Category Archives: Politics
Furious
Operation Fast and Furious should make you furious. Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms ran a gun running program into Mexico. They expected the guns to lead them to Mexican drug kingpins. One of those guns was used to murder border agent Brian Terry in Arizona.
Ten million dollars for Project Gun Runner, the parent of Fast and Furious, was included in the stimulus bill. Guess you really do need to read the bill to find out what’s in it.
For an additional amount for ‘State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance’, $40,000,000, for competitive grants to provide assistance and equipment to local law enforcement along the Southern border and in High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas to combat criminal narcotics activity stemming from the Southern border, of which $10,000,000 shall be transferred to ‘Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Salaries and Expenses’ for the ATF Project Gunrunner.
Media Matters, which is to Fox News as Hamas is to Israel, disputes this. They claim the money wasn’t spent in Arizona so it’s all a Fox Fib.
Gotcha, Granny
When your local school district needs to pass a levy – or else, what’s the first thing they threaten to cut? The Assistant to the Associate Director of Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum Enrichment? Hell, no.
More Sacred Bull
The president is sharing the sacrificial bull till the sacred cows come home. He has the Republicans where he wants em, continue building on his 24% grab of the economy or take the blame for a social security scare.
Wrong Stuff
In his State of the Union, Obama referred to our Sputnik moment. It was an attempt to rally the nation to “win the future” or do something or other. The one thing it was not was an attempt to deprive the Russians of a monopoly on manned space travel.
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.
