In what was an attempt to create a hit piece against Newt Gingrich, Freddie Mac execs have admitted that through the last decade it was “conservatives” who were pushing reforms to “dismantle” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before they could blow up the mortgage market and the banking system.
The next time Obama says that it was the Republicans who caused this, remind him of this article. This piece helps Republicans and makes a liar out of Obama far more than it hurts Newt.
So let us address what the anonymous Freddie Mac execs have to say about Newt.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac execs are almost all Democrat appointees. Newt has been blasting them in public since 2008 if not before, so under condition of anonymity what do you think they are going to tell a reporter?
Obama and the Democrats have protected Fannie/Freddie from serious reform, have been bailing them out for hundreds of billions and the Democrats, using language in the stimulus bill inserted by the Democrat leadership, made sure that Fannie/Freddie execs (as well as AIG execs) got their many millions of bonuses for running the mortgage industry into the ground.
So I ask you again what are they going to tell a reporter about the Republican front runner? If any Republican is elected their gravy train gets cut off.
Readers, does anyone honestly believe that people in the same position as Frank Raines, Jim Johnston, or Jaime Gorelick would ever say to a reporter, “Yup! Newt told us not to do what we were doing”?
Remember that Fannie/Freddie bought almost every lobbying and consulting firm in DC to prevent people from working against them. Fannie/Freddie also spent $20o million in partisan donations with the vast majority going to Democrats.
BUSTED: Newt Gingrich Lied About What He Did For Freddie Mac
In last week’s CNBC debate, newly-minted top-tier Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claimed he was hired by Fannie Maeto be a “historian,” and claimed that pointed out flaws in their “insane” business model.
But an investigation by Bloomberg reveals that Gingrich was much more involved with the government-backed lender than he let on — and that he was hired to promote the company (and its business practices) to other conservatives.
“Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with the consulting work Gingrich was hired to perform for the company in 2006 tell a different story. They say the former House speaker was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.”
In the debate, Gingrich claimed he warned the company that it was causing a housing “bubble,” but Freddie Mac executives told Bloomberg he was never critical of its business model.
“Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with his work in 2006 say Gingrich was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.”
His close ties to Freddie Mac are likely to be a liability in the Republican primary — where voters are deeply skeptical of the government-backed lenders, and furious that the public had to bail them out for their bad business practices.
In statement on his campaign website, Gingrich admits to helping the company reach out to conservatives — more than he said he did in the debate — but does not disclose how much he made from his consulting work:
“Freddie Mac was interested in advice on how to reach out to more conservatives. The Gingrich Group stressed that Freddie Mac must be open to reform of their lending practices but that by stressing the historical success of public-private partnerships in achieving public goods at a minimum of taxpayer money and bureaucracy.”
After Gingrich left Freddie Mac’s payroll, Bloomberg notes that he quickly turned into one of its most vocal critics, writing in his 2011 book “To Save America” that the companies “are so thoroughly politicized and preside over such irresponsible lending policies that they need to be replaced with smaller, private companies operating without government guarantees, whose leaders focus on making a profit, not manipulating politicians.”
UPDATE: Eric Holder lied to Congress & threatened with impeachment!
Holder: Lying has to do with your state of mind …..
Wow, talk about Clintonian answers. Holder didn’t mean to lie when what he said to Congress wasn’t true repeatedly…
In the document dumps the Justice Dept has delivered to Congress, there is not one email from Eric Holder on the issue, in spite of his deputies and chief of staff being all over it – Video Link
*****Original Story*****
First of all, we would like to show appreciation to CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Her courage in the face of derision and implied threats to get this story right has earned her great respect. If we had an award for Reporter of the Year it would go to Sharyl Attkisson.
Please examine our other operation gunrunner news HERE.
Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.
In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”
On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill–well done yesterday… (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.”
This revelation angers gun rights advocates. Larry Keane, a spokesman for National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group, calls the discussion of Fast and Furious to argue for Demand Letter 3 “disappointing and ironic.” Keane says it’s “deeply troubling” if sales made by gun dealers “voluntarily cooperating with ATF’s flawed ‘Operation Fast & Furious’ were going to be used by some individuals within ATF to justify imposing a multiple sales reporting requirement for rifles.”
[Editor’s Note – I am am American of Swedish ancestry so I keep up on Swedish news. Afton Bladet is a real paper and this is real news. The photo is “Photoshopped” as we will demonstrate further.]
Swedish news agency Afton Bladet claims the famous “chipmunk in the small chair” was photoshopped. What’s wrong with this picture?
The Swedish news agency Afton Bladet says Obama was photoshopped into the picture. AB insists that the president was just way to small in the picture. It must be a fake. Via Free Republic.
Indeed it is an obvious Photoshop.
Not only is President Obama sized incorrectly when inserted, but look at the light angles of the flash. Judging by the glare it is clear that the flash is being held up and to the right of where the camera is (and aimed slightly upward as well). This is a tactic that helps reduce “redeye effect” and is used to reduce the amount of glare in the photo. It is obviously a directed photo because all of the laptop screens are off.
I used Microsoft Paint to add the red circles which remakes the entire picture, but if you look at the “original” photo up top examine Obama’s shoulders and then look at Biden’s. Obama is obviously a digital insertion because one can see how pixilated the angle of his shoulders are against the beige wall and one can see that Biden’s shoulders are not pixilated (they are smooth). Vice President Biden was in the room. President Obama was not.
Notice how “F” Chuck Todd tries to sneak in some rather bogus political narratives? This is one reason why MSNBC has such poor ratings. People are smart enough to see the semantic games and bogus narratives introduced as a matter of routine at MSNBC.
On a side note, at the beginning “F” Chuck Tries to posture Trump and is completely bowled over. While Trump is at times a tad over the top and thus “unpresidential”, the GOP field could use a little bit of Trump’s fire.
Note: If you missed the Donald Trump interview with Sean Hannity be sure you see it as it is a good policy discussion – LINK.
[Originally posted on my old college blog in April 2010, Newt Gingrich says that the CBO is next to useless and needs to go. It would seem that he is correct – Editor]
Amity Schlaes is perhaps the greatest living economic historian.
I like how Schlaes describes how the CBO works, they are asked to score what is placed in their box and that includes the assumptions they are asked to make in the request.
