A virtually unanimous and bipartisan Alaska Senate this week found the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, Todd Palin, and nine state employees, including top Palin aides, in contempt for ignoring subpoenas to testify in the Troopergate investigation. Only one Republican voted against the measure.
The Senate vote is a direct contradiction to Palin’s argument that her staff cooperated and acted appropriately in the matter. However, the Senate voted not to seek punishment in the matter.
The 10 people cited in the resolution are Todd Palin; Sarah Palin’s Chief of Staff Mike Nizich; Deputy Chief of Staff Randy Ruaro; special assistant Ivy Frye; Department of Administration Commissioner Annette Kreitzer; Department of Administration employees Dianne Kiesel, Nicki Neal and Brad Thompson; Kris Perry, the director of the Palin’s Anchorage office; and the governor’s scheduler, Janice Mason.
The legislative special counsel, Stephen Branchflower, previously found that Palin had abused her office in the scandal.
For the full story, click here
Russia rattles sabres in Obama’s direction
By Quentin Peel
Published: February 6 2009
Russia may face a grim economic downturn but one would scarcely think so to judge by the sound of sabre-rattling emerging from the Kremlin. Unless, of course, it is intended as a domestic distraction from the gathering gloom.
The double-act of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin has come up with a series of security initiatives that seem designed to provoke the new administration in Washington.
Without even waiting to hear how President Barack Obama intends to conduct his relations with Moscow – something that Joe Biden, his vice-president, may well address on Saturday at the annual Munich Security Conference – the Russian leaders have thrown down the gauntlet.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85fd2362-f46e-11dd-8e76-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
bacon
bacon goes good with that
Then it’s outside for Buddha, little trollseys! Yard work calls.
mmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . I need to make pancakes.
Bron98:
NO!
Now move along little one.
buddha,mespo, mikea,mikes
may i have permission to copy some of your replies and post them to a blog i belong to? i will note your screen names and the turley blog
Reporter restrained after Panetta hearing
February 06, 2009
Categories: White House
Reporter restrained after Panetta hearing
Following Leon Panetta’s confirmation hearing Thursday, several reporters approached the CIA director-designate in the hallway outside room G-50 in the Dirksen Building.
There, CongressDaily reporter Chris Strohm — upon asking a question — was physically restrained by a man who accompanied Panetta at hearings both days.
Strohm, when reached by phone Friday, said he was unsure of the man’s role.
“I felt this hand grab my right arm and push me aside,” Strohm said.
Tim Starks, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, said he witnessed Strohm approach Panetta and ask a question, just before the man began “grabbing him by the arm and moving him away.”
“I said to the guy, ‘That’s not the way you do it,’” recalled Starks.
Starks said that he’s covered the CIA for years and had never seen a reporter strong-armed that way before, adding that the agency is typically respectful of journalists.
WELL, WELL, WELL, AND SO IT STARTS.
My but the trolls are foaming at the mouth this morning.
How completely and utterly satisfying. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
We can thank former Sen. Tom Daschle for illustrating why his Democratic colleagues in Congress thinks there is a vast pool in America of untaxed income – the so-called “tax gap” between what is reported to the IRS and what taxpayers really owe.
Daschle’s fellow Democrats clearly believe ordinary people share former Sen. Daschle’s miserable sense of ethics and need to be jailed, but Daschle get’s a handshake and a lecture – not to be so blatant about it next time.
TURLEY I am challenging you on this.
You and your little band here apparently believe that a state legislature can at will Subpeona a sitting Governor, her husband, and staff, but the Governor has zero power to do the same to the State legislature.
I rather doubt if anybody in the US Supreme Court would call that equal but separate powers.
Morons.
Obama’s Energy Savings Estimate Are Skewed
By BERNIE BECKER
New York Times
Published: February 6, 2009
WASHINGTON — When he ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to set new, mandatory efficiency standards for a variety of household appliances, President Obama projected how much electricity would be saved.
“We’ll save through these simple steps over the next 30 years the amount of energy produced over a two-year period by all the coal-fired power plants in America,” Mr. Obama said.
But audits of a prominent 17-year-old program, Energy Star, to conserve electricity used in consumer goods, a voluntary effort called Energy Star, have found that such estimates, however rosy, are not accurate.
