How does Holder survive?

Via-NY POST

Because AG is Obama’s alter-ego — his fall would be a defeat and an insult

By MICHAEL A. WALSH

If you want to see the true face of the Obama administration, you need look no further than the president’s embattled attorney general, Eric Holder.

By turns whiny, shifty, obfuscatory, petulant, insulting and arrogant, Holder has become a fixture before congressional investigating committees, fending off one Obama scandal after another, while proclaiming that he — the nation’s top cop — doesn’t know anything about anything and highly resents any implication that he does.

Indeed, all the Obama scandals — the murderous gunrunning scheme called Fast and Furious, the secret monitoring of the Associated Press and Fox News reporter James Rosen (personally approved by Holder), even the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups for special scrutiny — find their nexus at the top of the Justice Department.

As bad as it is, it is probably worse.

 Most people on the right side of the political spectrum view the recent revelations of the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative organizations for "special" treatment as proof that Barack Obama is everything that we have been saying about him for the past six years. The truth is probably far worse.

Oh it is more than probable that the Obama Administration knew of the shenanigans going on at the IRS for some time, perhaps even from the beginning, but the real problem, the reality that should send shivers up every American's spine is that probably nobody in the Obama Administration directed the IRS to do it.

If someone in the Administration and it would have to be a powerful member to do so, did pull the strings to get the IRS to harass conservative groups, well then we just have corrupt politician doing what corrupt politicians do. But the far more likely scenario is that the IRS took the opportunity of a sympathetic administration being in power to go after its, the IRS's, enemies. In other words the IRS, as an institution, sees the Tea Party and other like minded conservative organizations as a threat to their power

Since its formation the Tea Party has been portrayed as a bunch of greedy white people hell bent on protecting themselves from higher taxes. But the Tea Party movement has always made it clear that taxes are just a symptom of a far deeper threat. The primary motivation of the Tea party movement is the belief that the federal government is far too big and is trampling on American's individual and constitutional protected freedoms.

The Tea Party has always understood one important historical truth, government = control.

This is why the Tea Party so identifies with our Founders, they too understood this simple truth and devised a system of government that, if maintained, would limit the power of government thus insuring a greater degree of individual freedom than had ever existed before the founding of our nation,  Of course that system of government has not been maintained and thus we have deteriorated to the point where the IRS is harassing citizens whose only crime is that they want to become more involved in the political process of their nation.

Nothing has validated the Tea Party's  concerns of an out of control federal government as has the IRS targeting of those who most openly challenge big government. The IRS, like a cornered animal lashed out at its protagonist because its very existence, its institutional survival were threatened. The institutional  instincts of one of the United States most powerful and feared agencies in order to protect itself  has shown it not only can but will destroy American's constitutional liberties in order to maintain its power, the power which legally belongs to the very citizens it attacks. .

It is one thing for a partisan politician and his administration to use the power of governing to punish their political enemies, happens all the time. It is quite another thing for the Leviathan of a massive Federal bureaucracy to target ordinary citizens. We know this to be true regardless of the circumstances of who specifically directed these actions. With such widespread abuse of power, nobody stepped forward to blow the whistle. No IRS employee less alone manager stepped forward and declared "this is wrong". Neither publicly or with the protection of whistle blower status, did any bureaucrat think it important to protect fellow citizens from the abuse of power by a tyrannical government agency. The IRS as an agency was more important to these people than the constitutional protections of average Americans.

I sincerely wish that Obama and his petty tyrants had forced the IRS to "punish" his enemies, the solution to that is relatively simple. But the IRS and other such federal agencies are not on the ballot every four years and you do not impeach the Federal bureaucracy.

Our federal government is a amalgamation self sustaining and self defending organisms not really subject to political control, by either party. Constitutional restraints even in their current state of political demise are absolutely meaningless to soulless institutions whose only purpose are its own  perpetuation. The federal government is now so big that all of its institutions are entities unto themselves divorced from and little concerned with the citizens of the rest of the nation they ostensibly exist to serve.. They exist in order to exist, there truly is no higher goal.

