Grassley Should Be Recalled

Here's a YouTube video clip containing Iowa Senator Grassley's call for AIG executives to commit suicide.



I thought the Senate was supposed to be the country's "deliberative" body. These remarks by Grassley are reprehensible and inappropriate for an elected federal government official.

Yesterday, on Glenn Beck's Fox News program, psychologist Drew Pinsky decried Grassley's outburst as signifying a dangerous populism more akin to the French Revolution than our own, more reasoned and principled American Revolution.

I find Grassley to be tremendously irritating. From his grandmotherly rasping voice and similar glasses to his annoying Iowan farmer's perspective, his naivete, which the Senator mistakes for common sense, he has become, for me, emblematic of what is wrong with Congress.

Grassley demands corporate contrition for the US financial sector woes, but conveniently sidesteps his own and his colleagues' culpability in allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to swell to dangerous sizes, as well as forcing banks to make CRA mortgage loans which contributed to the current dilemma.

Perhaps the Senator will favor us all with a live demonstration on himself of how the AIG executives might follow up on Grassley's demand.

Carolyn Maloney Wants To Eliminate Private Contracts

New York Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney is reaching new heights of stupidity and legislative excess.

I wrote this post last month describing her economic naivete. It was hard to believe Maloney could behave worse than that on live television. But she has.

Yesterday, I saw her ranting on Grat Von Sustern's Fox News program that she was introducing legislation to tax the recent AIG bonuses at 100%! Moreover, when Greta pointed out that these were private contracts, Maloney retorted that Congress would simply nullify them.

That's right. This Congressional idiot is now rampaging through contract law, a linchpin of our economic system, threatening- no, promising- to simply legislate private contracts to be void.

It's hard to fully convey the irrational, grasping, power-crazed persona that Maloney projected last night.

For what it's worth, even Charlie Rangel, another liberal NY Democratic Representative, and tax-cheating-embroiled chair of the Ways and Means Committee, has indicated that he is hesitant to use the tax code to punish specific groups.

To her, standing laws, legal protections and the sanctity of the contract are nothing. If her own culpability as a member who voted for the TARP is inconvenient, she'll simply shred existing legal protections using federal power.

This woman is dangerous. Let's hope her district sends her back to whatever she was doing before she became a stain on our Congress.

Wonderboy's Fall In The Polls

Last week, Karl Rove, on a Fox News program, displayed a comparative chart of public opinion results for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush senior, GW Bush, Clinton and Wonderboy.

Guess what? The latter's poll numbers are now squarely in the middle of the pack. Ironically, Carter had the highest early poll numbers. And we all know where he ended up.

Despite the media love affair with the First Rookie, he's already fallen back to earth from the pantheon of the Gods where the liberal media has tried to install him since last summer.

Remember the faux Greek columns in Denver?

Anyway, as Rove pointed out, even his boss, George Bush, had higher ratings at this point in his infant administration.

So much for change that the public wants. Or the strict view that everybody must get behind a new President and want him to succeed.

More on that in my next post.

That Was Then....This Is Now

Remember back in September when Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, in an attempt to promote positive attitudes about the US economy, declared it to be "fundamentally sound?"

And then Wonderboy made fun of him, and claimed the US economy was the worst since the Depression of the 1930s, conveniently overlooking the Carter-created 1980-82 recession?

Guess who's now claiming, after months of worse job loss numbers than we saw by October, that the US economy is, yes, "fundamentally sound?"

That's right- our newly-elected First Rookie.

Wonderboy's handlers, when asked about this, replied,

'We won that spin contest, and the election.'

Nice. We have a liar in the Oval Office. The same guy who decried the condition of our economy when it was actually performing somewhat better than it is now, now is trying to tell everyone, as he socializes the country, that the economy is still in good shape.

Is it 2012 yet? Can we vote the inept one out yet?

Principled GOP State Pushbacks On The Stimulus

Much has been made by liberals of what is, in their view, the negativism of GOP Congressmen regarding the so-called stimulus bill.

That nothing could be further from the truth, and that Republican Senators and Representatives have and had offered various alternatives which the Democrats banned from discussion, bothers these liberals not at all.

Perhaps the really interesting actions, though, are occurring out in the 50 states. As I mentioned to my business partner a few weeks ago, this is exactly what former Republican Governor of Florida, and Presidential brother, Jeb Bush, predicted and called for in an interview published last month in the Wall Street Journal.

Terry Sanford, GOP Governor of South Carolina, is fighting his legislature in order to decline the stimulus money. Democratic Congressmen included a clause specifically aimed at Sanford, that lets a state legislature accept the money, around its governor.

However, Sanford is making a lot of sense as he decries being forced to begin expensive programs like SCHIP, more medicaid spending, and the hiring of unionized public employees, such as teachers and policemen, only to have the federal funding cut off after only two years.