According to the E.P.A.’s office of inspector general, which has released two reports on the program in the last 18 months, those estimates are misleading, and safeguards to protect the integrity of Energy Star labels must be stronger.
In December, the inspector general issued a report that said Energy Star’s savings claims were “not accurate or verifiable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/washington/07energy.html?_r=1
SO OBAMA IS OUT THERE LYING AGAIN.
You know betty, I’d be less worried about Leon and more worried about what’s about to happen to RNC Chairman Steele.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29066465/
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=3541216&referralPlaylistId=949437d0db05ed5f5b9954dc049d70b0c12f2749
Must see video.
Mother of USS Cole victim blasts barack obama.
“A virtually unanimous and bipartisan Alaska Senate this week found the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, Todd Palin, and nine state employees, including top Palin aides, in contempt for ignoring subpoenas to testify in the Troopergate investigation. … However, the Senate voted not to seek punishment in the matter.”
************
The Court finds you guilty of murder, mayhem, and crossing at a location other than the street corner. WE have made our point. No punishment is decreed! Alice, you and that rabbit are now free to go!
Another neo-con above the law – until it crashes down on them. As for new troll Betty, a little ditty from Tom Jones (with modification of course):
Whoa, [dense] betty (bam-ba-lam)
Whoa, [dense] betty (bam-ba-lam)
She’s from birmingham (bam-ba-lam)
Way down in alabam’ (bam-ba-lam)
Well, she’s shakin’ that thing (bam-ba-lam)
Boy, she makes me sing (bam-ba-lam)
Inherently contemptible.
Of course Palin and the others didn’t respond to their subpoenas. They’re Republicans and everyone knows that being Republican means you’re above the law.
Afghanistan tempering European allies’ “ardor” for obama
That’s the somewhat snarky headline of a Washington Post story on the European response to President Obama’s efforts to obtain assistance for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Post, European leaders “are proving just as reluctant to contribute more soldiers or money to the NATO-led operation as they were during President George W. Bush’s last years in the White House.” (emphasis added)
The French Defense Minister has said that his country will not consider sending additional troops.
The Dutch Prime Minister has announced that his country will begin drawing down its force.
German officials have ruled out sending any more troops beyond the 4,500 additional ones the government authorized last year. Germany, moreover, does not permit its troops to venture into Southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban happens to be strong.
My, the new era of cooperation seems to have come to an abrupt halt once the world realized the absurdity of Barack Obama.
Beating Up On Barack
Iran’s leaders continue to display their contempt for Barack Obama, whom they regard as weak.
It isn’t just Ahmadinejad; Iran’s leadership is unified in treating Obama with the disdain that he invited by impugning his own country’s past policies in the region on Al-Arabiya television. Today it was the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani:
Iran sternly dismissed decades of U.S. policies targeting Tehran and declared Friday that the new American administration had to admit past wrongs before it could hope for reconciliation.
The comments by Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani at an international security conference in Munich appeared to be the most detailed outline yet of Tehran’s expectations from President Barack Obama’s administration.
“The old carrot and stick policy must be discarded,” he said, alluding to Western threats and offers of rewards to coax Iran to give up nuclear activities the West views as threatening. “This is a golden opportunity for the United States.” … He declared the U.S. had to own up to the past before it could hope for a better future with Iran.
“In the past years, the U.S. has burned many bridges but the new White House can rebuild them” if it “accepts its mistakes and changes its policies,” Larijani said.
If Obama ever does sit down with Ahmadinejad, it will be apparent who is bestowing the honor on whom.
Peter Schiff: Stimulus Bill Will Lead to “Unmitigated Disaster”
uh, isn’t this your guy?
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/169781/Peter-Schiff-Stimulus-Bill-Will-Lead-to-%22Unmitigated-Disaster%22?tickers=^dji,^gspc,QQQQ,SPY,DIA,TLT,UDN
It took just two and one half weeks:
By Charles Krauthammer
Updated: Friday, February 06, 2009
“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
— President Obama, Feb. 4.
Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn’t understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.
He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.
At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend.
And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’s own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
Not just to abolish but to create something new — a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the “fierce urgency of now” includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.
The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting “planted” for “ready to market” would mean a windfall garnered from a new “bonus depreciation” incentive.
After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.