General Stupidity
Federal Reserve’s Secret Bailouts Totaled Nearly $8 Trillion
Mitt Romney's Top Donors
The American taxpayer was swindled to the tune of $786 billion for the TARP bailout of banks that were “too big to fail.” But at least we knew about it.
Thanks to language inserted into the Dodd-Frank bill by Ron Paul, a partial and very begrudging audit of the Federal Reserve has revealed that some of Mittens Romneycare’s biggest donors got over $7.7 TRILLION in secret, smoke-filled-room, under-the-table bailouts from the Federal Reserve.
It took three years of Freedom of Information Act requests by Bloomberg to get details of the secret bailouts and the massive swindle of the American people they represented.
The entire Bloomberg exposé is here. It’s very long and detailed…and the more you read, the angrier you will get.
For a Cliff’s Notes version, check out this commentary from The American Spectator. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis added):
On Sunday evening, Bloomberg News published a story that confirmed the worst suspicions of bailout critics. The article revealed that trillions of dollars of emergency loans the Federal Reserve disbursed during financial crisis went to the biggest banks, ultimately providing firms then on the edge of collapse with a $13 billion profit. According to Bloomberg, the Federal Reserve’s total emergency commitments to big banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley number $7.7 trillion when the previously unknown loans are taken into account.
Bloomberg’s expose makes it clear, three years afterward, that the infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which divided the country and ignited at least one mass protest movement (if not two), was never more than a sideshow when compared to the bailouts authorized by the Fed. TARP only allocated $700 billion for bailouts, and a significant portion of those funds were never used.
The Bloomberg story, reported by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun, and Phil Kuntz, needs no editorializing, because the facts alone are damning. The article notes that banks like Citigroup and Bank of America would have had less success lobbying against regulations limiting their rent-seeking activities had the public and Congress known that only trillions of dollars in Fed loans kept them afloat. There is little doubt that, as the authors conclude, “taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.”
The Fed’s various emergency lending programs, TARP, and the other bailouts undertaken by the government, together, saved the banking system but shortchanged the broader public. That was apparent well before Bloomberg uncovered this latest information, which only reveals the full scope of the swindle.
John McCain Agrees with Obama on Cutting Retired Military Benefits
H/T Cleveland.com
It turns out that the Obummer Regime isn’t against all budget cuts. Cutting benefits for retired military is just fine with the Narcissist In Chief…and his buddy John McCain (RINO – Arizona).
In his latest “reach across the aisle,” Juan McAmnesty has joined forces with the vile Carl Levin to shaft the dedicated men and women who have served in our all-volunteer armed forces, and cut their health care and retirement benefits. As reported by Fox News,
The American Legion has sent a letter to every member of the House and Senate pleading with them to spare health care benefits. The Veterans of Foreign Wars has urged its 2 million members, their families and friends to contact lawmakers and deliver the same message.
The two groups were unnerved when both parties’ leaders on the Senate Armed Services Committee — Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz. — recommended that the special deficit-cutting supercommittee look at raising enrollment fees and imposing restrictions on the military’s health care program, known as TRICARE. Current military members would be grandfathered in.
McCain and Levin also favored creating a commission to look at military retirement benefits and make recommendations for changes.
Somehow the Obama Regime can find money for endless parties, state dinners, vacations, “date nights,” Solyndra, Fast and Furious, Cash for Clunkers, GM, AIG, payoffs to unions, a vastly bloated federal bureaucracy, and more national debt than all other previous presidents combined, but it’s just “too costly” to take care of the men and women who risk their lives on a daily basis on our behalf.
Disgusting.
And what’s more disgusting is that RINO John McCain is right there with ‘em, ready to throw retired veterans under the bus.
However, not every so-called Republican was prepared to go along to get along. GOP Frontrunner Ron Paul, one of only two veterans running for the GOP nomination, reacted to proposed cuts in benefits with an open letter to Teh Won that makes me want to stand up and cheer. This is what a REAL Republican sounds like. Can you imagine Mittens Romneycare writing a letter like this?
Dear President Obama,
“As a Doctor, an Air Force Veteran, and Congressman, who serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee and has always fought for the best interest of our troops, I was deeply concerned to learn that our military retirees are now facing benefit cuts under your proposed $1.5 trillion dollar tax hike.
“Our military men and women have fought bravely. In exchange, our country made a promise to them, and we must honor it.
“There are trillions of dollars in unwise and unconstitutional spending we must cut. There are few other leaders in Washington willing to cut spending as deeply as I am and truly balance our budget. But, we must make sure we take care of our Veterans who fought to take care of us.