A Tennessee radio show host appeared on Neil Cavuto's Fox News program earlier this week to attest to his listeners bombarding him with complaints identical to Sanford's in South Carolina, begging Tennessee state government to refuse the stimulus 'gifts.'

Something important and powerful is occurring in America, and its going unnoticed by Wonderboy's minions.

The residents of the states through which the federal government is attempting to funnel some $800B of new spending are crying "STOP."

States can't print money, and many are not allowed to run deficits. People realize that they will have to pay for programs which, once begun, like an addiction to heroin, cannot easily be halted again.

Jeb Bush was spot on to identify the states as the places in which Republican fiscal rectitude could and would be reborn and regain strength.

My partner points out that people love a story with patterns. Right now, the First Rookie is in love with his own version of our current economic recession, in which he plays FDR, the recession becomes another Great Depression, and he and his team of tax cheats rewrite the American social contract to be pure socialism.

Trouble is, that's not what seems to be going on among voters. They are becoming angry, alarmed, and scared at governmental spending and impending waste of their taxpayer dollars.

As I remarked to my friend, while Wonderboy delights in his own coddled view of an FDR rerun, reality is already quite different.

Existing social safety nets like Social Security and welfare payments are easing the pain of the recession. Bank deposits are insured, so a bank failure really has little of the effect on the US economy in the way a 1930s bank closure did.

But voters in the states are informed by communications media not yet born in the 1930s. Newspapers and ordinary radio are no longer the most important news outlets. Instead, conservative talk radio, cable news, internet sites and blogs provide a wide variety of uncontrollable news and opinions.

This time, unlike in FDR's day, the failure of federal efforts to halt natural economic cyclical behavior will be publicized far and wide- immediately.

And the Republicans' positive actions to the contrary, including sensible refusals to take and spend stimulus money in many states, will lead the party back to control of at least one House in the 2010 election, as well as the Oval Office in 2012.

Tim Geithner Goes Slumming for Softball Questions

You have to laugh.

In order to avoid any chance at all of real questions from an informed interviewer, Treasury Secretary and administration Tax Cheat Tim Geithner appeared two nights ago on whose program?

Why, public television's good ole boy and affable dunce, Charlie Rose.

That's right. Geithner skipped any cable channel with an informed, veteran business or financial reporter who might have grilled him on issues such as:

-Tim, how can you lambaste the Bush administration's effort at rescuing the nation's banking system, when you were a key player in that rescue?

-Tim, why have you dithered since being sworn in, as you had nearly three months to prepare to tackle the various issues in your department? It seems you and the rest of your administration was great at 'transitioning,' but remain unable to govern, now that there is a new President?

-Tim, why don't you just work with Sheila Bair to close commercial banks that are insolvent, once all assets are appropriately market to economic value, such as Citigroup, which obviously would be bankrupt, had the federal government not injected so much of its current common equity?

-Do you think you'll be able to fully staff your department before your boss is running for renomination of his party for President?

No chance of questions like that from Charlie Rose. I'd be surprised if Rose knows what the Treasury Secretary does. The few moments of Rose's programs which I have seen usually show him agog with wonder and admiration for his guest. He asks questions in a tone of ignorance and appreciation that his guest will even speak with him.

Boy, Geithner couldn't have slummed much lower, could he?

Rumor has it his boss is going to appear on The View in lieu of his next press conference.

The Price of Playing with the Climate Change Gang

The Wall Street Journal published two interesting articles recently concerning Wonderboy's renewable energy initiatives.

Late last month, Daniel Henninger commented, unfavorably, on the administration's plans to subsidize non-carbon energy while taxing carbon emissions, but not calling the latter a tax.

Then a week or so later, Kim Strassel wrote extensively on Duke Energy's Jim Rogers' recent realization that he had been hoodwinked into supporting climate change-based energy policies.

Rogers, like other early adopters of the climate change-driven push for penalizing carbon-based energy production and consumption, assumed he would be given permits for what his company currently uses or emits.

Wrong. As Ms. Strassel points out, Congress, being Congress, intends to start with an auction. Thus, rather than monetizing private industry's possession of carbon emission permits as the private property they are, liberal Democrats and Wonderboy intend to claim that these permits are public property, and force industry to bid for them.

Of course, this results in a huge tax windfall to Congress, which will be passed along to consumers via higher energy costs.

Meanwhile, Congress has designs on at least $650B of tax revenue from these permits. A brand new tax source cloaked in the mantle of saving the planet. What could sound better than that?

Then all sorts of groups will kowtow to Democratic Representatives and Senators, in hopes of getting some of that nearly $1T of new swag.

It's hard to believe something this boneheaded and corrupt is really moving ahead through Congress. Harder still to believe any CEOs ever thought it would work differently.

Don't they know how Washington works by now?