US taxpayers underwriting the Taliban to the tune of $2.16Billion

Am I the only one around here who sees the utter nonsense in our being in Afghanistan at all if we aren't there to kill people and blow things up? Nation building, hearts and minds, and all that crap in a God-forsaken shit-hole with corrupt, drug-addled, 11th century tribesmen? Are you kidding me?

From Yahoo.com -- US government funds earmarked ostensibly to promote business in Afghanistan have landed in Taliban hands under a $2.16 billion transportation contract, The Washington Post has reported.

Citing the results of a year-long military-led investigation, the newspaper said US and Afghan efforts to address the problem have been slow, and all eight of the trucking firms involved remain on US payroll.

Moreover, the Pentagon extended the contract for six months last March, the report said.

The investigation found "documented, credible evidence ... of involvement in a criminal enterprise or support for the enemy" by four of the eight prime contractors, the paper noted.

If Congress would wipe out half the fraud, waste, and abuse associated with foreign aid alone, we'd be easily out of the financial hole in which we currently find ourselves. Good grief!

Fast and Furious likely to be Holder's downfall

With any luck and assuming the media don't provide political cover, Operation Fast and Furious by all rights should spell the end of incompetent racist Eric Holder's career at DOJ.

OF&F was an ATF program by which thousands of assault weapons were allowed to be sold by legitimate gun dealers to known Mexican cartel representatives, then traced as they were inevitably used in crimes in Mexico. Unforeseen was the likelihood that those very guns might be used to kill American border patrol officers on US soil, which is exactly what happened.

It is inconceivable to me that an operation like that would go forward without Eric Holders blessing. He'll deny that he had any knowledge but four border patrol officers have already stated officially that the operation was approved at the highest levels of ATF, which would include the DOJ.

A criminal scandal right under Obama's nose featuring AG Eric Holder would do much harm to Obama's re-election chances, but like with all political scandals, it all depends on how hard the media pursues the story.....and I wouldn't count on the US media to pursue it very stridently as they would if it were the Bush administration.

Bailout II

With close friends of Obama running Fannie and Freddie, who didn't see MOAB II coming?

From ABCMoney -- WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) on Friday said it would ask for an additional $8.5 billion from taxpayers as it continues to suffer losses on loans made prior to 2009.

The largest U.S. residential mortgage funds provider reported a net loss attributable to common shareholders of $8.7 billion, or $1.52 per diluted share, in the first quarter.

Including the latest request, the firm has taken about $100 billion from the U.S. government since it was seized in 2008.

Can somebody show me in the Constitution where the federal government has any business at all meddling in the private mortgage industry? And don't try to float the "promote the general welfare" balloon. You dumb liberals hide behind that clause as an excuse for every thing you do that is extra-Constitutional.

Even as both companies were collapsing, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd were defending them as on solid financial ground...and both were the biggest recipients of bags of cash from them. Coincidence? And why do you cretins in Mass. keep electing Frank? How stupid are you people?

Frank and Dodd should be in prison.

The boy wonder returns to the cash well one more time

That wee Timmy Geithner is begging for still more money illustrates perfectly the utter incompetence and moral bankruptcy of the Obama administration....

Squeaked the boy wonder as reported by Reuters -- "The longer Congress fails to act, the more we risk that investors here and around the world will lose confidence in our ability to meet our commitments and our obligations," Geithner said in a letter to congressional leaders.

"Default by the United States is unthinkable."

Previously, the Treasury had forecast that the $14.3 trillion statutory debt limit would be reached between April 15 and May 31. As of Friday, Treasury borrowing stood just $95 billion from the ceiling.

The notion of spending less money never entered the minds of these people. They are enriching their friends(and by "friends" I mean large campaign donors) with taxpayer money using the fear tactic of government default to extort the cash from Americans. It is unconscionable that these crooks are still at the wheel as we head toward the calamity of national economic collapse.

Obama's culture of corruption

Evidently it pays to be an Obama lick spittle....

