With the aim of stopping future bailouts! (H/T The Maritime Sentry)
This video has lots of full-screen Michele, instead of split-screen.
Sarah Palin, who is almost as pretty as Michele Bachmann, also grabbed the spotlight by signing a bill recognizing the sovereignty of Alaska over all powers not enumerated and granted to the federal government in the Constitution.
Meh. Michele’s video is better.
Story from the Washington Post. Senator Daniel Inouye (DEMOCRAT) intercedes to have TARP funds redirected to the floundering “Central Pacific” bank, which he owns.
But I prefer Hot Air’s summary.
In other words, Inouye interceded to get TARP funds to secure his personal assets. He used his political clout on Capitol Hill to get Treasury to approve a “marginal” application that had already been rejected once, in order to save his own bank from collapse. Central Pacific had already been in trouble with the FDIC even before the collapse in the lending and financial sector, thanks to bad management practices and undercapitalization. The FDIC had required a change in management and $40 million more in capitalization, which is why Treasury was reluctant to give CP a bailout check in the first place.
Inouye isn’t the first member of Congress to have used TARP to rescue personal fortunes. Maxine Waters did the same thing with OneUnited of Massachusetts, where she and her husband had significant investments. In that case, Waters arranged a meeting between OneUnited and regulators, while Barney Frank wrote legislation that required Treasury to grant special consideration to OneUnited’s TARP application.
A second Hot Air piece about the corruption in the cap-and-trade bill.
Remember that last-minute, 300-page amendment to the cap-and-trade bill that hit the House just hours before the vote approving it? The one that Democrats insisted on putting up for a vote before anyone had the chance to read it? When one reads the contents of it, as the Washington Times’ Edward Felker did, it becomes apparent why Henry Waxman and Edward Markey pushed it through so quickly. It was a payoff for Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) to turn her back on coal-producing Ohio and vote to kill the economy in her state, and she wasn’t alone…
…The amendment itself got published in the wee hours of Friday morning. By the time the House came to order and began debate, it hadn’t yet been noted by the media.
In essence, Waxman and Markey bought Kaptur with our money. They spent $3.5 billion for a single vote in Congress, and Kaptur had willingly put herself up for sale. Never mind that Ohio will get [hit] hard by caps on the use of coal. Ohioans will lose jobs, their energy bills will skyrocket, and that will have an inflationary effect on all goods and services as the jobless rate escalates.
More Democrat corruption in Michigan
But this is not the only corruption going on with those sneaky Democrats.
Michigan Democrats are involved in yet another corruption scandal. I wonder if these Democrats keep their piles of cash in freezers like the Louisiana Democrats do.
Here’s the story from the BlogProf. This blog has been tracking the story from its inception.
Excerpt:
Ever since Monica Conyers became a convicted felon, a big chunk of the the most powerful Michigan Democrats have been somehow connected to the growing scandal. Husband John Conyers somehow wrote a letter to the EPA to open toxic deep wells that he vehemently opposed, which was a boost to Jim Pappas who was bribing Monica for the favor. In the middle was Monica Conyers advisor Sam Riddle. In addition, Pappas hired U.S. Sen Debbie Stabenow’s husband, Tom Athens, to illegally lobby for the same deal, all the while Stabenow publicly came out against Canadian trash imports, including those that we to be injected into said wells.
Since the conviction of Monica, Riddle has been talking. What he said today raised many eyebrows throughout the state, now ensnaring the Michigan Democrat Party, Jennifer Granholm, Mark Brewer chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, and Bernard Kilpatrick father of disgraced felon ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. From The Detroit News: Riddle: FBI probed $50K deal with Dems.
People who trash the free exercise of religion, traditional morality, the rule of law and family should not be expected to act honestly. Morality requires certain metaphysical beliefs, which Democrats, being secular socialists, just don’t have grounded by their worldview.
We can’t elect people who believe that it’s OK to kill defenseless unborn children for convenience and then expect them to have integrity. It’s not rational for someone like that to act morally. If they are willing break the big moral laws, they’ll have no trouble breaking the small ones, too.
Gateway Pundit reports that the Democrat government has raised the average wage of government employees by over $2600 during a recession caused by the Democrat’s own policy of forcing private banks via regulation to make risky loans to Democrat special interest groups.
Excerpt from the CBS article:
President Obama’s call last year for “shared sacrifice” doesn’t extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration’s 2010 budget released this week.
At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge.
Executive branch employment — 1.98 million in 2009, excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department — is set to increase by 15.6 percent for the 2010 fiscal year. Most of that is thanks to the Census Bureau hiring 102,000 temporary workers, but not counting them still yields a net increase of 2 percent in one year.
There’s little belt-tightening in evidence in Washington, D.C.: Counting benefits, the average pay per federal worker will leap from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 next year.
So much for communism, the economic system of those who are unable to revise their beliefs in the face of reality and history. I recommend that those who voted for Obama read Robert P. Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism”, the best economics book for complete beginners. I wonder why American atheistic leftists are still living in the capitalist USA instead of in North Korea or Cuba? Oh, I know: hypocrisy!
And then there is the story of 5 of the 6 wannabe-Jihadists from a Miami terror cell were finally convicted for their part in a plot to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago.
The Jawa Report cites this Chicago Tribune article:
Ringleader Narseal Batiste, 35, was the only one convicted of all four terrorism-related conspiracy counts, including plotting to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to wage war against the U.S. Batiste, who was on the vast majority of hundreds of FBI audio and video tapes, faces up to 70 years in prison.
Batiste’s right-hand man, 29-year-old Patrick Abraham, was convicted on three counts and faces 50 years behind bars. Convicted on two counts and facing 30 years are 24-year-old Burson Augustin, 25-year-old Rotschild Augustine and 33-year-old Stanley Grant Phanor. Naudimar Herrera, 25, was cleared of all four charges.
Jihad Watch notes some bias in the coverage by AP, where they leave the identity and motives of the attackers to the last few paragraphs.
…Prosecutors Richard Gregorie and Jacqueline Arango focused on the group’s intent as captured on dozens of FBI audio and video recordings. Batiste is repeatedly heard espousing violence against the U.S. government and saying the men should start a “full ground war” that would “kill all the devils.”
“I want to fight some jihad,” Batiste says on one tape.
A key piece of evidence is an FBI video of the entire group pledging an oath of allegiance, or “bayat,” to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden in a March 16, 2006, ceremony led by an Arabic-speaking FBI informant posing as “Brother Mohammed” from al-Qaida. Testimony also showed the men took photographs and video of possible targets in Miami, including the FBI building, a courthouse complex and a synagogue.
Oooh, but there’s no such thing as media bias! The media is certainly not an arm of the Democrat party that covers their every policy blunder. (H/T Gateway Pundit)
Remember, the media elite has to cover for the Democrats. Who else would give them a bailout of taxpayer money?
WINTERY KNIGHT 