The Political Class

79% of the $2 Billion in Clean-Energy Grants have gone to foreign companies!

Take a stiff drink and sit down. We are borrowing money from the Chinese communist government so we can hand out grants to Chinese companies. Full story here.

Senate Democrats are furious that the vast majority of grants from the clean-energy program from last year’s stimulus have been awarded to foreign companies.

Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana announced Wednesday a new initiative to require the "Buy America" provision of the stimulus to all programs, not just the government ones. A study done by the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 79 percent of the $2 billion in clean-energy grants allocated since Sept. 1, 2009, has gone to foreign wind companies.

"We are demanding the Obama administration suspend this program immediately ... [and] indefinitely," Schumer said. "We are sending a letter to Secretary [Timothy] Geithner asking him to halt all payouts for this program until we in Congress can go back and fix this law."

The senators highlighted a wind farm project in west Texas, which received stimulus aid and is projected to create 3,000 jobs in China and a tenth as many in the United States.

"Some of us complained about this to the administration back in November when this project was first announced, so it's not that they don't know about it, but the Energy Department in their reply said they were powerless to stop it because projects like this are automatically eligible for the grants. That answer is not good enough," Schumer said. "The goal of the stimulus is to strengthen the American economy, and that means creating jobs here in the U.S. not in China."

I dare anyone to cover the Obama administration 24/7 for a month and not end up with a drinking problem or starting their own fight club. How else could you survive the insanity.

 

Technorati Tags: obama,china,clean energy grants

Video: Judge Andrew Napolitano on the U.S. Constitution, Patriot Act and healthcare.

 

Technorati Tags: Judge Andrew Napolitano Natural rights Patriot Act,video,patriot act,healtcare,constitution

Feinstein Seeks To Block Insurance Rate Increases Across The Nation

Full story here.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Friday that she plans to introduce legislation that would bar insurance companies from enacting health insurance premium rate increases that the Secretary of the Health and Human Services deems to be unjustified.

The bill would create a national Medical Insurance Rate Authority, which would be able to prevent such increases. Feinstein's announcement follows reports that Anthem Blue Cross had intended to jack up premiums for certain policyholders in California by as much as 39 percent.

A report published Thursday by HHS found that health insurance companies have requested dramatic premium hike increases over the past year in states beyond California -- 56 percent in Michigan, 24 percent in Connecticut and 23 percent in Maine.

Dear insurance company: If your costs are going up then tough - you can just go out of business.

Die die die,

Dianne Feinstein

 

Technorati Tags: Dianne Feinstein,insurance rates,congress

CPAC Day 2 Live Show. Live chat window included.

Live coverage of CPAC. Chat window now added.

Streaming live video by Ustream

 

Technorati Tags: cpac,live coverage,ed morrissey show,hotair

Donald Trump wants Nobel Committee to take back Prize from Al Gore

 

Technorati Tags: al gore,donald trump,nobel prize,global warming

Forced unionization - in a business run at home! Michigan takes over an at home day care.

Via BreitbartTV:

Stossel: Michelle Berry runs a day-care business out of her home in Flint, MI. She thought that she owned her own business, but Berry's been told she is now a government employee and union member. It's not voluntary. Suddenly, Berry and 40,000 other Michigan private day-care providers have learned that union dues are being taken out of the child-care subsidies the state sends them. The "union" is a creation of AFSCME, the government workers union, and the United Auto Workers.

 

 

Technorati Tags: michigan,jim stossel,forced unionization,michelle berry

Exposing The Story Behind Goldman's Record Profits - Part 2: The Role Of The Taxpayer.

Zerohedge.com is covering taxpayer money that ended up paying the bills at Goldman Sachs. Full story here.

