Arlen Specter has been a consistent supporter of organized labor, but he is siding with his Republican friends on card check (LINK).
Specter recently lashed out at fellow Republican Pat Toomey saying that Toomey (a consistent conservative) was like the AIG employees who received bonuses(LINK) . That’s funny. Pat Toomey was a very vocal opponent of the bailouts (LINK) that Specter voted for and which enabled the bonus scandal.
These statements followed Specter contemplating a run as an independent (LINK). The Senator passed on that because, unlike Joe Lieberman, he can’t lose in the PA primary and still enter as an independent. He would have to make the decision very soon.
It adds up to the same conclusion. Specter is feeling the heat. Specter may be trying to play the middle now, but even Joe Biden knows that he is a Democrat at heart. (LINK)
UPDATE:
Statement from Pat Toomey on Specter’s Conditional Reversal
“When Senator Specter does a flip flop, it’s worth checking the fine print. On the senate floor today he said: “I would be willing to reconsider Employees’ Free Choice legislation when the economy returns to normalcy.†In other words, if he thinks his political fortunes have improved, he will deny workers a secret ballot after all.†– Former Congressman Pat Toomey
What a weasel Specter is.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in PA Politics on March 24th, 2009
What would have happened in 1789 or 1942 or on 9-11 if a top government official stepped in front of the people and publicly proclaimed that America was a nation of cowards? He would have been run out of the country on a rail, packaged in tar and feathers. That’s what happened in 2009 and you did nothing. Have you become a nation of cowards America?
In the greatest display of arrogance and disdain any congress ever showed a citizenry, your dysfunctional elite self interested non-representing representatives passed the largest spending bill in history without reading it and you did nothing. You want them to obey your constitutional mandate and secure your borders and they ignore you. You ask them to enforce your immigration laws and they ignore you. You say stop the madness of handing 300 billion dollars of a bankrupted treasury to illegal alien welfare rewarding them for making a mockery of your laws and they ignore you. And now in open defiance of the overwhelming will of the people, they are preparing more amnesty.You say top exporting my nation’s vital industries to foreign shores, and they ignore you. You say not to use your money to bail out failed, corrupt and greedy businesses, and they ignore you. You say implement the eVerify system so American jobs go to American workers and they ignore you. If your self serving Congress were a business, they would all be in jail now. The biggest traders amongst you hold elective office. Only when they feel the wrath of the almighty ‘We the People’ marching in the streets from California to New York shouting, “We’re mad as hell and we want our country back!” will they get the message, “They work for you.”
Wake up America. While you were playing with the toys of your consumer wealth, you lost much more than your bloated economy of living beyond your means. You lost your representative Democracy. Your servants have become your masters. Taxation without representation is tyranny, but still you look to government to solve problems they created in the first place. You are sucking at the hind tit of a dead cow. Why isn’t there a 300 million person We The People march on Washington, a nationwide tax payers revolt, thousands of cars and trucks surrounding your nation’s capital, bringing your failed government to a standstill? Democracy doesn’t repress power, it unleashes it to We the People. Take it now. They dictated an economic salvation plan to you. Now it’s time to stick it to them with a “We the People Stimulus Package”.
The UN’s panel on climate change (IPCC) made some global climate predictions a couple of years ago. The predictions were from that famous “consensus” that Al Gore always speaks of. The funny thing about predictions is that they expose your theories to an indisputable test.
Correct predictions give credence to your theory, but are not proof. I could correctly predict the roll of the dice, but that doesn’t mean I understand how dice roll. The flip side is getting predictions wrong. A wrong prediction is a clear indication that your theory is not correct. Expanding on the dice analogy…if you theorize that you understand how the dice will roll, you must get it correct every time otherwise your theory is wrong.
When Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity, he made a prediction. His theory predicted that the sun’s gravitation pull could bend light. His test of his theory was that a known position of a star whose light passed near the sun would be altered when viewed during a full eclipse. His prediction was very precise and accurate. The Theory of Relativity didn’t generally say that the light would bend. It had mathematically calculated exactly where those stars would appear during the full eclipse. Einstein felt that he would fail if the light bent but appeared in a spot other than where predicted. He was not satisfied with a general understanding. He needed to predict the exact position.
