…to the bank!”

The kerfuffle comprised of flying blame over the financial crisis goes on.

Depending upon whom you ask, and that depending upon their individual political agendas, the conclusion one could easily draw is that the private sector’s to blame and the public sector’s to blame.

Face it, though, the entire economic mess was triggered, if that’s the operative word, by unconstitutional government interference in the marketplace.

As congressional Democrats press on with their attempts to get financial legislation reform passed, a key component has been lacking from the debate: how to handle the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE).

Although some Republican lawmakers have cried foul over the fact nothing has been included in a bill sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd, (D-Conn.), President Barack Obama’s administration has vowed to pursue reforming the GSEs … eventually.

However, despite a long history of alleged corruption, close ties to the current administration and a recent $10-billion extension of “emergency aid” to Freddie and Fannie in the deadest possible part of the news cycle, these two entities have gone relatively unnoticed by the news media, with a lion’s share of the spotlight given to Wall Street bogeymen like Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS).

Reporting on the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been almost nonexistent, particularly in the broadcast media. Since March 28, ABC, CBS and NBC put together only broached the topic of GSEs one time. But Goldman Sachs and the circumstances surrounding an SEC investigation were mentioned 37 times.

Even in the cable media, home of the 24-hour news cycle, when GSE-reform is discussed, it’s dismissed as some sort of Republican talking point or distraction.

As usual, the big government, regulation addicted side of the aisle kick started the problem.

Background: Freddie and Fannie ‘Proximate Cause’ of Crisis

Though the attention has been lacking, there is a strong to be made that these government-sponsored enterprises are at least somewhat, if not largely, culpable for the economic crisis.

According to the “Financial Services Committee Republican Plan for Reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” posted on March 26, it’s not just the collapse in housing these GSEs are responsible for, but the entire economic crisis.

“The evidence is clear that the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) – specifically, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – were the proximate cause of the economic crisis,” the Republican plan explained. “Ultimately supported by the taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, Fannie and Freddie permitted their executives, investors, and creditors to make outsize profits when times were good, but stuck taxpayers with the tab when the housing bubble burst. Fannie and Freddie’s access to cheap capital and the taxpayers’ pocketbook helped run up housing prices to unsustainable levels, while crowding out lenders and investors who could not afford to compete against these government-sponsored juggernauts.”

Howsomever, there appeared to have been some hanky panky going on, of, as they say, an unsavory nature.

For example, there’s the chain of shenannigans brought to us courtesy of Goldman Sachs, wherein they’re accused of capitalizing in less than forthright fashion upon markets broken by the onslaught of federal buttinskyism.

A Senate showdown has put Goldman Sachs’ defense of its conduct in the run-up to the financial crisis on display before indignant lawmakers and a national audience. Democrats hope it also builds momentum for legislation, now before the Senate, to tighten regulation of the nation’s financial system.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein testily told skeptical senators at a hearing Tuesday that clients who bought subprime mortgage securities from the Wall Street powerhouse in 2006 and 2007 came looking for risk “and that’s what they got.”

The Senate investigative panel alleges the firm bet against its clients — and the housing market — by taking short positions on mortgage securities, and failed to tell them that the securities it was selling were very high risk.

Naughty, dudes and dudettes at Goldman Sachs, if these allegations are indeed true.

One rather impissening revelation, if it is indeed a revelation, are the series of not-all-that-good accusations and the resulting investigation into my own former bank (no, I didn’t own it, per se, just had lots of money in it before it was absorbed by Chase as it began sinking to Davy Jones’ Locker).

Of course, the below ABC News account is a bit on the bursting-with-enthusiasm side of things.

In an incident that critics view as emblematic of rampant greed at Washington Mutual, a remix of that song — with the lyrics changed to “I like big bucks and I cannot lie…” — was performed at one of the company’s lavish annual retreats years before it became the largest bank to fail in U.S. history.

