted Haggard,” declined to comment Friday.
David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — which has largely focused on the Catholic sexual abuse scandal but also speaks out on cases involving Protestant clergy — said the new disclosures about Haggard are more disturbing because they involves a church volunteer.
“Technically, legally, they were both adults,” Clohessy said. “Psychologically and emotionally, Haggard was dramatically more powerful. … By definition, any sexual contact between a congregant and minister is inherently abusive and manipulative.”
In an AP interview this month before an appearance in front of TV critics in California, Haggard described his sexuality as complex and something that can’t be put into “stereotypical boxes.”
By Comment
January 24, 2009 9:01 AM | Link to this
Attention AJC staff — RE: Cynthia Tucker’s 1/25 op piece (and most days) “U.S. moves ahead only if science does”.
It sure would be nice to allow comments on Cynthia Tucker’s opinion reports. Worse case scenario, Cynthia might learn a thing or two…
By catlady
January 24, 2009 9:02 AM | Link to this
In an AP interview this month before an appearance in front of TV critics in California, Haggard described his sexuality as complex and something that can’t be put into “stereotypical boxes.”
Meaning, dear hearts, he is a pervert.
By Honest Banker
January 24, 2009 9:04 AM | Link to this
The financial giant Bank of America says it is no longer lobbying the federal government about its unfolding bank bailout. After receiving $45 billion in bailout money, lobbying was just too unseemly.
Mickey Kantor, an ex-commerce secretary, has advised lobbyists for A.I.G. “We are very sensitive to the fact that we have taxpayer money,” said Shirley Norton, a spokeswoman for the company.
Citigroup, recipient of another $45 billion, made the opposite call. While trying to keep a low profile, the company is still fielding an army of Washington lobbyists working on a host of issues, including the bailout. In the fourth quarter, it spent $1.77 million on lobbying fees, according to its lobbyists’ filings.
The different approaches from the two banks that have received the most money underscores the growing dilemma facing private companies, which increasingly deal with the federal government not only as rule-maker but also as shareholder, lender and trading partner.
Pressing federal policy makers risks the appearance of recycling public money to advance a private agenda, while staying on the sidelines could put a company at a comparative disadvantage.
Citigroup and Bank of America are hardly the only two financial firms to confront the issue. During the last three months of 2008, at least seven other firms receiving bailout funds — American Express, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, KeyCorp, Morgan Stanley, PNC and Bank of New York Mellon — all lobbied the government about the bailout, according to a review of their most recent disclosure reports.
The automakers that received billions under the same program lobbied as well: including General Motors; its financing arm, GMAC; and Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that controls Chrysler. Other recipients of federal financing also lobbied Congress, the Treasury or both about other matters.
The American International Group, taken over by the government during an injection of more than $40 billion last fall to prevent the company’s collapse, has discontinued all its federal lobbying; it is now in effect government-owned. But its former executives continue to lobby.
Its former chief executive, Maurice R. Greenberg, ousted a few years ago amid allegations of securities fraud, is leading a group of shareholders lobbying for a chance to renegotiate the terms of the government takeover or buy back a bigger stake in the company.
According to a recent filing, A.I.G. shareholders paid $90,000 in the fourth quarter to a lobbying team at Ogilvy Government Relations that includes the Republican lobbying powerhouse Wayne L. Berman, a former assistant secretary of commerce under the first President George Bush and a major fund-raiser for the second.
The group also includes three Democrats who had been top aides to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; Senator Edward M. Kennedy; and the former House majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt. (Mickey Kantor, secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, has advised the group as a lawyer as well.)
Lawmakers, troubled by the prospect of taxpayer-subsidized influence-peddling, are threatening to crack down. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Maine Republican, are pushing legislation that would explicitly bar companies from using bailout funds for lobbying or campaign contributions.
Although hard to enforce, the measure puts banks on notice that aggressive lobbying could set off a Congressional backlash.
“That taxpayer dollars intended to stabilize the economy could find their way into the bank accounts of lobbying firms” is “completely unacceptable,” Ms. Feinstein said in a speech supporting the measure.
On Friday, President Obama issued his own call for more oversight and transparency, citing “companies that have received taxpayer assistance then going out and renovating bathrooms or offices, or in other ways not managing those dollars appropriately.” This was an apparent allusion to reports of office renovations by the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, a recent acquisition by Bank of America whose heavy losses led to an expanded bailout for the bank.
Bankers, though, defend their right to a voice in public policy debates about the industry’s future. “Nobody mentioned that you are giving up your Constitutional right to petition the government” when accepting federal money, said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.
He acknowledged, however, that Citigroup and Bank of America were in a more ambiguous position than the rest of the roughly 200 banks that accepted money from the Treasury and agreed to pay it interest as part of the bailout program. While most banks are required to demonstrate financial health to qualify for the deal, the two giants received $90 billion in emergency measures to prop them up and agreed to give the government a larger say in management.
The two banking behemoths had entered a “middle ground,” Mr. Yingling said, between the other private banks accepting federal investments and the three financial firms under full federal control: A.I.G. and the failed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “I would expect that institutions in that middle ground would be well aware that they need to be careful about the tone and manner in which they lobby,” he said.
Citigroup and Bank of America say internal policies prohibit the use of any bailout money for lobbying. Neither, however, has stopped pressing its interests in Washington, albeit more quietly.
Though Bank of America says it has stopped lobbying about the bailout legislation — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP — it continues to lobby on other matters. The bank spent about $1 million on federal lobbying in last year’s fourth quarter, including $820,000 for its own lobbyists, according to filings.
Ms. Norton, the spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether Bank of America was lobbying on other financial crisis proposals, such as creation of a government-controlled “bad bank” to take over toxic securities.
Nicholas Calio, Citigroup’s top lobbyist, handled Congressional relations for both the first and second President George Bush. Its team of outside lobbyists has also included a former Congressional liaison for President Clinton, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary and the veteran Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf.
The two banks’ dilemma is an increasing problem for the industry, said Scott Talbott, top lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable. “There is a TARP blowback problem,” he said.
By Pork King
January 24, 2009 9:08 AM | Link to this
On Jan. 10, the U.S. Navy commissioned USS George H.W. Bush, the last of its Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Thousands of spectators, including the former president, gathered in Norfolk, Va., to “bring the ship to life,” in ceremonial parlance. Proclaimed Navy Secretary Donald Winter, “The impact of a carrier is global, for no other ship represents to the world the power of the United States the way this does.”
In 1988, as a fresh-faced engineering officer, I took part in a similar ceremony bringing the battleship Wisconsin back to life after nearly three decades in mothballs. Language like Winter’s greeted the reactivation of these World War II-vintage dreadnoughts, but their modern lives were short. The Missouri, best known of the battleships, now is berthed at Battleship Row in Oahu, a symbol of victory over Imperial Japan.
Despite its iconic status, the Missouri already was a relic in 1945, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Japanese emissaries assembled on its teak decks to formalize Japan’s surrender.
The destruction of the Pacific Fleet’s battleships at Pearl Harbor had forced the navy to improvise. At the behest of Adm. Chester Nimitz, new instruments of naval war - submarines and hastily organized aircraft-carrier task forces - charged across the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands.
While battlewagons still had a part to play in naval operations, defending carriers and bombarding enemy shores, the new operating environment relegated them to support status. Never again would they regain their place at the center of U.S. naval strategy.
My old ship, the Wisconsin, is a waterfront museum in downtown Norfolk. For me, its presence almost in sight of the Bush commissioning is a metaphor for the likely fate of big-deck flattops. Defensive technologies are rendering surface vessels acutely vulnerable to attack.
While the surface fleet still has its uses, its staying power in a fleet engagement in Asia - the most likely theater for a high-intensity fight - is increasingly in doubt.
Why the bleak prophecy? In the 1890s, Alfred Thayer Mahan, father of the modern U.S. Navy, described “capital ships” - those comprising the heart of the battle fleet - as “the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.” Battleships were capital ships for Mahan. But, just as air power rendered battleships more or less moot, new technologies appear to be overtaking carriers like the Bush.
China’s People’s Liberation Army is assembling an arsenal of weaponry designed specifically to hold off U.S. carriers and their escorts. One example is a revolutionary, shore-based “antiship ballistic missile” reportedly able to target ships hundreds of miles away.
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations (and assuming the antiship ballistic missile pans out), PLA missile forces will soon be able to strike at U.S. ships at the extreme range of cruise missiles and carrier-based aircraft.
If so, Mahan’s axiom suggests that surface ships will find their offensive power blunted, their ability to defend themselves likewise on the decline.
The bottom line: No longer can U.S. naval leaders blithely assume they can station carrier task forces off foreign shores in times of crisis, nor can they assume U.S. hardware and prowess simply will overpower future opponents.
Is this an elegy for American sea power? No.
It is a call to rethink the makeup of the U.S. Navy. To me, a robust undersea fleet founded on nuclear submarines meets Mahan’s standard better than one founded on surface vessels. Missile- and torpedo-armed boats can mete out tremendous punishment. And while they are no more sturdily built than carriers, they can cruise underwater almost indefinitely, eluding seagoing adversaries.
For lesser missions like battling pirates, interdicting contraband or rendering humanitarian assistance, surface vessels likely will remain the implements of choice. They are bigger, can carry more cargo and can survive in less threatening surroundings.
But tomorrow’s fleet ought to look quite different from today’s - just as the fleet that defeated Japan in 1945 scarcely resembled the fleet afire at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
By TN Gelding
January 24, 2009 9:15 AM | Link to this
Your pork is my bread and butter, and vice versa. As long as the money is spent in GA it isn’t totally wasted. With the revenue collected over the last 25 years there should be enough of an emergency fund to weather the storm. Lower taxes are great, but someone has to pay the freight. Why is the unearned income of those over 62 tax exempt? It’s good for us, but puts a greater burden on everyone else. We could close half the jails and prisons if we turned the druggies loose. A large percentage of them were working, productive citizens before being incarcerated. The son of our sheriff was recently arrested and the sheriff is ecstatic because he’s building an addition to the jail. Never mind that he won’t have the funds to staff and maintain the larger area. In other words, we’ve got to get smarter and look at every program, including education. Our county school board recently voted to air condition the school buses, which wouldn’t be necessary if they didn’t start school at the beginning of August. And just think of the savings if they encouraged home schooling instead of fought it to protect their jobs and turf.
By catlady
January 24, 2009 9:16 AM | Link to this
New rule: if your name appears in print related to your employer receiving government bailout money, you are subject to jail for being an accomplice to super-felony theft.
