Since the failure of the rescue bill, i have been privately imploring friends on The Hill to provide a viable alternative. Looks like they are crafting just that.
I like a lot of the provisions under consideration. I wonder if it could pass without “Christmas Tree” add-ons from the Left. Here are key provisions:
* Require the Treasury Department to guarantee, at up to 100 percent, bank losses resulting from failed mortgage-backed securities originated prior to the plan’s enactment. Such insurance, supporters say, would provide immediate value to the securities and a foundation for which they could then be sold. The Treasury Department would finance that insurance by assessing a premium on outstanding mortgage-backed securities.
* Allow companies to carry back losses arising in tax years ending in 2007, 2008, or 2009 back five years, generating a tax refund and immediate capital
* Allow a “repatriation window” for profits earned by U.S. firms overseas. Such repatriation amounts would not be taxed if invested in distressed debt (as defined by Treasury) for at least one year.
* Allow banks to treat losses on shares of preferred stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as ordinary losses, not as capital losses
* Suspend the capital gains tax rate for two years
* Limit backing of high-risk loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
* Schedule Fannie and Freddie for privatization
* Suspend “mark-to-market” accounting until the SEC can issue new guidelines that will allow firms to mark these assets to their true economic value
* Stabilize the dollar by repealing the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which alternative bailout supporters say diverts the Federal Reserve’s attention from long-term price stability to short-term economic growth
* Require the Treasury to write rules prohibiting excessive compensation or golden parachutes to executives of failed companies
* Task the SEC with regular, annual audit reports of entities the federal government has brought under conservatorship or now owns
If the bill comes up with the above provisions, I bet the bill passes overwhelmingly. AND the stock market would shoot straight up. Go John McCain!
What the Congressional supporters of this bill fail to comprehend is that this bill bails out Wall Street AND Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the fiscally irresponsible unpopular President.
Tell me again why the House GOP should support this bill? And I write this as someone who supports its passage. If it’s that obvious to me, how freaking blind are Congressional leaders?
Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden owe $1 million to SimmonsCooper law firm of East Alton from a hedge fund buyout that fell apart in 2006.
SimmonsCooper attorneys have contributed hundreds of thousands to campaigns of Senator Biden, his other son Beau Biden, and John Markell, current candidate for governor, while turning Delaware into a national magnet for asbestos lawsuits.
In the hedge fund case, Hunter Biden and James Biden seek to shift their debt to former partner Joseph Lotito through counterclaims in a fraud suit he filed against them.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried rejected their bid in May, ruling that they should have checked out the fund more carefully.
“These counterclaims, conditionally pleaded, do not rest on a justiciable controversy, but seek only to foment uncertainty and chaos between the parties in the event that plaintiff is successful in presenting the main claims,” Fried wrote.
“Such pleading will not be countenanced,” he wrote. (emphasis added)
That is a page out of the Democrat playbook - in fact, we’ve seen it massively on display these past few days as Democrats have sought to shift all blame away from Frank and Dodd on the financial meltdown, blame Republicans like McCain who actually tried to prevent the mess from happening and, of course, hog all credit for anything good which might come out of this financial meltdown…in other words they, “seek only to foment uncertainty and chaos between the parties in the event that plaintiff is successful in presenting the main claims”. So far, at first blush, its had some success - as we can see in Obama rising in the polls all the way back up to where he was a month ago…before he crashed and burned because, well, he is a zero entirely out of his depth. Given that McCain has been acting like a patriot and a statesman, his Democratic opponents have been given free hand to spin and lie like Biden boys trying to get out of a million dollar debt…but the time is swift approaching when McCain will back at it, beating Obama like a drum.
Meanwhile, what of this, Democrats? Here’s the son and brother of your VP candidate who are mixed up in just the sort of corrupt financial BS which was at the heart of our financial crisis…you gonna call for Biden to get the boot? Or will you just swallow this along with everything else?
The devil will be in the details (and I haven’t seen the final bill), but if the provisions below are true, this bill will be a good compromise. From The Corner:
1. No ACORN money: All money goes to debt reduction
2. No blank check: Treasury is required to develop an insurance program
3. No union power grab: Dodd-Frank permitted unions to force themselves into the board room. This proposed compromise eliminates that.