Every year the bank would hold huge parties in exotic locales to celebrate its mortgage originators who created the most loans — the same high-risk loans that would ultimately prove to be the company’s undoing.

At the 2006 retreat in Kauai, a group of employees performed a “tribute” to the event’s honorees. To the tune of the 1992 hit “Baby Got Back,” the employees came out on stage and started rapping, “I like big bucks and I cannot lie / You mortgage brothers can’t deny / That when the dough roles in like you’re printin’ your own cash / And you gotta make a splash / You just spends/ Like it never ends / Cuz you gotta have that big new Benz…”

At a retreat in Maui the year before, NBA Hall-of-Famer Magic Johnsonwas the emcee. “President’s Club,” Johnson told the gathering. “It’s kind of like the NBA All-Star game. Everyone there is an All-Star.”

But on Sept. 25, 2008, collapsing under the weight of these now-toxic loans, Washington Mutual — with over $300 billion in assets, $188 billion in deposits, and 43,000 employees – was seized by federal regulators and sold to JP Morgan Chase for $1.9 billion in the largest bank collapse in the country’s history.

For the past year the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Carl Levin and ranking member Tom Coburn, has been examining Washington Mutual’s collapse as part of a probe into the financial crisis.

What they have found is widespread fraud. The investigators have said that Washington Mutual engaged in fraudulent lending practices for years leading up to its demise.

I must admit that as we entered the mortgage quagmire, WaMu bank officers were being encouraged to push those loans any way they could, and one branch manager I know told me that there were generous bonuses being paid to help things along.

All the while, the bank was selling its toxic loans into the market: not only were some marred by fraudulent information, but others were ones that the bank believed would likely go bad. Still, the company did not alert the securities’ buyers about the looming problems. In fact, the bank even boosted compensation for its loan officers who sold higher-risk loans: the faster the speed and the greater the volume, the bigger the payday a loan officer would earn for the sales.

The entire article on Washington Mutual is here.

Any way you look at both sides in this, it is profoundly disconcerting.

…are in the same boat as teachers in most other states, evidently, members of a union that is just as hungry for increased dues, so as to purchase still more “stock” in the National Democratic Party, the kind price-tagged by campaign contributions.

So in Jersey, they’re on the warpath against the governor, whose tax cuts aren’t helping them feed their bottomless coffers.

… Facebook attacks really took off.

One educator, a librarian with a master’s degree, described the cuts as “rediculous.”

Another pointed out that Christie’s late mother was a member of the teachers union: “It’s not right to bite the hand that feeds you. Oh I forgot it’s Chirs Christie, He’s so large I bet he’d bite anything that’s put in front of his face!”

“Remember Pol Pot, dictator of Cambodia?” warned another. “He reigned in terror, his target was teachers and intellectuals. They were either killed or put into forced labor . . . King Kris Kristy is headed in this direction.”

It is always thus with the unions, they know we’re in a tight recession, they know the school districts are enduring massive shortfalls, so this is when they make their demands. These are not dedicated instructors of our youth, they are greedy opportunists who want to milk the budget wherever possible.

Personally, I don’t believe in teachers’ unions, just as I don’t endorse unions in any critical infrastructure.

In years gone by, every job I ever held where I worked for other people saw the same question and answer at the interview:

Interviewer — How much money are you looking for?

Me — Pay me what you think is fair, and we’ll talk again in three months.

I provided them with the opportunity to let me prove myself; If I wasn’t producing, then why should they be expected to pay me more than they were, or even keep me on the payroll? As it was, I generally ended up being either better compensated or even promoted before the three month periods had elapsed.

Why shouldn’t teachers have to do the same thing? Look at the less than satisfactory product so many of them have been putting out the last several years! Why should they automatically get uniform salary increases if they’re not successful, even, in teaching their students as well as do their colleagues in numerous third world countries?

