Bydio

Imagine, if you will, what the Left would say if we took this entire document and replaced all references to “military veterans” with “Muslims”, and all references to “abortion” with “universal health care”, and then predated this DHS report to 2008, during the Bush administration. They’d be screaming about being smeared as traitors for their political beliefs, and they’d be right to do so. That’s exactly what the Obama administration and Janet Napolitano has done here.

Double Standard – Transterrestrial Musings.

Where I found the link to the DHS Report:

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/04/12/homeland-security-document-targets-most-conservatives-and-libertarians-in-the-country/

Link to the DHS Report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Environment Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”:

http://www.gordonunleashed.com/HSA%20-%20Rightwing%20Extremism%20-%2009%2004%2007.pdf

One of the offending portions:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.  It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

What most are all a-flutter over:

rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority

Which is basically the 10th Amendment of the Constitution of The united States of America.

Constitution bad. Obama GOOOOOOD. Give me bailout now.

And in a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama
nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any
lawyer in the executive branch after Sept. 11, 2001

WTF? Obama’s just doing whatever he feels like doing. You thought Bush was bad….

Solomonia, Washington Post

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a chilling article about the trillion dollars in bailout money. It is, lacking a better word, rogue — there is no real oversight committee or audit rules in place. The key watchdog roles remain unfilled.

WaPo:

In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury’s massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country’s largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.

Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

“It’s a mess,” said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. “I don’t think anyone understands right now how we’re going to do proper oversight of this thing.”

Why am I not surprised at all by this?

>

Source:
Bailout Lacks Oversight Despite Billions Pledged
Watchdog Panel Is Empty; Report Is Unfinished
Amit R. Paley
Washington Post, November 13, 2008; A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/12/AR2008111202846_pf.html

Front page article in the Washington Post today, calling attention to a highly questionable aspect of the $750 billion bailout plan: A Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks.

We learn from WaPo that the Treasury Department slipped through a $140 billion tax windfall to US banks — in theory repealing 1986 legislation, passed by Congress and signed by President Reagan.

The likely illegal change was aggressively lobbied for by banking officials, who sought to take advantage of the market turmoil and credit crisis.This is an ongoing issue we have witnessed in every prior bailout: Opportunism knows no sense of decency.

WaPo:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

“Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.”

This should come as no surprise to long-time watchers of the Bush White House. From their extra-legal signing statements (they took them seriously, but legal scholars said they had no legal standing) to the abuses at the Justice Department, there was very little respect ever paid to the US Constitution.

How typical of the rogue elements within the outgoing administration.

Look for litigation about this shortly . . .

>

Source:
A Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks
With Attention on Bailout Debate, Treasury Made Change to Tax Policy
Amit R. Paley
Washington Post, November 10, 2008; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/09/AR2008110902155.html

Just finished reading a fascinating essay by Mencius Moldbug at Unqualified Reservations. It’s long, but I think it was worth reading the whole thing. Some excerpts:

I’m not even going to start to belabor this point. Arguing that Barack Obama is not a communist is like arguing that Mitt Romney is not a Mormon. Barack Obama is a communist by birth, breeding, education, and profession. His grandparents were communists, his parents were communists, his teachers were communists, his friends are communists, his colleagues are communists, he’s a communist. Duh.

But how could America elect an obvious communist? Easy…

The election of President Obama is the ceremonial culmination of the Movement’s march to power, and it’s only slightly less surprising than the sunrise. The likes of Billy Ayers were always the elite of their generation. Even as kids, they hardly lost a battle. Now they’re in their gray-headed patriarchal prime. Why shouldn’t they run the world?

Yes, folks, it’s true: we’re all communists now.

Wait – we’re communists? How’s that possible, I don’t feel like a communist. Read on…

So why do we have nothing to fear from Barack Obama? We have nothing to fear because progressives are the government. There is no Enemy. There is just the pathetic shell of a sham opposition party, a few thousand lame hacks fleeing the White House in disarray.

If Washington had actually been in the hands of sinister, drawling Texan white supremacists, we could have a revolution. Since it wasn’t, we can’t. Isn’t that nice? I’m sorry if that’s the most comforting thought that I can produce at the moment, but I feel it’s actually rather important.

This certainly explains the behavior of the GOP and the Bush Administration better than many other theories I’ve seen floating around.