If Obama ordered the IRS to attack the Tea Party that would, in one sense, be good news. It would show that the IRS was subject to "civilian" control, even if misguided, corrupt and un-American  control. But I fear it is far worse than that, I fear the IRS just does what it wants in order to maintain control, its control of us, to protect itself.

Proliferating scandals expose truth about Obama

Via-Chicago Tribune


President is Chicago politician, not Narnia faun

John Kass

Dogged by scandal, and with his press secretary presumably now curled up in the fetal position and breathing into a brown paper bag, it's obvious President Barack Obama is in need.

Our president must find his happy place again, away from irritating controversies.

Like Benghazi, where four Americans died and he stood before the United Nations and made a phony reference to a ridiculous video in order to save his politics at the expense of the truth.

And now it's known that his Internal Revenue Service was used to threaten conservative and tea party groups and quash political dissent. The IRS also leaked damaging information from secret files against his political enemies to the media, prompting some to call him President Barack Milhous Obama.

Another scandal, involving the Justice Department seizing reporters' phone records hoping to find administration leaks, is a chilling assault on the First Amendment that would have made Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover smile.

What Obama requires is another relaxing vacation. This time, the man needs a visit to Happy Land.

So please take my hand, Mr. President, and we'll fly there, over those political storm clouds in Washington, to where things were just about perfect:

Back home to Chicago. Grant Park. November 2008.

Can you remember the looks of genuine adoration in their eyes?

Some were so overcome they couldn't help but weep for joy. Others barely stopped their lips from twitching. Still others were wiggly with excitement, like puppies unable to keep still, and we know what puppies do when they're excited.

Many hugged and offered high-fives, or loudly clapped, or clinked glasses and gave each other profound smiles of satisfaction and joy.

And that was just the journalists.

The rest of Obama's voters were ecstatic too. But as historians will no doubt tell us, American journalists were especially thrilled.

Not all. A few grumpy types complained that messianic politics is never healthy for the Republic. But who could listen with all that joy in their ears?

The Republican establishment — the War Party — had been vanquished, and deservedly so, for talking out of both sides of its mouth about the need for a smaller government while feeding from that monstrous defense industry trough. They're in the wilderness still, and should remain there for a while.

And Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton had already had her wings clipped. Remember? She and Bill had dared suggest that Obama had played the old Chicago race card on her in the Democratic presidential primary — that primary of the 3 a.m. phone call. The media response was to crush her.

There was no memo, but the messengers gathered with common purpose, as if compelled by journalistic pheromones to do what must be done. And it was done. To Hillary. For her apostasy, she was almost cast out.

Because Obama wasn't just another politician. Reporters flocked to him as if he was the gentle forest faun, Mr. Tumnus straight out of the Narnia tales.

And American journalism was like that little girl in the C.S. Lewis stories, Lucy Pevensie, graciously accepting his tea and cakes, nodding off to the music of his woodland pipes, sleeping on his couch, smiling.

It was odd and somewhat frightening to watch so-called journalistic iconoclasts cleaving desperately to the myth of Obama as savior. His mouthpieces came up with excellent lines that were repeated endlessly, my favorite being that the guy from Chicago would transcend "the broken politics of the past."

Obama doesn't bother me. I disagree with his politics, but that's not what's galling. What's appalling was the pack mentality of journalists — and I don't need polls to tell me that most are liberals — who were so eager to wag their tails at his approach.

Benghazi is trouble enough for Obama, so troubling that a liberal soccer friend (yes, I do appreciate diversity of opinion) greeted me by sarcastically chanting, "Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!" as if that dusty, bloody town in Libya doesn't mean a thing.

But it means something to Obama's credibility, which is now in tatters. And it means something to the four dead Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. It means something to the whistle-blowers who say they were pressured not to talk.

And Benghazi means something to the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state's snarky comment "What difference, at this point, does it make?" will hang from her neck like the dead albatross in the poem. By 2016 it should be exceedingly ripe.

These days, Benghazi is no longer being viewed as some isolated artifact in a glass jar. The other scandals have joined it, and combine in organic fashion to produce a president on the defensive. The Obama administration insists its fingerprints aren't on this IRS business, and the president himself condemns it as an outrage.