In non-union, private sector careers, these teachers would have to demonstrate their asset value first. In the public sector, they simply assume that they’re entitled to as much of the taxpayer’s money as they can get.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that teaching is a vital profession, but I also believe in meritorious raises. I wouldn’t mind seeing a great teacher earning $100,000.00 a year, but I also can’t see one who can’t teach “earning” the same as the great teacher. Paying the successes the same as the failures is not a good precedent.

Christie’s supporters have responded with a Facebook page of their own. “Teachers need to sit down and shut up. They live in a dream world where they work 180 days a year,” it asserted. “Way overpaid to start with, they could never make it working in the real world.”

Even in these tough economic times, teachers in most New Jersey districts have continued to get annual negotiated raises - often about 4 percent - and don’t have to help pay for their health insurance.

So Christie has offered more money to districts that can get teachers unions to revise their contracts and freeze salaries for next school year -and agree to start paying 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their health insurance.

So far, teachers in only 20 of the state’s 590 school districts have agreed to any concessions.

In 2006, the last year for which data was available, New Jersey teachers made an average of $58,000. The salary, in one of the highest cost-of-living states, was fourth in the nation.

After a New Jersey teacher’s union wished Christie dead - like “my favorite singer, Michael Jackson” - the group’s president, Joe Coppola, of the Bergen County Education Association, called it a bad attempt at humor and apologized.

Christie’s people weren’t impressed. “The union is, has been, and probably always will be a bully,” the governor’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, said in an interview last week.

Some of these teachers even had their pupils march outside the schools, skipping classes, and strike for them. WTF is that!?

That, my friends, is what you get when you allow the far left into your political system.

Hat Tip James Taranto, Best of the Web Today.

Christie’s supporters have responded with a Facebook page of their own. “Teachers need to sit down and shut up. They live in a dream world where they work 180 days a year,” it asserted. “Way overpaid to start with, they could never make it working in the real world.”

Even in these tough economic times, teachers in most New Jersey districts have continued to get annual negotiated raises - often about 4 percent - and don’t have to help pay for their health insurance.

So Christie has offered more money to districts that can get teachers unions to revise their contracts and freeze salaries for next school year -and agree to start paying 1.5 percent of their salaries toward their health insurance.

…with the same kind of approach, you know, the kind that incorporates political correctness and, given the nature of our incumbent commander-in-chief, Islam-not-a-factor, even if the perpetrator, along with the evidence, was draped in the fanaticism of the militant Muslim.

The Pentagon vowed yesterday to work closer with law enforcement agencies about potential terrorist threats after a study commission criticized the military for poor coordination in the case of Army Major Nidal Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also said the Pentagon will adopt a uniform policy on personal gun ownership at military installations.

Yes, good start — first tighten the regulations for gun owners in the military, especially the white Christian ones who are staunchly patriotic and proud to be serving their country. It couldn’t be more obvious that these are the folks who’ll be committing the next terrorist action.

The policies were announced as Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, accused the Pentagon and Justice Department of stonewalling his investigation into the shooting by refusing to provide documents and witnesses.

“We have been met with much foot-dragging, very limited assistance, and changing reasons why the administration cannot provide us with the information,’’ Lieberman said. Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the panel, said they would issue subpoenas next week for FBI agents and Defense Department officials who were aware of Hasan’s contact with a radical Yemeni cleric before the shootings on Nov. 5.

The Obama junta must hate Lieberman by now. While the man’s a liberal’s liberal on most issues, he’s also an independent who’s already enjoyed a sample of the loyalty he could expect from the Communist Democratic party.

So he and Senator Collins are looking to get the facts, not the PC protectionist exclusion of reference to the actual responsible parties, who would seem to be of the Islamic “faith”.

Hasan is awaiting court martial on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He suffered gunshot wounds in the attack and remains paralyzed in jail at Bell County, Texas.

At least two of these people have come away from their episodes of applied Islam scathed, Hasan paralyzed and the underwear bomber the bearer of deep fried, human-substituted mountain oysters.