By Redneck Porkman
January 24, 2009 9:19 AM | Link to this
I never question pork, especially when it come to BBQ. If it ain’t pork…it ain’t BBQ.
As a matter of fact, I had me a big ol’ plate of BBQ pork yesterday. You do have to be careful though…I ate a little too much and slipped into a pork induced coma for a couple of hours.
Pork is a very sweet meat!
Come on now people…let’s stay on topic here!
By Ragnar Danneskjöld
January 24, 2009 9:31 AM | Link to this
Good morning all. Other writers here have already observed that the need to re-examine programs extends to the Federal level, perhaps even more urgently than to the state level. My only reason for posting is to salute the article of Pork King @ 9:08 - an essay worthy of friend @@.
Dear PoFo @ 9:18, maybe there is some potential there? Successful conservative comedy is much harder, cannot rely on stereotypes. If anyone can pull it off, you can. Look forward to reading the new PoFo after this promising start.
By Texan Interrupted.
January 24, 2009 9:36 AM | Link to this
“…the fleet that defeated Japan in 1945….” That’s when your comment might have been relevant, Popeye. In 1945. If you had written it then, you may have earned only a dunce cap. Now, it means your photo is in the dictionary under zzzzz.
What you should have written: u cant sink Taiwan with a ballistic missile.
moron
By Jim Jr.
January 24, 2009 10:06 AM | Link to this
Mr. Wooten;
You are right. We Republicans are proud and don’t need no handouts from the govenments. There plenty of educations without no one payin for us to go. I finished 10th grade which plenty enough for anyone and my wifes done got her ged dipoma. Both got us good payin jobs and don’t need no welfare. Couple of paymjents behind on my picku truck but plan to get some part time work when the fair comes to town. Don’t want no one payin for ourn doctors. 10 teeths enough for anyone. Need them commandts put back to schools. You tellm the old librourals that we is right
By Texan Interrupted.
January 24, 2009 10:11 AM | Link to this
That’s so unfair, Ragnar. I think Presumption 101 should be taught in all special ed classes and then the world would be spared.
It’s him, right, Jim? It’s not me. It’s him. ‘
Gee, Rag, I’m glad you liked Hard Days Night, but I’ve grown up, luv.
By Dusty
January 24, 2009 10:24 AM | Link to this
Dear Ragnar, 9:31
What was it you enjoyed so much in Pork KIng’s essay? Was it the great length of off subject material? You like all things Navy? You are bored with pork?
Was that PoFo who said “But I’ve grown up, luv.”
That couldn’t be PoFo, could it? Grown up? When did that happen?
By Texan Interrupted.
January 24, 2009 10:43 AM | Link to this
We must question pork in lean times. Look, my retirement plan is to make my own beef jerky thanx to a Ronco Commerical I saw in the 70’s. Ronco himself stole the idear from Native Americans, and look how well they did. And that’s the kind of adjustments and sacrifices Americans are prepared to make.
Conservatives would never make a silk parse out of a sow’s earmark.
Be bullish, but dont get buffaloed by the liberal stampede.
By Ayn Rand was Right
January 24, 2009 10:59 AM | Link to this
The first pork that should be outlawed immediately and without discussion should be lobbying. That alone would eliminate much pork. The President could prove to me that he believes in change by leading this charge.
Then disallow all tag-ons to bills. Each bill must pass through on it’s own merit. Certainly this would require more voting, but a lot less discussion and deal making. Requiring bills to be written in plain English in a way that could be understood my most Americans would make it even harder for our “leaders” to make deals.
By napoleon
January 24, 2009 11:00 AM | Link to this
MORTGAGES PORK OR LEAN
The mortgage industry suffers right now because of the government policies created on spending. This was done between the years 1994-1998 by government politicians naming former President Bill Clinton. His ideas on spending in the public sector making purchasing a home available to anyone who would sign a pay option mortgage or adjustable rate mortgage created this mortgage melt down. Politicians demanded this without any real concern of the buyers in the public sector or the financers in the financial industry. Where all those politicians who helped are pushed through government the ideas of the Clinton administration? These Ideas would force mortgage companies naming Countrywide to open up the doors of the mortgage industry to people who had nothing but a dream. What would you choose pork or lean?
Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be governed by a small few who would be influenced with the desires of gleam and glitter. Take a look at California and its inflated mortgage industry believe me sunshine and lying out beside a swimming pool could not pay for the cost of a short coming future and the reality of politics in federal government and southern California. Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be controlled by dreams and desires. Desires that would carry the same weight in personal finance as the cost of a 5 dollar movie pass and its ability to put a young teenager in the arms of a leading movie star who played on both stage and screen. With the near future in mind tell me brothers and sister of the AJC what would you choose pork or lean? Remember action speaks louder than words.
By Ayn Rand was Right
January 24, 2009 11:06 AM | Link to this
The first pork that should be outlawed immediately and without discussion should be lobbying. That alone would eliminate much pork. The President could prove to me that he believes in change by leading this charge.
Then disallow all tag-ons to bills. Each bill must pass through on it’s own merit. Certainly this would require more voting, but a lot less discussion and deal making. Requiring bills to be written in plain English in a way that could be understood my most Americans would make it even harder for our “leaders” to make deals.
By Ayn Rand was Right
January 24, 2009 11:07 AM | Link to this
Love the new website AJC…works like a freaking charm.
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 11:33 AM | Link to this
Gee I feel safer already. The Obama administration appoints a CIA head who never served in intelligence in any capacity and appoints a secretary of state better known - or notorious - for her mistreatment of White House staffers and being a royal B than diplomacy abroad. But leave it to that lib toilet wrap Newsweak to put in a final jab on Bush:
Erasing Bush
With a call for ‘relentless’ diplomacy, Hillary further obliterates W’s legacy.
Jan 22, 2009
After Inauguration Day, departed presidents usually become footnotes pretty quickly. What we are witnessing now is far more dramatic. It’s closer to a liquidation, or a cauterization. George W. Bush is being turned into an unperson, like a character out of Orwell. It’s been only two days, and there is scarcely a trace of not only his personal presence, but of his policies. Or at least that is the impression Barack Obama would like to convey.
The process of erasing the last eight years from American history began with President Obama’s inaugural address on Tuesday. Between condemning torture and expressing a willingness to talk with enemies, the new president began eliminating Bush even as the former president sat listening behind him. Then, on his first work day, Obama signed executive orders reversing the Bush administration’s emphasis on secrecy and reliance on revolving-door lobbyists, to be followed by three more orders: closing Guantanamo Bay (within a year), forbidding torture and suspending military tribunals for foreign terror suspects. Meanwhile Treasury Secretary-nominee Timothy Geithner (whose nomination was finally approved by the Senate Finance Committee) said brand-new strictures would also be applied to financial bailouts.
Then, on Wednesday, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of two permanent envoys to major trouble spots—George Mitchell to the Mideast and Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was perhaps the surest sign of all that Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration, which saw diplomacy mainly as an exercise in stating terms for surrender, whether to Iran, Hamas or North Korea (except over the last couple of years).
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 11:52 AM | Link to this
I see how it works in lib land.
An Obama appointee to head the US Treasury cheats on his taxes and the media is silent. You can bet that 1), had that been a Republican he’d have been outed before Obama even thought of the dude, let alone appointed him, and 2) because Geithner was appointed by a Democrat president who the DNC media is all but making love to, he just “made a mistake.” Oh, wait. There’s more. Geithner somehow overlooked the fact that his immigrant housekeeper’s work authorization papers had expired.
Next up, Carolyn Kennedy (note to a CNN “journalist” earlier this week: Carolyn hasn’t had a brother in over ten years, you lib DNC media moron). Apparently those “personal” reasons for withdrawal were actually a derailing by unpaid taxes and illegal alien housekeeper. Huh. More tax shenanigans and illegal immigration issues. Go figure. Had she been a Republican, the DNC media would have outed her before she even thought about running for Hillary’s seat.
This is change? I’m afraid this is really just the beginning. Oh yeah, and don’t look for the DNC lib media to out any of these shenanigans either.
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 12:12 PM | Link to this
Well that slobbering sock mouth Democrat Barney Frank, Mr. “There is no problem with Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac - nothing to see here - move along now Republicans,” sees fit to grant personal flavors to our tax dollars and bailout funds. Isn’t that special. I feel so warm all over — like a bedwetting lib. Again, this is only the beginning with a full DNC Washington. Thanks a lot Republicans for being worthless idiots, sucking up to the left, acting like Democrats, and losing your positions! This is what you call using federal taxpayer dollars to grant favors to and float a small minority owned bank in your district. Again, don’t look for this on Campbell Brown’s “No Bias, No Bull” CNN show (heh.. hahahah. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!) Man that was really funny. Anyway, read all about it:
Political Interference Seen in Bank Bailout Decisions Barney Frank Goes to Bat for Lender, and It Gets an Infusion JANUARY 22, 2009, 2:45 P.M. ET wsj.com
The Treasury had said it would give money only to healthy banks, to jump-start lending. But OneUnited had seen most of its capital evaporate. Moreover, it was under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives’ use.
Nonetheless, in December OneUnited got a $12 million injection from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. One apparent factor: the intercession of Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee. Mr. Frank, by his own account, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically aimed at helping this particular home-state bank. And later, he acknowledges, he spoke to regulators urging that OneUnited be considered for a cash injection.
Mr. Frank — who has played a leading role in both the initial design of TARP and current planning to revamp it — says he spoke with a federal regulator and asked that OneUnited be given consideration for TARP money, “without in any way impinging on their general safety and soundness rules.” Mr. Frank said he didn’t remember which federal regulator he spoke with.
On Dec. 19, OneUnited received $12 million from the Treasury, on condition it raise $20 million from its shareholders, which it did. Ms. McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Bush administration Treasury, said that OneUnited’s application was subject to the same review process as other banks faced.
Mr. Frank said he didn’t try to interfere with the regulatory process. “We have never told the regulators that they should ease up on them or not order them to do this or that,” he said.
He cites the bank’s status as the state’s only financial institution owned by African-Americans. “We did say, yes, I thought it would have been a social tragedy if the one minority bank in Massachusetts that has been working so hard and had been overextended into housing was to be wiped out by a federal action, the Fannie-Freddie preferred [shares] thing, and that’s why I think it was important to try to help them.”
Rep. [Maxine] Waters said she was unaware that the bank received money. OneUnited was “just a small” bank, she said.
By Texan Interrupted.
January 24, 2009 1:33 PM | Link to this
Did you see where that teacher sent a student nude photos?
Hell, I couldn’t get my teachers to sign a hall pass…..