4. No “cram down” bankruptcy provision (aka, trial bar giveaway):
5. No tax hikes: The proposed compromise simply requires a proposal to Congress to recoup any potential losses.
Note: Here is the office of Roy Blunt’s side-by-side comparison of a) The original Paulson Plan, b) the Dodd-Frank bill, and c) the final bill (according to Blunt).
This final bill is looking much better than the original iterations.
House and Senate negotiators have reached tentative agreement on Treasury’s $700 billion rescue plan for the financial markets after a marathon Capitol negotiating session that started Saturday afternoon and stretched into early Sunday morning.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the deal still had to be “committed to paper,” a process that will continue throughout the night, with an eye toward a formal announcement Sunday.
“We have something verbal,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.).
Republican Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the chief negotiator for the House GOP, said he was “looking forward to what we’re going to see on paper” but said he was optimistic that it would be something House Republicans could support.
“I’m not sure yet we can sell it to our conference but I’m 100% sure that this is the best deal we could get,” said a Republican aide.
Said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson: “We’ve been working very hard on this and we’ve made great progress toward a deal which will work and will be effective in the marketplace and effective for all Americans . . . .We’ve still got a lot to do to finalize it, but I think we’re there.”
Seems a bit tentative and my guess is that it could blow up by morning if Democrats have managed to slip in there things like the BS funding for ACORN, but it seems that at least some deal is on track. A lot of hard work for all involved - with John McCain and the House GOP representing America, and the rest of the Congress representing the status quo. And, as usual in a crisis, Obama is nowhere to be found…one wonders if he’ll even show back up in DC to vote on this…
McCain is there, of course…its where leaders go when leadership is needed.
In May 2006, six months after 24 people were killed in a small Iraqi town, U.S. Rep. John Murtha made a startling accusation.
American soldiers, he contended, had killed innocent civilians “in cold blood.”
Now, less than six weeks before the longtime Johnstown Democrat is up for re-election, a Marine involved in the now-infamous Haditha incident is suing Murtha for slander.
Justin Sharratt of Canonsburg, Washington County, left the Marine Corps last year. But he claims Murtha’s statements have caused “permanent, irreversible damage to his reputation.”
“What Murtha did is outrageous, and I am seeking punitive damages,” said Noah Geary, a Pittsburgh attorney representing Sharratt.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in Pittsburgh.
If there was any way to get Murtha to see the inside of a jail over this, I’d advocate it - “treason” is not too strong a word to describe what he did.
Here’s a 10 minute video that is worth every second to watch:
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Senator Bunning injects a note of reality into the debate:
I also strongly disagree with the Senators who have come to the floor and declared that this crisis is a failure of the free markets. No, the root of this crisis is a failure of government. It comes from a failure of regulation and, most importantly, monetary policy. In the long term we certainly need to update our financial regulation to reflect the realities of our modern economy, but it is just plain wrong to blame failures of our regulations and regulators on the markets…
…I want to mention a few more failures of government that directly contributed to this mess. Federal regulations require the use of ratings from rating agencies that have proven to be wrong on the biggest financial failures of the last decade. The Community Reinvestment Act forces banks to make loans they would not otherwise make based on the credit history of the borrower. The Securities and Exchange Commission under former Chairman Donaldson failed to establish meaningful oversight and leverage restrictions for investment banks.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used the implied backing of the government to grow so large that their takeover by the government effectively doubled the national debt. And they were pushed by their executives and the Clinton Administration to loosen their lending standards and write the loans that drove the companies to the point of being bailed out by the taxpayers.
Finally, the same individuals who have come to this building to ask for the latest bailout set the stage for the very panic they are using to justify the bailout.