Hasan is undoubtedly expecting to spend eternity making whoopie with his earned ration of virgins, somewhere in Paradise. The fantasies of Islam, that false and utterly murderous religion, won’t likely apply in Hasan’s case, however. The terrorist will, as all his comrades, burn in hell.

An independent review of the shooting completed in January by former Army secretary Togo West Jr. and retired Admiral Vern Clark led to a critical report about lack of communication between the military and US security agencies. It included 79 recommendations to better protect against future attacks. Gates this week ordered the military to immediately adopt 26 of the changes and said he would decide on the others by June.

The Pentagon also said that it was expanding an FBI and military threat reporting system to flag suspicious incidents. The announcement added that Gates wanted to work with the FBI and to establish a database to share information.

Another change would be to implement a department wide policy on how private weapons are stored and carried on military installations.

And again: implement a department wide policy on how private weapons are stored and carried on military installations.

No, don’t even think about more carefully screening Muslims who serve in the Armed Forces, or paying closer attention to (acting on) any evidence that they may have become “radicalized”, which would make infinitely more sense but, G-d forbid, might offend them.

Just enact strict gun control regulations against those who wouldn’t think of shooting their fellow soldiers. Look at the bright side: Next time a soldier goes Islamic on his fellow servicemen, none of them will be able to produce a weapon in time to stop him from a similar butcherfest to the one Hasan put on. More infidels dead, a happier Obama Administration, right? Doesn’t matter whose side they’re on, they simply ain’t among the Faithful, so go for it…

We hear more and more about the pushing of the Value Added Tax by the kommies in our midst, who thing every working (or spending) American is a mere cash sponge to be wrung out without mercy in order to finance the ever-increasing monetary demands of a socialist country.

Recently, progressives have made noise about introducing a value-added tax (VAT) in the United States. The VAT is an indirect tax — that is, Americans wouldn’t pay the tax directly to government, but would pay it to businesses as part of the retail price of things we buy, and businesses would then remit the tax to Uncle Sam.

A VAT is set at a fixed rate — say, 10 or 15 percent — added to the price of a good at every step of production, with a deduction allowed for the amount of VAT paid during earlier stages of production. The more steps there are in transforming raw materials into complex consumer goods, the higher the resulting consumer price as a result of those multiple layers of taxation.

Many countries have VATs, including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. One might say that a VAT is an emblem signifying that a country’s government consumes a large percentage of its GDP, for VATs seem to go hand-in-hand with big-budget nanny states.

The reason for this phenomenon is simple: Any government that seeks to be all things to all people, and therefore seeks to spend ubiquitously, must inevitably seek to tax ubiquitously. Such governments have insatiable appetites for revenue. Because VATs are cash cows, diverting huge sums of money from consumers to government, they are favorites of big-spending governments.

Unfortunately, though, VATs have significant negative economic consequences.

Because they inflate consumer prices, quantities demanded fall. Most often, the marginal buyers who can no longer afford to pay the higher price are poorer citizens. When government policy raises
prices, the first victims are poor people.

The second victims of a VAT are the workers who will lose their jobs as a result of falling demand for the newly higher-priced goods.

Many affluent Americans may not curtail their consumption, but because more of their money is diverted to the government treasury, their savings must correspondingly decline. This results in decreased capital accumulation, which, in turn, slows business expansion, development, and formation. It also slows the growth rate of labor productivity, hence retarding economic progress for workers.

Read on.

These leftists, who have no respect for the Constitution nor for the intentions of our founding fathers, and who certainly despise the very principles that define the United States of America, would love to watch our nation come apart, sinking into an abyss of socialism…

…and as a bit of lagniappe, let’s finish with an excellent and unrelated column by Wesley Pruden.

…from an exercise in idiotics to another skedaddler…

First we have a little Sebeliosity, bleaching just a smidgeon more character out of our everyday lives.

Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius said today that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is developing a new regulation that would require food manufacturers to display nutritional information on the front of packages.

This would mean that the front of a Wheaties box, for example, would display not only the smiling face of a famous athlete but also declare how many calories from fat are in each serving.

We Americans are obviously pretty dumb, if after all these years we haven’t figured out where to look on the side of a box, can or package, to read the nutrition information.

That is, if we are interested in doing so.

So, to compensate for our obtusesness, the information, courtesy of our micromanaging overseers in government, will be emblazoned across the front of the package where we can’t miss it.

Yes, I did refer to character — instead of the aisles lined by colorful packaging design, we’ll see plain white rectangles of “facts & figures” as we shop.

That’s very California-like: The politicians in California love their signs, notices and warnings, as they have more micromanagerial rules and more things they feel they must caution folks about than do most entire continents.

Of course, like our federal government these days, California is also run by far left liberals.

Meanwhile, we have another felonious Constitution-violating Kongressional kriminal heading for the tall timber with the usual rat-deserting-a-sinking-ship excuse that he wants to spend more time with his family.

Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak, targeted for defeat by Tea Party activists for his crucial role in securing House approval of the health care overhaul, said Friday he would retire from Congress this year.

The nine-term congressman told The Associated Press he could have won re-election and insisted he wasn’t being chased from the race by the Tea Party Express, which is holding rallies this week in his northern Michigan district calling for his ouster. Instead, Stupak said he was tired after 18 years in office and wanted to spend more time with his family.

It seems like an awful lot of the corrupt traitors (yes, they are, as well as stone felons: Every last one of those pieces of Kommie Krap took the oath to protect and defend the Constitution, so in my book, having both violated their oaths to G-d and the American people and shit on the Law of the Land, they should be prosecuted for felonies) who violated the Constitution in order to shackle us with the onslaught of ObamaCare have suddenly developed a shared yen to change their career tracks and spend more time with the ol’ family.

Right, of course — they’ve merely sacrificed themselves for the party, and no doubt the party will take care of them, since a bribe’s a bribe, right? These toilet cakes know they’re finished among the voters in their districts, so they’re “gracefully” bowing out.

Where are tar and feathers and the noose when we need them?

…I was watching Obama Hatchetwoman Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius give her spiel on C-Span this morning and was struck by the wideness of the spectrum encompassed by Obama’s “Health” Care program.

Unsurprisingly, the thin lipped, angular featured (I don’t want to make disparaging remarks about anyone’s appearance, but she did kinda’ sorta remind me of a hatchet, come to think of it) cabinet member managed to incorporate education, “acceptable” foods, corporate salaries and a few other items in there that I simply couldn’t relate to health care, per se, but maybe that was just me.

My own impression was that she was laying the groundwork for the mega-agenda distribution of the soon-to-be voluminously increased taxes we will behold as the Obama Administration and its Pelosi led, Congressional marxist contingent do their unconstitutional best, under the blanket misnomer of “health care”, to strip us of our liberty and as much of our hard earned money as they possibly can.

…with the World Government crowd.

Interestingly, it seems to begin with the two leaders showing their disdain for one another…

France may be America’s oldest ally, but the presidents of the two countries are not exactly the best of buddies.

When President Obama visited Paris in June, he declined a dinner invitation from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, even though he had no evening plans and was staying just a few doors down from the Elysee Palace.

The brushoff followed a more substantive snubbing, when the French president turned down a U.S. request to put more troops into Afghanistan. Mr. Obama responded by sending a letter to former French President Jacques Chirac expressing his desire to “work together … to build a safer world.”

The petite but fiery Sarko was reportedly livid.

So when he arrived in the U.S. on Monday, Mr. Sarkozy went not to Washington but to New York, where he delivered a speech at Columbia University.

There, he mocked Mr. Obama’s recent health care reform victory, saying “if you want me to be really honest, when we see the U.S. debate on the health care reform from Europe, it’s difficult to believe. … Excuse me, but we’ve solved this problem more than 50 years ago.”

