GM Used TARP to "Repay" Loan

You might recall that on October 3, 2008, Democrats in Congress passed a massive bailout of Wall Street investment firms called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) optimistically (or disingenuously) estimated would cost "only" $700 billion of your tax dollars. Although President Bush supported the massive TARP bailout of Big Business, not a single Republican in the House or Senate supported it.

Seeing big financial institutions get a government bailout, the Big Three American auto companies, GM, Ford and Chrysler, went begging to the federal government on November 19, 2008 to get their own multi-billion-dollar bailout. Congressional Democrats and President Bush agreed to an auto bailout bill that the CBO again optimistically estimated would cost "only" $15 billion. Conservative Republicans in the Senate, however, filibustered the auto bailout. Of 41 Republicans in the Senate, only 10 liberal or mushy moderates ones voted to kill the filibuster, along with 40 Democrats and the Senate's two liberal "independents" (who caucus with the Democrats). A supermajority of 31 Republicans (just more than three-fourths) joined 4 Democrats in supporting the filibuster. Without 60 votes to kill the filibuster, the Democrats failed to bring this second Big Business bailout to a vote, and it died.

Not to be deterred by Congress, President Bush unconstitutionally used an "executive order" to amend the first massive bailout law, TARP, to allow himself to give to the auto companies some of the money intended to bail out financial firms. GM and Chrysler eagerly took the TARP money, but Ford executives, wanting to keep their jobs, changed their minds. (Once Obama became president, he used the Bush-Democrat bailout of GM to force the old GM CEO to resign.)

On February 18, 2009, GM and Chrysler again approached the federal government, hats in hand, begging for another bailout. On February 24, Obama announced in an address before the joint session of Congress that he would give GM and Chrysler another $15 billion of your tax money. (It amazes me that liberal Democrats still run around claiming that it's Republicans and not liberal Democrats who support Big Business.)

You might have noticed recently that the new CEO of GM has been running TV ads where he crows about how GM has paid back the billions of dollars of your tax money that the federal government gave GM so that the United Auto Workers could continue to be the most overpaid union workers in the world. As Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reports in the two stories below, however, Obama's GM CEO should be eating crow instead: TARP's own inspector general, Neil Barofsky, reports that GM merely used more TARP money to "pay back" the subsidies, which came largely from TARP money in the first place! So GM's much-vaunted repayment is half like using your VISA card to pay off your MasterCard--and half like using your VISA card to repay your VISA card! I must say that the Democrats' capacity for blatant deception never ceases to amaze me.

http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/charles-grassley-gm-bailout/2010/04/23/id/356756?s=al&promo_code=9CE6-1

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/22/grassley-slams-gm-administration-loans-repaid-bailout-money/

Obama Reaches New Low in Daily Tracking Poll (-13)

Apparently accusing all the elderly, Medicare-receiving protesters of ObamaCare as unpatriotic, anti-religious right-wing radicals did not actually work for Obama and his liberal media proxies, and so his poll numbers continue to worsen, as Republicans widen their lead in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Members of the liberal media, who loved Scott Rasmussen when his polls showed Obama leading before the election and popular after it, have begun attacking Rasmussen for continuing to publish his polls now that they show Obama's growing unpopularity. I can't say I feel surprise, since liberalism, which simultaneously holds that all moral systems are equally valid and that a moral system that rejects homosexual marriage and abortion isn't valid, doesn't bother much with consistency anyway.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot

Bare Majority Says Congress Too Liberal

You really have to wonder who thinks that at filibuster-proof Democrat majority in the Senate and a similarly-large Democrat majority in the House is "too conservative?" Are these 22% radical leftists, or just largely ignorant? It would be interesting if we could visit a parallel world where the major news and entertainment media hadn't been dominated by liberals for more than a century and see what people there think--but then, holding all other variable constant, people there wouldn't have put the Democrat in the majority. :-D Even with the liberal domination of the news and entertainment media, and of government workers and the government-monopoly education establishment, a majority of Americans recognizes that the current Congress is too liberal, so we can feel thankful at least for that. Certainly the Democrats have no mandate from the people to socialize everything--or anything--in sight.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2009/51_say_congress_is_too_liberal_22_say_it_s_too_conservative