From FoxNews -- The company (G.E.) reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

CEO Jeffrey Immelt is probably Obama's best corporate friend, and G.E. has received various benefits from that association. G.E. builds most of the stupid wind-mills that the Obama administration got behind legislatively. They also manufacture all the dim and dangerous compact fluorescent bulbs which will replace the efficient, bright incandescent bulbs that Obama outlawed. Now we see that Immelt's company pays no corporate taxes? How does Obama square that with his historic hostility toward industry and business in general? I guess if your network gives him enough fawning coverage and you donate enough money to his campaign, he'll ignore pretty much any thing.

Laying the groundwork for another seizure of big tobacco money

It's been quite a while since the federal government attacked an entire, legally operating industry for the sole purpose of extorting as much money from it as stupid juries would go along with.

From FoxNews -- WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department disclosed Wednesday it wants to require the tobacco industry to admit publicly that smoking causes a multitude of medical problems, killing 1,200 Americans every day.

The government proposed that a federal judge order the companies to say in advertisements that they lied to the public about the safety and dangers of smoking. "We falsely marketed low tar and light cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes to keep people smoking and sustain our profits," one of the government's proposed statements begins.

Am I the only one to whom it's obvious that the government wants the tobacco industry to admit guilt so that they can use it as evidence of culpability in another round of law suits against the tobacco industry? Less than 5% of the original tobacco settlement money went toward smoking cessation programs in the states. Almost all of it, at least the 66% that the shamelessly predatory trial lawyers didn't keep for themselves, was used by politicians as a slush fund to pay for vote-buying schemes to get themselves re-elected.

It's no coincidence that the feds and states, being criminally reckless in how they spend taxpayer money, are woefully short on cash and are looking desperately for a revenue source. This move is designed to get tobacco companies to go ahead and settle under the threat of high-profile law suits. If cigarettes are as much of a public menace as our self-righteous politicians tell us in preparation for legal action, then why don't they ban them altogether? Because the government is the biggest recipient of tax money from the purchase of cigarettes. Politicians don't want you to stop smoking, they can't afford it.

Judgement day for Silky Pony

Looks like Silky Pony may finally get what he deserves....

From MSNBC via Hotair -- A two-year grand jury investigation of John Edwards has reached a decisive point. Prosecutors believe they have a strong case, but have not yet gotten a green light from the Justice Department to charge the former presidential candidate, NBC News has learned. The issue: did Edwards violate election laws by trying to cover up his affair with a campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.

Let me just say that I despise John Edwards. He was the worst kind of low-life, malpractice trial lawyer, a loathsome democrat as a politician, and a cad of the highest order for how he treated his wife. That said, his teen kids have just lost their mother to cancer. Do we really need to send their father to prison, essentially leaving them parentless, all because he used campaign cash to hide an affair from his wife and the public?

I know the prosecutors have spent two years and probably millions in taxpayer funds to investigate and bring this indictment so they won't just drop it. But come on, the guy has kids still in high school. Isn't it punishment enough at this point just being Silky Pony?

Compact fluorescent bulbs even more dangerous than we thought

Over at Moonbattery, Van Helsing has a post about the Consumer Product Safety Commission's recall of some compact fluorescent light bulbs because they may explode and burn your house down.

For no reasons other than to appease Al Gore and other global-warming hoax believers and to reward Jeffery Immelt of GE for being a loyal lapdog, our imperial government has banned cheap, efficient incandescent bulbs as being harmful to beloved polar bears. Instead, we will be forced to use dim, flickering, and potentially harmful CF bulbs that'll have us all squinting to read books in the relative darkness of our living rooms. It's likely that our benevolent Marxist overlords would like us to give up books altogether like in Fahrenheit 451, and mindlessly stare at the official Government Information Channel on TV instead. Forcing us to use CF bulbs to read by might just accomplish that.

If you haven't figured it out yet, Jeffery Immelt of GE stands to make billions for his company since GE will be the lone US manufacturer of stupid, expensive, and dangerous compact fluorescent bulbs.