With the supreme dismissiveness only a Frenchman can pull off, he added: “Welcome to the club of states who don’t turn their back on the sick and the poor. … If you come to France and something happens to you, you won’t be asked for your credit card before you’re rushed to the hospital.”

When Mr. Sarkozy finally came to Washington, he stopped first at the Capitol, where he met with 2004 failed presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry. There, he pledged to help enact global taxes on countries that resist steps to fight climate change.

Emphasis mine.

Did I mention the World Government crowd?

…and then making nice for the media as all diplocrites do.

With lunch finished, it was finally time to go to the White House to meet with the U.S. president. After a private meeting in the Oval Office, the two repaired to the East Room for a joint news conference, where it was all happiness and light.

Mr. Obama welcomed “my dear friend” and proceeded to call the French president by his first name eight times. “The fact that Nicolas went to Ben’s Chili Bowl for lunch, I think, shows his discriminating palate,” he said to laughter from Mr. Sarkozy. Mr. Obama, reading from notes, praised his counterpart for his “legendary energy” before ticking off a series of issues on which the two agree.

{Truncating here}

Unlike the Obamas in Paris, the Sarkozys accepted an invitation to dine in the White House, joining the first couple in the residence for a private dinner. And the two leaders, perhaps the hatchet finally buried, left the stage together, with Mr. Obama’s arm draped around the shoulder of his smiling French counterpart.

Yes, I did mention the World Government crowd.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday praised President Obama’s health care overhaul, called his push for stricter financial regulations “great news” and, standing alongside Mr. Obama at the White House, said he hopes their administrations can team up “to go even further in regulating world capitalism.”

Mr. Sarkozy, a fierce advocate for tougher rules on global financial markets, said France will use its position next year as leader of a group of the world’s top finance ministers to push for a new economic regulatory regime.

“During the French presidency of the G-20, [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner, [French Finance Minister] Christine Lagarde are going to be working hand-in-glove in order to go even further in regulating world capitalism, and in particular, raising the issue of a new world international monetary order,” Mr. Sarkozy told French and American reporters gathered at the White House in a brief joint appearance.

For his part, Mr. Obama said world leaders must take actions to ensure that “reckless speculation or reckless risk-taking by a few big players in the financial markets will never again threaten the global economy or burden taxpayers.”

“I will continue to work with President Sarkozy and other world leaders to coordinate our efforts, because we want to make sure that whatever steps were taking, they are occurring on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Sarkozy also took a moment to tell his host “how glad” France is for the U.S. that Mr. Obama’s health-care legislation passed.

Of course he did, because now the United States will be joining France and other socialist shitholes in the slide to gross economic failure.

Meanwhile, the two weasels, along with others of their ilk to be found under the large portside stone known as the European Union, will work to force other countries’ leaders to “tow the line” in the true spirit of national sovereignty-hating globalists.

An example was set back in the late 1990s, spearheaded by Bubba Clinton and his EU and UN butt buddies: What happened to Slobodin Milosevic can happen to you.

When Sarkozy was first elected, it seemed like we had a real ally in the French president. It’s a comedown to realize that all we got was another feckless French socialist.

I’ll tell you, friends, having grown up in America in the 1950s and 1960s, I’m beginning to suspect that somewhere along the line I was somehow transported to another dimension…

…there are so many things to criticize, at least unless one is a mega-leftist wingnut, that is, where the tragedy/travesty that is today’s presidential administration and congressional majority are concerned, that there’s a veritable smorgasbord of subject material to choose from.

For example, a great post at Red State.

Yesterday the White House went bonkers when several large corporations announced via their SEC filings that they were taking about $1.5 Billion in losses this quarter because of one provision in the health care takeover bill Obama signed into law last week. The Wall Street Journal estimates Obamacare will cost the Fortune 500 some $14 Billion in this single provision.

