"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
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.
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.
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.” . . . .
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.” . . .
. . . Sarah Palin’s? A misogynistic liberal Web site began speculating about the possibility of artificial enhancement, which prompted an indignant response from a leading conservative authority on impressive authenticity, Tabitha Hale:
If this were only on Wonkette’s site, I would never have seen it. I don’t exactly frequent there. However, the story picked up some legs. It’s been talked about by the Boston Herald, local news, and all kinds of leftwing blogs. Not to mention the “feminists” who claim that the question prompted “thoughtful discussion.” I picked it up initially via Jammie Wearing Fool.
The willingness to latch onto a complete load of crap like this is indicative of the real issue, which is that instead of acknowledging the power of Sarah Palin and launching serious attacks on, say, her grassroots cred after her establishment endorsements, they’d rather talk about her boobs. It’s demeaning. It’s offensive. It’s totally inappropriate.
Read the whole thing, because I would never — never — tolerate any inappropriate discussion about boobs. IYKWIMAITYD.
by Smitty
UPDATE: minor grammatical edit.
Dan Riehl says that ‘Smitty Is Short-Sighted And Confused‘. It is true that I am myopic, and, yes, his muddled point did throw me.
If I meant the GOP, I would have written it. The Right is a very different thing.
OK, fine. I suppose, given the following fragments from the post, you could have just as easily been talking about the Left:
But then again, you could have been talking about Independents. So it was entirely too great a conceptual leap for me to connect the word ‘Right’ in the post’s title with the word ‘conservative’ in the post’s URL to arrive at the conclusion that the people in question were, in fact, ye Grande Olde Party.
Maybe one should have paid for that laser eye surgery to clear up these matters, so that these “very different thing(s)” wouldn’t seem to, you know, overlap substantially. As they do. The fact that the GOP and the Right/Conservatives so frequently do not overlap (e.g. Stacy’s cousin) is also a crucial point. The Right has to figure out how to get the GOP to destroy itself and be reborn closer to the ideas it claims to espouse if there is ever to be a Federalist recovery in the country. I get that. My bad.
What’s truly confusing about Dan’s post is the bit about:
But, as I don’t have a gal Friday to man my blog, too much time doing that and not blogging – and the blog suffers, which drives traffic and revenue down. NTTAWWH a gal Friday like Smitty, or any thing.
Well, I’m sure that Sissy Willis will be taken aback by this attack on her femininity, or is this this merely and alias, and the Sissy Willis posting to Dan’s blog one of those M. Butterfly sorts of people, NTTAWWT?
A “union-backed slush fund,” as Kyle Drennen called them in March. I’d never heard of them before, but when their ad bashing Republican Nevada Senate nominee Sharron Angle showed up in rotation on my blog, I decided to find out.
Among other things, Patriot Majority PAC claims to “support our troops” and “patriotic policies,” but who do they really support? Democrats.
Patriot Majority PAC “is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups,” Joseph Abrams of Fox News reported:
Calls and e-mails to the Maryland-based consultant firm Independent Strategies, run by Varoga and Rakis, were not returned.
Outside of that firm, the center of their activity appears to be a single office in Southeast D.C. — 300 M Street, Suite 1102 — which plays host to a sprawling political shell game they have established.
Public records show at least seven political shops listed in Suite 1102, most of which are essentially clones of one another, but all of which have offered money — from measly thousands to game-changing millions — in state-level elections across the country:
- The American Public Policy Committee
- Patriot Majority
- Citizens for Progress
- Oklahoma Freedom Fund
- Mid Atlantic Leadership Fund
- Public Security Now
- Pioneer Majority
- Bluegrass Freedom Fund
Read the rest of that important report and do not be deceived by these bogus Democrat scam operations that are trying to cash in on words like “Patriot” and “Freedom” and “Security.”
While you’re at go help Sharron Angle fight back against these smears and Dump Harry Reid.
by Smitty
Dan Riehl seems concerned about the viability of Twitter as a communications channel this Fall, and especially in the 2012 contest.
There is a saying among SpecOps guys: ‘Two is one and one is none.’ Going into the 2010 and 2012 contests without a multi-channel comms plan for GOTV efforts will be roughly as effective as Stacy’s cousin in 2008. But all of the real work shall have been done, if at all, prior to Election day. Whether or not the political junkies and bloggers get a timely fix is tangential.
Keying off Dan’s earlier post expressing angst at the GOP, keep in mind that all organizational struggles boil down to attrition warfare. The right-o-sphere has to wear off a bit more “new”, in my estimation, and get bloggers into some no-kidding party positions before it shall have “arrived”. How this is done without sacrificing street-cred is left as an exercise for the blogger. Erick Erickson has moved in the direction of the media. Can Dan deliver the biatch-slapping the GOP needs?
Technology adoption is always a chancy thing. The GOP will have an effective Twitter strategy in place by around 2016. That result will be sandwiched between Stacy McCain’s 2015 adoption of TweetDeck, and the 2014 replacement of Twitter as the dominant communication tool by a to-be-announced technology.