Liberal Washington Post Admits CIA Saves American Lives

Even the liberal Washington Post admits that CIA interrogation of mass-murdering Muslim terrorists saves American lives. Sure, the Post has to make at least a token questioning of the methods, but the evidence is so overwhelming that the CIA has saved American lives with enhanced interrogation that even the Post has to admit the truth for the change. Could this be a new trend of the liberal media at least grudgingly admitting the truth?! Nah, I doubt it. :-D

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/28/AR2009082803874.html

Support for ObamaCare Falls to New Low

After all the demonization of protesters by Obama and his liberal proxies, opposition to his socialist seizure of our health care has risen to from a plurality to a majority. While predictably 69% of Democrats favor the plan and 79% of Republicans oppose it, a stunning 62% of unaffiliated voters oppose it too, demonstrating that on health care socialization, Democrats remain radically at odds with the rest of America.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/august_2009/support_for_congressional_health_care_reform_falls_to_new_low

Obama vs. Honduran Democracy

Apparently it's not just the Israel democracy Obama wants to destroy--he's out to destroy Honduran democracy as well. It's ironic that when Reagan brought democracy to most of Latin America, liberals attached him for "imperialism," but now that a liberal is trying to overthrow democracy in Latin America, liberals say nothing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574382872711784150.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Liberals Crow Over Government-Subsidized Profits

It's astounding to see the liberal New York Times crowing about Big Business profits. Why is this bastion of class warfare suddenly giddy with excitement over Big Business profits? Because the profits were subsidized by the federal government. Ah hypocrisy, they name is liberal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/economy/31taxpayer.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

54% Fear Government Will Do Too Much To Fix Economy

There's nothing like listening to the most liberal former Senator (NTU rating 9%, more liberal than Hillary, Boxer or Kennedy) to persuade millions of Americans of the dangers of more government intervention.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2009/54_fear_government_will_do_too_much_to_fix_economy

Tea Party, Anyone?

It started in 1773, when a group of 200 American colonists, disguised as American Indians, tossed the cargo of tea from each of three British ships in the Boston Harbor to protest Parliament's imposition of direct taxes on the colonists, including on tea, to repay debt borrowed to fund the French and Indian Wars.

Fast forward to February 27, 2009, when 15,000 American attended the Chicago Tea Party and similar events in other American cities to protest the Obama-Bush-Democrat massive spending policies under which we're now suffering, which, if not stopped, will double the federal debt to about $20 trillion in the next few years. The success of the Chicago Tea Party inspired grass roots organizers to organize a bigger protest with more people in more cities on April 15, 2009, a mere 9 days from now as I write. You can learn more about the coming Tea Party at http://www.surgeusa.org/actions/taxday.htm. Michelle Malkin, the beautiful, conservative, oriental columnist and pundit (i.e., talking head) has signed on as a sponsor (http://www.michellemalkin.com/), has Newt Gingrich's American Solutions (http://americansolutions.com/teaparty). Sean Hannity of Fox News plans to do his April 15 show from the Atlanta Tea Party. People in the DC metro area plan a large Tea Party across the street from the White House. Facebook has a Tax Tea Party group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=55223597239&ref=ts), and between it and the Surgeusa.com website, it looks like we could have at least one Tax Day Tea Party in every one of the 50 states, and several in some states. (For an enthusiastic endorsement of the Tax Day Tea Party, please see my buddy Don's blog at http://donliberty1787.blogspot.com/2009/04/join-tea-party-movement.html.)

Joining the Tax Day Tea Party is fun, and I signed up too, but will it have an actual political impact? Of that I'm not sure. Even the large conservative resurgences during my lifetime have had relatively minor impacts, mostly serving just to slow the growth of Big Government. The Reagan resurgence did win the Cold War, so that had a lasting impact, but is the world safer now than during the days when the Soviets held the leashes of most of the world's terrorists? I warned people back when the USSR collapsed that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't 1) the "end of history" as the liberal media was proclaiming, 2) the "end of socialism" as the liberal media were also proclaiming, or 3) the beginning of a safer world.

I will also give the Reagan conservative resurgence credit for deregulating the price of domestic oil and gas, so that we never had a repeat of the gas station lines of the 1970s, and for indexing the federal income tax system, especially using the CPI, which overstates inflation, giving us each a tiny little tax cut each year. (The same political forces that led Congress to start deregulating oil and gas prices under Jimmy Carter led to the election of Ronald Reagan, who completed the deregulation of oil and gas prices.)