It was an amazing piece of real science.
Compare that to the global warming predictions. Instead of one brilliant man, you have hundreds of so-called scientists making predictions about a field that is not even their specialty. They produced a very general theory based on very sketchy science. They came up with mathematical models that supported their theory. Where Einstein was accurate, the IPCC predictions of continued warming are already wrong.
The IPCC made predictions out for a hundred years, yet their prediction have proved inaccurate for the first five. The chart above shows the IPCC prediction with a dashed line within a very large “margin of error”, the green arrow shows our current level of warming, and the other dashed line shows a competing theory of warming based on natural isolation superimposed on expected warming following a cooler (Little Ice Age) period.
A legitimate scientific body would conclude that there are major flaws in their theory, but not the global warming crowd. Like much of society today, they continue unhindered by failure.
Here is what I would do if I was a recipient of an AIG, tax-funded bonus.
I would donate my bonus to charity in the most visible way possible. I would make sure it made the news and I would explain that I could not return the money in good conscience to a bunch of crooks on Capitol Hill who are just going to waste it.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Common Sense on March 23rd, 2009
Here are the first couple of lines from the Orlando Sentinel covering this weekend’s “Tea Party”
Singer Lloyd Marcus told the crowd assembled in Lake Eola Park on Saturday that he was going to give them his take on the first days of the Obama administration.
Then he shrieked.
That pretty much summed up the mood in the park Saturday afternoon, when more than 4,000 people attended the Orlando Tea Party, a conservative rally aimed at expressing discontent with Washington.
“This is maybe the greatest single gathering of God-fearing patriots in the history of Orlando, Florida,” local conservative radio host Bud Hedinger, who emceed the event, told the crowd. (LINK)
That’s two “conservative” labels and a “shrieking” in the first 4 sentences. I don’t remember every anti-war rally during the Bush administration being labeled “liberal” or Cindy Sheehan speeches considered “shrieking” by the so-called objective news.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Liberal Bias on March 22nd, 2009
Barack Obama may be popular, but his polls are dropping. There is a politician with a national identity who polls much better then Obama. Sarah Palin is wildly popular in Alaska. According to the Hayes Research Group, Sarah Palin’s ‘very favorable to very unfavorable spread’ is +20 points (LINK). That far exceeds the +4 points of the President (LINK).
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in polls on March 20th, 2009
According to a Gallup poll, President Obama’s approval rating has slipped a little. Overall, his approval rating has dropped to 61% from a high of 68% at Inauguration time. His disapproval numbers have increased from 12% to 28%.
A closer look shows that support from Republicans and Independents is slipping, but amazingly his Democratics support has gone up. It’s not that I am surprised that Democrats overwhelmingly support Obama. It would be surprising if they didn’t. What surprised me is that his support has risen amongst Democrats from 88% to 91%.
That means 3 out of 100 Democrats questioned Obama a couple months ago, but now support him. Apparently, poor cabinet choices, massive debt and incompentence is an endearing trait to some Democrats.
One thing to remember: George Bush’s approval rating was dismal because he lost the support of his own party. Republicans were not happy when the Iraq War was going badly. Republicans were not happy about George Bush abandoning his free market principals. Can we expect the same reflection and disappointment from Democrats from the obvious failures of Barack Obama or are they not paying attention at all?
Maybe Barack Obama should go back to the teleprompter and avoid analogies at all cost. Earlier in the week, our President compared bankers to suicide bombers(LINK). This shows he understands neither, nor his role as president. Now he is appologizing for insulting the Special Olympics. (LINK)
For God’s sake Mr. President, just say what the teleprompter tells you to say. Stop winging it.
Fast Eddie Rendell is putting preasure on Sunoco to reverse a decision to layoff 750 white collar workers (LINK). Fast Eddie says that these layoffs are not needed since Sunoco made “huge” profits last year. (Their profit margin was just under 1.5%…is that huge?)
Sunoco says that it is a strategic decision based on evidence that the refinery business is headed for a down cycle. If Sunoco is wrong, they will pay the price by losing market share and missing out on potential profits. If Ed Rendell were to have his way and be wrong…Ed Rendell would not pay the price. Management at Sunoco would be fired, Sunoco investors would lose money and all Sunoco employees would permanently lose their jobs.