For example Ann Coulter once made the following analogy. If Congress proposed a new “green energy bill” that assumed that there was a car that ran on grass and got 1000 miles per gallon of grass the CBO would tell us that our dependency on foreign oil would drop significantly.
The question is how can lawmakers get away with their misrepresentation? One answer lies in the structure of the Congressional Budget Office, the government’s official accountant. Its job is to establish an honest price: to tell legislators and voters what a policy will cost in the short, medium and long terms. That CBO work is important because Americans rightly sense that the politicians’ math is rigged.
Amity Shlaes
“Nobody told me you were cheating.
Aww, it’s just a feeling I had.”
Flawed Assumptions
The CBO’s rules make it hard for the group to fulfill its own mandate. You’d think, for example, that the CBO would use its own parameters when it crunches numbers. Instead, the CBO must use the same mathematical assumptions supplied by the very lawmakers who wrote the bill the group is evaluating. No matter how improbable those formulas are.
Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, writing in the New York Times, described the group’s process as “fantasy in, fantasy out.”
CBO rules often preclude common sense. Its forecasters can’t take into account any other legislation when studying the price tag of a proposed bill. That enabled the forecasters costing out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill to overlook this fact: Medicare spending increases will force tax increases, which in turn will hurt growth.
Political Salesmen
This dynamic is permitted because the answers the CBO supplies make it easier for politicians to sell their bills. They’re happy. And so, for the moment, are voters who are painfully aware that the U.S. federal budget can’t cover new entitlements, yet accept such legislation as a balm for that pain.
“So if I’m right, you got to lie to me
Then I won’t feel so bad.”
The CBO’s structural failure benefits the Democrats this week. Indeed, Pelosi is teaching Republicans something: the bigger the misrepresentation, the greater the credibility with voters. Croon to them a tune about entitlement, and they forget that you’re clearing a path for a tripling of the tax on dividends.
The CBO’s rules are bipartisan — they hold for whatever legislation lands in its in box. Congressman Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, recently put forward a new blueprint for the federal budget. Ryan’s plan is less questionable than Pelosi’s because it’s relatively honest about costs. Ryan points out that the current unfunded part of the Medicare liability is in the trillions.
“DVD sales are easy money and so are internet sales. While the first three episodes of The Playboy Club are on Hulu, the other seven episodes will not be made available on any internet service or DVD. The networks are not in the business of turning away easy money…”
Cast of ‘The Playboy Club’ on NBC
One might wonder why we would ask such a question, but by the end of this article you will not be so uncertain.
Sometimes television can reflect history, but sometimes it can be recreated too perfectly as is the case with NBC’s The Playboy Club.
The new TV show The Playboy Club takes place in early 1960s Chicago. And if you’re going to do a series about Chicago, you have to include a political angle, right? As the saying goes, Chicago is to politics as Paris is to romance. The Playboy Club, of course, wants to be about both.
So one of the main characters is a young lawyer named Nick Dalton, who wants to leave his past as an Outfit mouthpiece behind and become Cook County State’s Attorney. The Outfit, though, doesn’t want to leave Dalton behind. Dalton constantly hounded by the son of crime boss Bruno Bianchi, who reminds him that the mob can help him get ahead in politics.
In 1964 Chicago, only one man could help you get elected state’s attorney: Mayor Richard J. Daley, chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee.
Among local offices, state’s attorney was second only in importance to the mayor. It was important to have a Regular in there, who wouldn’t prosecute the Machine. In 1960, Daley handpicked Daniel Ward, who looked clean because he was the dean of the DePaul University Law School, to run against Republican incumbent Benjamin Adamowski. Adamowski had to go because he was investigating city workers for taking bribes to allow a trucking company to short-weight construction supplies. Legend has it that Daley stole the 1960 election for John F. Kennedy. But he stole just as many votes for Ward, who won by 25,000.
Given Daley’s concern with looking proper, it’s impossible to imagine him slating an ex-Mob lawyer. Daley wasn’t mentioned on The Playboy Club, but he’s an interesting part of the story, and not just because of his power to elect a state’s attorney.
The New York Times wrote about the political impact of the show:
Crime, Sex, Politics and Regular Folks
In the world of prime-time television, Chicago is home to rough-and-tumble politics, street-smart cops and robbers, and the sexiest nightclub of its time, as well as to plenty of down-to-earth folks who make you wonder how that nightclub arose in their midst.
That may not be the way Chicagoans see themselves, but it describes the city’s image as viewed through the lens of modern-day television. Most Americans get their idea of the nation’s cities from what they see on TV.
And that, Political Arena readers, is why ‘The Playboy Club’ had to go.
Indeed in one episode Hugh Hefner’s lawyer pays off the Daley machine with a “donation” of a Jaguar.
This administration has been rife with “pay to play: Chicago style corruption scandals such as Solyndra, BrightSource, and BP; the Goldman Sachs and lobbyist revolving door in the administration, the picking of winners and losers, the illegal offshore drilling ban, the shutdown “green energy competition” such as the Keystone Canadian Oil Pipeline, the yanking of perfectly valid coal mining permits, EPA regulatory shutdown of American power plants, the steering of stimulus funds to Democrat donors and political districts, the favors handed out to White House allies in ObamaCare, the huge political payoffs to get the votes of a few resistant Democrats for key votes, the closing of GM dealerships owned by Republican political donors, the list can go on to fill the page.
A little Chicago style persuasion is nothing new for this administration.
Remember the Ford commercial with the average Joe who said that one of the reasons he bought a Ford was because it didn’t take bail-out funds? It struck a chord with many people and received a great deal of attention.
On Tuesday, Detroit News reporter Daniel Howes reported that White House officials leaned on Ford Motor Company to yank a popular TV and Internet ad critical of competitors who took federal bailout money. According to Howes, “Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House” questioned the firm’s CEO Alan Mulally (who had earlier supported the bailout despite his company’s refusal to participate). Howes concluded: “You’re not allowed, in Obama’s America, to disparage the auto bailout, or — indirectly — Obama. Especially during the election cycle.”
Both Ford and the White House officially deny any political pressure received or applied. But White House press flack Dan Pfeiffer refused to answer when I asked him whether anyone at the White House had ever contacted anyone at Ford to complain about the bailout ad.