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 2:29 PM | Link to this
If Obama reaches out to this thug, it will set the foundation of America’s future weakness in international affairs. Remember, he wants to open up discourse with our political and military enemies. Again, I am feeling SO much safer in this first week since W has left office. Please.
Venezuela’s Chavez warms to Obama after insults
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday warmly greeted President Barack Obama only days after accusing him of “throwing stones” at Venezuela and suggesting he was much like ex-President George W. Bush.
The firebrand socialist, who has promised to end what he calls U.S. imperialism and called Bush “the devil,” praised Obama’s decision to close a prison in Guantanamo, Cuba that has drawn harsh international criticism.
Hey Hugo The Horrible: are YOU going to take in some of those terrorists from Gitmo? Didn’t think so.
By Algonquin J. Calhoun
January 24, 2009 2:32 PM | Link to this
I’m happy Obama is returning science to its proper place of importance. Religion has always tried to influence, control and stamp out science but religion should never have any influence over science. If you neanderthalic Religiosos don’t like scientific advancement remain in the dark ages but you won’t keep the rest of us with you.
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 2:41 PM | Link to this
The fact that you can’t link websites here really sucks. Oh well. Anyway, you want to see some brilliance of eco-nazi policies? Check out what happened in Minnesota - you know, that state where a senate seat was stolen by a loony Democrat better known for writing dry and trite humor for SNL. One has to wonder what other brilliance the eco-libs have in store for our future, especially with this new full Democrat Washington…………….
Much of the U.S. has been experiencing record cold this winter. In Minnesota, that means temperatures well below zero. It also means state-mandated biodiesel fuel that turns into a thick gel, clogging fuel systems and preventing many diesel-powered vehicles from operating.
The combination of cold weather and biofuel has closed many school districts, with school buses being unable to operate. Some school systems are seeking a state waiver to allow them to temporarily use pure diesel. Others have found a faster solution: leave the buses running on idle all night, to keep the motors warm. Some tractor-trailer drivers are reportedly using the same measure as well.By EdwardRMorrow
January 24, 2009 3:01 PM | Link to this
Let em eat fish, says sonny of the purty pink panties…spending other people’s money on stupid stuff sure is easy, eh sonny….
By Somnabulistic Ramble
January 24, 2009 3:04 PM | Link to this
zzzzz
By GaLiberal
January 24, 2009 3:09 PM | Link to this
Moron Jim said: An example from Gov. Sonny Perdue and the DOT is a boondoggle rail project from Atlanta to Lovejoy that exists only because $83 million in federal money was earmarked. This proposed commuter rail line is a pork-barrel project kept alive because the money was earmarked and is therefore not available for actual congestion relief. It’s another reason, incidentally, to fear the proposed $825 billion “economic stimulus” program that’s about to dump money willy-nilly.
What MJ leaves out is that The Laughing Fat Man continues to dump over $20 MILLION in tax dollars on his Go Fish Georgia! campaign. This is nothing but pure pork for TLFM’s home county. Yet, that’s ok because TLFM is a good little Rethuglicon who had is friends pass him a $100,000 tax exemption and then bought some FL property a well below market value. I wish I could be governor and use my office for personal profit. So much for ethics in Georgia as long as you’re a good butt-sniffing Rethuglicon.
MJ’s logic leaves something to be desired. Like logic. The specious link between some rail project that was passed while Bush was president and President Obama’s economic recovery plan demonstrates the desperation of MJ and his Rethuglicon butt-sniffers. This rail project has been proposed for many years and has no relation to the proposed stimulus package. Lies and more lies. That’s all MJ and his Rethuglicon bootlickers have.
When you vote Rethuglicon, you vote against your own best interests. And MJ once again is living proof.
By napoleon
January 24, 2009 3:13 PM | Link to this
MORTGAGES PORK OR LEAN
The mortgage industry suffers right now because of the government policies created on spending. This was done between the years 1994-1998 by government politicians. Their ideas on spending in the public sector making purchasing a home available to anyone who would sign a pay option mortgage or adjustable rate mortgage created this mortgage melt down. Politicians demanded this without any real concern of the buyers in the public sector or the financers in the financial industry. Where are all those politicians who helped pushed through government the ideas of the Clinton administration? These Ideas would force mortgage companies naming Countrywide to open up the doors of the mortgage industry to people who had nothing but a dream. What would you choose pork or lean?
Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be governed by a small few who would be influenced with the desires of gleam and glitter. Take a look at California and its inflated mortgage industry believe me sunshine and lying out beside a swimming pool could not pay for the cost of a short coming future and the reality of politics in federal government and southern California. Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be controlled by dreams and desires. Desires that would carry the same weight in personal finance as the cost of a 5 dollar movie pass and its ability to put a young teenager in the arms of a leading movie star who played on both stage and screen. With the near future in mind tell me brothers and sister of the AJC what would you choose pork or lean? Remember action speaks louder than words.
By napoleon
January 24, 2009 3:15 PM | Link to this
MORTGAGES PORK OR LEAN
The mortgage industry suffers right now because of the government policies created on spending. This was done between the years 1994-1998 by government politicians. Their ideas on spending in the public sector making purchasing a home available to anyone who would sign a pay option mortgage or adjustable rate mortgage created this mortgage melt down. Politicians demanded this without any real concern of the buyers in the public sector or the financers in the financial industry. Where are all those politicians who helped pushed through government the ideas of the Clinton administration? These Ideas would force mortgage companies naming Countrywide to open up the doors of the mortgage industry to people who had nothing but a dream. What would you choose pork or lean?
Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be governed by a small few who would be influenced with the desires of gleam and glitter. Take a look at California and its inflated mortgage industry believe me sunshine and lying out beside a swimming pool could not pay for the cost of a short coming future and the reality of politics in federal government and southern California. Common ideas would not allow the mortgage industry to be controlled by dreams and desires. Desires that would carry the same weight in personal finance as the cost of a 5 dollar movie pass and its ability to put a young teenager in the arms of a leading movie star who played on both stage and screen. With the near future in mind tell me brothers and sister of the AJC what would you choose pork or lean? Remember action speaks louder than words.
By Algonquin J. Calhoun
January 24, 2009 3:44 PM | Link to this
You want to question any expenditure that might help people but you never said a word about the billions being spent to kill innocents in Iraq.
By Somnabulistic Ramble
January 24, 2009 3:58 PM | Link to this
Let them eat fish is sage advice. Did you know that the Irish starved during the potato famine and the sea to their west is the richest fishery in the world?
I’m ashamed 2B an Irishman. Aye! It’s word up. It’s truth down, and tooth sideways, and carving up soap and drinking me pint….
By @@
January 24, 2009 4:00 PM | Link to this
By Ragnar — (((My only reason for posting is to salute the article of Pork King @ 9:08 - an essay worthy of friend @@.)))
and Heeeyyyyyyy!
By Dusty — (((What was it you enjoyed so much in Pork KIng’s essay? Was it the great length of off subject material?)))
I’m crushed….CRUSHED, I SAY! (ISH)
In my abstract way of thinking, Jim’s column today made me reflect on my pottery making. There are two approaches when working with clay — flat work (purely decorative) and then there’s utility (useful) pieces…….empty vessels that can be filled with essential nutritive substances.
Whether it’s me or anyone versed in the art of shaping and molding, it’s a well known fact that a utility piece can be made from a flat slab in a pinch. “Pinchin’ a pot” bellied pig shouldn’t be this difficult.
^^^ Hopefully short and to the point in a round-about way.
So PoliFore has revealed his dark secret? He’s really a conservative?
PoliFore, awash in the wishy.
Alrighty din!
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 4:47 PM | Link to this
I have to agree with GALib - Sonny is damn sure a Demoncat in a Rethuglicon’s clothing. Whoddathunkit? (Isn’t that SO intelligent and cool, making names from political parties???) .
Oh look! This is what passes for “news” at the lib DNC media outlet PMSNBC. Some senile old man misses his bus because he was so excited over the inauguration:
SOUTH BEND, Ind. - An 83-year-old South Bend man said he missed his bus home from the presidential inauguration because he was dancing. Mussa Muhammad said his “spirit jumped sky-high” when President Barack Obama took the oath of office Tuesday. He became separated from his group and, he said, “just danced and danced” with a couple of young women he met along the way.
Muhammad’s tour group waited five hours for him, but left Washington after tour leaders spoke with his wife. Rev. Lefate Owens of Elkhart Community Missionary Baptist Church said she assured them that Muhammad would be all right.
By Cuban Figurehead
January 24, 2009 4:51 PM | Link to this
Yes, @@, I am a conservative. I only blogged left for the jokes. They were so easy. And it was so much fun. But now, the country has swung far too left, and I love this country so much, I must reveal my true self as a Herbert Hoover conservative. Yes, Hoover. As a child, I checked out a library book about Hoover. It was all about the early years of our infamous president. You see, he had checked out a book too, about Rutherford B Hayes, and thus inspired, Hoover could easily be celebrated as our greatest president, if it hadn’t been for the bad luck of owning the white house during one of our cyclical busts, of which nobody yet can explain the why, the how, or the when. We could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
George Bush, who never checked out a library book as a child, split his presidency into two parts, commander-in-chief and everything else. Cheney was the defacto commander-in-chief, in the two-year wake of 911. Iraq was all his baby. Cheney classified evidence of this fact by using the dewey decimal system in braille and then fiendishly translating the formula into dog years against a logarithm based on pig latin numerology. Cheney is going to get away with it. Not even I can decypher that coded data.
So a conservative should revile George Bush. Not his party.
But I think we need to move on. Stop defending the last eight years. Stop attacking the left. They’ll blunder soon enough. Is there anyoone who doesn’t know for a fact that Camelot is always a brief shining moment?
We need to set forth upon new ground a clear set of principles and slogans that describe the new/old America we all want to present to the world. And I have not read one word from one journalist that makes me believe that he is capable of this undertaking. I am the only writer with the conservative pen sharp enough to replace Wooten…..and I just realized that i never returned that library book about the young Hoover…I did some preliminary calculations and I owe the city of Newark, New Jersey $37,384.27.
Top of the world, ma!
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 5:05 PM | Link to this
PoFo is jacking us again. (My opinion only).
Anyway, apparently a terrorist who did some bad things from 1973 is set to be released in a month. What I’d like to know is why exactly is this mouth breathing savage even alive? Oh, let me guess… liberalism. Hopefully someone will take short note of this terrorist’s release and make haste with his, errr, uhmmm, disposition:
Freedom looms for convicted terrorist Man behind 1973 N.Y. bomb plot to be released Feb. 19
NEW YORK - In 1973, a young terrorist named Khalid Duhham Al-Jawary entered the United States and quickly began plotting an audacious attack in New York City.
