Thomas Sowell

Opinion in Brief

"The corrupt manner in which this massive legislation was rammed through Congress, without any of the committee hearings or extended debates that most landmark legislation has had, has provided a roadmap for pushing through more such sweeping legislation in utter defiance of what the public wants.

Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for Congressional Democrats and for the President himself. But that is far from certain.

True, President Obama's approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the President will not be on the ballot until 2012.

They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats' control of Congress. As an old song said, 'It ain't necessarily so.'"

--economist Thomas Sowell

Corruption in High Office

Legal Dictionary

Main Entry: bribe
Function: noun
: a benefit (as money) given, promised, or offered in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust (as an official or witness) —compare KICKBACK

Main Entry: bribe
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Forms: bribed; brib·ing
: to influence (a person) by giving a bribe

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Senator Mary Landrieu BRIBED with $300,000,000 in taxpayer money

Senator Ben Nelson BRIBED by a an amendment forcing 49 OTHER states to pay increased Medicaid costs to cover HIS state.
(If bills singling out one citizen for a law, how is this legal? In addition to the bribery?)

Senator Harry Reid BRIBES fellow Senators to the tune of $1.2 BILLION OF YOUR MONEY!

I am willing to bring charges and/or a lawsuit against Reid and the Democrats for corruption. Unfortunately, I have no idea on how to do so properly.

AG Cuccinelli's first act should be to bring suit to prove that this bill is unconstitutional.

Update: Michelle Malkin has the list of those being bribed

DemCare Bribe List #1

DemCare Bribe List #2


Rope. Tree. Democratic Senators. Assembly required.

Putting It In Perspective

The Democratic Culture Of Corruption
By Michelle Malkin
December 10, 2008

Editor's Note: The following column contains language that may be offensive.

Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi can stop clucking now. For the last three years, Democratic leaders cheered GOP ethics woes. Dean accused Republicans of making "their culture of corruption the norm." Pelosi touted cleanliness as a liberal virtue. But with the eye-popping pay-for-play and bribery case against Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich topping a year of nationwide Democratic scandals, the corruption chickens are coming home to roost.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called the breadth and depth of charges against Blagojevich and his Democratic Chief of Staff John Harris "staggering." That's an understatement. Anything that breathed was a potential shakedown target. It's the Chicago way. Democrat Blago's so dirty he'd hit up a children's hospital for money. Oh, wait. He's accused of doing that, too.

Democrat Blago allegedly conspired to use his power to appoint President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat as a bargaining chip for financial payment. He explored trading on that authority for an appointment as Health and Human Services secretary or as an ambassador or for installment in a cushy union position. (He discussed his trading scheme with an unnamed "SEIU (Service Employees International Union) official" and unnamed "various consultants" in Washington.)

According to the criminal complaint released yesterday, he also tried to leverage his influence over the sale of Wrigley Field (owned by Tribune media company) in an attempt to get Chicago Tribune editorial writers who called for his impeachment fired -- which illustrates the very perils of media/government entanglements I warned about in my newspaper bailout column last week. His wife, Patricia Blagojevich, was apparently in on the thuggery, too. Taking a break from her first lady duties advocating "on behalf of women and children," she is heard in taped discussions about the Chicago Tribune/Wrigley Field deal telling a governor's aide "to hold up that f**king Cubs sh*t. ... F**k them."

Pelosi, champion of women as political cleaner-uppers, was unavailable for comment.
Fitzgerald says President-elect Obama was not implicated in the plethora of charges against Democrats Blago and Harris. The national media went out of their way to absolve him, too. But declaring Team Obama's hands clean -- especially with Blago crony and indicted Obama donor Tony Rezko in the middle of it all -- is premature.

(And if you're wondering why I keep putting "Democrat" in front of the accused corruptocrats, it's because the mainstream newspapers can't seem to remember to identify their party prominently the way they do when Republicans are nabbed.)

Chicago's Fox affiliate reports that Obama Chief of Staff and Chicago hometown heavy Rahm Emanuel was the catalyst for the Blago takedown and suggests Rahm-bo tipped off the feds. If so, this raises more questions than it answers about who on the transition team may have talked to Blago and his shakedown artists about what and when. Needless to say, if it were the Republican Bush administration tied to the Blago bust, the White House press corps would be frothing like a pack of Michael Vick's pit bulls.

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the "we're cleaner than thou" rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, Charlie "Sweetheart Deals" Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame "Text Me" Kilpatrick.

It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania's state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

The Democrats have met the culture of corruption, and it looks like it ain't just elephants among the jackasses soiling public office.

Willing to sink the economy rather that admit that THEY are wrong....

The recent attacks on the "greed of Wall Street" and on the Republican party are pitiful. The Democratic Party is a corrupt, willfully criminal organization, as it is run by the Pelosi, Frank, Reid, and Dodd gang. The assorted media is inept and incompetent.