But it is worse than an outrage. And the president was the beneficiary. If he were truly angry, he'd have fired people immediately. The push by the White House for an "independent" investigation is also an outrage.

It is the Congress' job to investigate. Let them ask the IRS why it provided information damaging to tea party members and conservatives to investigative reporters at ProPublica.

Using the IRS to smother dissent and grabbing the phone records of The Associated Press isn't something a gentle Mr. Tumnus would do.

But it is something done by politicians from Chicago, where government is the muscle that shuts the mouth.

The evidence is clear

Via-Jer's Notes

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

James Hansen

Admittedly I have not been keeping up with the global warming news nearly as closely as I used to, I pretty much have just been keeping up with the headlines and "big" stories.

One of those recent "big" stories has been about various 'alarmist" and alarmist institutions back pedaling from their normal doomsday claims and admitting that there has been a "slow down" in warming, see quote above by the "godfather" of the global warming fraternity as an example.

Then there was the rather detailed article in the Economist a publication that previously had taken the alarmist view of global warming where they admitted, well, the obvious.

"Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,"

It is sure nice that the fear mongers have quit denying the truth, but I have a rather simple question which I have not seen asked since this new "revelation" has taken hold of the climate community. It is simply this:

"If temperatures have remained flat over the past decade or more, what about all the stories over the past decade about the negative effects of global warming on well....everything?

I mean wasn't  it just this past fall when climate change/ global warming caused Superstorm Sandy?

Consider this story from the Washington Post. This would be considered  an attempt by the author to have an even handed look at the science regarding global warming and Superstorm Sandy.  But given the "big" story outlined above, it really is just  fiction

Here are a couple of the fair and balanced  points the writer makes:

1) Sandy should not be “blamed” on climate change. Climate change does not cause storms and did not cause Superstorm Sandy. Storms form when certain weather ingredients come together. The historic record shows violent storms, some even more severe than Sandy, have struck the Northeast repeatedly..

2) While climate change did not cause Sandy, it may have been a performance enhancer like a steroid, injecting it with somewhat more energy and power.

3) Sea level rise from manmade climate change increased the water level along the Northeast coast 6 to 8 inches and, as a result, somewhat worsened the coastal flooding from Sandy.

I might be going out on a limb here, but if temperatures have been flat for the past 10-15 years, not only can Superstorm Sandy not be blamed on climate change, there was no climate change to be blamed!

It could not have "enhanced" Sandy and whatever sea level rise they claim, can not be the result of man made climate change/global warming simply because, there has not been any and the scientist and their allies are admitting it.

Kathleen the Terrible

Via-American Spectator

By DAVID CATRON

Kathleen Sebelius is the most corrupt and arrogant HHS secretary in history.

Among the gifts Nancy Pelosi brings to the House of Representatives is her ability to draw a hearty guffaw from the most jaded observer of American politics. This talent for comedy was on display last Wednesday when she told a group of toadeaters disguised as journalists that she belongs to the anti-corruption party. The Orwellian absurdity of the claim, combined with her trademark vapid expression, was enough to make a cat laugh. I do, however, wish C-SPAN would flash some sort of warning on the screen when the former Speaker is about to deliver one of these howlers. That one caught me unawares with a mouth full of coffee and I had to spend the next ten minutes cleaning off my keyboard and monitor.

In reality, of course, Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats who infest Congress and the Obama administration constitute the most corrupt gang of grifters ever to have descended on Washington and the hapless American electorate. The only real question is: Who is the worst? Many would bestow this dubious honor on Pelosi herself. Others would favor her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid. More than a few would, of course, nominate Eric Holder. And still others would push the suit of President Obama for the “most corrupt” award. All are tough contenders, without a doubt, and each has certainly earned at least a dishonorable mention. Nonetheless, for my money, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius wins the prize.

read entire article

Now if this was a Republican...

Jackson May Face Jail Time

News To You?

Obama campaign accepted foreign Web donation -- and may be hiding more

News To You?

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Service director suspected of lying to Congress about prostitution scandal

New To You?