If you ever visit the Oval Office and you see a pair of shoes sticking out from under the President's desk, they'll belong to Jeffery Immelt. He'll be thanking Obama for banning superior incandescent bulbs, as the ban was solely for Immelt's financial benefit, they just use environmentalism as an excuse.

The unbearable weight of the imperial nanny-State

If this doesn't make you fume with outrage, you might be having a stroke right about now....



The licensure rate in this country has gone up 5 fold in the last 50 years or so. Why? There are three reasons I can think of, none of them are beneficial to consumers and all are corrupt....

1: With the ever-expanding nanny-State requiring more and more of our money, raising taxes again and again was obviously unpopular so local governments decided to create out of thin air, onerous and arbitrary criteria and force business owners to qualify to operate a business. Then they charge a huge fee for getting this license, and you must renew it over and over. Plus, failure to comply resulted in punitive financial penalties too, so they got you either way.

2: Existing business owners paid off politicians to create these absurd licensing boards in order to discourage competition. Less competition means they could charge higher prices.

3. The new licensing regulations meant the need for licensing boards staffed with lazy, bloated, self-important bureaucrats. To corrupt, incompetent bureaucrats, nothing makes more sense than to expand the regulatory bureaucracy. It makes the government unions stronger and increases the control they wield over regular citizens.

If this guy can't cut hair, his customers will stop coming and he'll self-regulate out of the barber business, no regulatory board necessary. That's how the free-enterprise free market works.
Obama promised(and by "promised" I mean lied) to remove the onerous regulations that hinder job growth and small business expansion, but we'll see if stupid licensing regulatory boards are abolished as they should be.....I won't be holding my breath.

Rules are for the little people, not for friends of Obama

It's as if Obama isn't even bothering to hide anymore the fact that he is having an affair with Jeffery Immelt of GE.

One month after the EPA began enforcing absurd rules regarding CO2 produced by existing and new power plants, Obama announced the first exemption to those rules. Turns out that the new Avenal Power Plant in California is powered entirely by turbines manufactured by General Electric. You're an idiot if you think that's a coincidence...or an Obama voter, but that's a distinction without a difference.

It's bad enough that GE pays on average 1/10th the corporate taxes of other comparable companies, but to blatantly exempt what is essentially a GE power plant from EPA rules that harm everybody else in the industry, is the epitome of sleazy cronyism and utter corruption.

Immelt was the driving force behind the incandescent light-bulb ban, because GE is the sole manufacturer of stupid compact fluorescent bulbs which we're all forced to buy now. Is there any end to the corruption of the Obama administration?

Cronyism evident in Dallas

The absurdly cold weather in Texas has caused over-demand of the power grids there such that authorities are importing 380megawatts of electricity(you need 1.21 gigawatts of electricity for time travel...just sayin') from Mexico to help meet demand. But that's not enough and they've instituted rolling blackouts until demand goes down. Obviously hospitals, public safety departments, etc are exempt and use generators for emergency electricity. But what has residents peeved is that Cowboy Stadium is also exempt. The Superbowl organizers claim with a straight face, that it's a public safety issue to not have the stadium and surrounding hotels be blacked out, even though the game isn't until Sunday.

I'm sure that as Texas residents sit huddled and shivering in the dark, they are comforted knowing that Superbowl tourists, media, and pampered players are toasty and warm in their well-lit rooms.

I become less and less interested in the Superbowl every year and now I'm not only uninterested, I'm a little hostile.

Government Motors....still a losing investment

As always, the American taxpayer gets screwed by our government....

From Yahoo -- WASHINGTON – By selling a block of its shares in General Motors Co. for $33 each — a price far below the "break-even" point — the government sharply reduced the chances of taxpayers fully recovering their $50 billion investment in the auto giant, a new report from a congressional watchdog says.

The irony is that the dreadful unions, who now basically own the car companies from whom they previously extorted undeserved billions, were the ones who destroyed GM and Chrysler in the first place. Obama sidestepped the intent of the Constitution and awarded ownership to villainous, union thugs....loyal-democrat, villainous, union thugs that is.

