Category Archives: Law
Sausage Works
President Obama signed $2.4 billion of new debt ceiling sausage into law. The Beaver’s evil twin, Missouri Democrat, Emanuel Clever, called the deal a satan sandwich. The stock market took one bite and retched up its remaining green gains for 2011.
Walk the Walk
Wall Street wasn’t an innocent bystander but Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner pin the blame for the financial meltdown on Fannie Mae in their book Reckless Endangerment. They say Fannie head, James Johnson figured out how to monetize the outfit’s government backing.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
Fannie Mae’s political machine dispensed campaign contributions, gave jobs to friends and relatives of legislators, hired armies of lobbyists (even paying lobbyists not to lobby against it), paid academics who wrote papers validating the homeownership mania, and spread “charitable” contributions to housing advocates across the congressional map.
Obama Enigma
Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes.
Under President Obama’s orders to go mano a mano, Navy Seals shot and killed the Evil One in cold blood. His Miranda rights were not read and he won’t be tried in a civilian court. His corpse was thrown on a helicopter and flown to a ship in the Arabian Sea where it was dumped overboard. All well and good.
But hard to square with a president who wanted Gitmo closed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in Manhattan, and considered prosecuting CIA interrogators to show the superiority of American justice. On the other hand, Obama has blown over 1500 terror suspects to smithereens.
In a display of respect, bin Laden’s body was washed and prepared for burial according to Islamic custom. His demise will not be verified by photos because “that’s not who we are… we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies”.
That won’t wash with the Muslim world.
Tax Day
Green energy credits for wind turbines, something Jobs Czar and GE CEO Jeff Immelt lobbies for, are one reason GE’s tax bill was zero..