Michael Barone has the scoop on how to get this rescue plan done. Alter the plan so it is insuring tax-payers against Wall Street excesses and not bailing out Wall Street and you can get a deal done:
What do House Republicans want? A senior House Republican gave me and some other reporters a look yesterday at what a working group headed by Assistant Minority Whip Eric Cantor is demanding. The senior House Republican (hereinafter SHR) has what sounded to me like an ingenious approach. He cited Ginnie Mae loans to low-income borrowers, which the government can insure. He proposed that the government (presumably through the entity envisioned by the Paulson plan) offer to sell insurance to financial institutions that hold mortgage-backed securities (hereinafter MBS). Premiums would be determined by the rates of foreclosure on each class of securities so far. Under this plan, the government would be taking in money, not paying it out. Of course, if the premiums are not enough to cover losses, the government might eventually take losses, as it did when the savings and loan industry collapsed. But losses don’t seem inevitable and in any case will mostly occur in out-years, not now.
[Would] House Republicans would go along if Paulson pledged to use authority in the statute to set up an insurance program within a month of passage. “That would go far toward convincing [Republican] members.”
As one of the few people that actually understands the inner-workings of these banks and what needs to get done to avert disaster, I like this plan. A deal needs to get done, but Paulson and the Democrats need to take a few more steps closer to tax-payer protection to get the deal done. It’s that simple.
We’ve just been alerted that despite House Democrats relenting on extending bans on offshore drilling and oil shale in the continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill, Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid has decided to sneak an extension of the oil shale ban through as Congress fights over the financial bailout. Oil shale in America’s West is estimated to hold be between 800 billion and 2 trillion barrels of oil — that is more than three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.
As an aside, I just got off the phone with Reid’s office and asked the staffer why Reid is hellbent on sending us to the economic stone age, with his constant stonewalling of our ability to harvest our own resources.
The staffer replied that Reid’s energy policy is long term in scope.
I replied, "What about the short term? What good is the long term if in the short term we collapse economically, and have nothing to leave our kids? Why is Senator Reid constantly stonewalling our ability to harvest our own resources?"
The condescending, smarmy schmo replied, "Well, sir, that’s if you believe that more oil will help us in the short term."
Someday, someone will invent a machine whereby it is possible to slap someone upside the head via the telephone.
Until then, banging my head against the wall will have to suffice.
I swear, and I’ll say this professionally: Anyone who votes democrat in the upcoming elections ought to have their head examined.
For the Most Unpopular Man in Human History, he sure does seem to be able to whack Democrats at will:
Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told reporters Tuesday that a provision continuing the moratorium will be dropped this year from a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running after Congress recesses for the election.
Republicans have made lifting the ban a key campaign issue after gasoline prices spiked this summer and public opinion turned in favor of more drilling. President Bush lifted an executive ban on offshore drilling in July.
“If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices,” said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.
Of course, there was some great work done by the Congressional GOP and the RNC on this issue, and it has worked well for America in that we’ll finally start to get an energy policy which produces, you know?, some energy. In the end, how were Democrats defeated? Simple - they came up against men and women who actually put country first…while a group which puts party first can cause a lot of ruckus, when the chips are down it is those who believe in something sublime who will defeat those who believe in something corrupt and mean.
Come what may this November, I will miss President Bush a lot - and I’m one of the very few people who will admit to this. But it has been endlessly entertaining the past 7+ to watch a man who understands run rings around those who don’t…and adding to the humor of the long-running event is the enormously funny fact that those who don’t understand actually think they are smarter than the man who does. I’ll also miss having a leader of decision and courage - though if the election goes right, that will be less missed than if it goes wrong.
There are certainly plenty of places to point fingers, and it may be hard to pinpoint the original event that set it all in motion. But let me give you an educated guess. The financial crisis we’re living through today started with the corruption and manipulation of our home mortgage system. At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
These quasi-public corporations lead our housing system down a path where quick profit was placed before sound finance. They institutionalized a system that rewarded forcing mortgages on people who couldn’t afford them, while turning around and selling those bad mortgages to the banks that are now going bankrupt. Using money and influence, they prevented reforms that would have curbed their power and limited their ability to damage our economy. And now, as ever, the American taxpayers are left to pay the price for Washington’s failure.
Two years ago, I called for reform of this corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Congress did nothing. The Administration did nothing. Senator Obama did nothing, and actually profited from this system of abuse and scandal. While Fannie and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of cards, Senator Obama was taking their money. He got more, in fact, than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them. And while Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent’s trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search.
