President Obama was shocked to learn that AIG gave out $165 million in bonuses after they took federal bailout money. At least that is what the president wants you to think.
But that is not entirely true, in fact the reason the bonuses were allowed to be handed out is because Chris Dodd wrote an amendment that allowed AIG to hand out the bonuses. Originally the amendment that Dodd wrote would have prevented companies who took bailout money from handing out bonuses but an Obama administration official, (probably the incompetent Timothy Geithner), demanded that Dodd remove that particular provision, clearing the way for the bonuses to be handed out.
There could be more than meets the eye behind the removal of the language that would have prevented the bonuses because we learned that Chris Dodd and Barack Obama were the two biggest recipients of campaign donations from AIG, perhaps this was a little payback to some of the people with whom they are indebted for their elections.
But the connection between Barack Obama and AIG doesn’t end there. One of the president’s advisers was on the board of directors of AIG when these bonuses were negotiated.
Obama administration special envoy Richard Holbooke was on the American International Group Inc. board of directors in early 2008 when the insurance company locked in the bonuses now stoking national outrage
Richard Holbooke is using the same defense as the president; I didn’t know.
Mr. Holbrooke had nothing to do with and knew nothing about the bonuses
I am beginning to believe President Obama’s excuse that he didn’t know what was going on in regards to the bonuses, because every day I realize more and more that he doesn’t know what is going on around him, period.
Bankers Call AIG Bonus Tax a Witch-hunt
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I heard that somewhere before. We are beginning to see backlash in the banking industry because of the confiscatory taxes that are about to be laid onto AIG’s executive bonuses ex post facto. And it is not just American bankers, this backlash is coming from bankers on the other side of the Atlantic also.
the “anti-American” measures smacked of “a McCarthy witch-hunt” that would send the country “back to the stone age”.
This does seem to be turning into a witch-hunt. This administration has built up anger through class warfare, Obama built most of his campaign around it, and when the people heard about these bonuses and became outraged because of the language coming out of Washington, politicians jumped on the opportunity to fan the flames of discontent for political gain.
The congress, now that they have worked up all of this hatred in America, (so much for bringing the country together) is going after a mere $165 million in bonuses compared to the almost $4 billion that Merrill Lynch handed out in bonuses last year. Merrill Lynch will not be subject to this new 90% tax. That is what makes this look like a witch-hunt. Someone yelled “WITCH!” and congress decided to burn them at the stake.
AIG is getting what they deserve though, they got drunk and jumped into bed with the federal government and when they woke up they realized who they had slept with and she was coyote ugly. But other bankers are concerned that the same will happen to them.
Finance is one of America’s great industries, and they’re destroying it,” said one banker at a firm that has accepted public money. “This happened out of haste and anger over AIG, but we’re not like AIG
This banker also went on to say that this was the “most un-American thing I’ve ever seen.” And he makes a good point, once again the congress and the Obama administration see something as critical and they hastily try to solve the problem. Before you know it there is another, bigger problem that the solution to the first problem caused. That is how this whole mess with the AIG bonuses started; by hastily passing the stimulus bill without reading it because Obama wanted to look good. He claimed delay would lead to a catastrophe that America could never recover from so the stimulus bill was rushed through congress and nobody read it. But congress didn’t learn the lesson and is now hastily passing this bill of attainder on AIG without thinking about the consequences.
This bill of attainder could very well lead to more banks being less will to make loans to people who can afford them and also to a larger credit crunch which could lead to a worsening of the economy and a deepening of the recession. Banks are afraid to loan money and to do everyday business because they know that big brother is watching their every move.
The Obama administration needs to stop being so reactionary and shortsighted and Obama himself needs to start leading.
Anti-War Group Calls Obama a War Criminal
Do you remember the war protest group “Iraq Veterans Against the War?” They were getting quite a bit of publicity before the elections of 2004 and of 2006 but they haven’t been heard from recently. Until now.
The IVAW held a protest called “Operation No Change” on the 6th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war. During this rally, while being interviewed, at least one protester called President Obama’s war policy criminal, he even went so far as to claim that President Obama is worse than President Bush was.
In some ways, Obama is worse than Bush,” Kokesh told CNSNews.com. “Bush wasn’t proposing a surge in Afghanistan – and Bush was talking about a quicker time-line for withdrawal than Obama.”