The normal American voter, today, is a communist. She is not a revolutionary communist. She is a status-quo communist. She thinks of America as a commune: a big Brook Farm, with Washington as mother and/or father, caring, sharing, providing, educating, punishing and guiding. She has stretched the mental modules which in a traditional human society would apply to her extended family, to cover the entire continent and probably the planet as well. Maybe she wants gays to be able to marry and maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she thinks taxes are too low, or too high. But that’s about the limit of her political imagination.

There is nothing surprising in this. Always and everywhere, communism is the last stage of democracy. What’s surprising is that it took 144 years for the New Deal to happen. This can be attributed to good fortune and bad organization. But happen it did, and it won’t un-happen.

Perhaps this is a tragedy. But it has its upside, which is that the US has somehow managed to pass from classical liberalism to sclerotic state socialism without stopping at Stalin. Or at Billy Ayers. The Lord looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States.

So, basically, so many of us are effectively volk-Marxists that it’s simply unexceptional. Most of us have lived under a progressive government for so long that we can’t remember what classical liberalism was like, if we ever lived under it at all. Even those of us who think we’re libertarians probably have unexamined beliefs that are “progressive”. We accept that there should be a government safety net, we just argue about the size and shape. We accept the Federal Reserve, and the FDA, and the FCC, and the FEC, and the IRS, etc. ad nauseam. I’m not saying it’s true of everyone, but it sure appears true of the overwhelming majority of voters.

The problem is: Washington is fresh out of power. It already controls everything it can possibly control. It just nationalized the financial system, and no one noticed. Why? Because a US bank in November 2008 has to comply with exactly the same ten-foot-tall stack of regulations that it had to comply with in September 2008. What difference can another love note or two from Barney Frank make?

The US Government was already guaranteeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and everyone knew it. Now it’s attempting to guarantee the value of everyone’s houses, and bail out all the big banks and I-banks, and this is normal. Expected. Still not sure if we live in a communist country?

Even in the ’60s, government proper was a tomb. The growth in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was all in the external arms: the press, the universities, the foundations and NGOs. These are all part of Washington in its broad sense – they all exist to compose or influence government policy. They are all, of course, progressive organs, aside from a few Republican and libertarian think-tanks. And all of them have reached the level of maximum organizational bloat, on the outer fringes of the red-giant state that is the Beltway. They grow, still, of course, but slowly. You can be an intern if you want. You can probably get laid. You won’t be redrawing constellations.

For the red-giant state, the only possible change is the ultimate change. The supernova. The reboot. What happened to the Soviet Union. As I keep saying, there’s no change like regime change. This is, of course, the opposite of what you voted for when you elected Obama. But perhaps, dear progressives, you’ve helped bring that moment a little closer.

This last few months has certainly had a lot of masks slipping and being torn away. It’s been made plain what the GOP is, and what the Democrats are, and what Washington is all about – for anyone interested and capable of observing carefully.

American voters are now very, very comfortable with communism. It may be possible to detach them. It may not. But flag-waving and glittering generalities certainly won’t do it. You’re trying to fight an entire educational system with slogans and 30-second TV spots. It’s like a salmon trying to jump Boulder Dam.

A dose of Obama may disenchant voters with Obama. It may even persuade them to elect another Republican. But he will be a communist Republican. Want a peek at the future? Google “David Cameron.” Want a peek at the rest of the future? Google “Leonid Brezhnev.”

Ouch.

People, Washington does not work. It never worked. We’ve just been lucky so far. (Sort of – if you don’t count the war.) But the nose is pointed at the ground, the engine is a brick, and the eject lever just came off in our hands. Luckily, we’re 35,000 feet in the air, so we have a little time to think.

We cannot rely on the profound, mystical, and deeply American wisdom of the infallible American voter. The infallible American voter just chose, as the leader of the free world, the former gofer of a murderous megalomaniac psychopath. Solely on the basis of his tawny epidermis. Fortunately, Washington is so vast and so broken, so fucked beyond all redemption, that for all its H-bombs, the gofer could indeed be a psychopath himself, and he won’t be able to hurt a fly. This is so beyond comedy that it’s gone past tragedy and back to funny again.

The only question left is: how do we land the plane? How can we rid ourselves of this ridiculous government, this political tumor from the age of powdered wigs, this city of foam colonnades and cardboard presidents, Washington, without turning North America into a smoking ruin? And what comes next?

An excellent question. Thank you, Mencius, for a most entertaining journey through a contrarian yet compelling viewpoint.

HT: American Digest