So the Washington Post comes to the administration’s defense:
A left-wing Washington Post writer immediately scoffed at concerns about the administration’s heavy hand because the Ford fiasco “is being denied by the parties on both sides.” Must be nice to mainline White House talking points for a living. For the rest of us, reality intrudes.
The Washington Post this morning ran an excellent piece about how President Obama has come up way short on his promises to help the housing market.
And so . . .
Today, Obama will travel to Las Vegas where he will outline new steps to help borrowers refinance. The White House leaked the story to the Post’s chief competitors on the national newspaper scene, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as Reuters.
CBS has been caving and is making Atkisson “unavailable”. She will be lucky to have a job after this is over:
Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.
I’ve also heard from a producer at another media outlet that has previously booked Attkisson that they tried to book her since she made news with the Laura Ingraham interview yesterday. They were also told that she would be unavailable.
Recall what Attkisson told Ingraham yesterday: [The White House and Justice Department] will tell you that I’m the only reporter–as they told me–that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.
The White House banned a reporter from the press pool because she covered some citizens who were protesting President Obama. When called on this as the obvious intimidation that it was, the White House denied yanking her passes, yet every reporter in the pool knows darn well that the reporter was banned. SF Gate:
In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area.
Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib:
Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.
The Chronicle’s report is accurate.
If the White House has indeed decided not to ban our reporter, we
would like an on-the-record notice that she will remain the San Francisco print pool reporter.
The White House has threatened to use regulatory action to punish insurance companies, health care providers etc to keep them from telling their customers about how ObamaCare and other Democrat legislation is going to raise proces and interfere with care:
Michael Barone: Gangster government stifles criticism of ObamaCare – LINK
There are some, and I suspect many, Democrat operatives in the elite media who are all for this kind of behavior, so long as they are not the victim of it. CNN political analyst Roland Martin advocated that Obama Go “Chigaco-Style Al Capone Gangsta” on political opponents:
Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ‘em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you, and will pay the price.
Of course how can we forget what the Democrats did to ABC. I wrote this piece for my college blog in 2006:
Democrats Threaten Broadcast License of ABC Over Path to 9/11 Film
Democrats have issued a thinly veiled threat against ABC’s broadcast license over their 9/11 miniseries, The Path to 9/11, set to air last Saturday night, in a press release issued by the Office of the Senate Democratic Leader last Thursday. Bill Clinton contacted ABC CEO Robert Iger in an effort to yank the film. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer and producer of the film, said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that political pressure from Democrats is causing edits to the film.
So partisan Democrats I have a question for you. Where is all the squawking about oppressing free speech now? Allow me to refresh your memory. When The Department of Defense issued a press release saying that they were hiring a public relations team to help counter enemy propaganda it was called an “assault on free speech.”
When the Justice Department investigated a series of classified leaks from the CIA to the New York Times it was called a “witch hunt” and a violation of the free speech rights of the Times. The leaker, Mary O’Neil, was appointed to Clinton’s National Security Council by former NSC Chief Sandy Berger, who later went to work for the Inspector General’s office in the CIA. Her job was to find leakers. Democrat talking heads in the media said that it would violate O’Neil’s free speech rights if she were prosecuted for leaking classified information….. no kidding. Let us not forget that Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to stealing and altering secret documents from the National Security Archive in preparation for the 9/11 Commission’s investigation.
The film was made in consultation with 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, “which praised the film’s ‘commitment to accuracy’ and ‘sincere respect for the subject’ ‘I worked closely with the filmmakers and the network to ensure the mini-series accurately reflects both the facts and the spirit of the Commission’s findings,’ wrote Kean” (http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060908-045948-7634r).
Clinton attorney Bruce R. Lindsey, who runs Clinton’s foundation, “wrote Kean last night that he was ‘shocked’ by the former New Jersey governor’s role, saying: ‘Your defense of the outright lies in this film is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission and tarnishing the hard work of your fellow commissioners.’”
So it boils down to this, who are we to believe: Bill Clinton, whose propensity to tell lies has not only been proven, but is renown in the American political lexicon; Sandy Berger, who stands convicted of stealing and altering documents from the National Security Archive to “prepare” for the 9/11 Commission investigation; or Thomas Kean, the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission? Even an NEA lobbyist knows the answer to this.
Be sure to read the rest of the piece HERE. ABC cowed to political pressure from the Democrats and edited out parts of the film that were confirmed as accurate. Not only were members of the 9/11 Commission on hand during production to insure accuracy, Dr. Michael Sheuer, the former head of the CIA’s “Bin Laden Unit” was also consulting. Dr. Sheuer wrote a book bashing President Bush so one cannot say that it was a “right-wing hit job” with any credibility.
The naked will to censor the film by the Democratic leadership inspired the production of a new documentary film called Blocking the Path to 9/11. Ironically those who produced The Path to 9/11 said that they expected to be on the receiving end of political heat from Republicans. Some things you just have to see for yourself:
NBC’s cable news channel also jumped on the anti-Path to 9/11 bandwagon.
ABC, in spite of high demand, refuses to release The Path to 9/11 on DVD. DVD sales are easy money and so are internet sales such as Netflix and Hulu. While the first three episodes of The Playboy Club are on Hulu, the other seven episodes will not be made available on any internet service or DVD. The networks are not in the business of turning away easy money.