I'm not college educated. I'm not an economist. But, even I had enough common sense and knowledge of history, to know that programs put into place to prevent another depression, MAY HAVE BEEN PUT THERE FOR A REASON! I predicted this would happen when Clinton and Co. (and there were some GOP members involved, too.) removed the separation of the regular and investment banks. And I predicted it again when the government forced the banking industry to liberalize their loans requirements to "provide loans to poor people....". Affordable housing, my butt. Buying votes is more like it.

Newsbusters.org has the truth:

Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC's Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been "resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac"...

And from the same article, an interview on Fox, with Brit Hume:

ANGLE: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, backed by the federal government, buy mortgage loans from the lenders who make them. But four years ago, both were in trouble over shoddy accounting. Fannie Mae Chief Franklin Raines, President Clinton's former budget director, was fired. To placate those in Congress who watched over them, Fannie and Freddie promised to do more to help poor people get mortgages. That led them to buy riskier and riskier home loans from private lenders creating incentives for everyone to make shakier loans.

PETER WALLISON, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: The problem is that they encouraged very bad mortgages to be made by banks and other institutions, because Fannie and Freddie would buy them.

ANGLE: Eventually, they bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgages, a substantial portion of them based on poor credit, then resold many of them to financial institutions who thought they were safe because the federal government was behind them.

WALLISON: As a result of this appearance that they were backed by the government, people never paid very much attention to the assets they were acquiring or the risks they were taking.

ANGLE: And so shaky mortgages spread throughout the system. But in 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then chaired by Republican Richard Shelby, tried to rein in the two organizations bypassing some strong new regulations.

WALLISON: Which would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from acquiring this bad -- these bad mortgages. It actually gave a new regulator for Fannie and Freddie the kinds of powers that a bank regulator had.

ANGLE: All the Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats, including the current chairman, Senator Chris Dodd, voted against it, and that was after Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had issued a stark warning to senators that Fannie and Freddie were playing with fire. Greenspan said without stronger regulations, "We increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis. Without restrictions on the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States."

And then there was....US. I notice that A WHOLE BUNCHA PEOPLE refinanced over the last few years......Yep, no complaining about a bubble then.... We are the ones at fault. For voting in these idiots and keeping them there. For buying the newspapers and watching the shows of those "news" media that continue to support them.
But we don't have to compound the problem by allowing these crooks in Congress to steal us blind and ruin the economy just so that THEY don't have to admit culpability.

Will the economy crash if there is no "bail out"? I don't know. But I do know that the Democrats don't act like this is an emergency. They had the votes to pass whatever is needed to fix the emergency. The original bill was 3 PAGES LONG! APPARENTLY THAT'S TOO COMPLICATED! They added another 107 pages of crap!

The corrupt leadership of Congress needed to stick their fingers in the pie before they were willing to support anything. They needed their share of the loot. Down where I come from, in New Orleans, we recognize that as corruption. And then they blamed the whole thing on the GOP. While asking for their votes.....votes that aren't necessary, since the Dems are the majority. Cowards. If the bill was for the good of the country, why not vote and take ALL THE CREDIT?
Today the vote failed with 40% OF THE DEMOCRATS VOTING AGAINST IT.

Some emergency.

The Pelosi gang insists that there needs to be more "oversight", which, in her world, means more bribes for Democrats....
It was the the willful disregard of existing protections by Dodd and Franks that caused this mess. And now they have the nerve to blame everyone else.......

Jerry Bowyer, at TCS Daily, has a great analogy:

Think of the analogy of a 'bail out': someone knocks a hole in a boat and the water rushes in. The crew bails water out of the boat to keep it from sinking. If things are really bad, another boat comes and helps. This analogy points to the real problem: the hole! If you patch the hole early, no bailing is needed. If you patch it very late, the whole ship needs to go into dry dock. But the bailing out only makes sense in the context of patching the original problem. The worst thing to do would be to allow the ship to sink to make some kind of populist political point. No, revise that:

The worst thing to do would be to take the left's view and say "too much water in the boat, let's knock more holes into it so the water can get out.

Here's how you fix the hole in the boat:

The best thing to do is to patch the holes. Here they are:

Some are talking about putting a hold on the mark to market regulations. That's a start but not enough. Don't suspend mark to market, abolish it. It's part of the whole Sarbox, Spitzer, FAS 157 wave of punitive regulation after Enron. It makes no sense to impose and universalize temporary downturns, especially during panics.

Abolish the Bank Holding Company Act. It's a remnant of the 1920s before branch banking. Its only current effect is to keep private equity from buying majority stakes in troubled banks. Goldman's decision yesterday just illustrates the problem. They had to change structure in order to buy up other banks. This is nuts. Get rid of this dinosaur and private equity will start the capital infusions.

Abolish the Community Reinvestment Act. Forcing banks to make minority loans is the original sin out of which came the Subprime mortgage industry. Let banks decide where to loan; that's their job. Leave identity politics out of our credit system.

Do all of the above and I'm not at all sure that any bailout would still be needed. Before we subsidize these institutions, let's stop the things we are already doing to collapse them. Back to Hippocrates: First of all, do no harm.