How about the Newt resurgence? He did manage to de-entitle some of the smaller entitlement programs, and at least start a phase-out of grain price subsidies. On the whole though I'd have to say that the Newt resurgence had even less long-term consequence even domestically than did the Reagan resurgence. So what will the Tax Day Tea Party achieve? If I had to bet real money--if I had any after the federal and state governments steal 28% of my income this year (not the marginal rate but the average rate for the year)--I'd bet that it will have no lasting impact. Alas I'm not even sure it will even have any short-term impact on taxes or spending.

In a recent email a friend of mine said that 98% of Americans support socialism. I don't know that it's 98%, and keep in mind that a large minority of eligible adults don't even vote, but I do suspect that a majority of adult Americans support some socialism or other. They do not all support systematic socialism (although pretty much everyone on the left does) but rather targeted socialism.

Some support socialism targeted to line their own pockets, such as the "conservative" Iowa farmers who think they have a divine right to grain price supports, or the mushy moderate chamber of commerce types who whine about paying taxes for welfare but have no trouble imposing local taxes to pay for bike trails for their kids or libraries that have their names up in neon lights.

Others support socialism targeted to benefit someone else whom they think has gotten or still has a raw deal, like many Jewish liberals who don't want social programs for themselves, but rather for poor blacks or other minorities whom the Jewish liberals believe have gotten a raw deal and therefore cannot succeed on their own (unlike Jews who got a raw deal but somehow managed to succeed on their own!).

Keep in mind too that people get addicted to the status quo, so if they're getting social welfare benefits, they don't want to lose them. That means that virtually every elderly person in the country supports the Social Security system, which is why even Reagan could make no headway with de-socializing the SS system. (W. Bush campaigned on a partial-privatization of SS, but then let it die on the vine in Congress without giving it any support. Liberals then used the collapse of the stock market bubble caused by liberal inflationary policy at the Federal Reserve System as "proof" that SS privatization would have been a bad idea, even though if you had been investing your SS tax in stocks for the last half century, you'd still be vastly better off than you are with your meager SS payments.)

With people who don't support systematic socialism, it's possible to persuade them to abandon at least pieces of the socialism they do like in favor of freer markets and better protection for their property rights. It's certainly possible to make reduce socialistic policy at the margin. That's a big part of why I wrote columns in Iowa and blog now.

And if the Tax Day Tea Party isn't just going to be a fun event where people vent their frustrations with Big Government, a lot of people are going to have to be willing to give up some of their targeted socialist policies.

Obama Nominee Koh Wants to Impose Foreign Law; Shariah?!

If you've been reading my blog at all in the past few weeks, you know that Obama has already tried to appoint 7 anti-Israel, pro-terrorist politicians to his administration. We managed to defeat one so obviously vile that even elected Jewish liberal Democrats who supported Obama last November opposed him, but that still leaves Obama with 6 anti-Israel, pro-terrorist miscreants in his administration. You might also recall that in his $410 billion socialist pork "stimulus" act, Obama got the Democrat majority in Congress to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Obama's terrorist buddies in Hamas, who contributed illegally to his campaign last fall.

Not content to help mass-murdering Muslim monsters exterminate the Jews in Israel, now Obama wants to appoint Harold Koh as the chief legal advisor for the US State Department. Koh, a leftist in charge of the notoriously left-wing Yale Law School since 2004, advocated subordinating the US Constitution to "international law." Koh has written and spoken widely against US sovereignty, likening the US to terror states like North Korea and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. According to New York attorney Steven J. Stein, Koh, during a speech in 2007 where Koh advocated imposing the laws of various foreign countries on US courts, Koh mentioned Islamic law, or Shariah, as one type of law that he advocated imposing on American courts.

Shariah, as you might know, is the Muslim law that allow a husbands to beat his wives for being disobedient, forces all women to cover themselves from head to toe in order to subjugate them into virtual nonexistence as individuals, and authorizes a husband to kill any wife who sleeps with another man. Liberals, who often get hysterical over even a law preventing third-trimester abortions, claiming that such a law somehow dehumanizes them, should have exploded in outrage over Obama's nomination of a pro-Shariah lawyer to the State Department. Other than Stein, however, not a single liberal has uttered a peep, and the liberal media refuse to even report the story. You can read more at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/31/obamas-appointment-koh-state-department-legal-adviser-stirs-controversy/.

