You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Ethics’ tag.
A lot of Democrats, looks like. Democrats by the Numbers
A sampling:
$133,900: the amount Fannie Mae “invested” in Chris Dodd (D-CT), head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee, presumably to repel oversight of the GSE prior to its meltdown. Said meltdown helped touch off the current economic crisis. In only a few years time, Fannie also “invested” over $105,000 in then-Senator Barack Obama.
$140,000: the amount of back taxes and interest that Cabinet nominee Tom Daschle (D) was forced to cough up after the vetting process revealed significant, unexplained tax liabilities.
$800,000: the amount of “sweetheart” mortgages Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) received from Countrywide Financial, the details for which he has refused to release details despite months of promises to do so. Countrywide was once the nation’s largest mortgage lender and linked to Government-Sponsored Entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their meltdown precipitated the current financial crisis. Just days ago in Pennsylvania, Countrywide was forced to pay $150,000,000 in mortgage assistance following “a state investigation that concluded that Countrywide relaxed its underwriting standards to sell risky loans to consumers who did not understand them and could not afford them.”
$2,000,000,000: ($2 billion) the approximate amount of money that House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) is earmarking related to his son’s lobbying efforts. Craig Obey is “a top lobbyist for the nonprofit group” that would receive a roughly $2 billion component of the “Stimulus” package.
$3,700,000,000: ($3.7 billion) not to be outdone, this is the estimated value of various defense contracts awarded to a company controlled by the husband of Rep. Diane Feinstein (D-CA). Despite an obvious conflict-of-interest as “a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions to her husband’s firms .”
We need an ethics stimulus bill, quick.
My question is, which people? Apparently not the ones we voted to represent us. From The Hill via Drudge, Panel chairmen fighting mad over snubs by Pelosi
Senior House Democrats have a message for their Speaker: We’re mad as hell, and we’re only taking it this one last time.
As congressional Democrats take the lead in responding to the sinking economy, subcommittee and even some full-committee chairmen — who normally wield significant influence in writing legislation — have been forced to wait on the sidelines as monumental bills are written in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.
And that’s from Democrat members.
Why this haste?
“In this case, the stimulus package is much too important to risk slowing it up too much,” Hastings said. But in the future, he continued, “it would be better to crawl through the process and go through all the hits and misses that come with that.”
Otherwise known as the representative democratic process.
What else is Ms. Pelosi doing behind our backs? Permanently banning drilling in ANWR
I don’t see a change in tactics anytime soon, based on Congress’s past performance on trying to ramrod through comprehensive immigration reform and the expansion of SCHIP, to name a few recent examples.
Most ethical Congress ever, Ms. Pelosi? No. Closer to most tyrannical Congress ever.
H/T Gateway Pundit
ABC aired a news special Tuesday, entitled “What Would You Do?’ and, from their site, the show is about “Confronting Racism” Parts 1 and 2: Actors portraying Latino day workers elicit divisive comments, and “The Ugly Americans” Part 1: Two tacky tourists run amuck: how do the Parisians react?
Already there seems to be something a little strange about this news show. Fake day workers , who “look” Latino, elicit divisive comments? Elicit? You mean they invited racist remarks? And divisive? Didn’t they mean derogatory? And two fake “tourists” run amuck? Isn’t there a lot of phoniness associated with this “news” show?
But wait. It gets worse (or better, depending on your opinion of the media).
Via Newsbusters, ABC Special Searches for ‘Ugly Americans’; Anti-immigrant Bigotry
ABC aired an incredibly insulting and condescending hidden camera news special on Tuesday that purported to probe the hidden racism of Americans. It also featured actors hired by the network to go to France and portray “ugly Americans,” complete with a “Bush ’08” t-shirt that was derided by one German woman as similar to saying “I like Hitler.”
Um, but wouldn’t that make the German woman something of a bigot herself? Maybe they should have called that segment “Mean Europeans and Me” or “Dislike Will Find a Way.”
The “What Would You Do?” special attempted to see how real people would react to racism or over-the-top behavior. As part of the experiment, host John Quinones introduced “Bob” and “Bonnie,” actors sent to Paris to represent obnoxious U.S. citizens. Quinones began the segment by cheerfully explaining, “They’re the ugly Americans. And for more than a century, they’ve been fixtures in American literature and film.”
Justifying the U.S.-bashing piece, he added, “So, why have we brought ‘What Would You Do?’ here to Paris? Well, we all know the stereotype. The loud, clueless American, oblivious to French manners and culture, and the haughty French, who seem to relish putting them in their place.” The walking stereotypes were clearly designed to be what members of the media see as Red Staters. At one point, the very loud Bob is decked out in a Dallas Cowboys jersey.
Seems to me more like they were measuring the effectiveness of Hollywood stereotyping on the European psyche. They could have used “Clash of the Stereotypes” or “Image Wars” as subtitles.
Another segment of the show featured a fake cashier insulting a fake illegal immigrant in a deli, to see what real patrons would do. In a surprising plot twist,
Finally, 25 minutes into the special, the anchor let slip an admission that completely undermined the whole concept of the show. Regarding the experiment and whether or not people would stand up to the bigoted cashier in the deli, Quinones admitted:
QUINONES: During our experiment, a total of 88 people came into the store. 49 of them didn’t get involved at all. Nine sided with the cashier, and most of them were unabashedly forthright about their feelings. But the fact is, 30 customers stood up and spoke out in defense of the day laborers.