Like NBC, ABC sure has learned its lesson about airing anything that Democrats might not approve of:
ABC does an infomercial for ObamaCare yet refuses health care ads from Republicans – LINK (2)
ABC saying that “Limbaugh has a history of making racially offensive comments” – but offered no proof – LINK
ABC: If you oppose Obama on policy, your racist – LINK
ABC cut out key substantive portions of the Palin interview (the parts that showed how knowledgeable she was) – LINK (More on that interview HERE and HERE)
Another ABC interview of Sarah Palin where substantive parts of her answers are edited out – LINK
ABC questions asked to Republicans vs Democrats – LINK
ABC’s Sawyer: ‘Protesters Roaming’ DC, ‘Increasingly Emotional, Yelling Slurs and Epithets’ – again no proof in the video – LINK
ABC Gushes Over Patrick Kennedy and Ted’s Fight for Health Care: ‘Dad’s Final Wish’ Came True – LINK
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Argues With McCain on Health Care: ‘What Would You Say’ to Ted Kennedy? – LINK
ABC’s Cokie Roberts: Glenn Beck ‘Corrupting’ Democracy, a ‘Traitor’ to American Values – LINK
Glenn Beck blasts ABC for doctoring clips in smear piece – LINK
ABC Casts Democrats as Profiles in Courage, Republicans as Grief-Exploiting Meanies – LINK
ABC News engages in blatant misrepresentation in anti- TEA Party hit piece – LINK
ABC News Managing Editor: I didn’t even know about the ACORN story – LINK
‘Liberal’ ABC Radio Boss Firing Profitable Conservative Hosts, Hannity Leaves ABC Syndicator – LINK
Howard Kurtz Blasts ABC for Dumping Andrew Breitbart from Election Coverage Because of “Newsroom Uprising” – LINK
This video is remarkable to see for those who are not trained in how Washington works. The first millionaire in the video says that their group got rich because of the deficit spending done in Washington, so lets raise taxes [so that the government can do more spending and you same greedy bastards can get even wealthier by sucking at the government tit while donating some of that money back to Obama]. The people at Solyndra and these other green energy companies that donated heavily to Obama took our money, paid themselves, donated to Democrats and promptly went out of business.
Washington — Two dozen “patriotic millionaires” traveled to the Capitol on Wednesday to demand that Congress raise taxes on wealthy Americans.
The Daily Caller attended their press conference with an iPad, which displayed the Treasury Department’s donation page, to find out if any of the “patriotic millionaires” were willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Mainstream Media Pushing Hard to Defeat the Tea Party, Raise Taxes
The Politico headline read: “Conservative elites pine for 2012 hero.” They could have shortened that sentence to “Elites pine” or more likely to “Elites freak the heck out.” Because it’s not just the conservative cognoscenti, it’s all of them. The folks in charge of the mainstream media equation miss the good old days when they ran everything and ordinary American voters and taxpayers did as they were told.
Those days are gone and the in-crowd is afraid it is on the way out, too. Congress’s favorability rating is down to 13 percent and even the lefties at Mother Jones are whining that both political parties are cancelling town hall meetings to hide from angry voters.
The era when elite Washington – of all three major parties: Republicans, Democrats and the Media – could just raise our taxes or cut deals behind closed doors has gone bye-bye. And the Powers That Be are determined to turn back the clock.
They blame the Tea Party and rightly so. A combination of a grassroots movement and a sophisticated technology now able to actually inform Americans has successfully taken away some power from politicians and the media. The logical solution would be for both groups to reflect more what the public actually wants from them – a saner, more affordable government and a media that is fair to someone other than just liberals.
Instead, the elites have declared war on the Tea Party.
That in itself is nothing new. Since the first spot of tea a couple years ago, anti-tax, anti-Big Government protesters have been called bigots, violent and a dangerous fringe element. The recent debt battle took it to a far worse level as those in power sought to blame Tea Partiers on our nation’s unwillingness to spend itself into the grave.
The result of that battle was, seemingly, a toss-up. The debt ceiling was raised and a super committee established to discuss ways to solve the budget crunch. But the design of the committee makes tax hikes likely. The deck is stacked as everyone from President Obama and Vice President Biden to Speaker Boehner and almost every generic pundit is now pushing to do just that. And the clock is ticking as a Dec. 23 deadline looms.
At least a few admit they want to use the chance to raise taxes. Obama, most Dems and even loud-mouthed billionaire Warren Buffett are begging for a tax hike.
On Sunday, Aug. 21, the major media chimed in. The Washington Post ran two huge pieces skewering the Tea Party on the economy and more. Columnist Allan Sloan led off the business section claiming “the Tea Party types bear primary responsibility.” Over in the opinion section (as if the first piece wasn’t opinion), they ran a pro-spending, pro-Keynsian economics piece complaining that critics of such policies “almost surely have it wrong.” The critics are, of course, the Tea Party and politicians who are friendly toward it like Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The very same day, The New York Times produced an editorial urging “business leaders to change the minds of the Tea Party lawmakers” and back a “grand bargain that cut spending and raised tax revenue.”
The push to raise taxes is near universal across the media for two reasons. First, it boosts the size of the burgeoning Nanny State. The journalistic elite always support more government. Even when politicians trim the size of growth in government, reporters bemoan such “draconian” cuts. Journalists have never met a draconian increase in the size of government that they didn’t like, but taxpayers sure have.
Secondly, a tax hike would require squashing the Tea Party. And the elites have joined in the hunt.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. has claimed GOP politicians are “subservient” to the Tea Party. Dionne’s columnist at the Post, Richard Cohen, concurs and said Perry “occupies the cultural and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican Party” because he “vows to diminish Washington’s influence.” Cohen calls that a “moronic policy,” instead claiming “what America desperately needs is more, not less, Washington.”
The network news shows use the same strategy with just a dash more subtlety. When local Tea Party leaders confronted Obama in Iowa, they were put down on air. On NBC, Chuck Toddnoted the “bitter taste of the energy and confrontational style of the Tea Party” and their “in-your-face tactics.” ABC’s Jake Tapper referred to it the “unruly Tea Party style.”
Politicians took the same view. “Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the deficit commission, said the American people are rightly disgusted, and he’s personally bothered by Republicans undermining any chance of Speaker Boehner compromising,” explained Tapper July 12. That’s a Republican argument supporting Obama’s “shared sacrifice” plan where the elites control more of your money.
They were mirroring the elitist anti-Tea Party talking points, such as the one from Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod who called the downgrade of U.S. debt “a Tea Party downgrade.” That, despite the fact that Tea Partiers were the only ones willing to cut enough government to prevent the downgrade in the first place.
Wherever you look, elites are moving to crush resistance.
The West does it the democratic way of course. In Syria and Libya, they use tanks and guns and SCUD missiles. Here in America, elites use the more dangerous weapon of the media to hang on to power over everything we do. Their bosses envy the power of their counterparts elsewhere. France , for example, just “announced $16 billion in new taxes to ensure it reaches its deficit-reduction targets,” rather than cut its massive welfare state.
In the U.S., Democrats and Republicans alike embrace the tax-and-spend approach, so the Tea Party threatens them all.
Naturally, it must be stopped. Rep. Frederica Wilson, (D-Fla.), made it all clear in a recent speech. “Let us all remember who the real enemy is. The real enemy is the Tea Party – the Tea Party holds the Congress hostage.”
Like most politicians, she’s wrong. If the Tea Party really had that much sway in Congress, our economy and our nation would be in much better shape.
Conservatives are crazy. Sometimes they’re stupid, racist or even evil. On creative occasions they’re all four – at least that’s how they’re portrayed by the American media. All that reflects the typical lefty view that right-wingers are “son of bitches” who need to be taken out, as Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa so sweetly explained. Hoffa envisions a “good fight” because his opponents must be the opposite – evil.
This election season, journalists have partnered fully with the left to depict conservatives in the most vile ways they can muster. While it’s nothing new, the sheer volume of attacks is noteworthy. What’s worse is that many are coming from supposedly legitimate news operations. . (It is fun to note this nasty attack comes just days before Obama pushes his latest “bipartisan” legislative effort.)
Every national conservative politician battles these media characterizations.
Ronald Reagan was crazy or stupid, depending on the lefty arguing it or the phases of the moon. Nancy Reagan was allegedly the power behind the throne, so she was crazy and evil.
President George H.W. Bush once ran the CIA – evil.
His son, President George W. Bush, managed to be crazy, stupid and evil. (Lefties liked to depict him in Nazi regalia or as a chimp, or both. Conservatives who use identical phrasing or images for Obama are, of course, category four – racists.) Vice President Dick Cheney got the Nancy Reagan treatment – crazy and evil.
It’s almost a party game to list the top conservatives and describe how the media and left are depicting them. But it’s no game to candidates. Prominent media outlets are trying to sabotage every viable conservative opponent to Obama.
Rep. Michele Bachman, (R-Wis.), is called crazy for her gas price predictions or for just being her. Newsweek’s Aug. 15 cover story on Bachmann was called “The Queen of Rage,” complete with a cover photo of a crazy-eyed candidate. “In Iowa, where she was raised, Bachmann has become the living embodiment of the Tea Party. She and her allies have been called a maniacal gang of knife-wielding ideologues. That’s hyperbole, of course,” wrote Lois Romano. When reporters write something that vile and follow it with “that’s hyperbole,” what they really mean is “no, it’s not.”
Then there’s ESPN’s L.Z. Granderson, also a CNN contributor, who called Bachmann “crazy.” Granderson said that “the people aren’t going to vote for crazy. And she [Bachmann] still registers as crazy with a lot of independents.” But those attacks were repurposing the lefty theme that has been around for years. Crazy Mother Jones magazine called her “Bachmann (R-Crazy)” in a 2008 headline.
With Bachmann now running for president, Matt Taibbi resurrected that assault in Rolling Stone’s June 22 issue. “Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions.” Taibbi summed it up by saying she’s “exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy.”
Then there’s stupid, a subject the old school media know all too well. Politico, the lefty publication that caters to Washington insiders, ran an Aug. 29 cover story with the headline: “Is Rick Perry dumb?” This sterling bit of journalism began with the premise that Perry is “confronting an unavoidable question: is he dumb – or just misunderestimated?” (That last bit is a dig at Bush the Younger, of course.)
This theme has been everywhere for years, enshrined even in T-shirt form as a red-white-and-blue elephant with the slogan: “Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Numbers.”
Tune into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and there’s co-host Mika Brzezinski bashing the right for not hiking taxes in the debt limit negotiations. “I think the Republicans look stupid and mean. I’m sorry, this is stupid.”
It’s a common theme over at MSNBC: conservatives are stupid. “Sarah Palin Has Proven Herself To Be Profoundly Stupid,” whined “Hardball” host Chris Matthews.
If it’s evil you want, Matthews throws that term around like beads at Mardi Gras. Let’s see: Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are evil: “These people are evil in what they’re doing.” All because he thinks they’re wrong about climate change. Then Matthews bashed former Speaker Newt Gingrich as “evil” and looking “like the devil.”
The media pile on Perry as the front runner. ABC’s Jim Avila called out conservative Texans as evil, even if you didn’t quite use the word. “Some argue that, deep in the heart of Rick Perry’s Texas, there is little heart.” “Some.” That’s another journalist weasel word, allowing Avila to say what he actually feels without owning up. It’s the same theme over on the left, typically blasting the Koch brothers with the term. A 2010 Gawker headline explained it only a bit tongue-in-cheek: “Republican Billionaires Arrange Secret Meeting to Plot Evil.”
Those attacks are awful, but the scarlet letter attack in today’s world earns the “R” for racism. Matthews is good at that one too, saying Perry “could be Bull Connor with a smile.” Matthews gave the Bull Connor comparison to Perry twice. (Connor was a civil rights era racist who unleashed police dogs and turned fire hoses on protesters. He was also a Democrat.)
If you’re white, even a bogus claim of racism is almost impossible to defend against. It’s the favorite of charlatans and media hounds, and a persistent media theme since Obama first announced for president. Everybody who’s anybody – the Tea Party, Fox, the GOP and more – are all racists for daring to oppose Obama.
Donald Trump’s request to see Obama’s grades? “That’s just code for saying he got into law school because he was black,” explained CBS’s Bob Schieffer.
MSNBC’s lefty religious expert Frank Schaeffer tells viewers about “a racist white bloc in the Republican Party that has come dressed as the Tea Party.”
Even black GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain gets abused as “racist.” TV nutball pundits from foul-mouthed comedian Bill Maher to massively inked, one-time comedienne Janeane Garofalo have criticized his candidacy – supposedly designed to deflect “the racism that is inherent in the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the tea party certainly.” Garofalo actually claimed Cain was being paid to fend off charges of racism against the GOP. Of course, you can’t fend off such disgusting charges. Even a lunatic like Garofalo knows that.
Because such charges get repeated dozens, hundreds or thousands of times. The examples above are just scratching the surface. We could fill newspapers with these outlandish claims, if any bothered to print such truth. Crazy, stupid, evil and racist. The four horsemen of the liberal media apocalypse this election. And every one of them has already been set loose.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture.
Normally we make it a practice to not republish an entire piece, but this is so important for readers to understand and share in this case we are making an exception. Read carefully.
If you’ve been following the news this week, you’d get the impression that America is a scandal-plagued nation. Scandals to the right of us, scandals to the left of us.
Take your pick. There’s the media assault on GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the deadly “Fast and Furious” federal gun-running case, the Solyndra solar loan fiasco, the collapse of MF Global, led by former Democratic N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine and, of course, the deeply disturbing allegations of child sexual abuse at Penn State.
But the real scandal isn’t any one of those. It’s how journalists pick and choose which controversies to play up and which to play down. They are so inconsistent, you’d think they studied ethics at Penn State under Joe Paterno.
Heck, maybe he studied under them.
Take the allegations against Cain. We are watching ABC’s George Stephanopoulos attack Herman Cain on how he deals with women. This is the same George Stephanopoulos who worked for Bill Clinton and did his best to undermine attacks against him. Remember, Clinton was charged with a variety of women-unfriendly incidents including rape. Yes, rape. Not that the networks made a big deal of it at the time.
Here’s Stephanopoulos, on page 267 of his autobiography “All Too Human,” “Most important, I wanted to keep reports of Paula [Jones’] press conference off television … It wasn’t a hard sell.” His book goes on to say how he tried to discredit her. Yes, this openly Democratic operative is a “newsman” now.
Don’t believe it for a second. The different between “journalist” and Democratic Party operative is often non-existent.
It shows in everything they do. We aren’t even two weeks into CainFest 2011 and the broadcast networks have done 117 stories on him. One-hundred and seventeen? That’s more than a small war would get.
Actually, it’s 58 times more than a small war has gotten. Obama ordered troops into Uganda in October, before the Cain allegations came out. CBS and NBC have each mentioned it once since then. ABC hasn’t mentioned it at all.
But the networks don’t care about American soldiers at risk. They are more concerned that Obama’s presidency is at risk.
That’s the only explanation for how they’ve covered, or not covered, the “Fast and Furious” scandal. You’ve had to look hard to find consistent coverage of this corrupt government program that cost the life of at least one law enforcement officer. Allegedly the goal was to track U.S. guns to drug cartels and arrest gun runners.
But the program was poorly run and it cost the life of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. A good leader would take responsibility for that. A moral leader would have called the family to talk to them or meet with them in person. Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t do either. All he did do was lie to Congress about it.
According to Holder, the program was furiously “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution.” That skips any blame for when he told Congress he had heard of the program only weeks before. Now we know that’s just not true. In any other city than Washington, D.C., what Holder did was a boldfaced lie.
Not that you’d know it from most network news. While CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson has shown her top-flight skills as a journalist, and been abused by the Obama administration for it, her competing networks have abandoned their responsibility to their viewers. Both NBC and ABC skipped the House Republican roasting Holder received on Capitol Hill.
It’s been much the same in the Solyndra scandal. There only ABC has shown any semblance of journalistic skill covering Obama’s failed green program. It’s a $500-million scandal involving an Obama fundraiser, a solar panel company that had a dot.com era idea on how to make a profit (none) and it’s gotten nowhere near the media coverage a Republican scandal might have gotten. (Just ask Herman Cain.)
A recent Media Research Center analysis found “just 15 stories mentioning the Solyndra scandal since its August 31 bankruptcy filing.” For those who find math difficult – like many journalists – that’s about one eighth of the stories the Cain controversy has gotten.
But hey, Solyndra wasn’t run by a former governor considered as a possible Treasury Secretary and hailed by news outlets as an economic expert. That would be a real scandal. Or not, if he had the infamous “D” after his name.
The former governor is Jon Corzine, who has the reverse Midas touch. He’s run Goldman Sachs, New Jersey and, most recently, MF Global, which just collapsed amidst a $2-billion bankruptcy. MF Global fell apart in what CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called a “mini Ponzi scheme.”
But not one story on ABC, CBS or NBC has mentioned that Corzine is a Democrat, was considered an Obama adviser and possible pick for a top spot in his administration.
Every time there’s a controversial story, media types are making these choices. They love the Occupy Wall Street crowd, so they play up the good from those protests, despite rapes, vandalism, arson, assaults on police and more. But they hate the Tea Parties, so everything they do is somehow nefarious.
It’s time the media covered their own scandals. They have plenty.
The stimulus bill, as ill conceived as it is, gives is a fantastic opportunity to test Keynesian economic policy and models in comparison to actual results.
According to the law, districts with the highest unemployment were supposed to get the bulk of the stimulus money. Did that actually happen?
First: The idea behind the $787 billion stimulus bill is that, if the government spends money where it is the most needed, it will create jobs and trigger economic growth. Hence, we should expect the government to invest more money in districts with higher unemployment rates.
Controlling for the percentage of the district employed in the construction industry, a proxy for the vulnerability to recession of a district, I find no statisticalcorrelation for all relevant unemployment indicators and the allocation of funds. This suggests that unemployment is not the factor leading the awards. Also, I found no correlation between other economic indicators, such as income, and stimulus funding.
Second: On average, Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones. Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts ($122,127,186,509 vs. $46,139,592,268). Republican districts also received smaller awards on average. (The average dollars awarded per Republican district is $260,675,663, while the average dollars awarded per Democratic district is $471,533,539.)
The exact same thing happend under the “new deal” where much of the spending went to swing districts to buy votes. Massive amounts of money spent and non-farm unemployment never dropped below 20% during the New Deal.
The fact remains and it might as well be considered a Law of Economics: Politicians spend money with a political result in mind, not an economic one. Pictorial logarithm proof:
As you can see the log shows no correlation, but look at this….
Well would you look at that. Oh the news gets better…
Now in case you are thinking to yourself, /whiney voice on “Well wait, that economist you quoted doesn’t count cause she is French and she wrote a note about her findings to Natioal Review which means she is a nazi and only twice removed from Hitler’s third cousin!”
Well USA Today hired some econo-geeks and they came up with the same result:
Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college…
This is the kind of press coverage we can expect from the Washington Post and the rest of the crew of profoundly snarky pundits sometimes called the elite media or as some others have called it the “Democrat Media Complex”.
[Flashback November 2010]
You would think that if you are going to lie about someone or an event, perhaps it should be an event that wasn’t witnessed by 7 million people. This is exactly the same nonsense that Media Matters does on a regular basis.
