VP Dick Cheney Offers Democrat Patrick Leahy Good Advice

Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy in the 2018 Senate Supreme Court nomination hearings has retained his reputation as a royal pain in the ass to others around him. This is a well deserved recognition by fellow senators too.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2004 Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

There is no rule against obscene language by a vice president on the Senate floor. The senators were present for a group picture and not in session, so Rule 19 of the Senate rules -- which prohibits vulgar statements "unbecoming a senator" -- does not apply, according to a Senate official. Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

Michelle Swears in the Oath Ignorant of the Facts

On 18 June 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama attended a ceremony at the National Archives rotunda in Washington, D.C., in which 51 foreign-born immigrants were sworn in as American citizens:

“It’s amazing that just a few feet from here where I’m standing are the signatures of the 56 Founders who put their names on a Declaration that changed the course of history. And like the 50 of you, none of them were born American — they became American."

In Michelle's remarks she noted that the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence — like current immigrants to the U.S. — became Americans rather than being born Americans.

What the First Lady was communicating on this occasion was that the Founding Fathers were not born into a fully formed and established America with its own history, customs, culture, and values, as modern American children are; they were born into a very different world as British subjects in a colonial empire, and they chose to seek new opportunities and lives for themselves - just as modern immigrants born outside America choose to transform their worlds by opting to leave their homelands for the United States and seek new lives through becoming Americans.

                                                                                                                                

So there's the history rewrite: the founding fathers actually are not like today's modern immigrants as they had transformed their world into something distinctive through the establishment of a new nation that made them quite different from any immigrants who followed them later--they established American freedoms that others later were seeking, a Constitutional freedom that the rest of the world has never been offered or ever had in history. 

  

In a strictly literal sense none of the Founding Fathers was born in the United States of America, because that country did not exist until they brought it into being through their efforts. It is true that many of the Founding Fathers were born in the original thirteen British colonies that later became the United States of America after those colonies jointly declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776. Michelle Obama’s remarks did not, however, as implied in the example quoted above, express her ignorance of that fact. 

Michelle Obama turned a flag-waving swearing-in ceremony for 50 new American citizens into a platform to call for action on the long-bogged-down issue of immigration reforms by the Obama administration. 

Who were the 56 signators of the Declaration of Independence?

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two Lost their sons in the revolutionary army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the revolutionary war.

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners who were men of means and educated. They signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.

Dodd-Frank Bank Bill - 5 Yrs Later

This article is for those readers who enjoy "getting into the weeds." [The origin of this phrase comes from harvesting when your machine or tool is going closer to the ground than necessary to get most of the grain and is picking up weeds along with the crop.]

The stark reality: Dodd-Frank Banking Rules mandate over-regulation so Bank loans will be harder to qualify for and get due to limited funds as bigger Federal deposit reserves are required to cover debt values making even less money to loan to borrowers. 

More than 90% of the electorate does not understand this Banking Bill--a ten second commercial sound bite at election time tells them all what they know--sadly, many eyes glaze over to let politicians think for them!

Grand Central: Dodd-Frank at Five Years, No Victory Laps Please

Senators Christopher Dodd (D - CT) & Barney Frank (D - MA)-By Jon Hilsenrath - Wall Street Journal

Tuesday [July 21, 2015] marks the five-year anniversary of passage of the Dodd-Frank law that overhauled U.S. financial sector regulation. Let the debate now resume about whether the law has made the U.S. financial system safer.

Barney Frank, the former congressman who co-authored the bill, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that it certainly did; a successor as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Tex., says in the WSJ it certainly did not.

In important ways, the financial sector clearly looks in less peril today than it was a few years ago. Financial sector debt has declined from 120% of total U.S. economic output in early 2009 to less than 80% in the fourth quarter, the lowest level in 15 years. Less debt in the financial sector makes the system’s edifice more stable. Banks, brokers, hedge funds, money market funds and others are less prone to panic selling when a shock hits asset values. They’ve got more capital to fall back on when losses hit.

Does Dodd-Frank deserve credit for this development? Not all of it. Much of this decline in financial sector debt took place before Dodd-Frank was enacted in July 2010 and even more of it took place before the law’s major provisions were implemented by regulators.  Banks and others reduced debt because the financial crisis scared them so badly.

The law can’t take full credit for some other important developments that have taken place in the regulatory arena. Federal Reserve officials have regularly described the central bank’s annual stress tests of large financial institutions as its key innovation of the post-crisis era. These annual exams – in which regulators imagine bad scenarios for the economy and financial system and ask banks to show how they would manage these scenarios – were an outgrowth of the government’s 2009 Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, developed during the crisis and preceding Dodd-Frank.

In many other respects, questions still loom over the nation’s financial architecture. The risk of some future financial asset bubble haunts policy makers. Fed officials, for instance, are getting agitated about soaring prices in the commercial real estate sector. Economists haven’t come up with a clear diagnosis of whether low interest rates caused the last bubble; they thus can’t describe what risks lurk behind the present state of even lower rates.

Nor have regulators gotten around to fundamentally restructuring the system of housing finance – notably Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which was behind the last crisis. The regulatory system that emerged from Dodd-Frank, moreover, remains highly balkanized, a regret Mr. Frank acknowledged in his interview with the WSJ. The law created new institutions, such as the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, without consolidating old ones like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

This thickening soup of regulatory agencies is one reason why so many Dodd-Frank rules are taking so long to get written. As this WSJ graphic shows, regulators have missed deadlines on 79 rules that were supposed to be done by now.