Feds probe ‘suspicious activity’ in Jesse Jackson Jr.’s finances: sources

News To You?

Latest O’Keefe Video Shows Obama Campaign Voter Fraud

Time to Investigate the Bureau of Labor Statistics

What's with the Household Survey's miraculous spurt of 873,000 new jobs?


Via-American Spectator

By Peter Ferrara


Who needs the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), when you have Rush Limbaugh? Limbaugh predicted almost a year ago that the unemployment rate reported last Friday would fall below 8% for the first time since Obama entered office. Limbaugh by his own admission is no economist. So how did he know? Maybe because we are in the realm of politics now, rather than economics.


How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
The BLS reported last Friday that the economy in September created all of 114,000 net new jobs, just 104,000 in the private sector. To give you some context for how great that is, the working age population increased by 206,000 in September. With a labor force participation rate normal for the fourth year of a recovery (where we are right now), just keeping pace with that population growth would require 138,000 new jobs, before we can even start to reduce the unemployment rate.

Andrew McCarthy on DOJ

Charlie Rangel Is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem

Via-Townhall

Star Parker

Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity. Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%. In the 15th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%. The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

Charlie Rangel is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

There are now 41 House members who belong to the Caucus. In the most recent elections, 37 of them ran as incumbents and all regained their seats handily. The four seats that were vacated were easily captured by new black Democrats.

That’s a 100% return rate. These Black Caucus Democrats recaptured their seats getting an average 75% of their district’s vote.

In a year when 62 Democrats were defeated – a 25% reduction in the bloc of 252 Democrats in the current Congress – the reduction of the bloc of 41 black Democrats was zero.

The average poverty rate in the districts of Congressional Black Caucus members is 20.3% - six points higher than the national average. The average child poverty rate in these districts is 28.8%.

So, as in Charlie Rangel’s case, it’s hard to conclude that these Black Caucus Democrats are being sent back to Washington by large voting margins, year after year, because they are delivering such fine lives to their constituents.

A problem here is that elections in Black Caucus districts are not exactly what might be described as free and open.

About three quarters of these districts are Majority Minority districts, hard wired to guarantee election of blacks. The remaining districts are also gerrymandered through various schemes flowing from collusion of political parties and state legislatures.

The initial provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, to deal with voting problems was structured to counter schemes going on in the South – literacy tests, etc – rigged to keep blacks from registering and voting.

But by the 1970’s, this provision morphed into district gerrymandering. What was initially meant to protect the voting rights of blacks evolved into provisions to guarantee the election of blacks.

The result of this overall process is a bloc of politically manipulated districts which, coupled with other institutional biases protecting incumbents, virtually guarantees the election of black Democrats.

You might say that rigged elections might be justified if it meant better lives for black constituents.

But given that these districts are largely characterized by persistent poverty and some of the worst public schools in the country, this is a conclusion that’s hard to reach.

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the prodigious money raising prowess and dubious ethics of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The Times editorialized, “Of all the money machines shaving ethical corners, few rival the Congressional Black Caucus…..the caucus spends far more on gala entertainments and golf outings than on the scholarships that billboard its charity drives.”

Political markets are like commercial markets. The absence of competition results in shoddy products.

When we send American soldiers into harm’s way abroad to fight for free elections, perhaps we should spend more time considering the quality of our own democracy at home.

Time to stand up and vote all the Rangels out

Via-NY POST

Michael Goodwin

It's official: Charlie Rangel is a crook. A liar. And a tax cheat.

The guilty finding by a bipartisan group of his peers lays to rest any illusion the flimflam man's disgraceful conduct was an aberration or mere sloppiness. The case revealed a decades-long pattern of willful deceit and intentional evasion.

In a better world, we would be bidding him good riddance. He would be expelled from Congress, and a federal prosecutor would be waiting at the door, ready to pounce on the ton of evidence that convicted him. A grand jury would be going through the bank accounts bulging with cash, the sources of which remain suspiciously unclear.


