November 19, 2008 by mr_flood.

Well Obama has selected Eric Holder to be the next Attorney General, what a nightmare. If you’ll recall Holder was the Asst. AG that sponsored the jack-booted Federal thugs which raided Elian Gonzalez’s house in the pre-dawn hours, sub-machine guns at the ready, so that Janet Reno could deliver him on a silver platter to Fidel Castro.

National Review has a great article on the subject, here’s a teaser:

Holder’s role was aptly described as “unconscionable” by a congressional committee. He steered Rich’s allies to retain the influential former White House counsel Jack Quinn (Holder later conceded he hoped Quinn would help him become attorney general in a Gore administration); he helped Quinn directly lobby Clinton, doing an end-run around the standard pardon process (including DOJ’s pardon attorney); and he kept the deliberations hidden from the district U.S. attorney and investigative agencies prosecuting Rich so they couldn’t learn about the pardon application and register their objections.

There’s more. In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.

Equally noxious were the stealthy pardons of Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans — Weather Underground terrorists associated with Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — issued on the same day as the Rich pardon. Rosenberg and Evans had been serving decades-long sentences for bombings targeting American government facilities. With Holder again helping to circumvent the pardon process and to evade objections from prosecutors, the terrorists’ jail terms were commuted just weeks after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Like one of my previous posts stated, Obama’s idea of change is more like a “Back to the Future” movie than any thing else, ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…’

So what do we have to look forward to for the next few years? Ruby Ridge Part Two. Waco Part Two. Elian Gonzalez Part Two. Something tells me that the folks crying about Bush’s trampling of our Constitutional rights wont utter a peep when we get a repeat of the Clinton administration’s ideas of rights.

Posted in Fascism Watch, Current Events | No Comments »

November 17, 2008 by mr_flood.

Read something on Powerline today that I didn’t know already

As of the close of business on Friday the market cap for General Motors was about $1.9 billion, Ford about 4.3 billion….Chrysler is privately held but it’s a safe bet that their FMV is less than $2 billion…probably a LOT less….so for approximately a lousy $7 billion….a rounding error for the federal budget…the government could simply BUY the entire U.S. auto “industry” — actually, of course, it’s just the U.S. nameplate manufacturers, but that’s another story — for what amounts to a pittance.

So they want us to loan them $25 billion which is over 3 times what they’re currently worth. Now, I guess that wouldn’t be too unreasonable for an average consumer looking for a house loan I suppose but in The Small 3’s case we have this to consider…

The numbers are literally absurd….Ford has $160 billion in debt!….with NEGATIVE book value of equity….GM has about $60 billion in debt…and a HUGE negative net worth on a book basis of $56 billion!….Essentially, the market is valuing the companies — well above their (negative) book values — but at what amounts to scrap value!.

Their stock is worth nothing because their companies are worth next to nothing. Sounds like a great loan candidate!

Jim Manzi from The Corner throws in this little nugget:

A dollar invested in GM shares twenty years ago would today have a face value of about 7 cents. There is no five year period that I could find in the last thirty years for which GM’s stock price outperformed the S&P 500. The market capitalization of GM is now under $2 billion, which is substantially less than that of such icons of our economy as Cognizant Technology Solutions, DaVita, Inc., Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, and the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. GM is in danger of becoming a small-cap. Investors apparently don’t buy (literally) Cohn’s thesis.

So, like I said, they’re ‘The Small 3′ now baby!

Posted in Economy | 1 Comment »

November 15, 2008 by mr_flood.

So it’s a loss to Aston Villa, at home, again. This time last year we dominated other teams by controlling the mid-field. Hleb, Flamini, Fabregas and Rosicky refused to give up the ball and when they did they got it back with a ferocity you don’t see today. Diaby, Song and Denilson are poor substitutes for them and Fabregas is having an awful year. Time to settle into a year of hoping we make the top four, even though at this point I don’t think we deserve it.

Posted in English Premier League | No Comments »

November 14, 2008 by mr_flood.

From the Politico we find out that Obama’s idea of change is to actually not change much of anything.

Obama gets the Clinton band back together

By BEN SMITH & CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 11/14/08 4:48 AM
Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to Obama’s transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration.

I betcha they’ll work really well with his co-chair of change, that D.C. Maverick himself, Joe ‘Champ’ Biden. After all, if 27 years in D.C. have taught him anything, it’s taught him how to really change.

The article also gives us the bonus feature of explaining that rehiring all those folks from era’s past is great, not because it’s the change we’ve been promised but because…

From the top down, his early choices reflect an openness, and even a warmth, to the veterans of 1990s governance. It’s a shift from a campaign that in the primary explicitly attacked President Clinton’s tenure as a time of partisan strife and missed opportunities.

So you see, now the party line is ‘We’re going to rehire all those old cronies so the media can label us warm and open while these new/old hires get work changing D.C. back into the land of partisan strife and missed opportunities that we all enjoyed so much.’

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

November 13, 2008 by mr_flood.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Late last week the leader of the House Blue Dog Coalition, Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper, announced that with Barack Obama about to enter the White House, “I’m not sure the old rules are relevant anymore.” Why not? Because, Mr. Cooper said, “It would be unfair to the new President to put him in a budget straitjacket.”

And what were the ‘old rules’?

Democrats ran on “paygo” in 2006, promising to offset any new spending increases or tax cuts with comparable tax increases or spending cuts. Once in charge on Capitol Hill they quickly made exceptions, waiving paygo no fewer than 12 times to accommodate some $398 billion in new deficit spending — not that the press corps bothered to notice

The WSJ then advises us to get ready for trillion dollar deficits, which is good advice. I’d also advise to be ready for an avalanche of broken promises from the new Ruling Party.

Posted in Economy | 1 Comment »

November 13, 2008 by mr_flood.

From Professor Mark Perry we get this wonderful graph:

So if Nancy and Harry get there way, and we give the Big 3 $25 billion more our lives we be enriched with the knowledge that the average over-paid auto-worker will be having their way of life maintained with the tax money of people who make much less than they do.

Talk about stealing from the poor to give to the rich…

Posted in Economy | No Comments »

October 10, 2008 by mr_flood.

Excellent article from Bill Whittle at NRO:

He said he thought it was a right. Well, if you accept that premise, I think you can ask some logical follow-up questions: Food is more important than health care. You die pretty quickly without food. Do we have a “right” to food in America? What about shelter? Do we have a “right” to housing? And if we do have a right to housing, what standard of housing do we have a right to? And if it is a right, due to all Americans, wouldn’t that mean that no one should have to accept any housing, or health care, which is inferior to anyone else’s… since it’s a right?

Please read the whole thing.

Posted in Current Events | 1 Comment »

September 22, 2008 by mr_flood.

By Kevin Hasset from Bloomberg:

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn’t. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

September 16, 2008 by mr_flood.

That’s right. Back in ‘03, according to that right wing rag the NYT, Bush wanted to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

”There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,” Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan.

Read the whole thing to find out that leading Dems, at the time, thought Freddie and Fannie weren’t headed for trouble at all.

Posted in Current Events | No Comments »

August 26, 2008 by mr_flood.

A nice article comparing our health care system to those of other countries with socialized medicine.

According to an August 2008 study published in Lancet Oncology, the renowned British medical journal, Americans have a better than five-year survival rate for 13 of the 16 most prominent cancers when compared with their European and Canadian counterparts.

With breast cancer, for instance, the survival rate among American women is 83.9 percent. For women in Britain, it’s just 69.7 percent. For men with prostate cancer, the survival rate is 91.9 percent here but just 73.7 percent in France and 51.1 percent in Britain.

Posted in Current Events | No Comments »