He built three powerful bombs — bombs powerful enough to kill, maim and destroy — and put them in rental cars scattered around town, near Israeli targets.
The plot failed. The explosive devices did not detonate, and Al-Jawary fled the country, escaping prosecution for nearly two decades — until he was convicted of terrorism charges in Brooklyn and sentenced to 30 years in federal penitentiary.
By Cosmo
January 24, 2009 5:09 PM | Link to this
Mr. Emanuel is arguably the second most powerful man in the country and, just a few days into his tenure, already one of the highest-profile chiefs of staff in recent memory.—New York Slimes
That should scare the absolute hell out of anyone with a brain (ie: those 60+ million who did NOT vote for Obama).
By Saxby Chambliss Wet Back's Best Friend
January 24, 2009 5:14 PM | Link to this
Former Republican National Committee Chair and Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson spoke out on the GOP’s electoral challenges Friday, urging Republicans to reach out to Hispanic voters by reviewing their position on immigration.
“We have to better inform and motivate and align with the Hispanic voters,” Nicholson said in an interview with Politico. “That’s one of the key issues that the party and its leaders need to convene and, you know, have a very open, transparent discussion about developing a party position on.”
Nicholson, whose home state of Colorado turned blue in 2008 thanks in part to heavy Democratic voting among Hispanics, said Hispanics could be open to Republican ideas.
“The Hispanic voters…in this country are center-right, more conservative, more family- and work-oriented people,” he said. “We have to overcome some of the predilections that they have about Republicans so that we get more of their votes.”
The former cabinet official pointed to Hispanic outreach as one of the top issues that would face the next RNC chair, who will be chosen in an election next week. Nicholson served as RNC chair during the second term of President Bill Clinton and compared the current political atmosphere to the one he faced as an incoming chair in 1997.
“When you’re out of power, the head of the party is the head of the loyal opposition,” Nicholson said. “We have leadership in the legislative branch and they have a role to play, but it’s the job of the chairman to coordinate the message and the resources of the party.”
Nicholson said he wasn’t prepared to back a candidate in the current RNC election. But many of the candidates are looking to his campaign as an example of how to win in a crowded field: Nicholson only won the chairmanship after six ballots in an election that pitted him against better-known opponents.
He defeated, among other rivals, former New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, then-outgoing chair of the Republican Governors Association, whose early frontrunner status faded as RNC members preferred to elect a sitting member of the committee.
That’s a pattern that might repeat itself this year, Nicholson said.
If so, that dynamic could favor the incumbent chair, Mike Duncan, or two currently serving state chairs who are running, South Carolina’s Katon Dawson or Michigan’s Saul Anuzis.
“That’s a big hurdle to overcome for an outsider,” said Nicholson, who served as RNC vice chair at the time of his election. “I knew the committee real well and they knew me…But I wasn’t well known nationally and I wasn’t well known in the national media and so I wasn’t given as much of a chance.”
The former chair had some advice, though, for whoever takes over: it’s all about communication.
“I think the most essential skill to have is good communication skills,” Nicholson said. “I think there’s been a dearth of visual, effective communications coming out of the RNC.”
The Coloradan said that was partly because the GOP controlled the White House and Congress, so “communications was coming from the White House and coming from the president and his team.”
Nicholson said the six candidates for chair appeared to be capable leaders, but admitted that he had approached higher-profile candidates about running earlier in the election process, including former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration. Both men had the communications skills to perform the job effectively, Nicholson said.
“I thought either of them would, you know, make very strong chairmen,” he explained. “People that came to my mind, although I didn’t talk to them, were people like Mitt Romney.”
Those efforts proved unsuccessful, however, and the next chair will be chosen from a list of candidates that includes Duncan, Dawson, Anuzis, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and former Tennessee GOP Chair Chip Saltsman.
“That’s the field. One of them is going to be chairman and they may rise to the occasion,” Nicholson said. “Or they may already be there.”
By Saxby Chambliss Wet Back's Best Friend
January 24, 2009 5:18 PM | Link to this
The Senate will take up legislation to pass a major children’s health insurance bill late Monday, knocking out yet another big priority for Democrats in the 111th Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday afternoon debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program would begin after the Senate’s votes on the confirmation on Timothy Geithner to be treasury secretary. Reid said he expected passage of the SCHIP bill by the end of the week.
Quick passage of the SCHIP bill would show that Democrats are quickly plowing through some of the top labor, health and workplace legislation backed by the Obama administration. The Senate on Thursday passed a gender discrimination bill, known as the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and the union-backed “Employee Free Choice Act” — which would make it easier for shops to unionize — could be on the agenda in the near future.
**Republicans have signaled they are unlikely to stop the SCHIP legislation, though they have expressed concern over provisions eliminating a waiting period for pregnant women and children of immigrants to participate in the program. President Bush last year vetoed the legislation, which would expand government-subsidized health insurance to 10 million more children.
“Some people want to make this a debate over immigration. It’s not a debate over immigration,” Reid said at a news conference today. “It’s about our kids so they can be taken care of the way they should be taken care of.”**
By Saxby Chambliss Wet Back's Best Friend
January 24, 2009 6:06 PM | Link to this
The Senate will take up legislation to pass a major children’s health insurance bill late Monday, knocking out yet another big priority for Democrats in the 111th Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday afternoon debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program would begin after the Senate’s votes on the confirmation on Timothy Geithner to be treasury secretary. Reid said he expected passage of the SCHIP bill by the end of the week.
Quick passage of the SCHIP bill would show that Democrats are quickly plowing through some of the top labor, health and workplace legislation backed by the Obama administration. The Senate on Thursday passed a gender discrimination bill, known as the Lilly Ledbetter Act, and the union-backed “Employee Free Choice Act” — which would make it easier for shops to unionize — could be on the agenda in the near future.
Republicans have signaled they are unlikely to stop the SCHIP legislation, though they have expressed concern over provisions eliminating a waiting period for pregnant women and children of immigrants to participate in the program. President Bush last year vetoed the legislation, which would expand government-subsidized health insurance to 10 million more children.
*”Some people want to make this a debate over immigration. It’s not a debate over immigration,” Reid said at a news conference today. “It’s about our kids so they can be taken care of the way they should be taken care of.” *
By Bill Shipp
January 25, 2009 8:28 AM | Link to this
If you think President Obama inherited a truckload of problems from George W. Bush, consider what the next Georgia governor faces:
► Soaring Medicaid enrollment due to unemployment. The present administration hopes to deal with that by taxing hospitals and reducing health services. As a result, the next governor will have to add closed hospitals to his problem list. Small hospitals across the state cannot survive a significant tax increase.
► An unemployment rate that keeps going up as more retail stores close and corporations go belly up. If you looked at a profile of Georgia south of Macon, you suddenly would believe we are a Rust Belt state.
► The drought still is with us. No meaningful plans to deal with it have been offered.
Traffic, bad schools, a shortchanged judiciary, an overflowing prison system, a skyrocketing public debt and a $2 billion deficit round out the list of major problems Gov. Sonny Perdue’s successor will find. Plus, the current legislature is considering a series of tax increases. Who in their right mind would propose raising taxes in the middle of a recession? The Georgia legislature and the Perdue administration, that’s who.
The next governor won’t have to deal only with headaches. Sonny’s bass fishing program and some of his brand-new boat docks still may be in place for a little time out to fish and relax. Of course, Gov. X won’t have much time to fish.
Unlike some other governors we know, the next guv may have to work full time at being our chief executive.
Georgia can’t stand another part-time executive constantly distracted by his private fertilizer and grain businesses, not to mention a $21 million personal note that falls due in March and a real estate portfolio that shows signs of souring.
If I were the governor, I’d have trouble concentrating, too.
Georgia has a plethora of candidates for governor in the next cycle: John Oxendine, Karen Handel, DuBose Porter, David Poythress and at least three others who are not ready to reveal their intentions.
The big question for all of these wannabes is this: What will Roy Barnes do? Will the former governor run or not?
He showed in one term (1999-2003) that he has the right stuff to manage the state. He also demonstrated that many Georgians, including educators, don’t want to rock the boat, and they’ll vote against anyone who threatens the status quo. It doesn’t matter that Georgia has some of the worst schools in the nation. Teachers voted en masse against Barnes and in favor of Perdue, who as a measure of thanks has whacked school funding by more than $1 billion.
Barnes also set out to solve the traffic problem and bring Medicaid under control. Voters didn’t care. They weren’t interested in a governor who opposed keeping a symbol of slavery on the state flag. At a speech to a civic club the other day, Barnes spent 20 minutes describing the causes of the economic disaster that has befallen the nation. He mentioned Georgia government only once. He said the state was running up too much public debt and needed watching.
Beyond the experience of one term, Barnes has several assets as a campaigner. Raising money ought to be relatively easy. He knows what needs to be done to get Georgia out of the doldrums, and he is an eloquent speaker and storyteller.
So what else does a candidate need?
A little fire in the belly is my answer. In the shock of being defeated, Barnes and his wife, Marie, could have lost much of their zeal for public office, which leads me to think that those of us who hope Roy will run again could be disappointed.
We might have to look for another hoss to go for governor - one with Barnes’ vision, but not one who says Mexicans and other migrants are among our foremost problems. In other words, we need a creative thinker and doer, but not another nut. We have enough of those already.
By John P. Murtha
January 25, 2009 8:35 AM | Link to this
Federal agents on Thursday raided the offices of a Pennsylvania government contractor with close ties to Rep. John P. Murtha, chairman of the powerful Defense panel on the House Appropriations Committee.
Agents from the FBI, IRS and Defense Criminal Investigative Service searched the offices of Kuchera Industries and Kuchera Defense Systems in three different locations in Pennsylvania.
Over the last several years, Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has helped steer more than $100 million in contracts to Kuchera, a government contractor founded in 1985 by Bill Kuchera. The company and its employees have donated more than $65,000 dollars to Murtha’s reelection campaign and leadership political action committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Thursday’s raid was first reported by the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat.
The newspaper also disclosed that federal agents went to the homes of Bill and Ron Kuchera, the president and CFO, respectively of the companies.
During the 2007-2008 cycle, Murtha was a top target for House Republicans, who raised questions about his earmarks for government contractors who have donated to him. Murtha defended the earmarks, saying his efforts have helped resuscitate an economically depressed region of Pennsylvania and created new jobs.
Murtha was caught on tape during the ABSCAM scandal back in the 1980s discussing a bribe from an FBI undercover agent, but he was never charged with a crime.
In recent years, FBI agents have scrutinized other contractors linked to the 76-year-old Democrat, but no steps as dramatic as Thursday’s search were ever taken.
