Miss him..

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Bush included bailout loophole to allow CEO payouts

Helping friends until the bitter end. Only this Congress - who has been much too shy about taking control during the end of one of the most failed administrations in decades - could allow this to happen. The Democrats are going to have to do much better than this because the only thing they have going now is chaos within the GOP ranks. The Democrats make it so hard to respect them as a power when they blow every imaginable opportunity that they face.
Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

Link

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Thanks ToniD.. :)

When Indeed !

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

Turning reality, truth inside out

Link
Last week, Bush said the Middle East is a freer, more hopeful place today than when he took office.
He said the threat from terrorist groups like al Qaeda has been curtailed and that Iran faces greater
pressure from the international community than ever before. Mr. Bush described his Mideast policies
as 'ambitious in vision, bold in action and firm in purpose.'...

Bush's vision may have been ambitious and his plan bold, but history will record that he utterly failed to meet
those objectives. He emboldened America's enemies, put Israel's security at greater risk, mired our military in
an endless occupation and diminished our prestige around the globe. No pixie dust can change that reality."

www.bartcop.com

But the whore media will back him up.
The newspapers and the networks write the first draft of history.
History will say Clinton was one scandal after another and that Bush protected us from al Qaeda.

Owning the whore media gives the Republicans a tremendous advantage.

Prop 8..The Musical

Link To Video


Thanks..GBC.. :)

AP IMPACT: US diluted loan rules before crash

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.

"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted the value of government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come. Many executives remain in high-paying jobs, even after their assurances were proved false.

Con't- & Video

Impeachment spot to run in California

David Edwards and Diane Sweet

The National Impeachment Network is planning to run an advertisement on California television during the months of December and January 2009 which advocates for the impeachment of President George W. Bush.

Headed by Ralph Lopez, diarist at the left-leaning Daily Kos, the National Impeachment Network is supported by grassroots groups such as Code Pink, Veterans for Peace and Republicans for Impeachment.

From the network's website:

Con't