Although I take no glee in knowing that 750 workers will be looking for jobs in a tough economy, these decisions need to be made by people who know the business and the industry. Ed Rendell knows nothing. Jobs are not entitlements. People are hired to help a company make a profit. Keeping on unneeded labor can only lead mean wasteful inefficiency or over-production.
Much of our economic problems today are caused by over supply. We have too many houses. We have too many cars. Easy credit and cheap labor led to a housing bubble. Easy credit and too many car manufacturers led to my neighbors buying new cars every year. Both were unsustainable.
The taxpayers would not be bailing out GM if they had looked into the future, saw a slowdown coming and started to scale back production. If someone at GM was wise enough to make that decision, Eddie Rendell would be fighting to get to the head of the line of politicians claiming GM executives were uncaring and greedy. Labor Unions would be screaming bloody murder and they would have the support of politicians who know that labor votes far outweigh auto executive votes. Someone at GM needed to see the coming storm, stand up and stare down the populist opposition. That is what Sunoco is doing now. The automakers wouldn’t need billions of dollars from American tax payers if they had the wisdom and courage to make the move that Sunoco is making today.
Every wise person knows what he doesn’t know. Ed Rendell knows nothing about the refinery business. The governor needs to wise up and stay out of Sunoco’s business. If he really wants to help refinery workers, he can lay off his enviornmental policies and make it easier for refiners to make a profit in Pennsylvania, but he won’t. There are way more voters worried about Al Gore style enviornmental doom than there are white collar refinery workers.
AIG is in the headlines because Barack Obama and the Democrats have manufactured outraged over bonuses, but the more important story should be told. Why is AIG in such trouble in the first place?
Harvey Silvergate has an editorial in Forbes that suggests the problems were caused by government.
Elliot Spitzer was always a grand-stander and an aggressive, populist. He turned out to be a whore chaser as well, but that just points to his underlying ethics (as if he has any). In 2005, Elliot Spitzer aggressively went after Hank Greenberg, the long time CEO of AIG. He used all the force of the government to have Greenberg removed as CEO, but then gave up on the case because “Greenberg did nothing criminal under New York laws”.
Greenberg’s replacment was a government stooge. Martin Sullivan was chosen because he was acceptable to Elliot Spitzer. He admitted to “improper accounting” and agreed to pay the state a settlement of $1.6 Billion dollars. Sullivan was in charge until it became apparent that the company was going belly-up under his watch.
Sources close to Greenberg claim AIG held very little subprime paper, if any, before April 2005…it wasn’t until the latter half of 2005 that AIG got “deeply into subprime mortgages.” Thus began the tailspin that culminated in AIG’s unprecedented $99.3 billion loss in 2008.
So let’s sum it up.
The government extorted $1.6 billion out of AIG for accounting that wasn’t against the law
The government bailed out AIG to the tune of $190 billion because the new CEO was a disaster.
The Democrats blame the financial meltdown on lack of oversight.
Compensating employees with bonuses is a business decision. Whether designed as a retention bonus or a performance bonus, they have a business purpose. A retention bonus is designed to keep good people who are considering a career change. Performance bonuses are designed as motivation for efficiency and productivity. Both types of bonuses can have mixed results, but the underlying decision to give bonuses is determined by profit and what is best for business.
Except, perhaps you noticed, our whole world has been turned inside out. Since Washington has showered loser companies with billions of dollars, our politicians feel that they know best how to run companies. Really! The children in my neighborhood selling lemonade have more business experience than Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank combined. Giving a bonus is no longer a business decision. It is now a political decision.
The politics of the day is outrage. Everyone is outraged at AIG. The company is a failure and yet AIG has received billions of taxpayer dollars. How could you not be outraged? Left unchecked, that outrage will backfire on the ruling party. They must channel the outrage. So Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank take to the air waves to lead the chorus against the AIG bonuses…so you won’t notice the bigger problem.
