Federal bailouts: $267 billion, counting

Should workout real good for Congress and the lobbyist.

Wonder if will be scandal proof ?

The crooks who perpetrated this economic disaster should be charged with treason. ..........

http://thefiresidepost.com/2009/01/08/bernie-madoff-traitor-turncoat-judas-treason/

Funny how Republicans have mysteriously morphed into deficit hawks now that someone is talking about spending money on people who work for it (the middle class).

Where were all of these "conservative" Republicans tearing their hair out over the billions spent on Wall Street or on an unnecessary war in Iraq? That's right, they were cheerleading FOR it.

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Posted by: Slinky | January 8, 2009 3:07 PM
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What you have said is false. Republican voters (as opposed to politicians corrupted by Washington) have always been deficit hawks. It is precisely because of this disparity that Republican voters have withdrawn much of their support for Republican incumbents.
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Furthermore, Republican voters, by and large, opposed the Wall Street Bailout. In fact, the greatest support for the Wall Street Bailout came from Democrats in Congress. More congressional Democrats voted in favor of the Bailout than against it. The largest opposition to the Wall Street Bailout came from Republicans. More Republicans voted against it that Democrats.
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As far as the War in Iraq goes, the Democrats have been just as culpable as anyone in continuing to keep that war going. For the last two (2) years, Democrats have held a majority in both houses. The President has made approximately two requests in each of those years for more funds to keep the war going. Had all the Democrats voted against further spending on any one of these occasions, our participation in that war would have come to an end. Yet, the Democrats only provided token resistance by adding “time-tables for withdraw” that always ended up getting vetoed. After the vetoes, they simply rolled over and voted to provide the money needed to keep the war going. So don’t tell us about cheerleaders for the war. There were plenty of them with Ds in front of their names.

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Posted by: Slinky | January 8, 2009 3:07 PM
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What you have said is false. Republican voters (as opposed to politicians corrupted by Washington) have always been deficit hawks. It is precisely because of the disparity between voters and politicians that Republican voters have withdrawn much of their support for Republican incumbents.
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Furthermore, Republican voters, by and large, opposed the Wall Street Bailout. In fact, the greatest support for the Wall Street Bailout came from Democrats in Congress. More congressional Democrats voted in favor of the Bailout than against it. The largest opposition to the Wall Street Bailout came from Republicans. More Republicans voted against it that Democrats.
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As far as the War in Iraq goes, the Democrats have been just as culpable as anyone in continuing to keep that war going. For the last two (2) years, Democrats have held a majority in both houses. The President has made approximately two requests in each of those years for more funds to keep the war going. Had all the Democrats voted against further spending on any one of these occasions, our participation in that war would have come to an end. Yet, the Democrats only provided token resistance by adding stuff like “time-tables for withdraw” that always ended up getting vetoed. After the vetoes, they simply rolled over and voted to provide the money needed to keep the war going. So don’t tell us about cheerleaders for the war. There were plenty of them with Ds in front of their names.

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Posted by: John W. | January 8, 2009 4:25 PM
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Elections have consequences. The American people have spoken loud and clear the last two elections and despite your fantasy, they aren't clamoring for more and better conservative Republican leadership, in fact it's just the opposite.

See ya in eight years when you can see if you can fool the American public with your "drown govt in a bathtub" voodoo economics again...but I doubt it.

This whole process stinks out loud! Let's not rush into anything. It seems to me everyone should be thinking of the old adage"Act in haste and repent in leisure". The government is responsible for this mess and I am not sure there is anyone in Congress capable enough to fix the damage. It's like let's throw money at it and that will fix everything,Here's hoping they think long and hard before giving taxpayer money away. They certainly dropped the ball on the bank bailout.

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Posted by: Bubby | January 8, 2009 4:51 PM
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Bubby (aka JohnEEE-Boy),
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Your post in response to mine is entirely non-responsive and irrelevant - which I suppose is about par for the course. The poster who goes by the name Slinky (which is probably just one more of your pseudonyms) tried to suggest that no Republicans are deficit hawks and that the Wall Street Bailout was the entire fault of the Republicans. “Slinky” also suggested that the war in Iraq is entirely the fault of Republicans too. I responded to each of these claims. If you wanted to be relevant, you should have responded to what I wrote. Instead you come out with your canned reply that I am going to be marginalized because of my political views. You are not going to silence the voices of conservatives through such ham handed methods. Give up now.
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As far as future elections are concerned, we will talk about what “the People” want in another four years, not eight. I think your suggestion of eight years is just a little too optimistic. Just remember how Carter went down the tubes in less than four years even though he, too, was elected on a platform of change and cleaning up after an unpopular Republican administration. Obama hasn’t been president for one second yet. He still has to perform positively in a manner that Carter didn’t (and couldn’t) if he expects to get elected for a second term. Time will tell. We will see.