“We have put our troops in harm’s way, and we must honor our promises. And, our troops have paid a heavy price these past ten years. Over 5,000 have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, 40,000 have seen crushing injuries, and hundreds of thousands more suffer from brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder.
“Failing to meet the promises we have made to our troops would be unjust and immoral. The cuts you announced yesterday, combined with the rumored cuts in benefits reported in publications like Army Times, have our soldiers and Veterans deeply concerned.
“Mr. President, instead of cutting our Veterans benefits, I call on you to support our troops. Support them by bringing them home to our shores, to protect our borders and defend our country. Ensure that they are rested and equipped to repel any real credible attack. Re-unite them with their families. And, make sure they no longer play policeman in dangerous foreign civil wars.
“Cutting the benefits of our Veterans benefits while we subsidize the security of other wealthy nations like Germany and Japan and play World Policeman makes no sense. The money we would save extracting our fighting men and women and our equipment from overseas conflicts and regions will more than offset the savings you seek by upending the manner in which veterans receive care.
“Bringing our troops home would ensure that we keep the promise to our Veterans, strengthen our national defense and secure our borders.
“Do not mistake me for a pacifist or a person solely focused on the economics of the unsustainable global security and state-building that has helped our country arrive at the shores of financial ruin. On the contrary, I consider my military service as an Air Force flight surgeon during the Cold War to be among my highest personal and professional achievements.
“Authentic, Constitutionally-sound national security — a strong national defense — begins with guarding our borders and not the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
“Mr. President, I call upon your to support our troops, honor our Veterans, and ensure our wounded get the care they deserve. To do so, we must end these protracted, trillion-dollar wars and bring them home.”
In Liberty,
Ron Paul
Herman Cain needs our help.
The Cocktail Party has already picked our nominee so all of us who do not want Romney as our 2012 nominee should just pack up and go home. It’s over. Romney is it.
Here are the results of the National Journals Political Insiders Poll…
| Rank the top five candidates, 1 through 5, in terms of who you think is most likely to capture the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. | |
|
Republicans
(105 votes) |
|
| CANDIDATE | INSIDERS INDEX SCORE* |
| Mitt Romney | 98 |
| Rick Perry | 72 |
| Herman Cain | 47 |
| Newt Gingrich | 31 |
| Rick Santorum | 13 |
| Jon Huntsman | 11 |
| Michele Bachmann | 7 |
| Ron Paul | 5 |
|
*Methodology: In tallying the rankings, a first-place vote was worth 5 points, a second-place vote was worth 4 points, and so on. The Insiders Index reflects the percentage of points that each contender received out of the maximum possible. For example, Mitt Romney scored an Index rating of 98, meaning he received 98 percent of the possible 525 points, the number he would have if all 105 participants in the poll this week had ranked him first. |
|
The ruling class of the GOP don’t want Herman Cain. They’ve spent too much time and money grooming Mittens to let an outsider like Mr. Cain take the nomination. They seem to be ignoring one little fact…
We the people decide who will be our nominee.
It’s our votes that count…it doesn’t matter what Karl Rove or Charles Krauthammer or Chris Christie or any of the other good little GOP puppets want.
Herman Cain needs our help. NOW. He needs money and he needs volunteers. He needs people on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire but I ‘m sure his campaign could use help everywhere.
Let’s help Herman Cain win the GOP nomination (and 2012 presidency).
Please go to his campaign website and donate….either your time or money or both.
The American people should decide who’s best for our country.
George Will correctly informs Republicans that a President Romney would be too afraid of making actual, hard decisions to save the country from economic ruin
George Will’s new column on Mittens Romneycare is out. You can read it here.
Essentially, Will clearly spells out that Mittens is just not the sort of politician who can be counted on to make tough, unpopular decisions that will be needed to get our economy back on track.
One area of Mittens’ long history of taking both sides of just about every issue that Will highlights is Mittens’ flip-flopping on ethanol subsidies; Mittens changes his opinion base on whom he is speaking to in a room on that particular day.
Ethanol subsidies are part of what’s tanking our economy and driving up food prices around the globe. Some days, Mittens is for them (when he’s sucking up to Iowans) and other days he’s against them (when he’s directly confronted on this by conservatives). Mittens is so afraid of bad media coverage and upsetting people he needs for his rise to power that he just can’t be trusted to do the right thing and end all ethanol subsidies and ethanol requirements in fuel.
Mittens can’t be trusted to do the right thing on anything, and would essentially be Obama-lite as president.