In that better world, his colleagues, shocked and embarrassed by how he flaunted his violations of tax laws and ethics rules, would immediately tighten the screws and increase the penalties. They would denounce him from the floor, ashamed to have accepted his friendship and favors.

They would call for a vote on term limits, conceding that permanent incumbency magnifies the corruption of power. Rangel, after all, was just elected to his 21st term, and men and women of goodwill would proudly shout "aye" to eliminate the temptations that pile up in a job for life.

Of course, that's not the world we live in. What justice we have in this one is too often corrupted by a double standard, one for the public and one for our government masters.

Any ordinary American who scammed the IRS the way Rangel did would be socked with fines and probably jail. Any private worker who cheated his employer the way Rangel cheated taxpayers would get fired and arrested.

Rangel will most likely get a letter of reprimand. Tsk, tsk.

And where are the prosecutors? Quaking in their hideaways, afraid to take on someone so big. Cowards all.

Try a little experiment. Walk into a government building -- a courthouse, motor vehicles, unemployment -- and take note of how you, the taxpayer, are treated. My experience is that it quickly becomes clear who is working for whom.

Most government workers don't believe they work for you or me. They know we work for them. Public servants? Grow up, sucker.

That's the overarching lesson of the Charlie Rangel moment. His unruffled arrogance, his air of entitlement, his lack of remorse personify everything wrong with Washington in particular and government in general.

He was shocked -- genuinely, I believe -- that anybody would dare accuse him of doing anything remotely wrong. Don't we know who he is!

In fact, we do know his kind all too well, and that was the point voters made two weeks ago. President Obama and Democrats in Congress lost the consent of the governed, just as Republicans sitting in their seats lost it in 2006 and 2008.

Members of both parties believed their own smoke until it was too late, then took turns being shocked to find themselves cast from the temples and into the shadows.

They lost their jobs, but too many who have them still don't get it. There are thousands of Charlie Rangels in Washington and Albany and in state capitals and city halls across America who believe they are above the law. They have convinced themselves they are public rulers, not public servants.

For too long, we let them get away with it. We the people always deserve the government we get. If we want a better one, we have to earn it by working like crazy for it. We have to relentlessly demand a single standard of justice and refuse to accept anything less.

Above all, we must root out all the Charlie Rangels until all the people in those jobs know they work for us.

We can do it. Yes we can.

Harry Reid should not be above the law

Via-Washington Examiner

Examiner Editorial

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid looked like toast a few days before the Nov. 2 election, trailing his Republican challenger Sharron Angle by three or more points in the campaign's concluding polls, according to RealClearPolitics. But when ballots were counted, Reid had somehow converted that deficit to a nearly six-point margin of victory. Most observers attributed the phenomenal success of Reid's last-ditch comeback to the Nevada Democratic Party's highly polished get-out-the-vote "ground game." But an internal e-mail from a Reid campaign operative to a Harrah's executive strongly suggests the Reid ground game depended at least in part on breaking the law.

As former Federal Election Commissioner Hans A. von Spakovsky explained Friday in The Examiner, federal law makes it illegal for officials with a Senate campaign to coordinate with corporate or union officials: "Both the Reid campaign and Harrah's may have violated federal campaign finance law that prohibits in-kind corporate and union contributions to, and coordination with, political campaigns. Corporations and unions may spend money to run ads in support of or opposing a candidate, but they are not allowed to make direct or in-kind contributions to federal candidates. Federal criminal law also prohibits intimidation and coercion of a person exercising his or her right to vote (or not to vote)."

According to the e-mail, which was first made public by National Review Online's Elizabeth Crum, the Reid staffer pleaded with Marybel Batjer, Harrah's vice president for government relations, to do everything possible to get the firm's thousands of employees and their families in Nevada's largest county to the polls to vote for the Senate majority leader, including putting a "headlock" on recalcitrant supervisors "to get them to follow through." In response, Batjer instructed her fellow Harrah's executives that they were to "do whatever we need to do to get the supervisors to know that there is NOTHING more important than to get employees out to vote. Waking up to a defeat of Harry Reid Nov 3rd will be devastating for our industry's future."

It is clear that the pro-Reid effort by Harrah's executive met with some level of resistance within the company, as one of the e-mails obtained by Crum referred to problems encountered by the Reid backers with midlevel supervisors in the company's culinary department. "They simply are not cooperating and listening with upper management" in the companywide get-out-the-Reid vote campaign, a Harrah's executive complained in one of the e-mails. Because intimidation and coercion were apparently involved, this matter requires the attention of the Department of Justice's Public Integrity Section. Attorney General Eric Holder can be sure that the House Judiciary Committee will be closely watching his actions on this matter.

GOP likely to urge Obama officials not to shred documents

Via-The Hill

By Jordy Yager and Bob Cusack

Republicans are likely to urge the Obama administration not to shred documents as they transition to the House majority. 



Before the election, GOP officials on Capitol Hill privately discussed the issue but refrained from publicly tackling it, not wanting to assume what would happen on Election Day.

 Now that Republicans will control the House, the shredding matter will move front and center. 


No one is accusing the Obama administration of destroying documents, but Republicans are expected to try to ensure that all records — on a range of issues — are kept intact.



Darrell West, a political scientist and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said Republicans likely will formally ask the administration not to shred or delete any relevant documents that could be requested in a congressional probe.



“That’ll happen right away, because they want to make sure that the documentary record is preserved so that they have something to investigate,” said West.



Armed with the House majority, Republicans next year will enjoy subpoena power — something they have not had in four years.




Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), poised to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, worked closely with the media in the 111th Congress.



Earlier this year, when it was pointed out by a reporter that he didn't have subpoena power, Issa responded, “I have you.” Issa then singled out other reporters in the hallway, saying, "I have him, and her, and him."

John Wonderlich, the policy director for the Sunlight Foundation — a nonpartisan group that promotes government transparency — said Republican-led investigations may be initiated more slowly than expected, because the party doesn’t want to be seen as too aggressive.



“[Asking for the retention of documents] is the sort of thing that wouldn’t surprise me at all, but as an opening volley that could be seen as really aggressive,” said Wonderlich. “And immediately, both sides are going to be posturing to look like the reasonable ones with the open hand. So it’s not like it’s going to be open season right away.”

Republicans Bachmann, King, and Goodlatte lead charge against alleged fraud in settlement with black farmers

Via-Daily Caller

Caroline May

Three Republican congressmen are calling on the Obama administration to launch an investigation into allegations of widespread fraud into a long fought farmer discrimination suit known as Pigford vs. Glickman.

Republican Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Steve King of Iowa, and Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, want to know how it is that over 94,000 black farmers have sought reparations for discrimination, when data show that there are only 33,000 black farmers in the United States? And why, if the discrimination was so widespread, no USDA official was ever fired for it?

For those not familiar with the case, in 1997, 400 black farmers joined Timothy Pigford in a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) alleging that from 1983-1997 racial discrimination prevented them from receiving loans for which they were qualified.

After filing suit against the nominal defendant in the case, Dan Glickman, the then Secretary of Agriculture, Pigford sought “blanket mediation” to cover all the farmers wrongfully denied loans — at that time estimated to be about 2,000 beneficiaries. The Department of Justice refused, instead requesting that each case be investigated on an individual basis.

In 1999, the parties agreed to a settlement whereby black farmers were granted two options, as described in a Congressional Research Service explained in a written report:

“Track A — provide[d] a monetary settlement of $50,000 plus relief in the form of loan forgiveness and offsets of tax liability. Track A claimants had to present substantial evidence…Alternatively, class participants could seek a larger, tailored payment by showing evidence of greater damages under a Track B claim. Track B claimants had to prove their claims and actual damages by a preponderance of the evidence.”

Under this system, the number of claimants ballooned into figures far higher than anything estimated, according to Congressional records. 22,505 individuals claimed Track A status, 59% of those (13,348) were granted approval and 172 were approved for Track B status. Over 73,000 petitions were filed after the deadline, of those 2,116 were allowed to proceed. As of 2009, approximately a billion dollars had been allocated to Track A applicants.

