Republican criticisms may not hold water with the faithful left… but now Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) is blaming the Obama administration for the AIG bonus scandal…

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said the Obama administration asked him to insert a provision in last month’s $787 billion economic- stimulus legislation that had the effect of authorizing American International Group Inc.’s bonuses.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said yesterday he agreed to modify restrictions on executive pay at companies receiving taxpayer assistance to exempt bonuses already agreed upon in contracts. He said he did so without realizing the change would benefit AIG, whose recent $165 million payment to employees has sparked a public furor.

Dodd said he had wanted to limit executive compensation at companies that got money from the government’s financial-rescue fund. AIG has received $173 billion in bailout money. His provision was changed as the stimulus legislation was negotiated between the House and Senate.

“I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate- passed amendment” to the stimulus bill, “but I did so at the request of administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG,” Dodd said in a statement released last night.

“Let me be clear — I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week,” said Dodd, who didn’t name the administration officials who made the request.

In all fairness, Dodd is one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate in 2010… and he may be trying to shift blame away from himself to save his chances of reelection, which this scandal most certainly hurts. Still, Barack Obama is responsible in that he signed the legislation that made those bonuses possible.

Sadly, Barack Obama, is not taking the blame… though he thinks he can save face by claiming to “accept responsibility.”

“Nobody here drafted those contracts (providing for the bonuses). Nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG and allowing themselves to put the economy at risk by some of the outrageous behavior that they were engaged in,” Obama said. “We are responsible, though. The buck stops with me. And my goal is to make sure that we never put ourselves in this kind of position again.”

Sorry, but signing into law a bill that allowed for those bonuses means you aren’t just responsible for the bonuses… but it means you are partially to blame. Accepting responsibility after denying any role in the situation is meaningless, especially when his signature allowed for those bonuses to happen.

Once again, Obama is passing the buck, even though he is pretending not to.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: And here’s the people who got AIG money:

Some of the donations to lawmakers include Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), $103,100;then-Senator, now President Barack Obama(D-Ill.), $101,332; then-Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.), $19,975; Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), $59,499; former Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), $35,965; Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), $11,000; and Sen. Max Baucus, (D-MT), $24,750.

“During that period of time when these companies were imploding and coming to the American people and asking for funds — I think political contributions coming during that time to Senator Dodd or others certainly bears further examination,” Pence told CNSNews.com.

Now, liberals, you were quick to demand that GOPers tainted with Abramoff money resign…what do you wish to do to Democrats tainted with AIG money?

…and not going to take it any longer? Victor Davis Hanson notes:

There is a populist anger out there, hard to calibrate exactly, but growing nonetheless. Here’s what I think people are saying: Wall Street gets bailed out, despite billions that the masters of the universe skimmed off. Meanwhile our retirement accounts are crashed. Then the government bails out those ‘homeowners’ who failed, often due to their own greed and foolishness, not those who played by the rules: so default on your over priced home that you should have never bought, and the fed is there to bail you out; put away $1,000 a month in your 401(k)—and tough luck.

No new taxes of course for “all of us” except the evil “them,” but rumors still somehow abound that health care benefits will be taxed, carbon emissions will be taxed, and even veterans will pay for their care via private accounts before drawing on VA resources. And why would not Obama resort to more bait and switch to pay for a $3.5 trillion budget—when that proverbial evil 5% simply does not have the wherewithal to make up for the 50% who pay no federal income tax at all?

This growing unease is a weird sort of prairie-fire populism, focused on both Wall Street and still more the government. (Who is worse, the AIG execs that praise capitalism, then want federal handouts to ensure their bonuses, or the incompetent and unethical government who feeds them the cash [”hope and change”?]—or we the poor fools who will keep working to pay for all this?)

Where it all leads I don’t know.

I don’t know, either – but I’m pretty certain that liberalism isn’t doing itself any favors right now. When Rasmussen for the first time in years picks up that GOPers are more favored than Democrats in the “generic” Congressional ballot, we’re clearly seeing a political whirlwind on the horizon. Will it actually benefit the GOP? Can’t say – people are still pretty ticked off at us, too. 2010 might be an excellent year to run as an Independent. Main thing – if a person is a smart politician, he won’t want to be identified in any way, shape or form with the Powers That Be in Washington at the moment.

I think what is happening is that people are, finally, getting fed up with it all – the lies coming out of Washington have gone from brazen to stupid. Its so obvious that, say, Dodd is lying to us about what is going on and what part he had in it – and the rest of them are only slightly less nauseating in their attitudes towards the people. When Obama tries to claim a populist mantle in this by grandly saying he’s responsible, people are seeing right through it – he’s saying he’s responsible as if he’s not, but willing to sacrifice himself for us and we’re supposed to think he’s such a swell guy for doing this…BS, Barry; we know that you really were responsible for it, and if you really wanted to take responsibility for it you’d be working for a repeal of your Spendulus so it could be re-written with a bit of honesty and common sense thrown in to the mix. Maybe on a re-do we can actually not pass the bill until everyone’s read it?

A little revolution, now and then, is a good thing. And we need it, dear people, we need it.