Do you really want this?
Herman Cain 2012
I am officially kicking off the Hillbuzz for Herman campaign. I am sick and tired of the main stream media (including conservative talk show hosts) telling us that Mitt Romney will be the next GOP nominee. It’s as if a memo was sent out and everyone is following the same script. There are a few exceptions….Rush, Mike Gallagher, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity. I was listening to Hugh Hewitt yesterday afternoon and he was yucking it up with a couple of guests (I can’t remember who they were) and they pretty much announced Mitt as the next Republican nominee. It really ticked me off. Where is the outrage from the Tea Party? Please don’t tell me the Tea Party leadership is striking a deal with Mitt. Have you all been hearing the reports that Mitt’s advisers have met with Obama’s advisers to discuss how to get Obamacare up and running? This country can’t stand 4 more years of Obama….or Romney.
We have got to get moving NOW and get behind Herman Cain. I heard him on the Neal Boortz show today and he said that his campaign donations have increased since he won the Florida straw poll but he will still need a lot more money to take on the Romney establishment machine.
I sent the Cain campaign an email 2 days ago telling them that Hillbuzz is behind them and asked what we can do to help. I haven’t heard back from them so….
If anyone is involved directly with his campaign or knows someone who is…PLEASE have them email us at this link. We would love to do an interview for the site or possibly have Kevin do a radio interview.
If you can afford to donate either your time or a few dollars to help Herman Cain become the next GOP nominee, visit his campaign site…
Donate here.
Sign up to volunteer here.
Anything to help! We can not let the establishment pick our candidate for us.
Why Erik Erikson’s childish anti-Palin hatefest on September 30th is a major problem for the Republican Party at large
[ Click above to embiggen. Screengrab of Erik Erikson's childish attack on Governor Palin and her supporters that ran every hour on the hour all day on Redstate.com 9/30/11 ]
Yesterday, Erik Erikson engaged in what amounted to a 24-hour hate directed against Governor Sarah Palin and her supporters, because Erikson believes the Governor owed him some personal duty to announce her presidential candidacy before October 1st, 2011 (when, in reality, the Governor will announce her campaign sometime between October 18-31st 2011, just before the filing deadlines in Florida and South Carolina — according to her plan all along).
Erikson lied to his readers and pretended Governor Palin promised, on a stack of Bibles taller than Denali, that she’d announce her intentions by the last day of September. What the Governor has actually said, consistently and loudly, is that she’d make up her mind at this time — with no date set for her announcement. Erikson evidently has reading comprehension problems — amongst his myriad other personal disabilities — because he missed the nuance of this. Or, more likely, he just flat-out lied because he wanted to throw an amateur hour, hate-filled, sexist, “tell the woman to shut up and go away!”, tantrum on Redstate attacking Governor Palin and her supporters every hour on the hour. No doubt, after this he held a farting contest in his basement with local Atlanta 10 year olds and waited for his wife to bring down a tray of Little Debbies and juice boxes, so all his emotional peers could congratulate him on how “rad” he was for “really showing that bitch her place”.
“Heh heh, you should totally rename your site Radstate.com because it’s so rad, Erik”, Beevis Jr. no doubt told him.
“Yah, I know man, it is totally rad. We are an online He-Man Women Haters’ Club and proud of it,” Erikson probably replied, underscoring what Redstate.com has become in the last year or so under his personal direction as his CNN gig afforded him more cover to bring his scorn for female politicians to a sustained boil.
No, Erik, you are not “rad” as you believe. I don’t care to know if you won that farting contest with your friends (though, by looking at you on CNN, I can’t imagine anyone other than Oprah Winfrey herself besting you in heated seat competition), and you have a right to use Redstate.com to make an ass of yourself all you want…but I hope other conservatives out there who read you understand just how much damage you’re doing to the Republican Party with antics like this.
Republicans at large need to learn a big lesson from the 2008 Obama campaign and how it treated Hillary Clinton and her supporters, because men like Erik Erikson who presume to speak for Republicans at large are treating Governor Palin and her supporters in largely the same way.
For months in 2008 — from just after the Iowa Caucus through the June 3rd South Dakota primary — Erik Erikson’s counterparts in the Democrat Party berated Hillary Clinton and her supporters to “shut up and go away” with childish antics like the stunt Erikson pulled on Redstate yesterday directed at the Palin camp. Obama’s supporters were ruthless when it came to haranguing Clinton supporters, calling us racists for not backing Obama and using every Alinsky-inspired bully tactic they could imagine to persecute those of us who stood proudly with Hillary in 2008.
