by Smitty
The latest whimsical outing featuring Purple People Beaters and a woman who seems conceptually related to Helen Thomas, and a Tea Party, is done. Note the links in the right column to start you at the beginning.
Good show, old boy!
Mea Culpa
‘Folks Says He Lied to His Wife’
Ben Smith buried the lede in his profile of Will Folks:
Folks says he was haunted by fear that the story of their affair would emerge after the Free Times, a local alternative weekly, attempted to report out Statehouse scuttlebutt on the subject.
Folks says he lied to his wife about the relationship with Haley and told her only the Saturday before the claim became public. He says he panicked, and . . . posted his confession.
But while rumors were flying around Columbia, there’s little evidence that a revelation was imminent.
“Nobody would have printed anything,” said O’Connor.
“I felt that I was confronted with a situation that I couldn’t get out of,” Folks said.
Will Folks is a liar. Period. And it doesn’t matter whether he lied in previously denying an affair or whether he’s lying with his “confession” now.
He may be lying about both. That’s who he is. That’s what he does. And no one can ever trust him again.
UPDATE: Brian O’Connell at Red Dog Report says the whole point of Will Folks’ “confession” was to drive up his web traffic and notes that Folks is now boasting that his monthly traffic will exceed one million visitors. That’s a lot for any site. For a site that only blogs about South Carolina politics, it’s huge, and Folks is laughing all the way to the bank with this vicious little smear.
Aleister at American Glob compares Will Folks to Larry Sinclair, who in 2008 claimed to have had a gay affair with Barack Obama in 1998. Guess which major mainstream media reported on Sinclair’s allegation. If your guess was “none,” you’re a winner!
And the Lexington County, S.C., Republican Party has voted to censure and call for the resignation of state Sen. Jake Knotts, who called Nikki Haley a “f–king raghead.”
Cute! Furry! Cusses Up a Storm!
An environment-friendly message from Richard McEnroe’s favorite squirrel:
Half The World Gives, While The Other Half Takes
by Smitty
The Last Tradition has a post, Brother, Can You Spare Some Liberty about deadbeat men and the women who find themselves supporting them. The Donna Summer clip was a fine choice to round off the post, but how about some Rush?
Meanwhile, Valley of the Shadow is taking the opposite tack, working hard putting together the Southland Fundraiser/Great Right Wing Hollywood Blogger Meet Up. Left coast bloggers, take note. JSF’s choice of Folsom Prison Blues for the post is kind of oddball.
AIG’s $100 Billion I.O.U.
Good luck collecting on this one:
A watchdog panel reviewing the bailout of American International Group Inc. said U.S. taxpayers “remain at risk for severe losses” and that the government didn’t act aggressively enough to protect U.S. taxpayers during the 2008 rescue.
In a lengthy report, the bipartisan Congressional Oversight Panel concluded that the U.S. government, which owns nearly 80% of the insurance giant, is likely to “remain a significant shareholder in AIG through 2012” and it is unclear if taxpayers “will ever be repaid in full.” . . .
Since September 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department have committed up to $182.3 billion to support AIG and provided roughly $132 billion of those funds so far. AIG is on the hook to repay about $101 billion mainly through asset sales and stock sales, and the rest is to be recouped from mortgage securities the New York Fed took onto its balance sheet. . . .
It also said a controversial decision by the New York Fed in late 2008 to pay off AIG’s trading partners in full on $62 billion in soured mortgage trades “distorted the marketplace” and protected AIG creditors at the expense of taxpayers.
“Billions of taxpayer dollars were put at risk, a marketplace was forever changed, and the confidence of the American people was badly shaken,” the report said. The panel, which oversees the government’s financial-bailout program, is chaired by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor. . . .
Read the rest of that. And notice that the guy who put taxpayers on the hook for the AIG bailout has since failed upward:
The New York Federal Reserve under Timothy Geithner failed to exhaust all options to arrange a private-sector rescue of American International Group before launching a taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008, a government watchdog group said on Thursday.
A report by the Congressional Oversight Panel said Geithner, now U.S. Treasury Secretary, on Sept. 15, 2008 left the task of finding a private bailout for AIG to two Wall Street banks, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Group. . . .
“The Panel is concerned that the government put the effort to organize a private AIG rescue in the hands of only two banks — banks with severe conflicts of interest as they would have been among the largest beneficiaries of a taxpayer bailout,” the report said.
Classic.
Kagan’s Clone Wars
They’re not dead babies, they’re just clumps of cells:
White House memos from 1997, when Elena Kagan was a top domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, show that Kagan — nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama — recommended that the Clinton administration permit cloning of human embryos for research purposes.
Writing just months after Scottish researchers had announced the birth of a cloned sheep, Kagan and another Clinton aide recommended that the president announce a ban on cloning that would lead to the birth of human infants, but emphasized that the policy “would not ban the creation of cloned embryos for research purposes.” . . . .
NRA Endorses John McCain, Prompts Outrage Among Membership
Barbara Espinosa is furious at the NRA sell-out:
Yesterday we posted the endorsements U.S. Senate candidate J. D. Hayworth received from former NRA President Bob Corbin and from the Gun Owners of America. Yet the NRA, which has previously referred to John McCain as “one of the premier flag carriers for the enemies of the second amendment,” inexplicably gave McCain their endorsement.
In endorsing Hayworth, the Gun Owners of America (GOA) said: “John McCain has gone out of his way to earn the ire of conservatives and gun owners in his 20-plus years as a U.S. Senator from Arizona.”
Watch this GOA ad exposing John McCain’s efforts to constrain our First and Second Amendment Rights. Then read what GOA’s Political Victory Fund says about McCain here.
This indefensible approval is akin to the shameful endorsement of McCain by Arizona Right to Life (AZRTL) which resulted in members of the board and PAC leaving the organization and calling the endorsement of McCain an “egregious affront.” . . .