In February of this year, the Obama administration announced a plan to rectify the perceived injustice of excluding those late filers, by doling out $1.25 billion to the over 70,000 late applicants who claimed discrimination on the part of the USDA.

“I’m going to focus all my time and resources on making that happen,” The Washington Post reported current agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack saying on the day of the administration’s announcement. “The president is prepared to indicate that it’s a priority not just for his administration but for the country.”

Bachmann, King, and Goodlatte spoke to reporters on Wednesday, voicing their concerns and highlighting the contentions of unnamed whistle blowers who have approached them, many of whom estimate that around 80% of the claims filed have been fraudulent.


In a statement from Edward Schafer, read by Bachmann, the former USDA Secretary voiced the importance of investigating the allegations. “I have heard that Congress is considering spending eight to ten billion dollars of taxpayer money to pay any claim of discrimination against the government


, whether legitimate or not,” he lamented. “This rush to judgment is totally unfair to all taxpayers including the minorities who were truly discriminated against.”

Thus far, over 94,000 black farmers have filed discrimination claims, yet many have pointed out to that there are no where near 94,000 black farmers in the United States — neither now nor when the discrimination allegedly occurred. The last census report shows that there are 39,697 “Black or African American Operators,” but according to Bachmann, today there are only 33,000. In 1992, the heart of the period of alleged discrimination, there were only 18,816 black farmers.

Bachmann, King and Goodlatte aim to deny the appropriation of any funds to the suit until the administration has completed a thorough investigation and resolved the issues at hand.

“We want to make sure there is a quick and timely settlement and that those who have truly and wrongly been discriminated against by the USDA do receive their just and fair settlement,” Bachmann said. “Where our concern lays is in the area of what appears to be massive and widespread fraud and abuse of the Pigford process.”

King said that the case has not gotten much attention due to the radioactive nature of racial issues in this day and age. “It’s a racially charged issue, and that is the bottom line. People are afraid to touch it. If this was something else I think you’d see more of a focus on it,” he said. “Another reason it hasn’t risen to the attention level of this congress is probably because we haven’t said enough or done enough.”

Well I guess since she's sorry....

Via-theblogprof

Model corruption

Via-NY Post

The truth about the GM 'rescue'

By MARK MODICA & HAL JOHN

General Motors plans an initial public offering as soon as today -- a first step in the government's effort to sell its ownership stake to private investors. The IPO comes on the heels of a much publicized plant tour by President Obama, who'll certainly hail the stock sale as proof he made a smart decision by bailing out the automaker with billions of taxpayer dollars.

But, to us, the IPO will be proof of something else: a White House that purposefully trampled the legal rights of investors -- many of whom, like us, are small savers -- to benefit its political supporters. Rather than a model of success and foresight, the GM episode is a model of corruption and cronyism.


Let's review the sordid history. Last year, the federal government bought a majority stake in GM for about $50 billion -- a sum equal to GM's market capitalization in 2000, when it was making record profits.

It should hardly be a surprise that the new GM, with so much money to work with (plus a special $16 billion tax benefit) would start inching into the black again. After all, Ford, without government help, has posted after-tax earnings of about $4.7 billion for the first half of this year -- more than twice GM's, even with the $1.3 billion second-quarter profit that "Government Motors" announced yesterday.

The bailout's announced goals required a more limited intervention than what Washington concocted. For example, a deal could have been brokered with strategic investors, as in a normal distressed sale, with GM's assets -- including its valuable Cadillac and Chevrolet brands and an expanding foothold in China -- passing from weak hands to strong.

But the fact that the administration mainly solicited advice from bankruptcy experts, rather than those in industry, is evidence that alternative solutions weren't considered.

Instead, politicians ran the company their way -- raining taxpayer money on key electoral states like Michigan and rewarding their staunch financial backers in the United Auto Workers union.

The devil, in this case, was in the details of the bankruptcy plan that the government pushed through:

Bondholders -- investors ranging from large institutions to retirees just scraping by, who loaned GM a total of $27 billion -- received just 10 percent of the company. By contrast, the government's $50 billion gave it about 61 percent.