The net result of this is that millions of people who once considered themselves Democrats — like myself personally, and all of my friends who worked on the 2008 Hillary campaign with me — no longer want anything to do with the party because of the way the Obama campaign, the DNC, and the lamestream media treated Hillary Clinton and the people who backed her.
Erik Erikson and his ilk are going to create a similar fissure in the Republican Party if they continue to engage in behavior like yesterday’s 24-hour Palin hate.
I’ve said this before and will say it again now: it’s men like Erikson who prevented me from even thinking of calling myself a Republican for the last 20 years, because I am so turned off by their sophomoric, smarmy antics.
Despite being a conservative by nature, I remained a Democrat until the summer of 2008 because I never felt comfortable joining the Republican Party because I wanted no part in the childishness of the Erik Eriksons the GOP seemed largely comprised of. I couldn’t stand the labor unions and the influence of the Left on the Democrat Party, but while it was still the Jacksonian/Clintonian Party prior to Obama’s usurpation, at least I felt I had some place to be on the political spectrum where people in my own party wouldn’t malign me.
Erikson heaped so much scorn on Governor Palin’s supporters that I imagine many who read Redstate.com yesterday feel like the Republican Party may not be for them — and I wonder where their votes will go if Governor Palin does not in fact run for President, the way Erikson so desperately doesn’t want her to run.
I can’t speak for all of these people, but only for myself, and my boyfriend Justin, and the friends I’ve chatted with today about Erik Erikson’s 24 hour Palin hate. Because Erikson’s Redstate is such an in-your-face pro-Rick Perry site, and because Rick Perry chose Redstate.com as the platform to announce his run for the presidency, I can’t imagine the Perry campaign wasn’t aware of what Erikson did all day yesterday in heaping all that unnecessary scorn on Governor Palin and her supporters.
I, therefore, will forever now associate this childishness with the Perry campaign…and I’ve thus removed Perry from consideration as a choice for the Republican nomination in 2012.
I had my doubts about Perry as a viable national candidate before, but seeing Erikson behave this way brings back too many memories of watching the Obama supporters behave so disgustingly in 2008 towards us Hillary Clinton supporters. Once again, these actions clearly seem to be rooted in irrational hatred, sexism, and misogyny and I want no part of any candidate whose supporters behave this way. Obama is all the proof I will ever need that a candidate’s supporters are very much a personal reflection of the man himself.
So, I am backing Governor Sarah Palin for president in 2012 and pledge again to do everything I humanly can to elect her to the White House. If the Governor chooses at some point in October, according to her own personal schedule, to forgo a presidential campaign, then the next candidate on my list of support will be the honorable and electric HERMAN CAIN.
Rick Perry is dead to me because of Erik Erikson and Redstate’s bad behavior yesterday in berating the Palin camp for an artificial announcement drop-dead-date of Erikson’s own invention.
Tomorrow, I am going to write the Perry camp a letter telling them as much. I’m sure they won’t care much that a gay guy in Boystown who worked for Hillary Clinton in 2008 and now supports Governor Palin doesn’t want anything to do with Perry’s candidacy…but maybe if enough Palin supporters out there join me in making our voices heard someone with half a brain in Perryland will realize Perry’s close association with Erik Erikson and Redstate.com is costing him a great deal of potential votes.
Honestly, while I think Mitt Romney is a joke of a candidate and is not the kind of president we’d need in 2012, I truly believe if the race ever came down between Romney and Perry in the end…my vote would go to Mitt Romney because yesterday’s Redsate outburst was my very last straw with Perry. I don’t like what he did with Gardasil, I don’t like his awarding in-state tuition to illegals, I am disappointed by his lackluster performances in the debates, and I am horrified by the behavior of his supporters.
Mittens Romneycare may be a severely flawed candidate who is squishier than a soggy cucumber and mayonnaise sandwich…and he may indeed be the Cocktail Party Establishment’s darling…but at least he and his supporters are not misogynist jackasses who behave like fart sniffing 10 year olds playing fort in their mothers’ basements.
If you know anything about me, you know how much I detest Mittens Romneycare…so that should give you an idea of what I think about Slick Rick Perry today in light of Erik Erikson’s 24-hour hate against Governor Sarah Palin on September 30th, 2011.
Live Blog Transcript of GOP presidential debate in Tampa, Florida September 12th, 2011 UPDATE: Bumped to top and awaiting debate to start. Chime in live with your comments if you’re watching.
Live Blog Transcript of Debate below the fold:
