Our newly-elected First Rookie hit a new low in Turkey on his recent trip abroad.
This time, our First Innocent insulted the majority of Americans by declaring to the Turks that our nation is not Christian, nor Jewish. Rather, according to the guy who fell asleep in the pew of his South Chicago church for 20 years, we are a Muslim and any other kind of religious nation.
But not Judeo-Christian.
Several media outlets hurried out survey results noting that, during this Easter Week and Passover season, Americans remain overwhelmingly religious, primarily in Judeo-Christian denominations.
Is it simply denial, or truly ignorance on the part of Wonderboy?
Or just blatant pandering to the Islamic Turks? As if that were necessary.
This guy doesn't seem to care how much he embarrasses our nation in the eyes of foreigners and their governments. Stooping to alleging America is not Judeo-Christian, merely to score points with the Turkish PM?
Whichever, he seems to be continuing to chip away at his own popularity as he offends more interest groups throughout America with each passing week.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Politically-Correct Retention Bonuses
Glenn Beck reported a story last night regarding some $210MM in retention bonuses being paid to employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two GSE's which are now government-owned, having lost tens of billions of dollars through the purchase and securitization of too-risky mortgages. The GSE's were, in fact, key players, along with their Congressional patrons, in causing the financial services meltdown of last year, Wonderboy's recent exclusive blaming of private firms to the contrary.
Curious about this, as these bonuses drew very little public media attention, versus, say, the recent, smaller AIG retention bonuses, I Googled the subject.
There are several results for the search, most prominently this one in the NY Times. It reads, in part,
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two troubled companies at the heart of the nation’s mortgage market, are set to pay their employees “retention bonuses” totaling $210 million, despite calls from lawmakers to cancel the payments.
The bonuses, which were made public on Friday, were defended by the companies’ federal regulator, James B. Lockhart, who said he intended to let them proceed.
In a letter sent last week to Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, Mr. Lockhart disclosed that 7,600 Fannie and Freddie workers were scheduled to receive payouts aimed at retaining those “employees most critical to keep and difficult to replace.” Under the plan, 213 employees will receive retention bonuses worth more than $100,000 this year, and one Freddie Mac executive will receive $1.3 million.
Mr. Lockhart’s defense of Fannie and Freddie’s bonuses has made him a lightning rod for legislative criticisms. It is also beginning to draw questions about why President Obama has not replaced the regulator, who was appointed by President Bush. The law creating Mr. Lockhart’s office, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, established him as the lead regulator until his successor is named by the president and confirmed by Congress.
By failing to name a successor, say observers, the White House is implicitly backing Mr. Lockhart’s stance on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonuses, which stands in stark contrast to President Obama’s criticisms of the A.I.G. payments.
“This is a de facto White House endorsement of these payments, which is a little odd considering that everyone spent days talking about how they were shocked by the bonuses given to A.I.G.,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington and a longtime observer of the companies. “It’s also a tempest in a teapot. We should worry less about $210 million in bonuses, and more about the fact that these companies are sitting atop $5 trillion of risks, and if they stumble, the American economy could disappear.” "
Is this for real? It's just unbelievable, after all the media coverage the smaller AIG payments received.
After Wonderboy incited public ire and lynch mobs over the reasonable payments to employees cleaning up the AIG-FP mess, he now goes silent over Congressionally-backed GSEs paying even more to their employees. And, to my knowledge, none of the Fannie or Freddie people got fired for their mistakes. Frank Raines got a huge payout for essentially ruining Fannie and bribing Congress to let him get huge bonuses.
But Raines is ethnically similar to Wonderboy, and backed his campaign, so, you know, it's okay.
That's the way things work in our new, post-partisan political world down in Foggy Bottom.
Curious about this, as these bonuses drew very little public media attention, versus, say, the recent, smaller AIG retention bonuses, I Googled the subject.
There are several results for the search, most prominently this one in the NY Times. It reads, in part,
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two troubled companies at the heart of the nation’s mortgage market, are set to pay their employees “retention bonuses” totaling $210 million, despite calls from lawmakers to cancel the payments.
The bonuses, which were made public on Friday, were defended by the companies’ federal regulator, James B. Lockhart, who said he intended to let them proceed.
In a letter sent last week to Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, Mr. Lockhart disclosed that 7,600 Fannie and Freddie workers were scheduled to receive payouts aimed at retaining those “employees most critical to keep and difficult to replace.” Under the plan, 213 employees will receive retention bonuses worth more than $100,000 this year, and one Freddie Mac executive will receive $1.3 million.
Mr. Lockhart’s defense of Fannie and Freddie’s bonuses has made him a lightning rod for legislative criticisms. It is also beginning to draw questions about why President Obama has not replaced the regulator, who was appointed by President Bush. The law creating Mr. Lockhart’s office, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, established him as the lead regulator until his successor is named by the president and confirmed by Congress.
By failing to name a successor, say observers, the White House is implicitly backing Mr. Lockhart’s stance on the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonuses, which stands in stark contrast to President Obama’s criticisms of the A.I.G. payments.