By Saxby Chambliss LOBBYIST Best Friend
January 25, 2009 8:40 AM | Link to this
With House passage all but certain next week, the battle over Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan is shifting to the Senate, where Democrats outlined their version of the $825 billion package Friday, putting greater emphasis on Republican priorities in hopes of broadening support.
Obama hosted a meeting with congressional leaders Friday and will meet Tuesday with House Republicans — possibly on Capitol Hill— the day before the House floor vote. But the die seems cast in that fight, and the Senate is the greater test of whether the new president can reach out to his former colleagues from across the aisle.
The Finance Committee, which meets Tuesday, is all important since almost $460 billion of the total package comes through its doors. Health and jobless benefits for the unemployed would be increased. And at a cost of $17 billion, Chairman Max Baucus proposes a one-time “economic recovery” payment of $300 to millions of elderly and veterans who otherwise wouldn’t benefit from a promised payroll tax credit sought by Obama.
While staying within the $275 billion target for tax cuts, the Montana Democrat would also make room for several business breaks not in the House bill. There is also a one-year suspension of federal income taxes for the first $2400 in jobless benefits received by an individual and a greater exclusion on capital gains for small-business stocks held more than five years.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, a swing Finance Republican and heavily courted by the chairman, has favored some tax break for unemployment benefits. And Baucus would also expand the new market tax credit, important to rural areas and a priority for the Maine moderate.
Baucus’ total business tax cut package appears less than first proposed by Obama’s advisers but is heavily weighted for impact up front. Over the first 19 months, for example, the business breaks are worth almost as much as the $123.6 billion for individuals and their families, according to estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, which also meets Tuesday, provided fewer details about its spending plan Friday. But when compared with the House, the bill includes substantially more for Homeland Security as well as an agriculture disaster aid package.
The Obama team would get its full $9 billion request to expand access to broadband—$3 billion more than the House bill offers. At the same time, the Senate bill provides $16.5 billion for increased food stamp benefits, less than the $20 billion in the House.
Rather than invite a fight with Republicans, the leadership has opted so far not to include a so-called “cram down” provision allowing bankruptcy judges to force settlements between banks and homeowners facing foreclosure. And at this stage, the total package is several billion below its $825 billion target.
But few expect it to stay there for long Tuesday, and some of the appropriations items already included are not without controversy.
Republicans were quick to ridicule $600 million in the House bill to buy as many as 34,000 energy efficient cars for the government’s fleet of vehicles. The Senate bill provides as much as $2.6 billion, the initial request by the Obama team. But that could translate into more than 147,000 vehicles in the space of two years—a big boon to the auto industry but also a target for conservatives.
On the tax side, Baucus’ draft bill mirrors many of the provisions in the bill approved Thursday by the House Ways and Means Committee. Included is Obama’s signature “Make Work Pay” $500 tax credit to help offset the burden of payroll taxes on working class and middle income families. Business would benefit from more generous depreciation and expensing rules. And, like the House, Baucus would permit a five-year carry back of 2008 and 2009 net-operating losses for companies.
But Baucus also adds language to allow the deferral of some business income from the discharge of indebtedness and to allow companies to claim additional research or minimum tax credits in lieu of claiming depreciation. These together are worth $16 billion in 2009 and 2010 and reflect Baucus’s desire to pump up the early impact of his tax package.
At the same time, the added exclusion for capital gains costs little at first for the government but then more over time. Current law allows a 50% exclusion for stock in qualified small businesses, typically defined as corporations with assets less than $50 million. The Baucus draft would increase that to 75% for stock issued after the bill is enacted and before Jan 1, 2011.
By ron
January 25, 2009 9:07 AM | Link to this
Good morning,Heavy hitters here this morning.
In less than a week Obama has laid bipartisanship and ethics to rest.He doesn’t have to worry about them for the rest of his term.
Sonny’s $21 million dollar personal loan may evaporate like the waters of Lake Lanier before March.
The Obama team is off to the Mideast Peace Talks.I’v seen that trip undertaken many times.I wonder just how much money the Mideast Peace Talks have cost the American taxpayer over the last 50 years.
Michele Obama will be a co-president if she has her way.We’ll probably never know.
Open hostility toward Rush Limbaugh and the press.Is Someone a wee bit touchy?Especially about certain lobbyists appointed to certain positions?
An interesting almost week one,considering the large numbers being attached to the amount of our money that’s going to be p** away.
By Frank Teddleson
January 25, 2009 9:12 AM | Link to this
Okay. Bill Shipp: Not bad. Good. However, you expect too much from the lurker ear. There’s too many words. Simply cut out some and it will be perfect. Also, you include too many tone reversals, (slavery, bass fishing) and then conclude with a non sequitur: “He’s distracted. He’s aloof. He’s a nut”. But overall, very good. I only gave it two Z’s. Try action verbs.
Best Friend: Five Z’s. Nobody would wade through that much tripe on a Sunday Morning when we’ve got the fat paper, the round tables, and of course, a long boring sermon. I want you to start paying attention to your words. If you notice that you have written a cliche, “Shifting to the Senate”, “Die is cast”, then you need to slap your wife. Trust me, you’ll stop writing them quick. Otherwise a wonderful effort. zzzzz (I’m watching you close, I like the potential here. Take heart, it was a superb effort.)
Murtha. Fine. Except you had an Abscam connection in this story and didn’t capitalize. Whenever there’s a callback scandal, and especially this one where we all saw the videos before Utube was invented, well, it’s gold, and very fertile ground. Why should I read your dry rehash when there’s 5000 other bloggers writing at the same level? However, I gave you only one Z because yours was the shortest.
Brevity, people. Why write 25 words when four will do? I love that you’re all trying so hard. I need writers in my life. This is Sunday and just look at you. Bravo. Give yourselves a round of applause. Good Job.
By AmVet
January 25, 2009 10:24 AM | Link to this
I don’t understand Wooten’s premise.
Of course, the nation has numerous major problems. Most of them exacerbated by the recently departed worst “conservative” president in American history.
But how does interrogating porcines help???
Is this some sort of veiled reference to a desire for more water boarding?
Sonny “Not Arms for Hostages but Flags for Traitors” Perdue - Georgia’s version of W with a little Ronnie thrown in.
Pray for rain…
By Redneck Convert
January 25, 2009 10:35 AM | Link to this
Well, pork is real good on a breakfast plate with a big serving of grits with about a stick of butter in the middle. It’s bad if it means spending tax money on stuff we don’t need.
Like that train to Lovejoy. The only people that ever went to Lovejoy were in Gone with the Wind. We don’t need to be borrowing about $15 million to match a guvmint grant of $78 million just so a few city folk can go sight-seeing.
Now take that entrance to GA 400 from my driveway. That ain’t pork, it’s a need. It will save all kind of gas and time. You can look it up. And I bet the budget writers would feel diffrent if it was a guvmint grant to build a expressway to Soperton or Eaton. See, whether it’s pork is how you look at it. And I want godly Republicans that ain’t from big citys to be looking at things with my tax money.
Have a good sabbath everybody. I’m all worked up after hearing the Rev. Postlewaite preach about guvmint waste and how it’s our duty to vote against the libruls and I’m awful sorry Wooten will be going part-time soon. We need godly Conservatives like him to keep things going good in GA.
By Levy
January 25, 2009 10:50 AM | Link to this
When Israel needed a friend to help it deal with a rapidly changing dynamic in the Palestinian government, President George W. Bush was absent.
When Israel needed a friend to help find better solutions to the Iranian-backed militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, Mr. Bush supported the use of military force, despite the fact that a military solution to these problems does not exist.
And when Israel needed a strong, respected ally to be its advocate with regard to Iran, Mr. Bush’s policies in Iraq and his refusal to deal with Iran in a diplomatic way prevented the world from being able to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
I have no doubt that Mr. Bush believes that he is a good friend to Israel and believes his love for Israel is genuine. However, Israel is further away from its goal of a safe and secure future today than it was when he took office.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 10:55 AM | Link to this
By John P. Murtha January 25, 2009 8:35 AM | Link to this
Federal agents on Thursday raided the offices of a Pennsylvania government contractor with close ties to Rep. John P. Murtha, chairman of the powerful Defense panel on the House Appropriations Committee.
You’ve gotta be kidding me. You mean that senile old Marine trasher who trashed his his own kind before all the facts were produced to make a political statement may have done something ala “Duke” Cunningham? We will see how the DNC lib media plays this out now, won’t we? After all, all that energy those vicious liberal serpents in the DNC media expended during he Republican busts surely can’t be forgotten now, can it? It sure helped the Pelosicrats win control of congress. Does anyone else see the biting irony here? When Republicans are in control the DNC lib media pulls a Bob Woodward and leaves no stone unturned. However, when Democrats are in charge, suddenly those same “news” ferrets go into hibernation mode. It’s rather quite amazing to watch, actually.
By David Grossman
January 25, 2009 10:56 AM | Link to this
Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster — despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard to separate. And as we do, we burn the one who is bound to us, our double, our nemesis, ourselves.
So, a month after the war began, in the midst of the wave of nationalist invective now sweeping Israel, it would not hurt to keep in mind that this latest military operation in Gaza was, when all is said and done, just one more way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred. On this road, you sometimes win and you sometimes lose, but in the end it leads to ruin.
As both Israel and Hamas declared their own cease-fires, we Israelis rejoiced at how this campaign has rectified Israel’s military failures in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. But we should listen to the voice that says that the Israel Defense Forces’ achievements are not indubitable proof that Israel was right to set out on an operation of such huge proportions; they certainly do not justify the way our army pursued its mission. The IDF’s success confirms only that Israel is much stronger than Hamas, and that under certain circumstances it can be very tough and cruel.
But as the magnitude of the killing and the devastation has become apparent to all, perhaps Israeli society will, for a brief moment, put its sophisticated mechanisms of repression and self-righteousness on hold. And then perhaps a lesson of some sort will be etched into the Israeli consciousness. Maybe then we will finally understand something deep and fundamental — that our conduct here in this region has, for a long time, been flawed, immoral and unwise. Time and again, it fans the flames that are consuming us.
Of course, the Palestinians cannot be absolved of culpability for their errors and crimes. To do so would show contempt and condescension toward them, as if they were not rational adults responsible for their mistakes and oversights. True, the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were in large measure “strangled” by Israel, but they, too, had other options, other ways of protesting, voicing and displaying their difficult plight. Firing thousands of rockets at innocent civilians in Israel was not their only choice. We must not forget that. We must not be forgiving of the Palestinians, as if it goes without saying that when they are in distress, their almost automatic response must be violence.