Kokesh also said that he “absolutely” thinks Obama’s war policies are criminal
He also went on to say this:
What Obama is doing with our foreign policy on a fundamental level is not change. Though we are going to re-label the troops ‘non-combat troops,’ they are still out there, and clearly they are still fighting for American interests.
That is a statement that I find interesting. The phrase “fighting for American interests” is the statement I am referring to. He admits that we are fighting for American interests in the middle east, if that is true, and it is, than in fact President Obama is not a criminal for continuing Bush’s war policies. He has ruined his whole argument.
This protester claims that he is not surprised by Obama’s war policies but many people are. People bought into the idea that once Obama became president he would end the war almost immediately. That would have been incredibly reckless and irresponsible. President Obama may be allot of things– incompetent, in over his head, radical, socialist, an anti-constitutionalist, and clueless; but even he isn’t irresponsible enough to have recklessly ended the war without listening to the generals on the ground, especially after the war has been won. Those who voted for Obama because they thought he would bring the troops home immediately were just being naive.
The war has been won and because of this we will now be able to begin a draw down of troops, this draw down takes time and President Obama is following the timetable that President Bush agreed upon with the Iraqi government.
Because our troops performed so heroically and because they had a president who never lost faith in them even while members of congress did, we will be able to bring the troops home gloriously in victory instead of with their heads hung in defeat.
President Obama would be a fool to do otherwise, that is why he is following President Bush’s withdrawal plan.
President Obama is aggressively pushing his cap and trade policy, this is going to be his next big agenda item. Under the president’s plan taxes will go up as will the cost of energy. And these taxes will be raised on everybody.
According to a new study released by the Tax Foundation, Obama’s plan will unfairly tax the working families and lower class in America.
the bottom 20% of income earners would pay 6.2% of their income towards the tax, while the top 20% of income earners will pay 1.4%.
But the tax burden won’t just fall on the working families, it will also fall on the young, the old, and the single parents.
the cost of Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme will cost each household $1,218, with the heaviest burden on single-parent households and those living alone. Others who would be most affected include those under 25 and over 75 years of age
The average tax burden will be over $1,200 a year, during a time of recession Obama is planning on taking away more of our money through this scam. Look at the groups that will be most hurt by his policies, the old and single parents, these are the people who need the money the most and Obama is going to take it away from them. $1,2oo is allot of money to a woman who has to buy diapers and baby formula and $1,200 is allot of money to an older couple who has to heat their home in the winter.
To the surprise of nobody, Greenpeace is claiming that the Tax Foundation’s study is flawed because they didn’t take into account some tax breaks for the lower classes, here is how the Tax Foundation relied.
They can talk all they want about offsets and other benefits that they plan to give the poor to make up for this new additional heavy tax burden. There is a very real and immediate tax imposed on working families, and then there is a future promise of some theoretical benefit or handout that will somehow make it all better,” said Landrith. “Con men usually make the argument better than that
The bottom line here is, and Obama’s ultimate goal is and always has been, that everyone is going to get a tax increase. And contrary to what Obama claims the poorer among us are going to feel the pain much more than the wealthy.
We will sacrifice for the dear leader; remember he said we can’t keep our houses at 72 degrees and drive big, fancy gas-guzzling cars everywhere; but while we feel the pain he will be flying all across the world in Air Force one, as will Nancy Pelosi and the rest of them.
We need to sacrifice, when will they do the same?
At least thirteen companies that did not pay their taxes received federal bailout money. These thirteen companies owe more than$220 million in back taxes. To put that in perspective, they owe roughly $60 million more in taxes than the executives at AIG got in bonuses. And yet they are eligible for taxpayer’s dollars? Where is the outrage in congress over this little fact?
With the man who is charge of the treasury department being a tax cheat himself, as well as the man who writes the tax laws, Charlie Rangel, they probably not only don’t see a problem with this but they probably condone it.
We are now giving these companies our tax dollars to bail them out when they didn’t even pay their own taxes. They didn’t pay taxes and now they are receiving tax dollars to bail them out. I know I am repeating myself but I just can’t get over how ludicrous this whole idea is. No matter how I phrase it I just can’t wrap my arms around the incompetency of this administration.
This should be a much bigger scandal than AIG paying bonuses to employees that they were contractually obligated to pay. These companies are stealing our money, pure and simple.
