I llinois seems bound and determined to take the title of “poster child for failed state government” away from basket cases Michigan and California. Illinois is now billions behind in paying its bills. As Comptroller David Hynes points out : “This is what the state owes right now to schools, rehabilitation centers, child care, the state university — and it’s getting worse every single day,” he says in his downtown office. Mr. Hynes shakes his head. “This is not some esoteric budget issue; we are not paying bills for absolutely essential…
MSNBC afternoon host Dylan Ratigan took to the ramparts of The Huffington Post on Thursday and urged home owners to stop paying their mortgages as a leftist protest against a government too cozy with the bankers. The title was “They Keep Stealing — Why Keep Paying?” The crisis was all Wall Street’s fault, and now they’re back to paying themselves bonuses after a federal bailout. So stop paying them. (Notice Ratigan doesn’t suggest you protest Washington and …
After Obamacare was signed into law last month several US corporations reported that the democrat’s health care bill would cost their company millions of dollars. On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks. In response, Congressional democrats announced that they would hold show trials to humiliate these US companies for the bad publicity. After several more…
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CNN’s Jack Cafferty on Monday slammed President Obama and the Democrats for their response to Arizona’s new anti-illegal immigration law. “One poll finds 70 percent of Arizona voters support this new law, so hey, maybe we better do something, too,” Cafferty sarcastically said on “The Situation Room.” “And like the lemmings they are when they smell a chance to score some political points,” he continued, “and some …
The co-founder of progressive blog The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington , has attributed the West Virginia mining disaster, along with virtually every other accident under the sun, as a direct result of small-government and corporate greed in the April 13 Huffpo column ” The West Virginia Mining Disaster and the Financial Crisis Have the Same Root Cause .” “Officials say it’s too soon to pinpoint…
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Megan McArdle has a good post on Congress’s decision to hold hearings about corporations’ disclosing their charges against earnings based on estimates of health care costs: The Democrats, however, seem to believe that Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are some sort of conspiracy against Obamacare, and all that is good and right in America. Here’s the story: one of the provisions in the new health care law forces companies to treat the current subsidies for retiree health benefits as taxable income. This strikes me as dumb policy; there’s not much point in giving someone a subsidy, and then taxing it back, unless you just like doing extra paperwork. And since the total cost of the subsidy, and any implied tax subsidy, is still less than we pay for an average Medicare Part D beneficiary, we may simply be encouraging companies to dump their retiree benefits and put everyone into Part D, costing us taxpayers extra money. But this is neither here nor there, because Congress already did it. And now a bunch of companies with generous retiree drug benefits have announced that they are taking large charges to reflect the cost of the change in the tax law. Henry Waxman thinks that’s mean, and he’s summoning the heads of those companies to Washington to explain themselves. It’s not clear what they’re supposed to explain. What they did is required by GAAP. And I’ve watched congressional hearings. There’s no chance that four CEO’s are going to explain the accounting code to the fine folks in Congress; explaining how to boil water would challenge the format. Fair enough. But I’ll bet that there will both a few moments of effective Congressional demagoguing and a few moments when the corporate officials are successful in depicting that the hearings are a farce and that corporate accounting is a lot more sensible than government accounting. Why bring in these corporate officials and ask them questions, when the members of Congress must know they won’t like some of the answers? I think the real reason for announcing the hearings is to intimidate other firms who have not yet taken a charge-off to get them to make only a small one — or none at all. These hearings, coupled with the phone calls from the White House complaining to the corporations about their disclosures, seem part of an effort to remind corporate America that their actions are not viewed positively by those who write and enforce the laws. It’s not a threat, just a reminder . . . . UPDATE: For some reason, the words of the eminent journalist Kent Brockman come to mind : “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” Copyright © 2010 This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright. (Digital Fingerprint: )
In response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, some Democrats are supporting legislation that would force CEOs to appear on-camera to endorse the political ads their corporations sponsor. The proposal, unveiled today by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), would have CEOs appear as political candidates now do in ads run on their behalf, telling viewers “I’m X and I approved this message.” The bill would also require that ads with opposing viewpoints get the cheapest possible ad rate to respond to corporate and union-financed ads
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Great news, but these guys were a little late in realizing that Obama wants to destroy all their corporations and confiscate their money. Not quite sure how they missed that. Just two years after Mr
It figures. When Obama attacked the Supreme Court at his hyper-partisan State of the Union address he relied on an old Jim Crow law to make his point. Justice Clarence Thomas was not amused. Rhymes With Right has the details: Justice Clarence Thomas is regularly attacked and denigrated by left-wingers who struggle with the notion that there can be an intelligent, educated black man who is capable of thinking for himself.
I thought only the Human Rights Commission people were dumb enough to make their lifestyle issue out to be the biggest thing since Selma. But now, Free Press is doing the same thing with Net Neutrality. And I know it says it’s the “blogger” section, but this blogger is Free Press Outreach Coordinator Jordan Berg, not some troublemaker off the virtual street. But he seriously wrote last week: As we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy – which was created and pushed by youth to inspire future generations to work toward equality – we must remember their message: It is not enough to work for change; we need the means to inspire that change. A generation ago, young people across the country organized to give us a day dedicated to that message. Today our fight for justice and racial equality is also about control of the Internet: Will it belong to us or to the corporations? It marks Berg and Free Press as unserious even to make the mere juxtaposition of Net Neutrality with the fight against the former Confederacy’s Jim Crow adminstered by 80 years of one-party Democrat rule (which for today’s generations too young to remember, was comparable with South Africa’s Apartheid administered by 50 years of one-party National Party rule).