If the car companies had been allowed to declare bankruptcy as they should have, the union labor contracts would have been thrown out and the companies could have reorganized under a free-labor market environment, the way all companies should have to operate. As it is, GM and Chrysler continue to drown under the unbearable weight of union wage and pension contract obligations and their declining stock price reflects that. It's just too bad the American taxpayer has to absorb the billions in losses.

Schwarzenegger: just another corrupt politician

Of all the corruption and graft in California politics, this might take the cake....

From Hotair -- In his final night before leaving office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger commuted the prison sentence of the son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez who had pleaded guilty to taking part in the murder of a college student.

Schwarzenegger announced the move in a batch of eleventh-hour press releases e-mailed to reporters. He also announced he was granting several other commutations and pardons and giving plum government appointments to political allies and the spouse of his chief of staff.

This is the kind of cronyism and corruption that makes Americans' contempt for all politicians completely justifiable. And to think when Arnold got elected, doe-eyed republicans were clamoring for a constitutional amendment that would allow this douchebag RINO to run for President.....idiots!

EPA deems itself 4th branch of government

In the absence of congressional support regarding Cap-and-Trade, the Obama administration is following through on it's promise to fundamentally transform America by using unelected and unaccountable political radicals, place in positions of power, to do it by issuing CO2 regulations that once in place, will be difficult if not impossible to rescind by subsequent congresses....

From Directorblue -- The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that it will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and oil refineries next year in an attempt to curb global warming.

The Obama administration intends to create a Soviet-style, centrally-planned economic society overseen by smarmy bureaucrats with no accountability to tax-paying voters who're forced to fund them. New regulations on the FCC, land management, and CO2 use will irreparably harm the economy such that throwing out the old rules in two years will not be able to repair the damage.

Only the most retarded democrat voter still believes in man-made global warming. Even Obama's EPA doesn't believe it, they're just using it as a scary justification for seizing control of the domestic energy industry. With these regulations in place, the prices of literally everything that uses energy to be produced, will necessarily go up.......everything!

I hope you people see what despotic evil arises when messianic politicians are given unlimited control over us and our activities.

Meet the new congress, same as the old congress

Included in the $1.1-trillion, 1,924-page omnibus crap-sandwich that the lame-duck congress is cramming down our throats are these examples of sheer spending lunacy.....

$277,000 for potato pest management in Wisconsin
$246,000 for bovine tuberculosis in Michigan and Minnesota
$522,000 for cranberry and blueberry disease and breeding in New Jersey
$500,000 for oyster safety in Florida
$349,000 for swine waste management in North Carolina
$413,000 for peanut research in Alabama
$247,000 for virus free wine grapes in Washington
$208,000 beaver management in North Carolina
$94,000 for blackbird management in Louisiana
$165,000 for maple syrup research in Vermont
$235,000 for noxious weed management in Nevada
$100,000 for the Edgar Allen Poe Cottage Visitor’s Center in New York
$300,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii
$400,000 for solar parking canopies and plug-in electric stations in Kansas

Both democrats and craven republicans have hidden earmarks in this bill so that in the new congress they can get on their high-horses and swear about how awful earmarks are. It's just like the indulgence of Mardi Gras leading up to lent....sin as much as you can today, so that next week you can pretend to be saintly.

I will be taking names of every republican who requests funding for a frivolous earmark and adding it to my 2012 purge list, and you should too. If these guys are so dumb that they need two electoral lessons about fiscal responsibility and small government, then we'll be happy to provide it.

The silver lining to the Wikileaks scandal

For all the damage the Wikileaks saga is doing, there is a silver lining. The insidious attempt by the Obama administration to seize control of the US economy based on climate-change, and the lengths to which it will go to facilitate it, is exposed as utterly corrupt and baseless....

From Guardian -- Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.

