Anthony Weiner (NY) rips the Republicans an new one over the 9/11 health care vote
Strategic Marketing Dude. Aging guitar hacker. I have been known to howl at the moon on occasion.
Currently working on my Social Media Strategy chops at Consensio.
There is a fascinating article in the NY Times on the Obama Adminstration's defense of the the insurance mandate that was part of the recent health care bill.
Opponents contend that the “minimum coverage provision” is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power to regulate commerce.
“This is the first time that Congress has ever ordered Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”
Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy.
“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.
Will regulators ever coherently explain why AIG could not be allowed to go bankrupt in September of 2008?
This topic probably deserves another hearing on its own.
At yesterday's House hearing, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and predecessor Hank Paulson said they didn't bail out AIG to save its derivatives counterparties. Instead, said Mr. Geithner, the now-famous 100-cents-on-the-dollar buyouts of credit default swap contracts were necessary to prevent a further downgrade of AIG by credit-ratings agencies.
Remember, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Mr. Geithner was president, had by that time already seized AIG. We're guessing that a ratings agency is pretty comfortable with the creditworthiness of a firm 79.9%-owned by Uncle Sam. Yet Mr. Geithner is saying that the same credit raters that applied triple-A ratings to tranches of junk mortgages somehow got the yips when the world's most respected borrower was standing behind AIG.
Yesterday, however, Messrs. Geithner and Paulson went further than ever in stating that the real systemic risk was to AIG's heavily regulated insurance businesses.
Their testimony directly contradicts that offered to Congress by former New York Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo, who was AIG's principal insurance regulator at the time.
Last year Mr. Dinallo told the Senate that "The main reason why the federal government decided to rescue AIG was not because of its insurance companies."
Article: "Congress's Team: Deal for Merger Included Saints", NYT.
Grayson is rapidly becoming a favorite of mine. I am not necessarily in line with his politics, but I love his pit bull approach to his role. This clip is a brilliant dressing down of the whole Acorn obsession currently distracting Congress from more pressing business.
Bowing to political pressure from community bankers, the House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption on Thursday for more than 98 percent of the nation’s banks from oversight by a new agency created to protect consumers from abusive or deceptive credit cards, mortgages and other loans.
Huh?!
So here is the deal: Congress is going to pass legislation creating a new bureaucracy to protect us consumers from bad banks and credit card companies. And the first thing they do is exempt 8000 of the nations 8,200 banks from being reviewed by the new agency.
So rather than hold the existing regulators feet to the fire (did anybody in the SEC get fired for missing Bernie Madoff all those years?) they decide to do what the federal government always does - get bigger. But before they actually grow a new arm they hollow it out. This is an amazing Kabuki dance to watch.
The bill, however, would add $1.7 billion for an extra destroyer the Defense Department did not request and $2.5 billion for 10 C-17 cargo planes it did not want, at the behest of lawmakers representing the states where those items would be built. Although the White House said the administration "strongly objects" to the extra C-17s and to the Senate's proposed shift of more than $3 billion from operations and maintenance accounts to projects the Pentagon did not request, no veto was threatened over those provisions.
The destroyer and the 10 cargo planes are not earmarks. These are incremental spending - totaling more than $4 billion - that was not requested by Defense.
I guess when you are running a $1.5 trillion deficit this seems like monopoly money. There is an old saying: "No one manages someone else's money as carefully as they manage their own."
Stop the madness.
The bill also increases the budgets for lawmakers’ offices by more than 8 percent.
Huh?! What was that? In the same bill that essentially acknowledges that the Federal Government needs to dip into the credit card to pay the bills, the Congress INCREASES its overhead by 8%. 8%!! Are you increasing the overhead in your household by 8% this year? In your business? In your church or synagogue or mosque?
This is the simplest example of why central planning does not work. It is divorced from financial reality and lives in some netherworld of privilege and hubris. Life is easy when you don't have to balance your checkbook.
Oh, man. This is so great. This guy Grayson is a lawyer's lawyer. He makes the other guy - the General Counsel of the Fed no less - squirm and wish he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.
I think the accusation he is making - "front running" - is that somewhere down the line the Fed executes trades through retail brokers. And these retail brokers, just before they push the Fed's order through, execute an order of their own so they benefit from the Fed's trade. They trade "in front" of the Fed order. This is insider trading of the highest order - and Grayson wants the right to audit these transactions.
Fascinating. And read Taibb's complete post for an entertaining story about his own encounter with Grayson.
