Support Nancy Pelosi

In an earlier post, I opined that God would be showing his goodness to conservatives if he allowed Nancy Pelosi to win the minority leadership position in the next Congress. Now you have the chance to assist The Almighty. Mosey on over to DailyKos and sign the petition to support Nancy's bid for Minority Leader. You can even leave a personal message thanking her for her leadership and the 60+ new Republican members of the House of Representatives.

I have a screen capture of my input:

Unintended Irony.

That God Would Be So Good

HotAir alerts us to the following Twitter feed from Nancy Pelosi:

Driven by the urgency of creating jobs & protecting #hcr, #wsr, Social Security & Medicare, I am running for Dem Leader.

I hope she wins. Republicans need to plaster this picture on every billboard in America for 2012. Harry Reid would be enough of an albatross for Obama, but this would be perfect.

Unintended irony.

P.S. I believe that #hcr = health care reform and #wsr = Wall Street reform.

Pelosi, Tea Parties and Financial Reform

I am sure that most of my readers have seen the HotAir column linking to the video where Pelosi alternately trashes the Tea Partiers as "astroturfing Republican hijackers" and then claims to have something in common with them:

But, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as — it just has to stop.

So Democrats are somehow above taking money and cutting deals with special interests? This is her claim? My rebuttal, Take Geithner . . . please! He is but one of many Democrats with ties to special interests that are in positions of authority with regards to financial regulation.

At least 25 senior Obama administration officials previously held executive or board-of-director posts with some of the globe’s biggest financial houses, according to a new analysis for Portfolio.com by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a campaign-finance watchdog group. (To see a full list of the officials with previous jobs on Wall Street, click here.)

Now the Bush administration was not better, and neither were any previous administrations. I'm not sure that you can adequately populate government staff without individuals knowledgeable about the industry. However, this often leads to a condition known as regulatory capture, where the regulators appear to be regulating for the benefit of the industry, not the general public. To some extent this process is inevitable, see Public Choice theory. Now this doesn't excuse Pelosi for her continued mendacity and slander against our movement, but it points out the complexity of the situation.

So how can we bring about financial reform? Much of what we are protesting in the Tea Party is the close ties between Big Business, especially Wall Street and Big Government the end result of which is taxpayer bailouts of risky behavior. The end result is the exact opposite of justice, the stockholders and the taxpayers get screwed and the bankers get bonuses. We don't begrudge the bonuses, we just don't think we should pay for them through the bailouts.

I am still working out a Tea Party position on bailouts that is cogent and deals with this complexity in a simple way. Here are some things to think about. First, we should demand that politicians allow at least some big banks to fail. The bankers have called the government's bluff and keep raking in the chips. Second, we should say, ok, if you're going to be too big to fail, fine, you're going to have to keep increasing your reserves so that you don't fail. (No time to fully flesh this out today, but I think reserve requirements should scale up once a firm reaches a significant market share. This will act as a brake on unbridled growth by one institution as well.)

Third, we should demand transparency for all financial assets. In October 2008, I had a chance to talk to some municipal bond traders. We were arguing about the need for a bailout, me contra, as you might expect. Since we got dug in our positions; I asked a different question, because even then it was obvious that the mortgage backed security free-fall was the real killer, roiling the markets. I asked if there had been transparency and good information about the underlying value of the assets backing the securities, would this problem have occurred. They agreed that it would not have because market forces would have come into play earlier, so their would have been more time for big firms to adjust.

In summary, we should demand an end to "too big to fail." We should demand transparency in the way that assets are priced. Finally, we should demand that banks can't take risks when their risks are subsidized, such as through deposit insurance. I welcome the comments of those more knowledgeable in this field than I.

Most Ethical

Pictured at right is the Chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, in Nancy Pelosi's most ethical congress ever. Mr. Rangel has been having some problems of late. For a full summary see the ProPublica article. A little taste would include: abuse of New York's rent control laws, use of Congressional stationary to solicit funds for his foundation from companies with business before his committee, and failing to pay taxes on a Caribbean villa (ironic or par for the course for the chair of the House' tax writing committee.) I guess Democrats are conservative, in the sense that they don't like higher taxes after all.

Now the House ethics committee has laid a turd at Speaker Pelosi's doorstep that is going to give her trouble (and hopefully harm the chances of passing Obamacare through distraction.) Here is a little tidbit:

Ms. Pelosi did say she had not read the findings of the House ethics committee, which determined that he violated Congressional gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored trips in 2007 and 2008. But she parsed the ruling a bit differently than the panel itself, saying it didn’t find that he had knowledge of the sponsorships himself. “And I think that’s an important statement they made,” she said.

The ethics report, however, said that while it had no evidence Mr. Rangel personally knew of the sponsors, “Representative Rangel was responsible for the knowledge and actions of his staff and the performance of their official duties.”

When the Democrats took the majority in the House in 2006, here is what Pelosi said:

"The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history."

So now that the Speaker is faced with an ethical scandal, her response has been the typical stonewalling, obfuscation and outright lies we have come to expect from Washington. Certainly no better and probably worse than Republican responses to scandal. Even Moulitsas of DailyKos fame is calling for Rangel to give up his powerful Ways & Means chair. For an in depth analysis of why that isn't happening soon, you can read the Slate article here. But in summary, Rangel has too much power as a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and Pelosi got burned by them over the Jefferson, I've got cash in the freezer, scandal.

The Republican party need to pound the Democrats on this issue daily. In these times, saving Rangel is a loser for Pelosi. Running against Pelosi and Rangel in purple districts seems like an easy winning strategy. Now I say this, not out of love for Republicans, they have yet to win back my trust, but because I hope for gridlock so that the Congress doesn't pass bad bills. It seems like some of the worst ideas to come out of Congress are when one party is in full control of Senate, House and Presidency. Clintoncare was launched with Dem majorities, as was Obamacare. The Republicans pushed through the moronic Medicare part B drug entitlement, so they aren't exempt. So I say, hooray for divided government.

Dems Shocked at CIA Plans to Kill Osama, Obama to Apologize

Top Democrat lawmakers expressed outrage that the CIA was working on a Tippy-Top Secret project to put together a process that would lead to a plan to eventually kill Osama bin Laden and other key al-Qaeda operatives. (My sources indicate lean six sigma was inolved.) Eight years later, nothing had come of the plan and it has been scrapped by CIA Director Leon Panetta, who reported its existence to Democrat lawmakers. Democrats expressed outrage that the U.S. would try to assassinate al Qaeda leaders without first getting authorization from Congress.

Meanwhile, other sources inside the White House say that the President is preparing to apologize to al Qaeda for this breach. A snippet of the speech follows:

"... recently, tension has been fed by our inhumane treatment of prisoners that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a so called "War on Terror" in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated without regard to their own aspirations and denied the opportunity to democratically elect Taliban or al Qaeda leaders..."

The President is counting on these and other apologies to prevent future terrorist attacks on the United States.

Planning for these clandesting ops at the CIA was so secret that only crack investigators at the Washington Post were aware of its existence. Mysteriously, the Washington Post article written by Barton Gellman, on Sunday, October 28, 2001; on Page A01, detailing the program has mysteriously disappeared from the post's web site. However, you can read snippets at Weasel Zippers, Free Republic or the whole thing at Subliminal News and judge for yourself the depth of Cheney's evil in trying to kill bin Laden AND keep the whole thing secret from Nancy Pelosi.