But even when the Palestinians act with reckless belligerence — with suicide bombings and Qassam missiles — Israel, which is many times stronger than they are, has tremendous power to control the level of violence in the conflict as a whole. As such, it can also have a profound influence on calming the conflict and extricating both sides from its cycle of destruction. This most recent military action indicates that there does not seem to be anyone in the Israeli leadership who grasps that, who fully appreciates this critical aspect of the dispute.
After all, the day will come when we will want to try to heal the wounds that we have just inflicted. How can that day come if we do not understand that our military might cannot be our principal tool for establishing our presence here, across from and among the Arab nations? How can those days come if we do not grasp the gravity of the responsibility imposed on us by our multifarious, fateful ties and connections, past and future, with the Palestinian nation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and inside Israel itself?
When the clouds of smoke clear, when the politicians’ declarations of comprehensive, decisive victory fade, when we realize what this operation has really achieved, when we see how large the gap is between those declarations and what we really need to know in order to live a normal life in this region, when we acknowledge that an entire nation eagerly hypnotized itself because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure its Lebanon malady — then we can turn our attention to those who time and again have incited Israeli society’s hubris and its exaltation of power. To those who have, for so many years, taught us to scorn belief in peace and hope for any change at all in our relations with the Arabs. To those who have persuaded us that the Arabs understand only force, and that we can speak to them only in that language.
Since we have spoken that way to them so often, and only that way, we have forgotten that there are other languages that can be used to communicate with other human beings, even enemies, even enemies as bitter as Hamas — languages that are mother tongues to us, the Israelis, no less so than the language of the jet and the tank.
To talk to the Palestinians. That must be the central conclusion we reach from this last, bloody round of war. To talk even with those who do not recognize our right to exist here. Instead of ignoring Hamas now, we must take advantage of the new situation and enter into a dialogue to enable an accommodation with the Palestinian people as a whole. To talk, in order to understand that reality is not just the hermetically sealed story that we and the Palestinians have been telling ourselves for generations, the story that we are imprisoned within, no small part of which consists of fantasies, wishes and nightmares. To talk in order to devise, within this opaque, unhearing reality, an opportunity for speech, for that alternative — so scorned and forlorn today — for which, in the tempest of war, there is almost no place, no hope, no believers.
To talk as a well-considered strategy, to initiate dialogue, to insist on speech, to talk to the wall, to talk even if it seems fruitless. In the long term, this stubbornness may do far more for our future than hundreds of airplanes dropping bombs on a city and its people. To talk out of the understanding, born of the recent horrors we have seen, that the destruction we, each people in its own way, are able to cause one another is a huge and corrupting force. If we surrender to it and its logic, it will, in the end, destroy us all.
To talk, because what has taken place in Gaza over the past three weeks places before us in Israel a mirror that reflects a face that would horrify us were we to gaze on it for one moment from the outside, or if we were to see it on another nation. We would understand then that our victory is no real victory, and that the war in Gaza has not brought us any healing in that place where we desperately need a cure.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 11:20 AM | Link to this
Hey David, if you want to write (or cut-n-paste) a book, do it elsewhere, okay? Thanks.
Let’s see, where was I …. oh yeah. Gallup numbers are out and Obama’s approval rating is at 68%. Sayeth them:
“The Gallup Poll on Saturday released the first job-approval rating for President Obama, based on interviews during his first three full days in office: 68 percent.”
“Now that he’s in office, Obama’s approval ratings are starting to normalize, as partisan back-and-forth picks up. Just a week ago, Gallup found an astonishing 83 percent approval of how he has handled his transition, showing he had even won over most Republicans.”
First of all, he’s a Chicago liberal Democrat. He will NEVER “win” me over and just about everyone I know who did not vote for him. Dream on. Second, the man hasn’t even done anything yet other than establish some yawner rules and announce Gitmo closing. So how can in 1), his performance in less than a full week in office be determined and 2), be validated by a mere 1,591 adults who were polled?
Oh wait, here’s our new president on RUSH!
“WASHINGTON — President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.”
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.”
Gee, some of the libs say that Rush gets his talking points directly from the GOP themselves, and then others say that the GOP gets their thoughts from Rush. Well, which is it libs? Besides, how come I never hear libs in Washington whine about Air America?
RUSH! RUSH! RUSH! LIMBAUGH! LIMBAUGH! LIMBAUGH!
Have you ever heard so much infatuation from the left about the man? He gets them good. Not as good as, say, Ann Coulter - who the libs call everything but a child of Satan (maybe that too, who knows, who cares), but, he holds his own - and makes tens of millions a year doing it too - another sore point for the libs to be sure. Imagine making a LOT of money off of exposing their shenanigans, hypocrisies, double standards, and flat out failures at tax payer expense. We should be so lucky.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 11:26 AM | Link to this
Finally some sensibility from the Right. Where were you Republicans for the last eight years, John?
“You know, I’m concerned about the size of the package. And I’m concerned about some of the spending that’s in there, [about] … how you can spend hundreds of millions on contraceptives,” House GOP Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) later said.
“How does that stimulate the economy?”
Oh it stimulates alright, just not the economy. Not any more than federal funding for the “arts” stimulates the economy.
By Frank Teddleson
January 25, 2009 11:39 AM | Link to this
David, the nation of Israel is a fractal of Jewish History. Every era in Jewish History reads like the last month, the last year, the last five years, the last century, and the last eon. They’ve been forced to fight for survival for 10K years. Your long meditation on unilateral denial becomes a fantastic appeal against the thunderclap. Cant we just see the lightening and not have to hear the crash?
You express well our universal desire for freedom, but you forget that the price of freedom is death.
Every era in Jewish History reads like the last month, the last year, the last five years, the last century, the last eon.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 11:40 AM | Link to this
Uh huh, let’s close Gitmo and release everyone. After all, they’re all innocent and a victim of Cheney’s war. Idiots.
Two ex-Guantanamo inmates appear in Al-Qaeda video
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Two men released from the US “war on terror” prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.
One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.
Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 11:50 AM | Link to this
Will wonders never cease under president Obama. Now the Washington Compost has discovered and deems it “news” that al Qaeda is trash talking our president. I only find it interesting to point out because in the DNC lib media, this hate on a president sure as hell wasn’t “news” to them over the last six years or so worth reporting about.
To Combat Obama, Al-Qaeda Hurls Insults Effort Hints at Group’s Consternation
By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 25, 2009; A01
Soon after the November election, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader took stock of America’s new president-elect and dismissed him with an insulting epithet. “A house Negro,” Ayman al-Zawahiri said.
That was just a warm-up. In the weeks since, the terrorist group has unleashed a stream of verbal tirades against Barack Obama, each more venomous than the last. Obama has been called a “hypocrite,” a “killer” of innocents, an “enemy of Muslims.” He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office.
“He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection,” an al-Qaeda spokesman declared in a grainy Internet video this month.
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin
By Frank Teddleson
January 25, 2009 11:55 AM | Link to this
Cosmo, those prisoners are double agents, planted by Bush. From these released prisoners, we will find exactly where OBL is.
If they’re not spies, then Al Queda will assume they are, and keel them anyway.
Life is always one chess move ahead of the average bear, Boo Boo.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 12:51 PM | Link to this
“Cosmo, those prisoners are double agents, planted by Bush. From these released prisoners, we will find exactly where OBL is. If they’re not spies, then Al Queda will assume they are, and keel them anyway.”
Uhm, Frank. Did you miss this kinda important point on just that? Please allow me to reprint in bold for you:
One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.
Three other men appear in the video, including Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi, identified as an Al-Qaeda field commander. SITE later said he was prisoner No. 333.
I sincerely hope you were speaking tongue in cheek…or should I say foot in mouth? You decide.
By GaLiberal
January 25, 2009 1:12 PM | Link to this
AJC reported that all Georgia Rethuglicons are against President Obama’s economic stimulus plan as being too costly. That would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic. These are the same Rethuglicon butt-sniffers that had no problems with tax cuts for the uberrich, the reckless and unnecessary Iraq war, and unrestrained pork spending. No problem racking up a $1.2 TRILLION deficit, DOUBLING the national debt, and trashing the economy in eight years as long as your a Rethuglicon. So now the same Rethuglicon will obstruct and imped President Obama just to score cheap political points.
Amazingly, The Laughing Fat Man is drooling over the $3 BILLION President Obama’s stimulus plan would send to Georgia like a double order of ribs. Yet, the Rethuglicon delegation is going to spit in the President’s face. I wonder if the Rethuglicons will be so principled they send all that money right back to be used in other more deserving states. Obviously not because principals are for everyone else except Rethuglicons.
When you vote Rethuglicon, you vote against your own best interests. And our Rethuglicon representatives are living proof.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 1:53 PM | Link to this
Let’s take just two of GALib’s points (rants) apart:
AJC reported that all Georgia Rethuglicons are against President Obama’s economic stimulus plan as being too costly.
Funny you mention that, you hysterical lib hyena. Wasn’t it you mindless libs who wailed about the cost of Bush’s many stimulus plans, the first one being in 2002? I remember quite well how you Demoncats (isn’t making up names from political parties SO cute and cool???) made fun of last years $300-$1200 checks working Americans got (and non-working Americans) and said that you didn’t need that money. Short memory, eh boy?
These are the same Rethuglicon butt-sniffers that had no problems with tax cuts for the uberrich
Gee. Where do we start. Okay. The top 10% of federal income tax payers (by income) pay 71% of all federal income tax taken in by the federal government from US citizens (for the Obama voters, that means no corporate tax income is calculated in said calculations). Conversely, the bottom 50% pay just 2.9%. The middle 40%, or more specifically, the “middle class” making between $30k and $100k pay 27% of all IRS revenue taken in. Now, what kind of communist would make the mindless claim that ANY tax cuts would NOT be for those who paid them? After all, anything LESS would be income redistribution, would it not?
See how easy that was?
By Frank Teddleson
January 25, 2009 2:06 PM | Link to this
You could be right, cosmo. However, only allah knows if these new al queda operatives are triple agents. Like, remember in Hogan’s Heroe’s when the french guy dressed up like der heelter unt fooled all the nazis and they blew up their own ordnance?
Or when the japs dressed up like GI’s during the Battle of the Bulge and changed all the directional signs so our troops would march the wrong way?