The news story:

The Federal Reserve sharply stepped up its efforts to bolster the economy on Wednesday, announcing that it would pump an extra $1 trillion into the financial system by purchasing Treasury bonds and mortgage securities.

Having already reduced the key interest rate it controls nearly to zero, the central bank has increasingly turned to alternatives like buying securities as a way of getting more dollars into the economy, a tactic that amounts to creating vast new sums of money out of thin air. But the moves on Wednesday were its biggest yet, almost doubling all of the Fed’s measures in the last year.

The action makes the Fed a buyer of long-term government bonds rather than the short-term debt that it typically buys and sells to help control the money supply.

The idea was to encourage more economic activity by lowering interest rates, including those on home loans, and to help the financial system as it struggles under the crushing weight of bad loans and poor investments.

Investors responded with surprise and enthusiasm. The Dow Jones industrial average, which had been down about 50 points just before the announcement, jumped immediately and ended the day up almost 91 points at 7,486.58. Yields on long-term Treasury bonds dropped markedly, and analysts predicted that interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages would soon drop below 5 percent.

Get ready for a gigantic bubble which will either burst with a financial crisis which makes the current one look small, or the Fed tightening the screws later this year or early next and knocking us willy-nilly into a double-dip recession. In my long study of history, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more short-sighted and bone-headed policy move. Imagine the idiocy which figures that if you steal money from the people you’ll be able to create wealth.

Steal? Yes, steal. You see, by waving their magic wand and creating a trillion dollars, the Fed has effectively devalued all of the money outstanding the moment before the Fed acted. This will help bankers and financial speculators – they’ll now be able to obtain devalued currency to pay back loans contracted with pre-devaluation money. It works like this – I borrow $10 from you today. Tomorrow, the Fed devalues the currency by 20%. I borrow this devalued money from the Fed at 0% interest and then pay you your $10 back with $1 interest the day after tomorrow – but you didn’t get $11; you actually got $8.80 because each dollar is worth 20 cents less than it did when you loaned it to me. Its real cool, unless you’re the guy holding the pre-devaluation notes…and guess who is buying up the pre-devaluation notes? Look in the mirror. And thank your Barry for the swell deal.

It’d be nice if, at least, this would work in the long run – but it won’t. Its going to spike inflation like no tomorrow (and we’re talking 10, 20 or 30% inflation, boys and girls) unless it gets cut off real fast, and that means the funds for moving the economy along will be gone…so, welcome to 25% unemployment. Of course, there’s always that chance we’ll get “stagflation”, as we did in the 70’s…won’t 20% inflation and 20% unemployment be a kick?

We’re being swindled – we’re balancing the banks’ books on the back of the middle class taxpayer. And some people wonder why I want us to return to the gold standard…

Dear Readers,

As you might recall, last week I brought my father to the hospital where it was discovered that he was bleeding internally. That particular issue is at least temporarily stable, but the plain fact of the matter is that my father’s manifold health problems at age 82 indicate that the end draws near.

I ask your prayers that my father will be at ease as he enters this time and that we all accept God’s will in this as in all matters.

If President Truman’s motto was “The Buck Stops Here,” then Barack Obama’s motto  is “Passing The Buck” … The fundamentals of Barack Obama’s hypocrisy are strong … and the culture of corruption and the 2010 elections…

This is getting rather absurd:

Faith and begorrah, is nothing sacred?

Some folks are trying to transform the name of Tuesday’s holiday from St. Patrick’s Day to “Shamrock Day.”

Card shops have banners proclaiming the occasion; the Disney Channel is using the term; and some places in this country have changed the name of their community celebrations of Celtic heritage to the “nonoffending” terminology.

And that offends some folks.

I’m telling ya, good people, eventually someone kook leftist is going to notice that “Corpus Christi” means “Body of Christ” and they’re going to insist that Corpus Christi, TX change its name. And just what are we to do with St Louis, MO and St Paul, MN? And lets not forget that city in California which is named in honor of the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of the Angels.

Look, leftists, this is our civilization – you’re welcome to live in it, but it has some ground rules. Among these rules is that Christians built the civilization and you can’t have said civilization without it remaining Christian in its fundamentals. Look what is happening in post-Christian Europe; ever more kowtowing to radical Islam and an increasing demand that basic liberties be curtailed because said radicals say it offends against Islam. If the people of Europe were majority Christian they would tolerate the Moslems and politely tell them to take their Islamism and get stuffed…in other words, if you want to preserve your ability to have gay pride parades, you’d better ensure that your civilization remains Christian because its only us Christians who are easy going enough to allow such nonsense to carry on in public.

Please, do, Senator:

Sen. Arlen Specter said Tuesday that he will not run for reelection in 2010 as a Democrat, but might run as an Independent.

The Pennsylvania Republican has been under tremendous pressure from the GOP base since being one of just three Republicans to vote for the Democratic-led stimulus package last month…

…Specter said he is open to the possibility of running as an Independent with the understanding that he would caucus with Republicans, just as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) did with Democrats in 2006.

Though he left that option on the table, he suggested it would be a last resort.