This CEO, Mr. Johnson, walked off with tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses for services rendered to Fannie Mae, even after authorities discovered accounting improprieties that padded his compensation. Another CEO for Fannie Mae, Mr. Raines, has been advising Senator Obama on housing policy. This even after Fannie Mae was found to have committed quote “extensive financial fraud” under his leadership. Like Mr. Johnson, Mr. Raines walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
Senator Obama may be taking their advice and he may be taking their money, but in a McCain-Palin administration, there will be no seat for these people at the policy-making table. They won’t even get past the front gate at the White House.
My friends, this is the problem with Washington. People like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system.
We’ve heard a lot of words from Senator Obama over the course of this campaign. But maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems. The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was square in the middle of it.
As Matt and I detailed in Caucus of Corruption, there is this nexus of money and power in DC which confounds the efforts of the honest and hard working to build a better future. There is, indeed, plenty of blame to go around and there are GOPers who played a dishonorable role here, but the fundamental revolves around the way business is done on Washington, DC; and the business culture of DC is almost entirely the creation of the Democrats, who essentially ran the DC show for the better part of 60 years.
While I did (and do) oppose McCain’s campaign finance reform, he was on the right track with it - while Money shouts for the attention of Power, the quiet words of the People are drowned out. I know that Obama and his Democrats are continuing to advance the narrative that they are for the little guy and will kick Money out of the loop, the pragmatic facts of life are that Democrats set up the system where Money has to wait upon government and, in order to preserve and/or advance itself, Money is forced to play the money and power game of DC. Unless there is a fundamental shift in how things are done, the best we can hope for is a band-aid designed to do no more than get the nation past the next election cycle before everything goes to heck in a handbasket.
The problem with Obama - as evidenced by the very large amount of money he swiftly amassed from the very same interests at the center of the financial meltdown - is that he isn’t an agent of change and he can’t ever be as long as he’s a liberal Democrat. Over the years the confluence of money and politics has become very tight…and a lot of the people running banks into the ground are people who have been high up in Democratic politics, and these people are not about to allow Democrat Obama to mess up their lucrative game. In the end, only a McCain/Palin Administration gives us a shot at real change in the way DC does business.
Neither McCain nor Palin are enthralled to any particular pressure group. Both McCain and Palin seem to take delight in kicking in the doors of political consensus and allowing enough light to force the cockroaches to scatter. Imbued with a love of country which knows no bounds, connected with average Americans by grace of suffering, poverty and struggle in their own lives, McCain and Palin will batter down the walls of corruption and bring about real change - not in a century have we had a prospective President so keen to help the average American and so contemptuous of what Theordore Roosevelt termed the “malefactors of great wealth”. We can have real change - but only from someone who is entirely uninterested in whether or not some of his fellow politicians will have to lose office; that thing which is the only bad thing as far as Democrats are concerned.
What is this? The amounts of money John McCain and Barack Obama, respectively, have received from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac according to Open Secrets. The linked information goes on to note that current members of Congress have received a total of $4.8 million from Fannie and Freddie, 57% of that money going to Democrats. Further more, the top three recipients are all Democrats (Dodd, Obama, Kerry, in that order).
Given that Obama has only been on the national scene a short time, we have to stand amazed that he’s beating out the likes of Reid and Pelosi in the Fannie/Freddie money race.
This is change we can believe in? Or is it change we need? Or is it just more of the same corrupt nonsense we’ve had to deal with from Democrats from time immemorial?
With “main street” America worrying over their finances and having to foot the bill for a hundred billion dollar bailout during the Wall Street meltdown, what is our US Congress doing? Secretly stashing pork barrel projects in bills and hiding behind Senate procedural rules to refuse debate on the issues:
As the stock market plunged nearly 1,000 points in two days this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada was preoccupied with protecting billions of dollars worth of earmarks contained in a separate, unpublished committee report that got a one-sentence reference in a giant $612 billion defense bill. Reid engineered the 61-to-32 vote to limit debate on the bill, thus barring consideration of an amendment offered by Sen. Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republican’s amendment would have deleted the reference to the committee report so that it would have to be considered separately. By leaving the language in the bill, the lawmakers were able to carry out one of their favorite maneuvers: Incorporating committee reports into omnibus bills so they can give billions of tax dollars to their cronies without recorded votes on specific spending measures. This is the same Harry Reid who with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” of Republican corruption if voters would return the Democrats to the majority.