Our pal JohnnyDollar, who has been on a roll lately with his vigilance, captured the video:
Before we begin it should be clear that the “Center for Public Integrity” CPI is a far left outfit complete with all the spin and trimmings. And while the story they tell is spun I find it to be directionally accurate. While it is rather obvious that environmental regulations go way beyond science and are in fact used to pick winners and losers for purposes of corruption, influence and donations, this article demonstrates that fact with detail. Unknowingly and in it’s own way, the CPI has made the case against leviathan government and the kind of “Chicago Style” regulations that always result from it as well as this web log ever could.
In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.
The administration has awarded more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing those projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Coal-burning utilities like Westar Energy and Duke Energy, chemical manufacturer DuPont, and ethanol maker Didion Milling are among the firms with histories of serious environmental violations that have won blanket NEPA exemptions.
Even a project at BP’s maligned refinery in Texas City, Tex. — owner of the oil industry’s worst safety record and site of a deadly 2005 explosion, as well as a benzene leak earlier this year — secured a waiver for the preliminary phase of a carbon capture and sequestration experiment involving two companies with past compliance problems. The primary firm has since dropped out of the project before it could advance to the second phase.
Agency officials who granted the exemptions told the Center that they do not have time in most cases to review the environmental compliance records of stimulus recipients, and do not believe past violations should affect polluters’ chances of winning stimulus money or the NEPA exclusions.
The so-called “stimulus” funding came from the $787-billion legislation officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009.
Documents obtained by the Center show the administration has devised a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications. In fact, administration officials told the Center they chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant.
Some polluters reported their stimulus projects might cause “unknown environmental risks” or could “adversely affect” sensitive resources, the documents show. Others acknowledged they would produce hazardous air pollutants or toxic metals. Still others won stimulus money just weeks after settling major pollution cases. Yet nearly all got exemptions from full environmental analyses, the documents show.
Consumer confidence has been in the tank since march.
If you want to know what is going on with the economy in recent months, Dick Morris has a very good explanation in this video.
Dick Morris was the political strategist for Bill Clinton for many years.
Speaking of the former President, Bill Clinton seems to have had enough. For a while he was openly criticizing Obama’s mis-steps with the economy, especially the illegal offshore drilling ban, the yanking of coal permits etc.
This may have also been a political shot across the bow. The Obama Administration was jerking Hillary around for months starting with the Egypt/Libya debacle. The State Department thinks it has agreement across the administration on Middle-East policy, makes a cautious yet sensible statement on the position of the United States, and Obama comes out the very next day and contradicts it. This kind of thing happened too often to be an accident and is obviously designed to marginalize her. Niall Ferguson asked if we have two foreign policies and mocked the administration. It shows a great immaturity at the White House. It also confuses and undermines the confidence of our allies.
Being a cabinet Secretary is a brutal job. It is often seven days a week and 13 hours a day. Most Cabinet Secretaries last around 20 months. Obviously there are exceptions but that tells you how brutal the job can be. I have seen recent pictures of Hillary lately and she is not looking well.
I am not saying that Hillary resign because she is doing a bad job, although she is not among the best who had held the position, she should resign because the situation in the administration is intolerable and may be designed to do her political damage.
Many of us have seen this photo which has gone viral on the net:
The far left, which is not happy about this photo for obvious reasons, is touting a piece from “Talking Points Memo” claiming that nine or ten TEA Party protesters were arrested on Capital Hill.
Talking Points Memo is a radical left smear site that is designed with a custom WordPress theme complete with ads to make it look “legit”. Even the elite media does not consider TPM to be a reliable source. TPM is associated with writers at the Huffington Post. Readers might remember that this was before most of the Huffington Post staff walked out after Arianna Huffington refused to pay them after she had gotten her multimillion dollar windfall from AOL.
TPM likely edited this piece after the fact to make it look like people at a TEA Party protest were being mass arrested. So how is it that we discovered that TPM knew that those taken into custody were a part of a pro-life group that often gets arrested and not TEA Party participants? Google Cache doesn’t lie:
Well look at that, Google shows that TPM did report that those arrested were a part of a pro-life group at the time. This has been scrubbed from the TPM web site. Anti-abortion protesters somehow got converted to TEA Party members. TPM was not careful to edit the entire piece though as at the bottom of the piece they left this update intact:
Friday update: Evan is running down the story of these arrests, Randall Terry’s group was involved. Also, the man who was on the curb appears to be Norman Weslin, and we dug up some video showing him using similar tactics as he was arrested at a Notre Dame protest when President Obama spoke during graduation.
Randall Terry’s group has made it a point to get themselves arrested for doing “sit ins” for decades. TPM either forgot to scrub this as well or assumed that most readers would not know about Randall Terry’s group. Randall Terry is so famous for getting arrested that most anyone who has taken even a moderate interest in politics knows about his group. Hardly the “storming of offices” and other violent imagery that TPM used.
[Editor’s Note – I took screen shots of all of the pages involved in case our friends at TPM or HuffPo decide that they wish to engage in any further creative editing.]
Remember how we mentioned that TPM was affiliated with people at the Huffington Post? It would seem that they pulled the same trick at Huffington Post, but were more careless:
Notice how they claim Politico.com as a source and even include a quote? But when one follows the link to the Politico.com piece there is no mention of any TEA Party activists being arrested.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. ABC News reports that on the same day nine leftists demanding health care to be nationalized were arrested for “occupying” the office of Senator Joe Lieberman. Through some miracle this escaped reporting at the Huffington Post and at Talking Points Memo, unless Huffington Post would dare consider trying to attribute the arrests of these nine leftists to the TEA Party.
TPM still has videos online attributing the arrests to TEA Party activists.
This is an administration that does not act in good faith.
UPDATE I – Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Confirms: Democrat Energy Policy is To Push For Less Energy and More Deficit Spending.
Democrat energy policy: Less drilling, more deficit spending. Pinheads like Debbie Schultz have said that there would be “no immediate” new oil if we started drilling today is cute, but they have been saying that for 20 years. Now if we started more drilling back then, or even five years ago it would be an entirely different story. By the way Obama’s illegal drilling ban has already cost many thousands of jobs.
If I start digging a well, it will not immediately result in more water, so lets all have massive thirst. If you start your car, it will not immediately result in you being at work, so lets ban cars and have trains….
Someone is voting for these idiots.
NOTE – If Sarah Palin had uttered the shear nonsense that Schultz puts out on a regular basis it would be the headline almost every other night on the news.