Do Goldman employees deserve any compensation, much less the $16 billion paid out in salaries and bonuses in 2009 when one considers that the firm would not only have no money to pay, but would be defunct had the US taxpayer not stepped in and bailed them out? Should this money have been used to prepay the firm's $20 billion TLGP exposure instead, thus truly making the firm independent of taxpayer support, instead of just claims to Goldman's public funding independence? Will the wave of public anger, now that President Obama has suddenly and inexplicably done a 180 degree turn and sides with the middle-class instead of the financial executives, take Goldman down at the next black swan occurrence? Is Goldman hypocritical in claiming it did not need a bailout after it rushed to become a bank holding company? Is Goldman a doomed business model which relies solely on the existence of the "greater fool" to sell to? Will its monopolist and ever-larger dominant status result in an implosion in the financial industry (especially with the DOJ continuing to deny there is any anti-trust problem)? All these questions and more seek answers in the just released Part Two of the PBS series "Is taxpayer money behind profits at Goldman Sachs."

I'm just shocked that PBS ran this story.

Climategate Scientist admits No Global Warming in last 15 years.

 

The Daily Mail has the astonishing story. Link here.

• Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
• There has been no global warming since 1995
• Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. 

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

Waiting to see if ABC, CBS or MSNBC picks up this story and reports any part to the American public.

 

Technorati Tags: phil jones,global warming,hockey stick graph,climategate

SEC votes to require disclosure of climate change risk to investors.

No really - I'm not making this up. The Washington Post has the story here. AND they did it right before a giant snowstorm hit Washington, D.C.! The largest snowstorm since 1922!

A politically divided Securities and Exchange Commission voted on Wednesday to make clear when companies must provide information to investors about the business risks associated with climate change.

The commission, in a 3 to 2 vote, decided to require that companies disclose in their public filings the impact of climate change on their businesses -- from new regulations or legislation they may face domestically or abroad to potential changes in economic trends or physical risks to a company.

Chairman Mary L. Schapiro and the two Democrats on the commission supported the new requirements, while the two Republicans vehemently opposed them.

"I can only conclude that the purpose of this release is to place the imprimatur of the commission on the agenda of the social and environmental policy lobby, an agenda that falls outside of our expertise and beyond our fundamental mission of investor protection," Republican commissioner Kathleen L. Casey said.

Are these people freaking nuts? How could you possibly measure this - and on what timeline? More relevant though would be a rule that requires companies to calculate the risk to investors of a group of Marxist eco-fascists taking control of The United States of America.

Billzard report as of Saturday, February 6th:

Historic snowstorm rages on...

Former Senator Tom Daschle gets help as his car is stuck in the snowstorm. Video Below. Oh - using Rachel Maddow's language he is former failed presidential primary candidate.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: sec,climate change,reporting,investors

Russia urged China to dump Fannie, Freddie Bonds to create collapse. “The Russians don’t take a dump without a plan.”

Was this over the possible U.S. intervention in the dust up between Russia and Georgia at the time? Or is it something deeper? Putin is KGB and the KBG take a few shots during the Cold War at taking down the U.S. Dollar.

Sounds crazy to you? Then read the following and then read that last quote from Henry Paulson a few times. Full story here via Bloomberg.

Russia urged China to dump its Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said.

Paulson learned of the “disruptive scheme” while attending the Beijing Summer Olympics, according to his memoir, “On The Brink.”

The Russians made a “top-level approach” to the Chinese “that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the U.S. to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies,” Paulson said, referring to the acronym for government sponsored entities. The Chinese declined, he said.

Russia’s five-day war with U.S. ally Georgia started on Aug. 8, the same day as the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush during those ceremonies that “war has started,” according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman.

“The report was deeply troubling -- heavy selling could create a sudden loss of confidence in the GSEs and shake the capital markets,” Paulson wrote. “I waited till I was back home and in a secure environment to inform the president.”

And the most unsettling statement by Paulson:

Paulson said he was surprised not to have been asked about the Fannie and Freddie bonds during a trip to Moscow in June. “I was soon to learn, though, that the Russians had been doing a lot of thinking about our GSE securities,” he said of his meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Putin in the Kremlin the previous month.

Maybe the financial experts working for the Russian government were just worried about their investments in the U.S. housing market? Perhaps. I’ll end with a quote or better yet the video clip for the quote:

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: fannie mae,freddie mac,bonds,russian,china,selling,dumping,putin,henry paulson