News

Did GM pay off its bailout loans by using other government loans?

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Story from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

Moderate Republican Chuck Grassley, who supported Obama’s bailouts, wants to know how GM paid off their debts. He wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Excerpt:

General Motors (GM) yesterday announced that it repaid its TARP loans. I am concerned, however, that this announcement is not what it seems. In fact, it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings.

Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

[…]In reality, it looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another. The taxpayers are still on the hook, and whether TARP funds are ultimately recovered depends entirely on the government’s ability to sell GM stock in the future. Treasury has merely exchanged a legal right to repayment for an uncertain hope of sharing in the future growth of GM. A debt-for-equity swap is not a repayment.

Ed summarizes:

In other words, this is just a shell game. As Jim Vicevich points out, it’s akin to paying off your Visa credit card with your Mastercard — and then bragging about your financial condition. Taxpayers are still on the hook for GM. Nothing at all has changed.

Instead, we have another good reason for government to refrain from bailing out private companies. It makes them act like government when it comes to transparency about their finances. This claim really does prove that GM now stands for Government Motors.

Michelle Malkin also has a good column here about MORE connections between Democrats and rich Wall Street investment bankers. The Democrats are tightly connected with large corporations and investment banks. As a small government conservative, I find this alarming and unsettling. I believe in separation of government and corporations.

Videos

ACORN’s CEO Bertha Wilson explains why she favors amnesty

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A new video clip of Bertha Wilson, the CEO of ACORN. (H/T Verum Serum)

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Immigration is the next big battle. Immigration, immigration, immigration. And the reason this is so important is, you know, here’s the secret [whispers]:

We’re getting ready to me a majority, minority country. Shhhh. [applause] We’ll be like South Africa. More black people than white people. [laughter] Don’t tell anybody.

[…]My challenge to black folks, and to people of color and civil rights folks, are as this: the face of immigration needs to be a lot blacker than it is. Because once they can frame the immigration debate as about Latinos, crossing some mythical border, when in fact we have second and third generation black folks in this country who come from immigrant families. But they’re not standing up and marching with their Latino brothers and sisters, and saying “I am an immigrant too”…

Morgen (from Verum Serum) writes:

As a country, we have a proud history of accepting immigrants from all over the world, and we are better off for it. But we do not have a “mythical border”. It is the responsibility of our government to maintain our territorial integrity, and as citizens – through our democratic institutions – we should proudly seek to defend the laws and traditions which have made this nation great. There is nothing inconsistent between this and a rational immigration policy, as evidenced by multiple generations of immigrants who have peacefully and successfully assimilated into our way of life. (While enjoying unparalleled freedom to continue to honor their cultural and religious traditions, however they desire.)

But we should have no tolerance for those who ignore our laws, and seek to undermine the values we hold most dear through subversive means. This is the socialist agenda for America, and this is the “progressive” agenda for America – and it must be defeated.

I find it interesting that Bertha Wilson seems to be so concerned with race. Why is race so important to people on the left? There’s a word for people who judge people by the color of their skin, like Bertha Wilson does. Come to think of it, lots of Obama’s friends (Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, etc.) seem to have a fixation on skin color. What is it about the left that makes them judge people by their skin color? Maybe it has something to do with the need to gain power by pitting some groups against other groups, then offering government as a solution.

My thoughts

I am myself a very dark person of color, and a son of a first-generation immigrant family. My parents came to this country with virtually nothing, and we worked our way up. I am the first person in my family to attend graduate school (computer science). And at no point did my skin color ever hold me back from achieving success. What matters in the capitalist West is a person can produce, not what a person looks like. This is the best place for me to succeed.

Like almost all conservatives, I am in favor of increased legal immigration – provided that those immigrants work hard, play by the rules, and are ineligible for social programs for at least a decade. Any legal immigrant who can stick to these rules for a few years should be put on a path to citizenship. America should welcome those who have skills that benefit all of us. But we should not be rewarding illegal immigrants just because they have the “right” skin color.

ACORN and Obama

ACORN, you remember, is Barack Obama’s former employer. He trained them in community activism. He helped them to sue Citibank, so that the bank would be forced to make loans to people who could not afford homes. This was a major cause of our current recession. Bertha Wilson endorsed Barack Obama for president.

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News

William Dembski discusses irreducible complexity and co-option

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William Dembski explains what the debate on origins is really about.

About the speaker:

Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

The lecture:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Summary (snark is in italics)

What is evolution:

  • Is it enough for Christian students to just retain their faith in college?
  • Or should Christian students seek to transform their universities?
  • The word “evolution” refers to a unguided, purposeless, undirected process
  • Living organisms are not designed, they just appear to be designed
  • Therefore, it is an atheistic theory – there is NO ROOM for God
  • Random variations and natural selection can do the creating of life without God
  • Nothing about evolution suggest that God had anything to do with it

The appearance of design:

  • The cell is a nano-engineered information processing system.
  • The cell has engineering, e.g. – signal transduction, message passing, etc.
  • There are molecular machines similar to man-made machines, but less efficient
  • E.g. – the bacterial flagellum which has 40 parts
  • These molecular machines have minimal complexity – all the parts are needed
  • can’t build a molecular machine step-by-step – all the parts must be present and integrated

How does evolution try to explain molecular machines:

  • The standard naturalistic response is “co-option”
  • Each intermediate step has pieces that are used for other purposes
  • I.e. – Subsets of the parts can have different functions
  • For example, a subset of the bacterial flagellum can be used as a syringe
  • The subset, called the Type-3 secretory system, has only 13 parts
  • The problem is that evolutionists don’t show all the steps, and all the functions
  • For this to be a good response, you need a smooth path from 1 part up to 40
  • Each step of the path has to have a working system with a different function
  • But the atheists don’t have the path, or the intermediate functions
  • It’s like arguing that you can walk from Seattle to Tokyo via the Hawaiian islands

Is the bacterial flagellum a cherry-picked example?

  • There are no detailed molecular pathways for any biochemical systems in the cell
  • The atheistic response is to speculate that pathways will be found as science progresses
  • The pathways are unobservable entities, just like the multiverse and the Cambrian precursors

Where does the machinery to create proteins come from?

  • The molecular machines are composed of proteins
  • The proteins are manufactured by copying protein-building instructions from the DNA
  • The instructions are carried to the build site by messenger RNA
  • The build site is called a ribosome
  • The DNA requires proteins to build, so there is a chicken-and-egg problem
  • The problem is that protein transcription systems require everything in place
  • There is no materialistic theory about how to build this step-by-step

So what do the molecular machines tell us about how life began?

  • The problem of the origin of life is the problem of the origin of information
  • What needs to be explained are the functional sequences of parts
  • The sequences are identical to sequences of letters that make sense
  • The atheist has to say that material processes can create the information
  • The problem of finding sequences of amino acids or proteins is a search problem
  • A blind search of the space of possible sequences is not efficient
  • even with lots time, parts and trials, you can’t converge on functional proteins
  • information is required and the only known producer of information is a mind

Bill is one of my favorite people. He’s smarter than practically all of the atheists who dominate the universities. But because he is an outspoken Christian, he never gets the recognition he deserves. He just keeps plugging away on his research. He doesn’t make excuses.

What is intelligent design?

Related DVDs

Illustra also made two other great DVDs on intelligent design. The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.

Here are the 2 playlists:

I also recommend Coldwater Media’s “Icons of Evolution”. All three of these are on sale from Amazon.com.

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