In the rush to pass the bailout bill and to get the money out there nobody in this administration bothered to check into who was getting the money or how it was being spent.
This president is incompetent, unqualified, and totally over his head and clueless. Timothy Geithner, who we were told was brilliant and was the only man who could do the job, is a moron and is also incompetent. This is astounding considering that we were told he was so fucking smart that we should overlook his own tax problems and give him the job overseeing the tax code.
This is amateur hour.
Some GITMO Detainees May Be Released Into the United States
One of the first moves that this president made was to sign an executive order to close down GITMO. In what is becoming a trademark of this administration’s presidency, in a rush to judgement he didn’t fully think the issue through. This president didn’t bother to even try to figure out what to do with the detainees once GITMO was closed. He will leave the tough decision to someone else.
That someone else will be Eric, we are a nation of cowards, Holder. It turns out that some of these terrorists will be released back into society. Eric Holder has even stated that some of the GITMO detainees will be released in the United States. Just to be clear here, this is RELEASED into the United States not just sent to American jails. They could be released into the general population of this country.
people who can be released there are a variety of options that we have and among them is the possibility is that we would release them into this country
What else needs to be said? This is what happens when you have a radical far leftist administration. What comes next, voting rights for these people? I wonder who they will vote for.
According to Nancy Pelosi if you believe that America is for Americans, and people who immigrate here legally, and you also believe the laws on illegal immigration should be followed than you are un-American.
Who in this country would not want to change a policy of kicking in doors in the middle of the night and sending a parent away from their families?” Pelosi told a mostly Hispanic gathering at St. Anthony’s Church in San Francisco.
It must be stopped….What value system is that? I think it’s un-American. I think it’s un-American
If America enforces the law it is un-American. Evidently she is too stupid to understand that America has laws and procedures for those who wish to come here and become legal aliens, resident aliens, or even American citizens. She lumps those who have no concern or respect for American laws in with those immigrants who do. This should be a slap in the face to Americans as well as those immigrants who come here legally and try to do things the right way. The message here is that if you break the immigration laws you will be rewarded but if you come here legally you are screwed. Just get in line and we will get to you when and if we can.
But as ignorant as that comment was Nancy Pelosi didn’t stop there:
You are special people. You’re here on a Saturday night to take responsibility for our country’s future. That makes you very, very patriotic
She was addressing illegal aliens when she made that comment. She said that these illegals were patriotic for taking responsibility for “our” country’s future. Using the term “our” when speaking of America to a group of illegal aliens. This is “our” country, this is not “their” country, they have no say in how we run “our” country. To include and legitimize people who broke the law to get into this country is offensive.
This could be the next big battle we face with the Obama administration. We were able to stop the John McCain/George Bush immigration reform bill the last time around but it is about to come back and this time we probably won’t be so lucky.
Chris Dodd Says the Obama Administration Told Him to Change the Amendment That Allowed AIG to Hand Out Bonuses
When the news first broke that an amendment to the stimulus bill written by Chris Dodd was what ended up guaranteeing the $165 million in bonuses that AIG payed to it’s executives Chris Dodd denied it.
First he claimed that he did not write any such amendment but that was a lie. He then claimed that he wrote the amendment but the wording was changed from what he had written but that was also a lie. Finally when doing an interview on CNN Chris Dodd admitted that it was he who wrote and he who also changed the wording of the amendment that helped AIG pay out the bonuses.
Today Chris Dodd is pointing fingers, he claims that his original amendment was much more strict than the final version of the amendment but that he was told he must change it. And he is pointing the finger at the Obama administration
That’s right, Cris Dodd is claiming that the Obama administration told him to take out the language that would have forbidden AIG to pay bonuses to it’s employees.
I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment” to the stimulus bill, “but I did so at the request of administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG,” Dodd said in a statement released last night. “Let me be clear — I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week
So while the president comes out and feigns outrage over these bonuses it is essential to remember that it was his administration that made these bonuses possible. Somebody in his administration, my guess would be the incompetent Geithner; but it could have been Obama himself, made Dodd amend the amendment that limited executive pay for companies that accepted bailout money to exempt contractually obligated bonuses, which these were.
Now all of these politicians are pretending that they had no idea about this amendment, and it may be true because nobody read the bill, but the truth is that they voted to allow this to happen in the first place.
