Thursday, November 18, 2010
Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010
This video is really, really cute!
What a good dad, huh?!
Anyway... I remember when Kim was little... maybe, oh, five years old... and the three of us were at this restaurant on Rt. 4 in Hackensack...
(*FONDLY REMEMBERING*)
Anyway, we were just finishing up our dinner when the band in the next room - the bar area - started their first set of the night and one of their first songs was "Brown Eyed Girl."
Well, next thing you know Kim was up and bopping... heading to the bar...
(*GRIN*)
It was the cutest damned thing!
"Brown Eyed Girl" has always been Kim's song.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-126K1EfroA&feature=related
The U.S. government is satisfied with pricing and the investor lineup in the General Motors public offering, a senior Obama administration official said.
Ron Bloom, the administration's point man on auto restructuring, told Reuters...GM has done the right thing and pricing of $33 per share is a "fair deal" even though the partial sale represents a loss of roughly $9 billion on taxpayers' original investment. "We're very comfortable with the way this went," Bloom said.
* SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT... (*SCRATCHING MY HEAD*)... ALREADY "WE THE TAXPAYERS" ARE LOSING $9 BILLION ON THIS "FAIR DEAL" AND THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS "VERY COMFORTABLE WITH THE WAY THIS WENT."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123897513268491077.html
Steven Rattner arrived in Washington six weeks ago with a reputation as a finance whiz who amassed a fortune on Wall Street. His ability to size up troubled firms, he and others said, was just what President Barack Obama needed to plot a rescue of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
* NOTE, FOLKS... THIS IS AN ARTICLE WHICH RAN ON APRIL 6, 2009.
* CONTINUING...
A look back at his years in New York, though, suggests that a broader blend of skills - deal maker, Democratic political fund-raiser and networker extraordinaire...
Mr. Rattner grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island. After Brown University, where he edited the college newspaper, he took a job as a reporter at the New York Times. After stints in the Washington and London bureaus, he jettisoned a promising journalism career for investment banking. He was tagged as an up-and-comer, first at Lehman Brothers, then Morgan Stanley and finally at Lazard. He ascended to the No. 2 spot at Lazard before leaving to start Quadrangle.
Along with three colleagues, he started the firm in March 2000, at the height of the tech bubble. They set up shop in a swank office on a floor of the landmark Seagram's building on Park Avenue. Mr. Rattner was the firm's headliner. One former colleague called him "Quadrangle's brand manager."
Mr. Rattner was already looking at opportunities in Washington. Prominent Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan had introduced him and his wife, Maureen White, to President Clinton and Hillary Clinton on Martha's Vineyard four years earlier. After the 1996 election, Mr. Rattner was offered a senior policy job at the Treasury, which he turned down. He promised his Quadrangle co-founders he would stay at the firm for five more years.
The firm scored a coup [in 2008] when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg selected it to manage his multibillion-dollar fortune.
* O.K., FOLKS... SO YOU GET THE PICTURE. RATTNER WAS IN WITH FIRST THE CLINTON, THEN THE OBAMA CROWD; OH... AND THROW IN BLOOMBERG FOR GOOD MEASURE. (*SMIRK*)
* WHICH LEADS US TO... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704104104575622500156880416.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories
Former Obama administration official Steven Rattner was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Thursday for his role in a pay-to-play scheme involving New York's pension fund.
Mr. Rattner agreed to pay $6.2 million and to a two-year ban from associating with any investment advisor or broker-dealer to settle the SEC allegations, the SEC said Thursday.
* YES... EVERY SO OFTEN THE OLIGARCHS ARE FORCED TO SACRIFICE ONE OF THEIR OWN, BUT THE KEY LESSON IS THAT YOU CAN OFTEN FIGURE OUT WHO PEOPLE ARE BY CONSIDERING WHO THEIR FRIENDS ARE.
(*SHRUG*)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704648604575620764245541450.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
'Fund in works for victims of foreclosure mess," announced the Washington Post's front page yesterday.
Sorry to report that the Post was not referring to taxpayers who have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up this mess.
So who exactly are the "victims" in this story?
The Post doesn't name anyone who's been harmed, [aside from responsible taxpayers,] and neither did Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd [aka: "Friend of Angelo"] as he opened Tuesday's Banking Committee hearing on the problems in the mortgage servicing industry.
