Swamp Creatures

Senator Al Franken has just joined the host of current and previous  pervs in Congress ... Ted Kennedy, Bob Menendez, Lyndon Johnson, Anthony Weiner, JFK, Wilbur Mills, Newt Gingrich, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Bob Packwood, Joe Biden, Gerry Studds,  260 anonymous Congresspersons who had previously cost the U.S. taxpayers $15 million in sexual abuse settlements, and 50 current Congresspersons who are on a known "Creep List" ... see: Conservative Review Article.

For lots more perv names, see: Supreme Find Law.

And these are just the ones who have been exposed. How many more have existed is obviously a lot larger. And we wonder why so little gets done in the swamp ... they all seem preoccupied with groping others and exposing themselves.

Afterward: Should I add Barack Obama to the above perv list? See: DC Clothesline.

Skunk at the Garden Party

President Obama was effective in blaming the Republicans for leaving him an economy that was "in the ditch." It's a complicated story, but, in a way, he was right in that George W. Bush allowed the daring duo of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to corrupt the US mortgage market to the point where financiers found a way to turn these two bozos naive mandate into an economy killer ... a Ponzi scheme which took in most of the world financial markets.

Now the Democrats have released another skunk at Trump's garden party ... Obamacare ... which should have collapsed before Obama left office ... however it was kept on life support through a series of executive actions that postponed its worst mandates. Now, unless the Republicans untie Gruber's Gordian knot, they will be blamed by millions of poor suckers on expanded Medicaid of taking away their health insurance. As it turns out this is not as many that lost their "bad apple" health insurance under ACA, but nevertheless many in Congress still fear being sprayed by Obama's pole cat.

Up Chuck Schumer is counting on it ...

Robbing the Bank

Permit me an indulgence … I offer here an analogy to try to explain our sub-prime mortgage meltdown in late 2008 that cost the United States at least one trillion dollars and likely elected Barack Obama to the Presidency. This analogy will use a simple bank-robbery scenario to try to explain the actors and their roles in this (to me) criminal enterprise. Here is the cast:

- The Master Planners – Barney Frank and Chris Dodd whose drive for universal home ownership was the diabolical felonious scheme behind this travesty (with the template of the Community Development Act of 1974.)

- The Bank Robbers – Countrywide Finance, GMAC, Quicken and the myriad of other bucket-shop mortgage origination companies that sprung up during the last years before the meltdown … along with the complicity of the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who got these no-documentation mortgages using chicanery and mendacity.

- The Money Launderers (legitimizing the pelf acquired in this robbery) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac abetted by all those financial institutions (e.g.s: Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc.) that packaged up these mortgages (Collateralized Debt Obligations -- CDOs) to sell to these fences … AND all those players in the Credit-Default Swaps casino (AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, etc.)

- The Get-Away Car Drivers – the Credit Rating Agencies that gave these CDO’s unrealistically high credit ratings

- The Bank’s Security Force – those myriad Federal financial regulatory agencies who spent the period during the actual robbery lounging in the bank’s break room playing pinochle and watching porn on the bank’s security-system screens.

- The Bank’s Depositors (who lost their money in the robbery) –ordinary United States’ citizen-schlubs.

Ditch the Republicans?

Yesterday at a Democrat fundraiser, our august prexy, Barack Obama, gave his partisan argument as to why a Democrat Congress deserves to win the elections in November. Basically, he said that Bush and the rest of the Republicans drove our economy into the ditch in 2008. Obama was subsequently elected and thus he [sigh] was required to patch up this accident. With that sly grin of his, he went on to say that the Democrats have gotten the car (our economy) out of the ditch and back on the asphalt. And he added with a snide guffaw … now the Republicans want the keys back. In his best sophomoric manner, he said, “No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”

Perhaps what he said has a modicum of metaphoric truth to it, however please allow me to modify and extend his remarks with the following observations:

- The Republicans were not alone in driving our economy into the ditch. Clearly, by insisting on the irrational expansion of sub-prime mortgages, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and their cronies in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did their share of reckless driving. The major sin that Bush and his Republican compatriots in Congress can be accused of is not pushing back hard enough.

- Yes, the Democrats have stopped our economy from sliding further into the ditch. But to say that we are back on the asphalt is, at best, political hyperbole. At worst, it is demagoguery. Economic growth is clearly anemic and unemployment still hovers around 10%. In fact, we are in serious jeopardy of slipping back into negative GNP growth. And this is occurring after monstrous government deficit spending that cannot be sustained. Such a Keynesian economic experiment has once again been proven misguided … and if the Bush tax cuts are left to expire this coming January, it is quite likely that Obama’s stretch limo will also end up back in the economic ditch.

- Even public opinion has now decided that it is Obama’s recession. See: Obama's Fault. After 18 months in office, Obama needs to stop pushing his ultra-liberal agenda at the expense of job seekers and economic growth. He is rapidly losing Bush as a scapegoat and would be advised to start accepting responsibility for our economic malaise. Perhaps, as Obama was decrying at the fundraiser, the Republicans might make an equivalent mess of things if they win back majorities in Congress this fall, but then we would still have some hope that things will finally change. I kind of suspect that if the tea partiers have anything to say about it, things will.