“This is a de facto White House endorsement of these payments, which is a little odd considering that everyone spent days talking about how they were shocked by the bonuses given to A.I.G.,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, a managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington and a longtime observer of the companies. “It’s also a tempest in a teapot. We should worry less about $210 million in bonuses, and more about the fact that these companies are sitting atop $5 trillion of risks, and if they stumble, the American economy could disappear.” "
Is this for real? It's just unbelievable, after all the media coverage the smaller AIG payments received.
After Wonderboy incited public ire and lynch mobs over the reasonable payments to employees cleaning up the AIG-FP mess, he now goes silent over Congressionally-backed GSEs paying even more to their employees. And, to my knowledge, none of the Fannie or Freddie people got fired for their mistakes. Frank Raines got a huge payout for essentially ruining Fannie and bribing Congress to let him get huge bonuses.
But Raines is ethnically similar to Wonderboy, and backed his campaign, so, you know, it's okay.
That's the way things work in our new, post-partisan political world down in Foggy Bottom.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wonderboy- The Innocent Abroad
Karl Rove expressed it so well on Bill O'Reilly's program last night. The insightful conservative political analyst and brilliant Bush campaign manager noted that European leaders always love a weak, ineffectual US President.
Their worst nightmare is a US leader capable of and determined to unilaterally pursue America's interests.
Instead, observed Rove, the Europeans stonewalled our First Rookie on sending troops to Afghanistan and joining America in over-spending on economic stimulus.
When he wasn't getting slow-rolled by his G-2o colleagues, Wonderboy was busy apologizing for America's imagined- by him- past sins, and for almost anything his predecessor did.
The depth and breadth of this president's stupidity and bad judgement are staggering. As Rove asked, what must European leaders think of a US President who, rather than focus on his own agenda, spends most of his time reminding everyone he won the election, and that he disagrees with his predecessor's largely-successful policies?
Basically, we witnessed the American Weakness tour by the First Rookie. He coupled this with an embarrassing olive branch to the globe's worst terrorist sponsors, e.g., North Korea, by announcing a willingness to cut our nuclear arsenal deeply. One British observer commented that our president has learned nothing from the nearly-fatal inter-war disarmament of the 1920s and '30s by America, Britain and France. Only those countries interested in disarming did so. Japan and Germany did not.
Gee, do you think that's a valid example for today? Or do we expect China, Russia and North Korea to rush to the negotiating table with their own offers to disarm?
We'd better hope that Congress still has some latent, middle-of-the-road, non-partisan sense of self-preservation and defeats any of this idiot's arms control treaties.
Their worst nightmare is a US leader capable of and determined to unilaterally pursue America's interests.
Instead, observed Rove, the Europeans stonewalled our First Rookie on sending troops to Afghanistan and joining America in over-spending on economic stimulus.
When he wasn't getting slow-rolled by his G-2o colleagues, Wonderboy was busy apologizing for America's imagined- by him- past sins, and for almost anything his predecessor did.
The depth and breadth of this president's stupidity and bad judgement are staggering. As Rove asked, what must European leaders think of a US President who, rather than focus on his own agenda, spends most of his time reminding everyone he won the election, and that he disagrees with his predecessor's largely-successful policies?
Basically, we witnessed the American Weakness tour by the First Rookie. He coupled this with an embarrassing olive branch to the globe's worst terrorist sponsors, e.g., North Korea, by announcing a willingness to cut our nuclear arsenal deeply. One British observer commented that our president has learned nothing from the nearly-fatal inter-war disarmament of the 1920s and '30s by America, Britain and France. Only those countries interested in disarming did so. Japan and Germany did not.
Gee, do you think that's a valid example for today? Or do we expect China, Russia and North Korea to rush to the negotiating table with their own offers to disarm?
We'd better hope that Congress still has some latent, middle-of-the-road, non-partisan sense of self-preservation and defeats any of this idiot's arms control treaties.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Doesn't It Make You Proud?
What's with Wonderboy and his wife? Far from his promise of making America respected and liked throughout the world, as if that mattered, he and his partner have committed serious foreign relations faux pas.
I missed the details on the first go-round of the First Rookie's insult to Great Britain's Gordon Brown when he presented the PM with a gift of non-working DVDs. But, thanks to his repeat performance with the Queen of England last week, I caught up on that first gaffe.
Can you believe the classlessness of this moron? He gave the Queen an iPod filled with, evidently, his own bizarre concept of need-to-have music.
How appropriate. Why not toss in a few gift cards for Old Navy or Starbucks while he was at it?
By the way, the Queen already has an iPod. Maybe she can regift Wonderboy's to somebody else?
Then there was the British Monarch's look of distress as our President's wife manhandled the Queen. You can just imagine Queen Elizabelth feeling that she'd been pawed at by hired help.
It just makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
I missed the details on the first go-round of the First Rookie's insult to Great Britain's Gordon Brown when he presented the PM with a gift of non-working DVDs. But, thanks to his repeat performance with the Queen of England last week, I caught up on that first gaffe.
Can you believe the classlessness of this moron? He gave the Queen an iPod filled with, evidently, his own bizarre concept of need-to-have music.
How appropriate. Why not toss in a few gift cards for Old Navy or Starbucks while he was at it?
By the way, the Queen already has an iPod. Maybe she can regift Wonderboy's to somebody else?
Then there was the British Monarch's look of distress as our President's wife manhandled the Queen. You can just imagine Queen Elizabelth feeling that she'd been pawed at by hired help.
It just makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
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