It’s just like that, man. Osama doesn’t know which of the released gitmo’s to trust. So he probably wont trust any of them. Would you? Suppose Your comrade has just been released from six years of brain washing and torture by the enemy. Deal? or no Deal.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:08 PM | Link to this
Priceless. The libs in the DNC mainslime media just won’t let W go. What the hell is wrong with these hate-filled wingnuts? The latest example is some Chicago Tribune (yeah, expect that rag to be non-biased lol) columnist who has her panties in a wad over Bush allegedly not being a reader (dunno how someone can have an MBA from Harvard and not be a reader…but anyway…). Check this chick out. She was SHOCKED to find out Bush actually DID read books. Priceless (and apologetically ARROGANT) liberals………………
Of books and Obama: What does ‘literary president’ mean, exactly?
Julia Keller | CULTURAL CRITIC January 25, 2009
Now it’s official. We have a “literary president.” That is a good thing. That is a very good thing.
How do I know? Because people keep saying so, without further elaboration, as if the adjective “literary” is such an obvious, transparent, uncontested word that only a slow-witted dope—a “non-literary” person, perhaps—could fail to grasp its implications.
But I’m being coy here. We all know what people mean when they say Obama is a “literary” president—and, sadly, it has less to do with our widely beloved new leader than it does with the apparently unloved man he replaced: George W. Bush. Bush became the poster president for the non-literary set, for people who not only don’t read, but also seem to be rather proud of not reading.
Yet shortly before Bush left office, his closest adviser—Karl Rove, now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal—made a shocking revelation: Bush, it turns out, reads. He reads a lot. Two books a week, in fact. That, anyway, is the claim.
I don’t know how many books Bush has read. But I also don’t know how many books Obama has read. Politicians of all ideologies have been known to exaggerate and embellish. I suppose we could ask both men to sit down and take a quiz on the books they claim to have perused, but short of that, there’s no way to be certain.
Then why did she waste so much time thinking up and writing a pointless column? So typical of mindless liberalism and Democrats.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:14 PM | Link to this
“Osama doesn’t know which of the released gitmo’s to trust. So he probably wont trust any of them. Would you? Suppose Your comrade has just been released from six years of brain washing and torture by the enemy.”
FrankFo, they don’t think like that. First, their religion doesn’t allow them to change their ways, and second, their trust amongst each other is all they have. They are of a much stronger mental capacity than we can ever understand. Their entire life revolves around their Allah and the Koran. Nothing will waver them from their duty except death, which as we have seen throughout the years, becomes the ends to the means. I’m disappointed you don’t understand that basic concept of the enemy we face: radical Islamic terrorism.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:21 PM | Link to this
A rethought from my 2:08 about some Chicago Tribune columnist comments:
“Bush became the poster president for the non-literary set, for people who not only don’t read, but also seem to be rather proud of not reading.”
Actually, the only thing Bush admitted to not reading was “news” papers by you liberals. Who in their Right mind can blame him? There is a reason I haven’t subscribed to the AJC since 2001.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:26 PM | Link to this
Apparently, the mentality of the libs with CDS (Conservative Derangement Syndrome) can’t even escape the Miss America pageant.
“The questions for the Q&A segment were asked by purportedly randomly chosen people, and a young woman asked Miss New York, Leigh-Taylor Smith, “During the presidential campaign, the media made a big deal about Sarah Palin being a Miss America contestant. Do you think that was fair?” Wrong! Palin, as Miss Wasilla, was a Miss Alaska contestant and didn’t advance to The Show …”
Yeah okay. All who believe this was a “random question” all bend over now and take your medicine. It’s pretty pathetic that even that something so supposedly non-partisan has to be turned into a partisan affair, irrespective of the fact that Sarah Palin is and has been out of the spotlight publicly (minus the infatuated libs in the DNC media and on blogs) for nearly three months. Liberals remind me of the cat that just won’t let anything go..long after it went limp. Derangement indeed.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:37 PM | Link to this
One has to wonder about this. President Obama is doing some pretty significant cabinet power shifts. Will the same libs and the same DNC lib media of the left whine and pitch a hissy fit over this, as they claimed essentially this is what BUSH did? I already know the answer, so no need to reply, thanks. It goes under the topic of “Liberals & Double Standard Hypocrisy.” Are we going to have a fun four years or what?
“President Barack Obama is taking far-reaching steps to centralize decision-making inside the White House, surrounding himself with influential counselors, overseas envoys and policy “czars” that shift power from traditional Cabinet posts.”
“Not even a week has passed since he was sworn in, but already Obama is moving to create perhaps the most powerful staff in modern history – a sort of West Wing on steroids that places no less than a half-dozen of his top initiatives into the hands of advisers outside the Cabinet.”
By Amithy
January 25, 2009 2:48 PM | Link to this
My book of the week to answer this question is “Dogs and Demons” by Alex Kerr.
Kerr details how Japan lost a decade in employment and market growth due to a long series of infrastructure programs undertaken from the early 1990s.
The jobs did not come back. the Nikkei went the wrong one way The stimulus didn’t come late. It never came to the extent imagined.
And the aesthetic damaged vied with the economic damage. Infrastructure spending cost Japan a seascape. “Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2006 will comes to an astronomical 630 trillion yen, (about $6.2 trillion), three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population will spend on public construction in the same period. In this respect Japan a huge social-welfare state…
It is not only the rivers and valleys that have suffered. The seaside reveals the greatest tragedy: by 1953 55 percent of the entire coast of Japan has been lined with cement slabs and giant concrete tetrapods.”
There’s an old phrase from literature, “suspension of disbelief.” The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that people “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
The infrastructure programs, are a classic example of a suspension of disbelief.
By ron
January 25, 2009 2:50 PM | Link to this
Now that cosmo has become his own self sustaining blog,the rest of us are free for other pursuits.I think I’ll take the rest of the afternoon off.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh, Attorney
January 25, 2009 2:51 PM | Link to this
Within short order, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Milton Friedman and others who understand and appreciate that the free market continues to get it right more often than central planners ever could, will find themselves vindicated by the course of history. In a sense, it is already happening; note the portion of the Bloomberg story that points out the Bush Administration’s decision to abandon the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, leaving it to the Fed to do that as a way to increase the role of monetary policy in combating the current financial crisis and recession (moral hazard is an issue here, to be sure, but the Fed’s activities nonetheless do represent an extension of monetary policy—on this general point, see Robert Lucas, via Greg Mankiw). And of course, the lessons of Vietnam—referenced in the story—remain with us; a society that places blind trust in The Best And The Brightest will find itself coming to grief over one significant policy issue or other. Are we actually to believe that the same political class that brought us the depredations of Rod Blagojevich (via Cafe Hayek) will now bring us financial salvation by seizing the controls of the commanding governmental heights and employing Keynesian statism to bring prosperity for all? The very proposition is comical.
“Deregulation” remains a scapegoat for the current crisis—the actuals facts notwithstanding (see here, here, here, here and here for evidence against the claim that deregulation was responsible for the economic downturn. And see this for a good reason to be scared of the creeping approach of economic statism). Perhaps we should propose that those who think the Federal Register makes for thin reading ought to do weight training exercises with copies of it. Either these people will get remarkably buff or they will pull muscles left and right; in either event, the argument that we are somehow regulation-deprived should suffer the brutal blow it deserves to suffer.
Massive governmental spending sprees can make for massive displays of public corruption. TARP was used as a pork-barrel program at the expense of fulfilling even minimal standards of responsible policymaking. Who actually believes that the situation would be any better when it comes to the design and implementation of a Keynesian stimulus plan that will not be implemented immediately, that will fail to do anything to stimulate the economy even if it is implemented immediately, that will balloon the deficit to gargantuan and heretofore unimagined proportions, and will encourage public corruption just as surely as unbrushed and unflossed teeth encourage the presence of cavities?
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 2:56 PM | Link to this
By ron January 25, 2009 2:50 PM Now that cosmo has become his own self sustaining blog,the rest of us are free for other pursuits.I think I’ll take the rest of the afternoon off.
Translation from Libspeak: I have no counter argument to what Cosmo has posted, so I will return my head from whence it came - where there is no sunshine.
By Steve
January 25, 2009 2:57 PM | Link to this
The federal government is spending way too much right now and indeed federal spending is set to reach the highest percentage of GDP since World War II. The biggest failure of the Bush Administration was its inability to keep federal spending from exploding and the former president’s failure to use his veto power.
The stimulus package on top of the financial bailout on top of the former president having let federal spending get out of control threatens to create a fiscal catastrophe. We cannot afford to borrow even more money right now from China to pay for long run capital improvements that will not immediately stimulate economic growth. What we should do is cut the two lowest federal income tax brackets as House Republicans have proposed. And if we do spend any borrowed money we do not have on capital improvements it should go for construction of new nuclear power plants.
By Lawrence
January 25, 2009 2:59 PM | Link to this
Republicans seem to be complaining that President Obama’s stimulus plan isn’t spending taxpayer dollars fast enough. Instead, they should argue that Keynesian-style government spending – at whatever rate – will not increase national income. Think of it this way: every dollar that the Federal government spends has to be borrowed, so in effect money is taken out of one pocket of the economy and put into another pocket. By contrast, marginal tax rate reduction on productive activities – work effort, entrepreneurship, and investment – will increase national income, rather than redistribute it.
Republicans must also focus the economic debate on the root cause of this recession: The excess supply of housing. It was the excesses of the housing boom, brought on by Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policy, that led to an inventory of over leveraged mortgages and mortgage backed securities that placed lenders in a high-risk environment. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also deserve blame for the housing bubble. Unless the glut of housing is mopped up and housing prices stabilize, the economy will continue to struggle.
However, the Democrat’s massive spending stimulus plan does little, if anything, to address this root cause. For example, their plan includes taxpayer funding for contraceptives and the abortion industry; $50 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; $44 million for repairs to the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters; $200 million for the national mall, including grass planting; and so on (Go to “Read the Stimulus.Org” to learn more here) . I ask other Arena participants to explain how this kind of government spending addresses the housing supply problem, or increases private sector job creation?
Economists Lawrence Lindsey and Glenn Hubbard have offered some policy ideas to address the housing crisis, stabilize housing prices and promote economic growth here and here that Congress ought to consider.
By Jeff
January 25, 2009 3:01 PM | Link to this
.” This so-called “stimulus” package, all $850 Billion, 334 pages, and counting of it, contains very little by way of actual economic stimulation, and very much by way of massive pork barrel giveaways to be paraded as an “I got mine!” monetary victory in Senators’ states and Representatives’ districts — all at taxpayers’ expense.
Testifying yesterday before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, Thomas Barthold, head of the Joint Committee on Taxation, couldn’t promise one single job would result from the Democrats’ proposal, which makes one wonder what the point of all this spending really is in the first place. While earmarks like $1,000,000,000 for new Censuses, $400,000,000 for “habitat restoration and migration activities,” $150,000,000 for “bridge removal,” $800,000,000 more for Amtrak, and $200,000,000 for the “leaking underground storage tank trust fund” may be deemed necessary to some (particularly those who have a stake in each of those projects), none are actually stimulative to the economy.