The big banks haven't agreed to a fund for hypothetical "victims" and they shouldn't. But they still want a settlement because the state investigations have rapidly decelerated the pace of foreclosures that will ultimately happen one way or another, and further delays only add to bank costs.
[State and federal "investigations"] are also delaying by more months a recovery in the housing market.
[I]f [,as appears likely,] a settlement transfers more wealth from investors and taxpayers (who now stand behind most mortgages) to delinquent borrowers, the least the attorneys general could do is stop calling them "victims."
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/17/1931298/at-dream-act-rally-a-surprise.html
Nineteen-year-old José Salcedo took a stand Wednesday that may turn out to be a milestone in his life and in the struggle for [amnesty for illegal] immigrants.
A keynote speaker at a student rally at Miami Dade College's InterAmerican campus in Little Havana, Salcedo surprised many of his listeners when he revealed he was "undocumented." [I.E. ILLEGAL.]
Salcedo's disclosure came as some students here and across the country mobilized one day after President Obama promised to push for a DREAM Act vote in the lame-duck Congress. The landmark legislation, stalled in Congress for years, would give green cards to foreign students brought to the country illegally by their parents when they were babies, toddlers or teenagers. Salcedo said his mother brought him here when he was 9...
[T]he Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)...issued a statement calling the DREAM Act the ``illegal alien student amnesty bill.''
* WHICH IT IS!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/40249849
The state of California on Wednesday said it would "restructure" upcoming bond issues as it tries to raise $14 billion in the middle of a sell-off in the municipal bond market.
* "RESTRUCTURE," HUH? (*SMIRK*)
California’s latest spate of borrowing – it is the largest issuer of state debt in the U.S. – started a week after news of new projected budget deficits of more than $25 billion in this fiscal year and the next.
(*SIGH*)
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/11/18/house-gop-bans-earmarks/
House Republicans today unanimously adopted a ban on earmarks...
(*CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
The House ban, which will apply to the entire 112th Congress, follows a similar move earlier this week by Senate Republicans...
(*SATISFIED NOD*)
While the vote is an obvious nod to the new Republicans, it’s also a big win for House Minority Leader John Boehner, the speaker-in-waiting, who has never requested an earmark and tried - unsuccessfully - for years to impose a ban.
“Earmarks have become a symbol of a Congress that has broken faith with the people,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement afterward. “This earmark ban shows the American people we are listening and we are dead serious about ending business as usual in Washington.
(*MORE CLAPPING*)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/18/wrong_signal_from_democrats_107993.html
When the rules of the House of Representatives forced the Democrats to confront a painful choice among their leaders, they did what Democrats are often inclined to do. They changed the rules.
When the Democrats lost their House majority in the political upheaval on Nov. 2, they also lost one of their four leadership posts. Since the speaker would no longer come out of their caucus, House rules required them to yield it to the Republicans, who will use it to elevate John Boehner.
Instead of having four people in the formal leadership of the House, the Democrats should have three - a minority leader, a deputy or whip, and the chairman of the Democratic caucus. It has always worked this way whenever an election shifts control on the House between the parties. Someone on the losing side loses his leadership job.
When [Nancy Pelosi] claimed the minority leadership [of her party], Steny Hoyer was demoted one level to whip, and he in turn bumped Jim Clyburn from that job. Hoyer had no problem in accepting the change; he had been No. 2 to Pelosi before. But Clyburn was not as accommodating...
The two men who both aspired to remain in the leadership were no ordinary players. Hoyer, who once challenged Pelosi unsuccessfully for the top leadership post, had close ties to moderate and conservative Democrats already devastated by their election losses. Clyburn is a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, in many ways the most loyal and dependable bloc in the party. Neither man was willing to step down... So what to do?
* THE ANSWER... (*DRUM ROLL*)
Change the rules. Invent a new job of assistant leader, which no specific duties, and slot Clyburn for that post.
* AND ITS TAXPAYER PROVIDED PERKS!