And the union -- in return for the $20 billion that GM owed its health trust -- got a remarkable 17.5 percent of the stock plus $2.5 billion in cash plus $6.5 billion in preferred stock carrying a dividend of about 9 percent.

In other words, the UAW got three to four times as much as the bondholders for a smaller claim on GM's assets. The union even boasted to its members in May 2009 that it had made no concessions on pay, health care or pensions in the restructuring.

In effect, the government divided up GM's creditors into favored and unfavored groups, then gave a fat stake in the reorganized business to the favored (a k a longtime Democratic Party donors). On top of that, Washington also ordered the shutdown of 1,650 GM dealers and another 1,000 Chrysler dealers as part of its takeover.

In last month's audit, TARP's inspector general criticized the Treasury Department for that very decision. Treasury didn't show why the cuts were "either necessary for the sake of the companies' economic survival or prudent for the sake of the nation's economic recovery." The move "substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses."

Remember this as the president brags about recent gains in auto-industry jobs: Even though some plants have added union jobs, many in the dealerships have been lost.

But our main concern is what happens going forward. A terrible precedent has been set.

Small bondholders are essential to funding US industry. How eager will they be to invest their savings after seeing how the administration misappropriated the federal government's vast power and ignored long-standing bankruptcy law to reward its supporters at the expense of the less powerful?

We're pleased that GM is making a profit and, with the IPO, taxpayers should get some of our money back. But the government takeover of GM absolutely should not be framed as a success or, worse, as a model for the future. It was political bullying at its worst -- an arbitrary action befitting a banana republic, and deeply unfair to small investors who expected their lawmakers to play by the rules.

Mark Modica was a business manager at a now-closed Saturn dealership in Chalfont, Pa.; Hal John is an executive-search consul tant in Chesterfield, Mo. Both were steering committee members of Main Street Bondholders, a coali tion of small GM investors.

If only Tony could have been there

Via-Washington Examiner

Examiner Editorial

At Thursday's Chicago Democratic fundraiser, it was President Obama, Alexi Giannoulias, who is seeking the Senate seat formerly held by the chief executive, and piles of cash. It was just like the good old days, except for one thing: If only Tony Rezko could have been there. When Obama showed up to raise money for Giannoulias' Senate campaign, the two probably didn't discuss the imprisoned Rezko, the subsidized housing developer and felon who was a business associate of both. Both men were responsible for providing millions in cash to Rezko's crooked enterprises, too.

As a state senator, Obama thrived on Rezko's campaign cash while promoting housing programs that made him and other government-subsidized developers wealthy at the taxpayers' expense: state tax credits, rent and development subsidies, grants, state loans, exemptions from local ordinances, and mandates that Illinois municipalities build more subsidized housing. At one point, Obama even wrote a letter to Chicago and Illinois officials on Rezko's behalf, urging them to give Rezko and a business partner (another Obama friend) a $14 million construction loan that came with $885,000 in cash for the two developers. The project in question wasn't even in Obama's state Senate district. For his part, Rezko took the money and let his subsidized slums go to seed. He later made Obama's purchase of a gorgeous Chicago mansion possible when he agreed to buy an adjacent lot that the seller insisted on unloading along with the house.

Giannoulias, meanwhile, once served as vice president of his family's bank, Broadway, which recently collapsed because of its shaky business practices (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Bad-banker-for-Senate-91644884.html). Some of Broadway's loans to Rezko were already known, but we learned Monday from the Chicago newspapers that the bank had made an additional $22.75 million loan to one of Rezko's companies in February 2006. This was well after Rezko had become radioactive, and despite the fact that another Rezko company had declared bankruptcy and defaulted on an earlier $10.9 million property loan from Broadway.

Giannoulias left Broadway five months before this new loan was issued. But along with the bank's earlier loans to Rezko and other felons and mobsters, about which Giannoulias once lied to the Chicago press, we get a pretty good idea of how his bank worked -- a lot like state and local government in Illinois. You just need to know a guy. So if you like the way Illinois is governed, and if you want to elect more federal officials who can funnel money to future Tony Rezkos, just put your money and your vote behind the two guys at last night's gathering.