They trotted out the hapless Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, to deny basic laws of economics and according to some reports White House aides were directly calling and berating company executives who were complying with federal law.

Henry Waxman took a brief hiatus from braiding his nose hair to announce that he would hold hearings to determine why these imbeciles had fraudulently declared Obamacare would cost them money when everyone knows it is the key to balancing the budget and retiring the national debt. According to him:

The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern. They also appear to conflict with independent analyses.

In fact, Waxman asserts that the losses run counter to a report prepared by the Business Roundtable predicting the health care takeover would reduce health insurance costs to businesses by $3,000 per person…

Read the entire post here.

The lies, misrepresentations, fabricated math and general duplicity employed by Obama and the Pelosified marxist Congress followed by a flabbergasted, “I don’t believe it! We’ll convene an investigation at once!” reaction when the bullshirt gives way to reality is almost laughable until one remembers that at the bottom line lies the future, or lack thereof, of our beloved republic.

Moving right along, as they (whoever they are) say, I just thought I’d paste in a copy of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. Give it a read, then match it up against anything Barack Hussein Obama and/or the House and Senate have thusfar passed or are preparing to legislate, remembering that the following is what you might call the Employee Handbook of U.S. Governance. If something is not included in the list below, Congress can’t (without committong a felony, as far as I’m concerned) do it:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

…I could, in any kind of conscience, leave one of my few pet peeves, that being the incompetence of the Transportation Safety Administration, by the wayside, along comes this item.

The Transportation Security Administration inadvertently revealed closely guarded secrets related to airport passenger screening practices when it posted online this spring a document as part of a contract solicitation, the agency confirmed Tuesday.

The 93-page TSA operating manual details procedures for screening passengers and checked baggage, such as technical settings used by X-ray machines and explosives detectors. It also includes pictures of credentials used by members of Congress, CIA employees and federal air marshals, and it identifies 12 countries whose passport holders are automatically subjected to added scrutiny.

TSA officials said that the manual was posted online in a redacted form on a federal procurement Web site, but that the digital redactions were inadequate. They allowed computer users to recover blacked-out passages by copying and pasting them into a new document or an e-mail.

Okayyyyy….

Yeah, I know, in the past I posted quite a bit about TSA, about their incompetence and the dangers it poses, as a result, to the millions of people who fly out of U.S. airports annually.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is not that the rank and file employees of the TSA are lazy, don’t want to do their jobs or what have you, and not even that they, themselves, are as incompetent as their agency is, as a whole.

Like any government entity, the TSA is run not by people who should be running it, ie veteran industry professionals who have been around the block a few times, but by political appointees who, despite flowery resumes of administrative excellence and vast bureaucratic experience, don’t know diddly about the hands-on aspects of that which they purport to command.

This was true at TSA’s inception, and it’s true today.

It was true under the Bush Administration and it’s true under the Obama Administration, and it’ll probably still be the same under the next administration.

Why?

Because those who run your — our — government, Democrat and Republican alike, care more about the repayment of political favors than they do about your — our — lives. Period.

Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the manual will become a textbook for those seeking to penetrate aviation security and that its leaking was serious.

“It increases the risk that terrorists will find a way through the defenses,” Baker said. “The problem is there are so many different holes that while [the TSA] can fix any one of them by changing procedures and making adjustments in the process . . . they can’t change everything about the way they operate.”

Of course there are “so many different holes” — what do you expect when you entrust policies to people who shouldn’t even be managing a security agency?

Another former DHS official, however, called the loss a public relations blunder but not a major risk, because TSA manuals are shared widely with airlines and airports and are available in the aviation community.

“While it’s certainly a type of document you would not want to be released . . . it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way,” the official said.

A “public relations blunder” is certainly of more worry to a government agency than a risk to the lives of those that depend upon them for security.