So, of the 39 people who got involved, 30 of them didn’t act like bigots. Instead of “What Would You Do?’ they should have named it “What Civilized People Do.”
Still, this bizarre goulash of Candid Camera and True Confessions is a form of rerun. NBC tried a similar stunt almost two years ago, that time attempting to root out (oh, excuse me, elicit) anti-Muslim bigotry in NASCAR country. Michelle Malkin was all over it.
Where, exactly, is the news value in this? Touting a show as an expose of hidden racism by using contrived situations and fake “real people” following a script is, to say the least, dishonest. Or has ABC News adopted a new guiding policy, Fake But Accurate?
What would I do, ABC? I would change the channel.
Update:
Protein Wisdom has thoughts on role reversal, and Gateway Pundit illustrates the perils of hidden cameras
I’ve seen some Demolition Man-like fantasies about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger running for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012 on the net. Maybe because the state he leads is in such good financial shape? Or maybe it’s his “Girlie Men” thing which, by the way, got him my vote for a while.
Until now, that is. Vaclav Klaus is the President of the Czech Republic, which took over the rotating Presidency of the European Union on January 1. His ideas about what the EU is for, and his outspokenness about those ideas have caused, shall we say, consternation among the career trough-feeders in Europe.
Stand aside, Governator, there’s a new Terminator on the world stage:
It is a common feeling that the Czech Republic is taking over the European Union presidency at a rather complicated moment, even though almost all “moments” can eventually be called “complicated”. We should not panic and must say No to people who – by describing the current moment as the historically unique one – want only to manipulate us.
There are, of course, highly publicised (if not over-publicised) problems. The world is in the midst of a deep financial and economic crisis. The EU has growing troubles with its increasingly visible democratic deficit and is gravely divided as regards its own institutional arrangements. The global climate is basically not changing, but global warming alarmists have succeeded in persuading politicians (and some ordinary people as well) that a doomsday is coming and on this false assumption they have tried to restrain our freedom and curtail our prosperity. The long-existing nucleus of armed conflicts accompanied by immense suffering of millions of people – in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and some African regions – does not promise any quick solution.
The economic crisis should be regarded as an unavoidable consequence and hence a “just” price we have to pay for immodest and over-confident politicians playing with the market. Their attempts to blame the market, instead of blaming themselves, are unacceptable and should be resolutely rejected. The Czech government will – hopefully – not push the world and Europe into more regulation, nationalisation, de-liberalisation and protectionism. Our historical experience gives us a very strong warning in this respect.
I do believe he just called the entire European political establishment girlie men. Delicious. There’s lots more, including this un-curlicued, Terminator-like statement of fact:
Our historical experience gives us a clear instruction: we always need more of markets and less of government intervention. We also know that government failure is more costly than market failure.
And:
The EU presidency might give us a chance to make use of some of our views to the benefit of the citizens of all EU member states. Their welfare and happiness will be maximised in a free, democratic, decentralised, open and liberalised Europe.
There’s his problem. His statements are not complicated enough. They don’t have all those twists and turns of phrase that let the speaker hide his real meaning (if any) and evade any responsibility for his own words. No wonder the European political class can’t stand him. He’s a straight-talking cowboy, and we all know that’s the ultimate insult, at least to Europeans. (Note to Europeans and American lefties: cowboys were my heroes when I was a kid and still are, and all your sneering won’t change that fact. If you’re going to bad-mouth someone, make sure your audience shares your prejudices. It works better for you that way.)
Will he make it possible for Europe say “Hasta la vista, bay-bee” to the bureaucratic sinkhole the EU has become? I don’t know, but I wish President Klaus good luck. He will certainly need it.
Thank you, Open Europe Press Summary and EU Referendum
More about this:
The Wall Street Journal agrees: A Prague Spring For Political Honesty
What’s in that $1 trillion stimulus package, really?
According to Thomas Sowell writing in Jewish World Review , it’s full of get-out-of-jail-free cards for future Congresses:
Regardless of what President Bush or Secretary of the Treasury Paulson may have had in mind when they promoted this huge bailout package, with all due respect to these gentlemen what they had in mind will not matter in the slightest after January 20th.
All that money is just a gift to the Democrats to spend in whatever ways will advance the interests of their constituents and of the Democratic Party.
It was not just a gift of money— huge though that is— it is also a gift of exemption from Republican criticism, even for the bailout of General Motors, which President Bush began, even when Congress refused to give GM the money without preconditions. It is a political get-out-of-jail-free card that can cover whatever disasters the Democrats create on their own in the years ahead.
Take that, Mr. Bipartisan Maverick John McCain! Can’t have a bigger political tent than one that includes mutually contradictory views. I guess President Bush showed him.
Will anybody draw a Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go card? If you’re a Democrat, maybe, maybe not, according to Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine.
Ah, well. With Mr. Obama as President, we’ll all get Free Parking. Does it come with valet parking?
Justbkuz 