Schultz has been making these kind of orbital statements for a long time. I think it is time for Rush Limbaugh to start giving her a little of what the Democrats need right now:
Flashback March 2011. Amazing how the elite media lets us forget about these litthe scandals isn’t it?
Michelle Malkin
This has been going on repeatedly in this administration. To see the complete story and back ground, be sure to check out this great piece by Michelle Malkin.
Remember when we said that the Democrats are pushing for a government shut down, which is why they keep moving the goal posts in trying to boost deficit spending? Well here is the proof. It is called acting in bad faith folks.
How could anyone who wants fiscal responsibility ever vote for any of these people again. You heard me. If you take exception to that comment please try to justify what we have just seen in the comments below.
UPDATE: Rand Paul: What Schumer is doing to the country is extreme
Michelle Bachmann responds as well:
Mike Pence: If the Democrats want a shutdown so bad, do it and see what happens…
Boehner/Bachmann: Democrats rooting for a shutdown
Its true too. Every time the Republicans make a compromise the Democrats move the goal post. First it was move spending back to 2008 levels; then it was cut by $100 billion; then it was $61 billion’ then it was, 10.5 or 33 billion dollars depending on what Democrat you were talking to. How anyone, and I mean anyone who tells you that they are for fiscal responsibility and want to vote Democrat in 2012 is either duped or just lying to you.
Obama ally Google paid 2.4% federal tax earlier and threw gala events for Democrats while President Obama blasted the Chamber of Commerce as greedy for not wanting small businesses to pay a 39.9% tax.
General Electric paid no American taxes in 2010, the New York Times reports:
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
G.E.’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is considered Barack Obama’s favorite businessman and serves as the head of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Fred Barnes wrote about Immelt here.
Editor’s Note – It is tenacity and vigilance like this that has kept Michelle Malkin the queen of conservative internet news since the invention of the medium. The respect she enjoys is well deserved.
Caught between their boss’s anti-lobbyist rhetoric and the reality of governing, President Barack Obama’s aides often steer meetings with lobbyists to a complex just off the White House grounds – and several of the lobbyists involved say they believe the choice of venue is no accident.
It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs collected on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.
…Obama’s administration has touted its release of White House visitors logs as a breakthrough in transparency, as the first White House team ever to reveal the comings and goings around the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building.
The Jackson Place townhouses are a different story.
There are no records of meetings at the row houses just off Lafayette Square that house the White House Conference Center and the Council on Environmental Quality, home to two of the busiest meeting spaces. The White House can’t say who attended meetings there, or how often. The Secret Service doesn’t log in visitors or require a background check the way it does at the main gates of the White House.
…It’s not only Jackson Place. Another favorite off-campus meeting spot is a nearby Caribou Coffee, which, according to the New York Times, has hosted hundreds of meetings among lobbyists and White House staffers since Obama took office.
And administration officials recently asked some lobbyists and others who met with them to sign confidentiality agreements barring them from disclosing what was discussed at meetings with administration officials, in that case a rental policy working group.
Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group largely focused in recent years on Google’s privacy practices, has called on a congressional investigation into the Internet giant’s “cozy” relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.
In a letter sent Monday, Consumer Watchdog asked Representative Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to investigate the relationship between Google and several government agencies.
The group asked Issa to investigate contracts at several U.S. agencies for Google technology and services, the “secretive” relationship between Google and the U.S. National Security Agency, and the company’s use of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration airfield in California.
Federal agencies have also taken “insufficient” action in response to revelations last year that Google Street View cars were collecting data from open Wi-Fi connections they passed, Consumer Watchdog said in the letter.
“We believe Google has inappropriately benefited from close ties to the administration,” the letter said. “Google is most consumers’ gateway to the Internet. Nonetheless, it should not get special treatment and access because of a special relationship with the administration.”
Consumer Watchdog may have an ally in Issa, a California Republican. In July he sent a letter to Google raising concerns that White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin, the former head of global public policy for Google, had inappropriate e-mail contact with company employees.
A Google spokeswoman questioned Consumer Watchdog’s objectivity. Some groups have questioned the group’s relationship with Google rival Microsoft, and Consumer Watchdog’s criticisms of online privacy efforts have also exclusively zeroed in on Google, with the group rarely mentioning Microsoft, Facebook and other Web-based companies in the past two years.
“This is just the latest in a long list of press stunts from an organization that admits to working closely with our competitors,” said the Google spokeswoman.
But Consumer Watchdog gets no funding from Microsoft or any other Google competitor, said John Simpson, consumer advocate with the group. “We don’t have any relationship with Microsoft at all,” he said. “We don’t take any of their money.”
Consumer Watchdog has decided to focus on Google’s privacy practices because the company’s services serve as a gateway to the Internet for many people, Simpson said. If the group can push Google, “without a doubt the dominant Internet company,” to change its privacy practices, other companies will follow suit, he said.
“Google’s held itself to be the company that says its motto is, ‘don’t be evil,’ and they also advocate openness for everyone else,” he said. “We’re trying to hold them to their own word.”
Consumer Watchdog, in January 2009, suggested that Google was preparing a lobbying campaign asking Congress to allow the sale of electronic health records. Google called the allegations “100 percent false and unfounded.”
In April, Consumer Watchdog officials called for the U.S. Department of Justice to break up Google. They appeared at a press conference with a representative of the Microsoft- and Amazon.com-funded Open Book Alliance.
Consumer Watchdog’s latest complaints about the relationship of Google and the Obama administration are outlined in a 32-page report.
The paper questions a decision by NASA allowing Google executives to use its Moffett Federal Airfield near Google headquarters. Although H211, a company controlled by Google top executives, pays NASA rent, they enjoy access to the airfield that other companies or groups don’t have, Simpson said.
The paper also questions Google contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies, suggesting that, in some cases, Google contracts were fast-tracked. The paper also questions Google’s relationship with the U.S. National Security Agency and calls for the company to be more open about what consumer information it shares with the spy agency.
When asked if other companies, including broadband providers, should disclose what customer information they share with the NSA, Simpson said they should, too.
“I understand the NSA is a super-secret spook organization,” he said. “But given Google’s very special situation where it possesses so much personal data about people, I think that there ought to be a little more openness about what precisely goes on between the two.”
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 