Normally, this would not matter much. But we are about to start a new Congress where everything depends on the willingness of the leadership in both parties to face up to hard choices - on the budget, Afghanistan and a dozen of other issues. Too often in the past Democrats have avoided making hard choices by throwing more money in the pot or taking similar self-indulgent steps. The Democrats' unwillingness to face the hard choice in this internal fight sends exactly the wrong signal.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/silence_of_the_ceos_aj0k5skO7Voc23Hiqi7dlL
The trend of the mealy mouthed, politcally correct CEO started long before Obama...
Over the years, it's grown worse, thanks to ambitious state prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer who forced AIG's board to oust long-time CEO Hank Greenberg in a case that ultimately came down to almost nothing.
The board probably had no choice: Spitzer went on national TV calling Greenberg a crook even before filing civil charges. He then threatened to indict the whole company for criminal offenses - a death sentence for any firm whose business depends on a pristine reputation.
Making matters worse, Spitzer also forced the board to accept his choice for CEO: the inexperienced Martin Sullivan, who failed to comprehend the massive risk-taking at the insurer that ultimately led to its near-demise and government bailout in 2008.
All Spitzer really wanted was a high-profile scalp to further his political career. Greenberg wasn't alone, of course. No one in corporate America can forget how Spitzer threatened "to get" former Goldman chairman John Whitehead for writing a column in support of Greenberg. All the bullying worked: Spitzer became New York governor before collapsing in disgrace over his use of high-price prostitutes. But the spirit of Client No. 9 lives on.
A coalition of state attorneys general is now forcing banks to "modify" possibly thousands of loans that mortgage holders had defaulted on, because of simple paper work errors during the foreclosure process.
Execs of the big Wall Street firms, including Goldman, tell me they felt compelled to bail out a failed Chicago bank a few months ago, because of Shorebank's close ties to the president and his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Even when the bank went under, the Wall Street money remained in a newly constituted institution that later emerged when the federal government (ie, the taxpayers) took over all the bad debts while the old management went back to the same mission of unprofitable albeit politically correct lending.
* THE OLD MANAGEMENT WHO IN THIS CASE HAD LONG BEEN TIED TO BARAK OBAMA AND THE CHICAGO DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL MACHINE... (*SIGH*)
Why would some of the most savvy businessmen in America throw good money after bad? Because offending the administration might be suicidal. The new regulations being handed down as part of the new financial-reform law raise fears that the administration will unleash its Wall Street enforcer - the Securities and Exchange Commission - to comb through your books and records. SEC probers don't need to find much before you're sitting next to Hank Greenberg.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/253527/campaign-protect-our-illegal-alien-criminals-heather-mac-donald
The ongoing campaign by the illegal alien lobby to block the deportation even of illegal alien criminals is the lobby’s most unfathomable activity. It is also a reminder of the strength of [their] commitment to the evisceration of the...rule of law [as it applies to immigration law].
As the Obama administration and the lame-duck Congress push for a partial amnesty, the background campaign against deporting criminal aliens reminds us that such intermediate measures as the DREAM Act belong to a larger agenda of destroying all existing penalties for illegal entry and presence.
For years, illegal alien advocates have opposed any cooperation between local jail and prison officials on the one hand and federal immigration authorities on the other that could result in the detection and possible deportation of illegal-alien inmates.
The Obama administration touts its deportations under Secure Communities (the jail-ICE database checking program) as proof that it cares about the immigration rule of law. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2010, 137,000 criminal aliens were deported, part of a 10% increase in total deportations over the same period in the last fiscal year of the Bush administration.
(*SINCERE APPLAUSE*) HEY... WHEN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DESERVES APPLAUSE FROM ME THEY GET IT. PERIOD.
But a recent study by an anti-incarceration, pro-illegal-immigration group shows how modest that number is compared with the number of potential criminal deportees. Of the 1,215 aliens held in New York City’s Rikers Island jail in 2008 whose top offense was a drug violation, ICE sought detainers only on 45%. ... So 55% of illegal alien drug dealers in Rikers were simply released back into the city without ICE intervention.
(*SHRUG*) AND THE ADMINISTRATION WAS DOING SO WELL FOR... er... ONE PARAGRAPH. (*SIGH*)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a4d9b80a-d7e2-11df-b044-00144feabdc0.html#axzz15exTrR45
Steven Rattner will continue to manage about $5 billion of Michael Bloomberg’s fortune...
