Tim Pawlenty, who is so certain that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-handedly caused the 2008 financial crisis, hired one of their top lobbyists of the last decade to be one of his campaign co-chairs.
Pawlenty has suggested that blame for the financial crisis rests only with the "catastrophic scandal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," the two government sponsored mortgage giants. But for all his bluster about Freddie Mac, which required a massive bailout in 2008, Pawlenty had no problem making Freddie's top government enabler a leader in his presidential campaign.
When he announced his campaign, Pawlenty tapped William Strong, a vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Vin Weber, a veteran K Street lobbyist, as his campaign co-chairs. And Weber is not just any corporate lobbyist.
According to a review by ThinkProgress, Weber represented Freddie Mac for an entire decade, from 1998 to 2008. The partnership between Freddie Mac and Weber ended in 2008 when, as part of the government bailout deal, Freddie Mac was barred from hiring lobbyists. For some of the period Weber represented the company, his firm was paid as much as $360,000 a year to lobby for Freddie Mac. As reports from the AP and MinnPost.com from 2008 reveal, Weber helped create the "catastrophic scandal" his boss Pawlenty now laments.
Well that's brilliant.
If Tim Pawlenty believes that blame for the 2008 financial crisis rests solely with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, why would he hire someone who lobbied for Fannie and Freddie for the entire duration of the run-up to the financial crisis?
Isn't hiring a lobbyist as your campaign co-chair, a lobbyist who was let go from his former employer only after the government barred Fannie and Freddie from hiring lobbyists, a little counterproductive if you're trying to make a "blame the government" argument?
Are there any serious Republican candidates out there?
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Skippy's environmental news stories Sunday.
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Taibbi: Greed, Excess and America's Gaping Class Divide
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If you think your local Andy Griffith is a greedy pig because he retired in his forties and built an addition to his garage with your tax money, try hanging out with a guy who eats $400 crabs, throws himself $5 million parties where he is serenaded by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle (who sang "Happy Birthday"), and then compares the president to Hitler when word leaks out that he might have to pay taxes at the same rate as a firefighter or a kindergarten teacher.
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If this story turns out to be true, Murdoch's News Corp could have some very serious legal problems. David Beckham is also claiming that he was a victim of the hacking and remember that he did live in the US while playing soccer for the LA Galaxy. News Corp apologists need to wake up and accept that there is enough smoke to warrant an investigation.
The hits just keep on coming: The commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police Services, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned his post on Sunday just hours after his officers arrested Rebekah Brooks, the former chief of Rupert Murdoch's media operations in Britain, as damage from a phone-hacking scandal moved to the highest levels of British public life.
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As you read this, rich and powerful people in Washington, DC are trying to determine not whether they should cut programs designed to help low and middle-income Americans, but by how much they should cut those programs. The rich and powerful people in DC are making these cuts in order to pay for tax breaks they recently gave to rich people and large corporations. Additionally, the cuts are being made at the behest of the lobby organizations and media operations owned by rich people and large corporations.
If that isn't a class war, I don't know what is. For the past 40 years, the outcomes of the political battles in this war have almost always approximated the forthcoming debt ceiling deal. Stuff for low and middle-income people gets cut. Stuff for big corporations and the wealthy gets protected.
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Funny how electing a constitutional law professor as president has led to the rule of law at Guantanamo getting worse.
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The republican Swiftboating of Romney is going to be really, really ugly, based on this opening salvo. "The Republican Party has not outwardly embraced any of its official candidates for the 2012 presidential race warmly, leaving many outside characters to threaten a run themselves. In a discussion on the possible run of Texas governor Rick Perry, the cast of Fox & Friends speculated this morning that he had a strong chance of raising big money among Christians, as the current presumptive frontrunner, Mitt Romney, is "obviously not a Christian.""
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Scarah Palin's documentary is a flop, but nevertheless, Fox News is touting the opening as a smash hit, leading their "Fox Nation" website with the following:
The Fox Nation piece, which purports to be about the film's opening weekend, leads with a quote from an article that appeared before the movie premiered. It avoids all mention of actual ticket sales. The movie currently garners a zero percent positive rating by the movie review aggregation site Rottentomatoes.com.
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A new CBS News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans disapprove of the way congressional Republicans have handled debt limit negotiations, while only 21 percent approve of the GOP's "intransigent resistance to raising taxes." More than half of Republican respondents disapproved of the way their party has handled the talks.
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The intense heat wave across the country spurred Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to call for a statewide day of prayer for divine intervention. "I think if we have a lot of people praying, it moves the heart of God," Fallin said.
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Freedom is only free when it's used to oppress others
Herman Cain: First Amendment Says Muslims Not Allowed To Build Mosques
According to Herman Cain's latest terrorismism reports from Tennessee, he can safely tell us that whatever the Mooslims over there are up to these days, it is "not innocent." Tennessee is practically Afghanistan, is how bad things have gotten, which means that it is full of poor, mostly illiterate people ruled by intolerant religious fanatics and opium meth addiction. So because of this, the jihadists hiding out there want to build another mosque, a request legally known as "rape of the First Amendment," because free exercise of religion is magically its total opposite whenever a Muslim practices it.
What exactly is it that the terrorists want? A mosque, they just want to build a mosque, known in English as a "church." For worshipping, on their own, their own religion, which is unlike running for office and trying to write legislation in a number of ways. Herman Cain can't tell those ways apart.
Here he is blathering incoherently on Chris Wallace's Fox News Sunday morning show:
"Our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state," Cain explained. "Islam combines church and state. They are using the church part of our First Amendment to infuse their mosque in that community and people in the community do not like it, they disagree with it. Sharia law is what they are trying to infuse… What I am saying is American laws in American courts."
"Couldn't any community then say we don't want a mosque in our community?" Wallace asked.
"They could say that," Cain admitted. "They are objecting to the fact that Islam is both a religion and set of laws, Sharia law. That is the difference between any one of our other traditional religions where it's just about religious purposes. The people in the community know best. I happen to side with the people in the community."
Yes, silly Islam with all its "laws," they should just have something more like the Bible, that book about dinosaurs. [RawStory]
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(Reuters) - BP reported yet another pipeline leak at its Alaskan oilfields, frustrating the oil giant's attempts to rebuild its reputation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
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Teabagger favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Sunday dismissed calls for Congress to hold hearings to find out if Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. had broken U.S. law by hacking phones or bribing police.
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