As for it’s not something a determined expert couldn’t find another way, well, to say that such a statement should earn the official who uttered it an immediate date with a firing squad would be completely accurate in my book. A dedicated security professional would be looking for methods of preventing “a determined expert” from “finding it another way”.

The “former DHS official”, in my professional estimate, is a piece of shit who has no business in the Protection Industry, not even emptying the waste baskets of the folks actively engaged in doing the job at hand. But then again, look who’s running the Department of Homeland Security — Janet Napolitano, no real, hands-on security experience, instead, an infinitely more relevant qualification, political relevance.

This is a measure of how cavalier, in the name of self and party serving politics, the government can be with the safety of we, the people, whom they are sworn to protect and defend.

Of course, there’s the usual bland, butt covering form letter style malarkey from the TSA.

“TSA takes this matter very seriously and took swift action when this was discovered. A full review is now underway,” the agency said in a statement. “TSA has many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe and to constantly adapt to evolving threats. TSA is confident that screening procedures currently in place remain strong.”

To be perfectly blunt, what’s needed is management, from top to bottom, of the Transportation Safety Administration by purely meritoriously appointed or hired, experienced security professionals who have no political or other debts to anyone in the administration or anyplace else in government.

Such people would ensure the proper training and, in effect, that those trained in each specialty area have completely absorbed all of said training before they are deployed. That these employees are properly motivated. That their supervisory personnel are both responsible people and are experts themselves at their subordinates’ duties, “been there, done that”.

The incompetence at hand, as such, makes for a rather grim joke.

Employees at the Transportation Security Administration inadvertently exposed classified information about the agency’s security procedures because, apparently, they don’t know how PDF documents work.

Read on…

No, they really don’t, these members of the current majority festering in Congress. Anytime any opportunity arises where they have the chance to sabotage our economy, our freedom of speech or our security in the name of liberal quagmirism, they’re wide awake and on it with a vengeance.

The Senate rejected a move Thursday to block the Obama administration from using ordinary federal courts to prosecute those alleged to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.

On a 54-45 vote, the Senate tabled an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have left military commissions as the only option for prosecuting Sept. 11 suspects.

All 40 Republicans supported the amendment, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and four Democrats: Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

Graham said the measure, offered as an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice Departments, was needed to head off what he said were plans by the Obama administration to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 plot to trials before civilian courts in the U.S.

Of course, we were expecting something like that, the left having discussed it for a long time, often with comparisons of the gulag and Nazi death camps when referring to the Camp Delta incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay, the feeble argument that these Butchers For Allah are mere felons, not captured prisoners in a war between civilizations we did not start, but to now see that they’ve actually done it, well, is nevertheless disconcerting.

The more sensible among our leaders, mostly Republicans, were, rightly, completely for the bill.

“These people are not criminals. They’re warriors — and they need to be dealt with in a legal system that recognizes that,” Graham said. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not rob a liquor store.”

“The attacks of 9/11 were not a crime. They were a war crime,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said.

Some Democrats flatly disagreed, arguing that military trials could play into the Al Qaeda operatives’ claims that they are fighters in a holy war against America.

“They are criminals. They committed murder,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “These are not holy warriors. They are criminals.”

Here, here!

Jim Webb, one of the few smart Democrats present:

“I have consistently argued that the appropriate venue for trying perpetrators of international terrorism who are in fact enemy combatants is a military tribunal,” Webb said. He said federal court procedures for turning over evidence to defense lawyers and for calling military and intelligence agency witnesses “could lead to the exposure of classified materials.”

My emphasis, there, and the man said a mouthful.

Regular court procedures would require the prosecution to produce evidence that might consist of disclosure of methods, means and personnel we can’t afford to have the enemy read about in the New York Times.

Then again, that precedent was already set back when the NYT was printing the details of Bush terrorist surveillance strategies, so I don’t suppose it would be anything new.

Webb also indicated he was concerned that a terror suspect sent to federal court could be released in the U.S. if he was found not guilty.

Fancy that!

The whole story is here.