* SEE WHAT I MEAN, FOLKS...! (YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP!)
“Steve Rattner is my friend. Of course I’d keep him on. Why would you not?” Mr Bloomberg said. “I value his advice and . . . you stick by your friends.”
* YEP. JUST BECAUSE A MAN IS A CROOK DOESN'T MEAN THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK DOESN'T STICK BY HIM!
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/18/time-for-holder-to-go/
Let’s face it. Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose.
The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals...
* SHOWS THAT EITHER CIVILIAN PROCEDURE SIMPLY WON'T WORK, OR... (*PAUSE*)... THE SECOND POSSIBILITY (WHICH NO ONE EXCEPT ME SEEMS TO RECOGNIZE AS A POSSIBILITY) IS THAT THE JURY GOT IT RIGHT AND WE CAN'T TRUST OUR NATIONAL SECURITY APPARATUS TO SEPARATE TERRORISTS FROM NON-TERRORISTS.
* YEAH... THINK ABOUT THAT ONE... (AND THEN ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU'RE HEARING THE POSSIBILITY RAISED BY ME INSTEAD BY HOLDER AND OBAMA - ASSUMING THEY WERE SERIOUS IN THE FIRST PLACE ABOUT BELIEVING IN CIVILIAN TRIALS FOR "ALLEDGED" TERRORISTS.
The administration is left with three choices in regards to Ghailani: announce that they will release him at the appointed date whenever his sentence ends, announce that they will hold him indefinitely without regard to the court’s ruling on the matter while referring the case back to a military commission despite his acquittals, or refuse to state which they will do and hope the issue falls to the next administration.
* CALL ME A CYNIC... BUT I'LL BET ON #3. (*WINK*)
The first will mean that the US will knowingly release a master al-Qaeda terrorist with more than two hundred murders under his belt; the second will mean that the trial they staged was nothing but a sham. And the third will be a cowardly dodge.
* AGAIN... PUT ME DOWN FOR OPTION #3!
Such is the state in which Holder as Attorney General has left the US. Either the US is so inept that it will eventually release a man who attacked two of its embassies abroad (which was an act of war by al-Qaeda) or that the DoJ may commit an impeachable act by knowingly submitting a defendant to double jeopardy, whether in this administration or a future administration. By committing to the civilian criminal system and assigning judicial jurisdiction where it never belonged, those are the only options left.
(*SHRUG*) THE AUTHOR - ED MORRISSEY - IS OF COURSE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.
It was [Holder's] decision [- approved by our Nation's Lawyer-In-Chief, President Barak Hussein Obama, Esq.] that created the entirely predictable set of decisions that forced the judge to exclude the evidence gleaned by intelligence interrogation that proved Ghailani guilty - a cascade of consequences foreseen by critics and arrogantly sneered at by this administration as “politicization.”
It’s both the arrogance and the incompetence that requires Eric Holder’s termination as Attorney General.
Holder made these decisions and hotly defended them as perfectly reasonable, with no reduced chance of getting convictions in these cases. There could be no greater failure by the DoJ in this war on terror than to get these decisions wrong, especially in light of the avalanche of criticism over those decisions and the administration’s reaction to it.
Holder should hand in his resignation before he makes the same mistake with the other terrorists our military and intelligence assets risked their lives to keep off the battlefield forever. His continued presence insults their work, insults Congress, and insults our desire for justice for 9/11, the USS Cole bombing, the two embassy bombings, and the other terrorist attacks and plots we’ve managed to stop through a forward strategy on the war on terror.
If a resignation is not forthcoming, the Senate and House Judiciary committees should start hearings to determine why Holder remains in this position.
* AGREE!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-18/jobless-benefits-extension-blocked-in-house-as-republicans-balk-over-cost.html
A bill to extend jobless benefits for three months was defeated today in the U.S. House, increasing the odds that some of the nation’s long-term unemployed will start losing aid.
The measure fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval under an expedited process. The vote on the bill was 258 in favor, 154 opposed.
(*HIGH FIVES ALL AROUND*)
Republican lawmakers complained that the bill’s $12 billion cost would be added to the government’s budget deficit. They demanded offsetting savings elsewhere in the budget.
(*MORE HIGH FIVES*)
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