Senator Specter is a fine man and from what I understand a very nice guy – but he’s not a Republican. Not even close. He’s a Democrat who did a bit of political calculus and figured that he’d have a better chance winning election way back when as a Republican. But we of the GOP just don’t need him in our party – much better to have him as an Independent we can work with from time to time. And, of course, there is just that chance that a more solid GOP could slip through with the Democrat and Specter splitting the mush-minded semi-liberal vote, especially in 2010 when things are likely to be very favorable to the GOP, unless Obama’s plan to spend us into prosperity works.

A bit of a lesson here, boys and girls: the reason we have political parties is so that on some basic, crucial issues there is a clear choice for the American people. While a GOPer and a Democrat can both be in favor of, say, increasing funding to the National Park Service, when it comes down to whether or not we should increase spending, per se, it is good for the GOP to be known as the watchdog of the Treasury and the taxpayer as opposed to the Democrats being tagged as the party of taxing and spending. But we’re not going to get anywhere on this if people like Specter, wearing the GOP label, continually cut us off at the knees when the chips are down. In the long run, it will be better for the GOP even if it gets a little smaller if by so doing it becomes a more cohesive entity able to battle for clearly defined ideals. Winning isn’t worth it if all we’re doing is getting into office – we want office for a purpose.

Our purpose, as GOPers, is to reform America – to restore those constitutional provisions which have been eroded by decades of liberal usurpation; to put America on a sound financial footing where we live within our means and only tax as necessary for the basic functions of government; to ensure that the American military is second to none; to stand firm with all people who are free or who aspire to be so; to work for a public square which is decent and home to all Americans, not the plaything of the most depraved. There is in this much room for difference – a pro-choice and a pro-life Republican will both agree that Roe is a legal abomination, while they will differ in whether or not a law should be passed to make abortion legal or illegal. A libertarian GOPer and a social conservative GOPer will disagree on what level of regulation should be placed on the availability of pornography, but both will agree that local standards must dictate such availability in each particular community. On and on it goes – room in the tent for a diversity of opinion, but agreement on core principles. And fighting for such will remain impossible if there remain in senior GOP ranks people who agree with the liberal worldview of Statism, licentiousness and group rights over individual liberties.

I hope that Specter does decide to go Independent – he’ll be in his proper element, and we’ll have a better chance of advancing our cause.

He’s going to try and gerrymander the entire United States:

The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year’s count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States — currently believed to be more than 306 million people.

A U.S. Census “sell sheet,” an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says partnerships with groups like ACORN “play an important role in making the 2010 Census successful,” including by “help[ing] recruit census workers.”

What ACORN’s assignment will be is to ensure there is a large over-count of population in Democrat-heavy areas of the country so that in both the US House and in State legislatures, Democrats get more safe seats. Proof? If you don’t believe this assertion then you’re either a blind partisan, or a complete fool. ACORN is a leftwing tool of the Democratic party and its sole purpose is to increase the power of the left – it doesn’t do anything else, it never has done anything else, it won’t ever do anything else. Eventually, when we get a properly courageous GOP government in office, we’ll have to shut it down via criminal prosecutions – meanwhile, Obama is going to use it to corrupt the American political process just as he did in the 2008 campaign.

We’ll have to fight twice as hard in 2010 and 2012 because Democrats will use every dirty trick in the book to thwart us – we’ll need 60% of the vote just to counter-act the votes Democrats will manufacture. Get ready for the battle, fellow GOPers and conservatives.

Geesh:

While $58 billion of your tax dollars — or more accurately, your children’s tax dollars — are being used to pay foreign banks, a substantial portion of that money ($43.5 billion) is being used to pay American banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, AIG International, and JP Morgan.

The following recipients of President Obama’s trickle-down-to-my-donors bailout plan rank among his top 20 contributors to his 2008 presidential election campaign, according to Open Secrets:

Goldman Sachs: $955,473

Citigroup: $653,468

JP Morgan Chase & Co.: $646,058

Morgan Stanley: $485,823

Three other banks that were significant contributors to Obama received money through AIG:

Bank of America: $274,493

Wachovia: $214,151

AIG: $112,170

Lehman Brothers, which did not survive long enough to join the list of banks leaching off the work of the American taxpayer, also gave the Obama campaign $276,088.

Individuals identifying themselves as working for the banks above gave Barack Obama’s presidential campaign $3,617,724. In other words, more than 3.6 million reasons for the president to help focus the media’s glare on the relatively minuscule $165 million in AIG executive bonuses, and away from their $43.5 billion portion of $100 billion of taxpayer dollars the administration, by design or incompetence, filtered to other banks through AIG.

In receiving $43.5 billion for their investment of just over $3.3 million, it looks like the banks that gambled on Wall Street certainly got their money’s worth out of their investment in Barack Obama.

And those executive bonuses which Obama is now complaining about? It was inserted into the Spendulus – an exemption which allow executive bonuses provided they were contracted prior to the Spendulus was passed. Obama signed the bill – and its clear he didn’t know what he was signing…or, perhaps he did?

Discuss how happy you are as you contemplate the coming melt-down of Obama and his Democrats. Alternately, you can discuss how miserable liberals must be now that even the densest of them are realizing they’ve been had.

Have at it.