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Posted by: John W. | January 8, 2009 4:25 PM
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You act like everyone should just forget the last eight years of Bush/Republican incompetence. Bush and the Republican leadership trumped up intelligence to get the Dem votes to invade Iraq and after that Dems were forced to vote for Iraq spending bills or they were accused by GOPer's of not supporting the troops.

It must be frustrating for "conservative" Republicans like you today. After years of success your propaganda machine has been derailed and put out of business for good.

Good night and good luck....because you're going to need alot of luck to rebuild the stinking pile of failure that is today's GOP.

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Posted by: Ybbub | January 8, 2009 11:16 PM
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JohnEEE-Boy,
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Far be it from me to forget the past eight years of Bush’s tenure in office. It offers too many lessons for anyone to forget about it.
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The last eight years demonstrate just how bad “big government” can get. George Bush entirely abandoned the “small government” and “fiscal responsibility” ideals of the Republican Party (along with too many other Republican politicians) and used the “big government” machinery of Washington to promote his neo-con agendum. It is this kind of misuse, along with its utter inefficiency and wastefulness, which make the currently popular big government model a bad one. Keeping government small is the only way to insure that George W. Bush style governments don’t happen again. Distributing and diffusing power, as opposed to concentrating it in a central location, is necessary to keep tyrants from becoming dangerous.
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Bush’s two terms in office also demonstrate just how easily a party can get hijacked by a radical element because the voting public is too ignorant to know the difference. I honestly believe that too many Republican voters don’t understand why they are Republicans aside from some instinctive sense that they don’t like this or that policy of the Democratic Party. Put a gun to their head (figuratively speaking only) and they couldn’t tell you much about the Republican Party platform over the past thirty years - except maybe mumbling something about being anti-communist, anti-taxation/spending, or promoting good conservative social, “family values” (and, of course, not going along with “those people” in the Democratic Party, especially with regard to their “tax and spend” ways.) Of course, it’s hard for one to know what one is supposed to think when one doesn’t know where they have come from. Too many people (regardless of party affiliation) are deficient in their education when it comes to the history and traditions of American government and its foundations. Given all of the above, it shouldn’t be hard to believe that a large faction of the Republican Party voted for George W. Bush, while simply not knowing how much they would have disagreed with his ideas had they known them. Bush, after all, didn’t come out and tell everyone that his neo-con ideas included maintaining a large government welfare state without any fiscal discipline, an aggressive Wilsonian foreign policy, or even that he would have resorted to police-state tactics under the pretext of waging a war. Most Republicans (at least those that I know) would never have voted for him even in the primaries had they known what he was really all about. They acted on trust, and their trust was abused.
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As to the issue of Democrat responsibility for the war, I must disagree with you. Barack Obama was correct on this point: The war was a stupid idea even if one assumed the correctness of the so-called “trumped up” intelligence reports. The Iraqi people had spent the better part of thirty years taking down an Arabic monarchy set up by the British in the twenties and thirties - just because they viewed it as imposed upon them from the west. No one in their right mind could have believed they would welcome another western occupation. Furthermore, an intelligent person would have realized that taking down Saddam Hussein would result in a power vacuum for which there could be no satisfactory compensation. It was, for instance, only because of Saddam Hussein that Iran was kept in check. Saddam Hussein also suppressed internecine fighting between Sunni and Shia factions. More to the point, there was nothing to suggest that we couldn’t have contained Saddam without invading, or that he posed any imminent threat to us or any of our legitimate interests in the world. He did not have the means of delivering WMDs even if he had them. These facts were known, or should have been known, by Democrat and Republican politicians notwithstanding the Bush Administration’s claims of WMDs. Thus, all who voted for the use of force in Iraq, voted foolishly.
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Nor can I accept the rhetoric that the Democrats in Congress were kept hostage by the threat of being exposed as “not supporting the troops” if they failed to keep funding for the war. Everybody knew that Bush would have had enough money to wage the war for another half year before bringing the troops home in an orderly fashion if Congress forced his hand by defunding the war. Those that didn’t know could have been informed of that fact. It’s not as though the Democrats are lacking in loyal news media outlets in sufficient numbers. Furthermore, Democrats swept the 2006 mid-term elections largely because the public didn’t like Bush’s handling of the war. Thus, it is not as though there wasn’t enough public support for the Democrats had they decided to pull the plug. What we have seen, instead, is purely a failure of will on the part of the Democrats. Thus, they are just as responsible as anyone for putting U.S. troops in Iraq and keeping them there.

TARP, TARP, TARP
(From William Shakespere's Macbeth)
WilliamBanzai7

TARP, and TARP, and TARP,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded waste;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to financial ruin. Out, out, brief bailout candle!
Paulsen's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
sold by a panicked idiot, full of sound and fury,
In the end signifying nothing.