The outrage Washington wants to avoid is the outrage of U.S. tax dollars being spent to bail out companies that are not too big to fail and foreign banks. AIG is being used as a distribution point for billions of dollars to other entities. Some of those entities are U.S. companies…like Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs has many strong connections in Washington. Jon Corzine and Henry Paulson are both high profile insiders from Goldman Sachs. If Washington bailed out Goldman Sachs directly, we would surely catch on. But funnel the money through AIG and then start some phony outrage, and you just might slip it by a public more interested in Octomom.
The outrage that must be avoided at all costs is the bailout of foreign banks. More than 50% of the bailout money given to AIG was used to pay off foreign banks. Polling data shows that Americans are not happy about bailing out American companies. Many have been convinced it is a necessary evil, but few will be happy with our future earnings being used to fund foreign banks.
Bonuses have a business purpose. Outgage has a politcal purpose. When you mix business and politics, you end up with a third way, Corporatism…the kind of system once attempted in Italy and Germany. Let’s just say that didn’t end well.
Glenn Beck pulled in some good viewing numbers on Friday (LINK). According to Neilsen Ratings, Beck’s one hour show starting at 5:00PM had more viewers that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann during prime time. Actually, Beck’s show beat the combined number of viewers for Olbermann’s show shown in two time slots…8-9 PM and 10-11 PM.
Comparing 5:00PM time slots, it looks even worse for MSNBC. Beck got three times more viewers than Chris Matthews. In the all important 25-54 demographic, Beck got four times the viewers of Matthews. Chris Matthews may think it is his job to help the Obama administration succeed (LINK).
Apparently, the viewers are not interested in watching an Obama cheerleader.
I would say that is a serious butt kicking.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in photoshopped,polls on March 16th, 2009
On the one hand, Nancy Pelosi wants to promote and save her favorite liberal paper (LINK). On the other hand, she would like to destroy a whole segment of the media that is not generally favorable to her (LINK). Where are the freedom of speech advocates? Why are we promoting business losers and destroying business winners? What the hell has happened to my country?
What do you do when you have lost the support of voters? If you are a Democrat…you change the rules. The Senior Senator from Pennsylvania is a Democrat at heart (according to our Vice President), so Arlen Specter is taking a page from their book.
Specter’s polling numbers among Republicans are horrible. His chances of even getting to the general election are greatly deminished by another attempt by Pat Toomey. To improve his chances, Specter is trying to change the state election to an “open primary” according to an anonymous source. (LINK)
IF this is true, it is disgraceful. Republicans should chose the Republican candidate. It is the wishy-washy moderates in open primaries that chose John McCain. John McCain had two selling points. He supported the surge before it was popular and he was supposed to be attractive to moderates and independents. He was supposed to be electable. That all fell apart when he was unable to speak of the economy in a way that contrasted conservative principals to the class struggle rhetoric of the Democrats. He joined in with the chorus of “greed” and “help for the little guy”. Now we are surging toward socialism.
John McCain’s primary victory was made possible by open primaries. As a conservative, I would hope our party would keep the system closed to registered Republicans. Republicans should chose the Republican candidate. If voters want a say in the primary selection, they need to get off the fence and register with a party.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in PA Politics on March 16th, 2009
Here in Pennsylvania, we have something called “bonus scandal” (link). Democrats have been paying staffers with tax dollars to work on campaigns. Now the former House Democratic Leader is implicated in an email. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
In December 2004, an e-mail written by legislative research analyst Karen Steiner thanked DeWeese, D-Greene County, and then-House Democratic Whip Mike Veon of Beaver Falls for a “bonus for campaigning.” DeWeese responded with “U R welcome,” (LINK)
The cloud of corruption over the the Democrats grows thicker each day.
Share on Facebook
Barack Obama may be popular, but his polls are dropping. There is a politician with a national identity who polls much better then Obama. Sarah Palin is wildly popular in Alaska. According to the Hayes Research Group, Sarah Palin’s ‘very favorable to very unfavorable spread’ is +20 points (
According to a Gallup poll, President Obama’s approval rating has slipped a little. Overall, his approval rating has dropped to 61% from a high of 68% at Inauguration time. His disapproval numbers have increased from 12% to 28%.
Glenn Beck pulled in some good viewing numbers on Friday (