Even if we choose to believe that Obama, Dodd, Geithner, and all of the others didn’t find out about the bonuses until two weeks ago, and with all of the lying and spinning that these guys are doing their credibility has been soiled, they still had time to stop this before it happened. But they tried to sneak it past us because the order to change the amendment came from the Obama administration, they were protecting Obama. They hoped that we wouldn’t catch on to what was happening and now they are caught in a firestorm.
Now, for public relations reasons, they hold hearings and berate the AIG executives for taking the bonuses that they themselves guaranteed the executives would receive. Again hoping that we won’t see what is really going on.
The Obama administration caused this mess and now Democrats in congress are trying to deflect the blame back onto the evil capitalists.
Obama is Diverting Money From the Armed Pilots Program
President Obama has begun his attack on the second amendment, he is doing it subtly but he is doing it nonetheless. President Obama has begun diverting $2 million away from the Armed Pilots Program and has begun sending this money to fund field inspections of pilots.
The Armed Pilots Program is a program that trains pilots and allows them to carry guns in the cockpit. This is the president’s way of phasing out the program without actually having to come out against it. He will just let the program die a slow death and hope that second amendment advocates don’t hear about it. But if gun rights advocates do hear about this and the president is questioned on it he will be able to claim that the program is still in place, that he hasn’t cancelled it. But what good is a program without money?
But some second amendment groups have heard about this already and they are not happy.
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) Chairman Alan Gottlieb :
Alan Gottlieb agreed that the Obama administration is “risking public safety, as the newspaper put it, ‘in the name of an anti-gun ideology.'”
“How dare the president, or anybody in his administration, take measures to erode the safety of air travelers?” Gottlieb asked. “The armed pilot program provides a guaranteed level of security to the public. There may or may not be an air marshal aboard every airplane, but there is definitely a pilot in the cockpit.”
Alan Gottlieb continued:
“These anti-gun, anti-self-defense bureaucrats seem more interested in their own power, and protecting their little empires, than they are in protecting the public. And now Obama is catering to their anti-gun bigotry.”
Thousands of pilots have participated in this program since inception in 2003. The pilot union is in favor of this program and has been fighting for more funding. With the most ever radical anti-second amendment president ever in office the pilot union can forget about more funding, they will have to fight just to keep the funding that they already have. And they are losing that funding already. This program keeps Americans safe, and its abolition will naturally make Americans who are flying less safe. Obama would prefer that latter option to the idea of any pro-gun agenda.
This could be a sign of the way President Obama goes after the second amendment in general- stealthily. He is quietly going after this program, a program that only targets a relatively small minority; a group of a few thousand pilots rather than the millions of gun owners across the United States.
He starts with a group like the Armed Pilot Program and there are so few affected by it that the people don’t take notice; after all it doesn’t affect them personally. But then the president moves on quietly to the next group; a slightly bigger group, and then the next group. And it continues.
Quietly strangling the life out of the Armed Pilots Program by cutting out it’s funding will not be the last attempt that this president makes on the life of the second amendment, this is just the beginning.
We need to watch President Obama very closely on this issue, he is radically anti-second amendment.
Yesterday I wrote a post about how Chris Dodd inserted an amendment into the stimulus bill that permitted AIG to pay out the bonuses to its executives. Since the news broke about the Dodd amendment Chris Dodd has been denying that he wrote any such amendment. He has been trying to distance himself from this controversy.
But Chris Dodd has now admitted that he did insert the amendment into the stimulus bill that gave AIG permission to pay its executives $165 million in bonuses.
We wrote the language in the bill, the deal with bonuses, golden parachutes, excessive executive compensation that was adopted unanimously by the United States Senate in the stimulus bill,” Dodd told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this afternoon.
It should come as no surprise that Dodd wrote these protections into the stimulus bill for AIG after it was learned that AIG donated over $100,000 to the Dodd campaign.
This man has been exposed, he is the man responsible for the $165 million in bonuses that has become the hottest topic on capital hill. While all of these self-righteous politicians grill the executives at AIG and condemn them they let people like Chris Dodd off the hook.
There would have been no bonuses without Chris Dodd, maybe they should put Chris Dodd on the stand.
How would you like to see the following exchange:
Frank: Did you write the amendment?
Dodd: you want answers?
Frank: I want the truth!
Dodd: you can’t handle the truth!
Frank: did you write the amendment?
Dodd: you’re goddamn right I did!