Can we once and for all dispel the notion that the industrious activities of man have anything at all to do with the overall climate? If man-made climate change was real, the hand-wringing Obama administration wouldn't have to dig up dirt on, black-mail, and cajole other nations into pretending that it's real too.

The rottenness and malfeasance of the Obama administration and it's craven attempts to control the US economy based on a complete hoax hatched in the deranged, patchouli-addled brain of Al Gore is breathtaking.

Heartache....some tea-party reps actually big spenders

Remember in the halcyon days leading up to the midterms how many tea-party candidates ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, drastically reduced spending, and balanced budget governance? Well, it seems many of the ones who've signed on to Michelle Bachmann's Tea-Party Caucus are among the worst pork-barrel offenders....

From NationalJournal -- Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget.

According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which records are available.

Bachmann and 13 others in the caucus did not request any earmarks. If these representatives who were elected with tea-party support morph into the same big-spending republicans their predecessors were, they'll likely get thrown out after only one term. The tea parties didn't organize and throw the democrats out of power only to be used by smarmy republicans to get elected and then ignored.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unless the earmark is a road, bridge, school, or some other public work, no...NO money should be taken from one group of taxpayers and used for the benefit of another group.

Why is Bernanke not in a pillory in DC somewhere?

We are just now learning of the utter corruption, at American taxpayers' expense, associated with the Federal Reserve's role in doling bailout money.....UNBELIEVABLE!!!

From WashingtonPost -- The Fed launched emergency programs totaling $3.3 trillion in aid, a figure reached by adding up the peak amount of lending in each program.

Companies that few people would associate with Wall Street benefited through the Fed's program to ease the market for commercial paper, a form of short-term debt used by major corporations to fund their daily activities.

By the fall of 2008, credit had frozen across the financial system, including the commercial paper market. The Fed then purchased commercial paper issued by GE 12 times for a total of $16 billion. It bought paper from Harley-Davidson 33 times, for a total of $2.3 billion. It picked up debt issued by Verizon twice, totaling $1.5 billion.

The Fed bailed out General Electric 12 times and not once did NBC news, a subsidiary of GE, report it. The astonishing stupidity of anybody who still trusts NBC do deliver honest news is......well, astonishing.

The Fed bailed out Harley-Davidson 33 times? Are you kidding me? Harley-Davidson might as well be GM or Chrysler now. That whooshing sound you hear is my respect for HD going down the toilet.

Additionally, hundreds of millions of dollars taken from taxpayers went to bailout foreign banks too. The Fed has become the international bank of the world, using our money to prop up the businesses of the country-club buddies of the Fed board members.

Maybe I'm missing something here because I don't fully understand the need for the Fed, composed of private, unelected citizens with little or no oversight, who have vested interests in the profitability of certain banks and Wall Street firms, to be in charge of US monetary policy. Furthermore, I don't really know who oversees their actions. If anybody can explain why any of this is OK, I'd gladly withdraw my outrage.

President Obummer has no shame

Today Chairman Zero slapped American citizens in the face yet again by giving his favorite union thug the Presidential Medal of Freedom...

From FoxNews -- President Obama today named AFL-CIO President Emeritus John Sweeney as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The award is presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

Just like with the Nobel prize that Obama received, this honor was unearned and is therefor worthless. Anybody who receives the PMF going forward will think twice before being thankful for it.

Obama never does anything except payback campaign donors for past gifts, or lines up future donations. This is what's going on here. Lazy union thugs turned out big for democrats three weeks ago and Sweeney wanted a payback for it.

GM is still Government Motors

I'm finding it a little hard to get excited about GM's return to the NYSE.....

DETROIT — General Motors returned to life as a public company Thursday, launching a stock offering worth potentially $23 billion and ending the government’s role as majority shareholder and closing a remarkable chapter in American corporate history.

I'll still never buy another GM car....ever. The unions and bloated management that ran this company into the ground and who were rewarded with unconstitutional ownership of the company by Obama, are still there and intact. What's stopping them from whining about another bailout in 5 years? Nothing's changed.