Is the financial system safer? By some measures yes. But Wall Street executives and the regulators who oversaw them were – for the most part – highly confident it was safe in 2005 as well. It turned out to be on a precipice. Five years after Dodd-Frank, these players are all best served if they avoid taking victory laps.

Obama Economy Failure Exposed in Pictures

This is a montage of pictures of the Depression Era, 1935-39, 80 years ago. I bring up the age of the pictures because generations that follow do depend upon those before them to honestly tell what they are about. In this case, "Pictures do speak a thousand words." so not much more needs to be told; that said, I find our current President always waffling history facts and fabricating stories to suit his false, deceptive narratives to further his socialist agenda.

Many times during the past six and a half years which now is almost at the end of the Obama second term, Obama still complains things are still so bad. It's been since G.W. Bush's term as he has been trying his best to bring the United States out of that economic ditch. Well maybe he should see where we were as a nation way before under FDR, another Progressive Democrat. Yeah, Obama is right, with all his record IRS taxes collected, the highest in history, they have not helped to stem the flow of U.S. Federal spending programs yet!--it's hard to fill a hole if you keep digging it deeper--approaching $20 Trillion U.S. Debt and counting.

Do you remember these scenes during the Bush years?

Take a real look at an American family eating in 1940 New Mexico. The Depression is still not over yet as they hungrily devour Karo shortening laden flour biscuits with gravy, garden grown pickle relish or hot green peppers, creamed corn, okra gumbo and fresh milk.

OMG!...Where are these people's iPhones, flat screen TVs, Xbox game controllers, air conditioners and heaters, bottled water and SNAP EBT cards (Federal Food Stamp Cards)?--things must have been really tough back then!

President Lyndon B. Johnson 1964 Legacy to Obama

President Barack Obama will attend a major summit on Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy at the LBJ Library in Austin on April 10, 2014 the White House confirmed. Obama will deliver a keynote address on the final day of the three-day summit, following presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton on the two previous days. George W. Bush is tentatively scheduled to speak on April 10 as well.

Summit organizers said. “On Thursday, April 10th, President Obama and First Lady will travel to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, to deliver remarks at a Civil Rights Summit to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act,” a White House statement said. “Further details about the President and First Lady’s travel to Texas will be made available in the coming days.”

As President Ronald Reagan said, "No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!" 

How true about LBJ's 1965 "Great Society" Agenda!

This legacy goes back fifty years to the passage of "The Great Society" Bill enacted in 1965 by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, a 'good ole boy Southern Democrat' known for his racially bigotted comments and ways. 

The oft quoted "I'll have niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years" -- in the biography, "LBJ", Inside the White House by Ronald Kessler. The quote is attributed to Robert M. MacMillan, a steward aboard Air Force One Jet.

"[LBJ] called me 'boy,' 'nigger,' or 'chief,' never by my name... Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me 'a lazy good for nothing nigger'...I was afraid of him because of the pain and humiliation he could inflict at a moment's notice." -- Robert Parker, LBJ's chauffeur, in his autobiography, "Capital Hill in Black and White".

The Democrat party historically was always actively promoting laws that supported racial segregation and had several Ku Klux Klansmen such as: Democrat Senators Robert Byrd, Senator Al Gore Sr., Democrat President Harry S. Truman, Democrat Governors Strohm Thurmond filibustered against civil rights in 1957 and George Wallace blocked black students entry into segregated schools in 1957. As a side note, as a Democrat Senator, JFK himself voted against the 1957 civil rights act too.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was the former longtime U.S. Senate Democrat Majority Whip who was boorish, bullying, boastful and politically savy. Lyndon literally 'white-washed' the Democrat Party past history as he used black voters for pawn pieces on his Washington, D.C. chess board to win their support for his 1964 Presidential race and bragged that his Democrat voter legacy legislation, the 1965 'Great Society' Bill, would last, "for the next 200 years." ~ his own personal bigotry certainly remained. The 1964 'Civil Rights Act' provided the political cache' to win the 1964 Presidential election with a Democrat Majority Congress that enabled LBJ to submit eighty-seven bills to Congress, and Johnson signed eighty-four, or 96% into law for the 1965 'Great Society' Bill's agenda on his 'War on Poverty.'

What has happened to the core of black America since the 1965 'Great Society', the largest reform agenda passed since Roosevelt's New Deal, with a set of domestic programs: Operation Headstart, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, an act for higher education and jobs Corps?

All their families have been destroyed:

In 1950, 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father. By 2010 that had increased to 50 percent. 

In 1965, only eight percent of childbirths in the Black community occurred out-of-wedlock. In 2010 that figure was 41 percent; and today, the out-of-wedlock childbirth in the Black community sits at an astonishing 72 percent. 

The number of African-American women married and living with their spouse was recorded as 53 percent in 1950. By 2010, it had dropped to 25 percent.

President Johnson's legacy to Obama is a multi-billion dollar debacle of the largest proportion of waste to the wealth and people of the United States. Obama has learned nothing from his legacy and continues on with the Liberal, Progressive Democrat out-of-control programs bent on destroying the economy and country.