Working together we managed to defeat one pro-terrorist nominee, as you can read at http://david-lifelibertyandproperty.blogspot.com/2009/03/recently-ive-documented-how-obama-has.html. Now's your chance to oppose the nomination by sending a free email to your US Senators (who have to consent to the nominee) at http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=3604 (toward the bottom of the page). If you're one of my liberal Jewish high school friends, or indeed any liberal, and you've read this far, I give you kudos! Now please use any connections you might have to Democrats in Congress, the Obama, administration, or the liberal media to oppose the nomination of Koh and to publicize the issue further.

If we can pressure the liberal media into actually reporting the story, as we did to defeat the nomination of Charles Freeman, if we can just get word of his pro-Shariah comments to Democrats on Capitol Hill, we might just defeat Harold Koh too. Even if your connections consist of just a $50 contribution to Obama, Hillary, or some Democrat in Congress, please write to them opposing Koh. Let them know that you supported them. They're more likely to respond to favorably when their own supporters oppose what they're poised to do. So please don't delay, but contact them in opposition to Koh now. Thank you.

David

Are you part of the silent majority that supports Israel?

Are you part of the silent majority that supports Israel?

I hope that you will sign the petition at the link below in support of Israel, whether you're Christian or not. I did.

Israel has been fighting mass-murdering Muslim monsters since the days when we ignored them for the bigger threat of world communism. The mass-murdering Muslim monsters BLAME Israel for the mass-murdering that the mass-murdering Muslim monsters do: "If only we could murder EVERY Jew, we'd stop all the mass-murdering. Really we would. But since you won't LET us murder every Jew, just thousands per year, we have to murder YOU too," say the mass-murdering Muslim monsters.

Of course mass-murdering Muslim monsters have been murdering innocents, even other Muslims, for centuries. An unlike Christians, who didn't have such a great track record before the 19th and 20th centuries, mass-murdering Muslim monsters have a book that TEACHES them that Jews are subhuman and should be killed, indeed that Muslims should kill ALL infidels (which apparently includes other Muslims who don't agree with the mass-murdering Muslim monsters). To the Muslims who ignore the part of the Koran that tells them that the rest of us are all subhuman and must be exterminated, I say, "More power to you."

It used to be that American liberals hated Islam in general and Arab Muslim in particular for the way that Islam subordinates the individual to religious leaders and the way that Arabs treat women as property, or less than property, because you don't behead a car (or a camel) for behaving differently than you want it to. From the 1940s through 1960s liberals bore a great deal of responsibility for the US supporting Israel against the Arab Muslims who wanted murder every single Jew. Even as late as the 1990s it was American liberals, mostly in Hollywood, screaming bloody murder over the Muslim Taliban (not Arabs but Afghanis) in Afghanistan and how they oppressed, tortured and even killed women.

But two bad things happened to change all that: The Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968 turned American liberals against America, and the 9/11 bombing in 2001 demonstrated that mass-murdering Muslim monsters represented a grave threat to the America that so many liberals hate. So suddenly, the Islam that liberals had hated for decades became, in liberal parlance, "a religion of peace." Many liberals respond to any attempt to characterize the mass-murdering Muslim monsters as mass-murdering Muslim monsters by accusing of bigotry the victims and intended victims of the mass-murdering Muslim monsters. The liberal media even refused to report that the two Beltway snipers were both Muslims, yet reported in every single story that Madoff, the financial criminal was a Jew. Despite the presence of many Jews within postmodern liberalism--74% of Jews who voted in the 2008 presidential election voted for Obama, down only slightly from the 76% who voted or Kerry in 2004 and the 79%, a record high, who voted for Gore in 2000--postmodern liberalism has turned against the Jews, and now supports the mass-murdering Muslim monsters, precisely because the mass-murdering Muslim monsters share with many liberals a contempt for America.

You can find some of the biggest supporters of Israel, besides big-city, Jews ironically, among Christian social conservatives in small towns and rural areas. I say "ironically" because the liberal news and entertainment media consistently--one might say relentlessly--portray conservative Christians and small-town residents as ignorant, anti-Semitic bigots. I found far more anti-Semites, in the real world, living in Chicago than living in small-town Iowa. Big-city Jews and small-town social conservatives, sadly, almost never mix, and so big city Jews, who tend to rely on the liberal media fro all their "news," rarely even know that Christian social conservatives number among the staunchest allies of Israel. The very fact that the organization of Christians pushes this petition in support of Israel demonstrates some of the support that Christian social conservatives give to Israel. I hope, as I said at the outset, that you'll sign it whether you're Christian or not. I did.

http://www.cufi.org/site/PageNavigator/standing_pledge_Townhall1