But Reid’s move was not just a slap at DeMint. Under pressure from a bipartisan coalition of fiscal watchdog groups, including Porkbusters, Club for Growth, Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union and Taxpayers for Common Sense, President George W. Bush signed an executive order last January that directed federal agencies to ignore earmarks that only appear in committee reports. If DeMint’s proposal had passed, the earmarks in the defense bill’s committee report would have been merely suggestions – not legally binding spending instructions. No wonder Reid made sure the South Carolinian’s amendment never made it to the Senate floor.
One does wonder how one becomes this nasty and dishonest - Senator Claire McCaskill on This Week:
MCCASKILL: But women of America are going to kick the tires the next 55 days, George, and they’re going to going to find out that this is a ticket that wants to put women in prison for having an abortion after they have been raped.
Sad to say that this poor woman is a fellow Catholic - and clearly a woman who needs our prayers for wisdom and love of neighbor to become more important in her life. Fortunately, she didn’t have the stage all too herself:
FIORINA: Those are ridiculous charges, point one. But I think the important point here is that this is what the Democratic Party has done for years. It has tried to hold women hostage by frightening them on issues such as reproductive rights, Rove v. Wade.
American women in this country will not be held hostage by the politics of fear on Roe v. Wade anymore.
Ms. Fiorina did miss one very important point in her riposte: its not just fear tactics, its also the lies. Senator McCaskill lies when she claims that Senator McCain, Governor Palin or, indeed, that the GOP advocates jailing women for having an abortion. Allow me to make one thing completely clear - we of the pro-life movement want the killing of unborn children to stop, for the sake of the children, their mothers and the moral health of the United States of America. We seek no vengeance, we want no one - not even the abortionists - to be punished. We just want it to stop. Murdering innocent, unborn children is not the right thing to do and no one who actually applies reason to the issue can come to any other conclusion than that abortion is wrong.
I think that in later years we’ll think back on this time and realize that the vital thing about the McCain/Palin ticket was the way it forced the left and the Democratic party out into the open - they are no longer able to hide behind a friendly media because that media, itself, has been unhinged by the McCain/Palin ticket, and now MSM and Democratic Party/Political Left are driving together off a cliff as the American people finally get an unmistakable example of just how dishonest and nasty the MSM and Democratic party have become.
PRINCETON, NJ — A potential shift in fortunes for the Republicans in Congress is seen in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with the Democrats now leading the Republicans by just 3 percentage points, 48% to 45%, in voters’ “generic ballot” preferences for Congress. This is down from consistent double-digit Democratic leads seen on this measure over the past year.
Given that Democrats always poll well in the generic ballot question, this is an exceptionally stunning turn around - and it does explain why some House Democrats are starting to get the jitters and also to distance themselves from Obama and the national party.
There are a lot of things at work here - Obama’s poor performance since about mid-April; McCain’s very effective campaign; the Palin pick; backlash against the MSM/Democratic party for how they are treating Palin; a series of recent stories highlighting Democratic corruption; a sense that the Democratic majority has been entirely ineffective…will it all come together and give the GOP a new majority? Perhaps - I’m not sure; as in all things about election 2008, there are just too many uncertainties out there, and it is notoriously difficult to figure House races via polling. But one thing is certain - GOP efforts and Democratic flubs have turned what was once a near-certain Democratic wave into a down-to-the-wire battle which can go either way. The nation, dear lefties, did not actually turn left in 2006 - the people voted against the GOP, but not in favor of you…you had to close the deal and by nominating an ultra-liberal empty suit, you might just have cut yourselves off at the knees.
Dave Hartline over at The Catholic Report gently rebukes Pelosi, Biden and all those who wrap themselves in Catholicism, but don’t adhere to the teaching authority of the Church:
Catholics who faithfully attend Mass are tired of hearing that Cafeteria Catholics are really faithful Catholics even though they think they know better than the Church. This type of self absorbed excess has not only damaged the Church but society as well. Pope Benedict XVI is fond of referring to the D