The New Deal was a very, very raw deal for America at the time and since (with the latter being far worse due to the repercussions of such an increase in government ownership, involvement, and interference in the economy and the day-to-day lives of American citizens). At very least, though, its infrastructure projects were forward-looking for the time — new roads, bridges, etc. What was progressive in the 1930s, though, is now incredibly regressive, and therefore not worth a fraction of the time or investment now it was then.
We must shore up the parts of our infrastructure that are crumbling, yes; however, rather than working to enhance our current infrastructure with more 20th-century fingers in the dike, we should be investing in more forward-looking projects that will help move America as a whole into the 21st century while also actually creating jobs and helping increase wealth — and the chief way to do that is not by shelling out nearly a trillion dollars more in taxpayer-funded pork barrel spending, but by making America a place where businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and hard-working individuals can once again succeed without having the fruits of their labors appropriated by a “Nanny State” government which sees ensuring equality of outcome, often by penalizing the successful and by forcibly “sharing the wealth,” as its chief purpose.
By Cristy
January 25, 2009 3:03 PM | Link to this
Should we spend money on investments or taxs cuts that extend beyond 18 months? Yes, if the initiatives meet the task and test set forth by the American people. The task mandated by the voters is to make tough choices, invest in people, and get our economy back on track; the test is not for each representative to love100% of the recovery and reinvestment package, but whether the initiatives create jobs in the near-term and continue a foundation of economic stability going forward. At todays White House meeting, Congressional Budget Office chief Peter Orszag explained how he would guarantee that at least 75% of the bill would go directly into the economy within the first 18 months. What will people see in 18 months? President Obamas spokesman Robert Gibbs said that more people will be back to work, more people will have money in their pockets, more people will see credit flowing and action to address home foreclosure process whether they live in or near homes that are foreclosing.”
Is anyone being “snookered?” No - the initiatives are all out in the open and debated by various Congressional committees with the attendant bipartisan legislative jockeying. Many of these investments are public-private partnerships that create private sector jobs, and that at least 40% of the House bill involves tax cuts, including some suggestions from Republicans. So far it seems we are on track with the task and the test. Of course, all are free to ignore the public mandate for change at their peril, but the fact is a large majority of the American people demand economic recovery and support President Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.
By Gary
January 25, 2009 3:06 PM | Link to this
It was sadly necessary to strengthen our banking systems which are a foundational structure in our economy, but the shopping spree now being proposed has little to do with shoring up the economy. It is much more about growing government and giving political payouts to favored industries, all the while laying unimaginable amounts of debt on our children.
By Steve
January 25, 2009 3:07 PM | Link to this
My youngest son invariably asks for a Barney the Dinosaur band-aid for every hurt, from pink-eye to an ankle sprain. As a solution to our current malaise, spending stimuli lie close to the same level of accuracy. And let all neo-Keynesians note that even without the latest proposed larder the government will be “stimulating” the economy in 2009 by spending over 50 percent more than it takes in tax revenue, with the red ink equal to over 8 percent of GDP. But adding another $900 billion in single-year stimulus would push those numbers to 93 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Although (and perhaps because) I’m in the infrastructure business, I know that public works spending will not rescue the economy; for that, we need to keep focused on banks and credit markets. Rather, a stimulus might ease the unavoidable transition to more rational asset (home) pricing and less household and corporate debt, with many banks, businesses and the most over-leveraged homeowners still having to fail along the way. That said, so long as the stimulus is simply a front-loading of future infrastructure expenditures and not replicating the Japanese “build anything” debacle, it might be better than a band-aid. And if it this investment plan also includes new avenues and incentives for private businesses to invest in public infrastructure, it could deliver a double-dose of stimulus for the same dollars. Such a plan should be able to pass the Congressional “snooker” test.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 3:12 PM | Link to this
“The biggest failure of the Bush Administration was its inability to keep federal spending from exploding and the former president’s failure to use his veto power”
Agreed, steve. Of course, we haven’t seen any funding cuts from a full Democrat Washington lately though, have we? Nah. Deafening silence by the left on that for some mysterious reason. But they can sure as hell dish it out on Republicans though.
“And if we do spend any borrowed money we do not have on capital improvements it should go for construction of new nuclear power plants.”
With the Algore lib enviro-nazis, that ain’t gonna happen any time soon I’m afraid. You’ve got a better chance on eBay at collecting an intern’s blue dress stained by a former Democrat president’s bodily fluids than seeing them support nuclear power. The absolute amazing thing about it is that those are the same people who think we should model our health care after France’s socialized health care, yet France is very successful in nuclear energy. Does the phrase “cherry picking” mean anything?
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 3:19 PM | Link to this
“Massive governmental spending sprees can make for massive displays of public corruption. TARP was used as a pork-barrel program at the expense of fulfilling even minimal standards of responsible policymaking. “
Yep, and I posted a Wall Street Journal article about just that yesterday with regards to sock mouth Democrat Barney Frank. As expected, libs read it and then stuck their heads back up where there is no sunshine without so much as a whimper:
Political Interference Seen in Bank Bailout Decisions Barney Frank Goes to Bat for Lender, and It Gets an Infusion JANUARY 22, 2009, 2:45 P.M. ET wsj.com
The Treasury had said it would give money only to healthy banks, to jump-start lending. But OneUnited had seen most of its capital evaporate. Moreover, it was under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives’ use.
Nonetheless, in December OneUnited got a $12 million injection from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. One apparent factor: the intercession of Rep. Barney Frank, the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee. Mr. Frank, by his own account, wrote into the TARP bill a provision specifically aimed at helping this particular home-state bank. And later, he acknowledges, he spoke to regulators urging that OneUnited be considered for a cash injection.
Mr. Frank — who has played a leading role in both the initial design of TARP and current planning to revamp it — says he spoke with a federal regulator and asked that OneUnited be given consideration for TARP money, “without in any way impinging on their general safety and soundness rules.” Mr. Frank said he didn’t remember which federal regulator he spoke with.
On Dec. 19, OneUnited received $12 million from the Treasury, on condition it raise $20 million from its shareholders, which it did. Ms. McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Bush administration Treasury, said that OneUnited’s application was subject to the same review process as other banks faced.
Mr. Frank said he didn’t try to interfere with the regulatory process. “We have never told the regulators that they should ease up on them or not order them to do this or that,” he said.
He cites the bank’s status as the state’s only financial institution owned by African-Americans. “We did say, yes, I thought it would have been a social tragedy if the one minority bank in Massachusetts that has been working so hard and had been overextended into housing was to be wiped out by a federal action, the Fannie-Freddie preferred [shares] thing, and that’s why I think it was important to try to help them.”
Rep. [Maxine] Waters said she was unaware that the bank received money. OneUnited was “just a small” bank, she said.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 3:24 PM | Link to this
“What was progressive in the 1930s, though, is now incredibly regressive, and therefore not worth a fraction of the time or investment now it was then.”
Jeff, you can throw in the left’s beloved unions too in your very good post @ 3:01.
By Glinda
January 25, 2009 4:24 PM | Link to this
“Don’t take their money and buy them toys, and don’t take it to spend on programs that are marginally useful.”
Jim,
Are you talking about Gov. Perdue’s Go Fish program?
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 4:41 PM | Link to this
“Glenda”:
I’ll bet Go Fish will bring in more relative revenue to the state than Atlanta’s former mayor who thought up of the brilliance of a putt-putt and arcade park downtown on taxpayer dollars to try and bring the suburbanites back into town.
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 5:38 PM | Link to this
Gee. Where did all the libs go? Was it something I said? I guess it was. The truth. Here’s some more. Moonbats need apply:
“Former President George W. Bush and wife Laura evacuated the White House, making room for President Barack Obama, his wife Michelle and their two daughters to move in for the next four (optimistically eight) years. [The] photo of the White House that was released to the media showcases a manila folder with a Post-It note left behind from George W. Bush for our new president. The folder is supposedly the only thing left behind from the old administration. There has been some speculation about what the contents of the folder might be. But, I’m more concerned about any energetic crud that may still be hanging around inside the house, especially in the living quarters. There are surely lingering energies that could use a good smudging.” —Phylameana’s Holistic Healing Blog
By Glenn
January 25, 2009 5:42 PM | Link to this
Sad to think that Jim’s successor probably won’t be able to glean from the dronings of legislators and bureaucrats the kind of reactions and remarks that tell this column’s tale. Who but Jim would remain sufficiently inured to the gamey logic of the Gold Dome long enough notice the absurdity of an agency chief asking for higher prices with which to deliver a product she promises to downgrade? Who else would notice the deadpan disgrace of elected officials fighting for a useless program so that at least it might be their constituencies which can enjoy non-benefits paid for by all Georgians?
And at the same time, who except Jim would be mild enough to suggest that in hard times — what with multi-billion-dollar deficits and a worldwide recession and all — maybe, yunno, spending caps or program efficiency reviews might be in order. For now. At least until the return of those times “when money’s free-flowing”?
In this column you have a fine hand working the stiletto gently between the ribs and to the hilt, but rather than twisting at that point, he sews up the wounds instead with bromides about cost-benefit analysis. Basic organizational efficiencies, such as cost-benefit analyses can be, and should have been, instituted across state operations by immediate order of the Governor, and they should be permanent. Smarter state operations would dictate the Governor’s imposition of models for the continuous improvement and evaluation of the performance of the agencies. And perhaps the smartest approach would entail systems of incentive for each agency to deliver to Georgians, per taxpayer dollar, services that demonstrably and continuously improve over time. More for less instead of, as Rep. Jay Neal notes, less for more.
But Georgia’s pickle is a gherkin compared to the barrelful of kosher dills they’re rolling up in Washington. Still, even here it’s scary to consider the implications of falling so far short of any kind of fiscal discipline other than triage (and that, only when times are hard).
By Cosmo
January 25, 2009 6:15 PM | Link to this
Well, I see the pathetic drive-by libs like GALiberal @1:12 continue to prove their mentality: run thy mouth without hanging around to back up what thy posted. So typical. But so not surprising from a member of an elitist group full of anger, hate, and vitriolic nonsense.
$200 says that asshat lib Demoncat (isn’t making up names from a political party SO cool???) will be back tomorrow with a vengeance since most Conservatives will actually be working and all that……….
By Glinda
January 27, 2009 8:19 AM | Link to this
I am not familiar with the puttputt/arcade mentioned above. However, I am against government waste and pork no matter who proposes it-even a Republican governor.