AIG News

The Public On AIG Bonus Tax

12:28 pm EST March 23rd, 2009 | News | 7 Comments

So this is kind of interesting. Rasmussen has been pushing a lot of polling in a GOP-friendly way. And the right, especially in the blogosphere, has been clutching their pearls over the AIG bonus tax because it means the evil Democrats are going to tax their babies or something. So, this Rasmussen poll showing 57% approval of the AIG tax is a bit of a sticky wicket.

The right seems trapped in this death spiral with the dead-ender 20-percenters, the Palin loving, Obama birthers, who think that he’s a secret Muslim terrorist socialist something. TEA PARTY!

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CNBC’s Mark Haines Stands Up For The Poor Widdle Wall Streeters

3:27 pm EST March 20th, 2009 | Media | 11 Comments

God, the contempt for average Americans is so pathetic. Time to storm the Bastille, it feels like sometimes with these guys.

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AIG/Schiavo

11:11 am EST March 20th, 2009 | Republicans | 25 Comments

There’s been a lot of handwringing by the GOP and their representatives in the media – Rush, Hannity, CNBC – about the measure passed in the House by the Democrats to get the people’s money back from the robber barons at AIG. Now, that legislation was pretty broadly written, for corporations owned by the government to the same extent as AIG (We own 80% of the thing and yet still haven’t been dictating how it’s run. Crazy!).

But these same people bitching and moaning about taxes on millionaires larding more millions on other millionaires were the same gang of jackals who passed a law in the congress not about a group of people or a class of people, but one person: Terri Schiavo.

They were involving the government in a private family matter where it had no place being, but yet they’ve ginned up the outrage factory over taking back our own government money from one of Wall Street’s gangs.

This should tell you all you need to know about the current crop of Republicans and conservatives.

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Republicans Crumble On AIG Tax Bill Vote

4:14 pm EST March 19th, 2009 | Republicans | 12 Comments

Party discipline?

The wide margin of victory came despite sharp Republican attacks calling the legislation a ploy to paper over Obama administration missteps.

Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the bill was “a political circus” to divert attention from why the administration and congressional Democrats had not done more to block the bonuses.

However, although a number of Republicans first cast “no” votes, the political appeal of the legislation apparently won the day. In the closing moments of the roll call there was a heavy GOP migration from the “no” column to the “yes” side before the final vote was called.

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“Tea Party” Rick Santelli Defends AIG Bonus Babies

4:21 pm EST March 17th, 2009 | News | 20 Comments

He’s standing up for the little guy. The little guy with the giant fortune.

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Conservative Leaders For AiG Corporate Crooks

3:02 pm EST March 17th, 2009 | News | 46 Comments

First Rush Limbaugh came out and defended the bonuses being paid out to AiG’s executives (at least 73 of them got at least $1 million), and now his brother in arm on Fox, Glenn Beck, also supports the robber barons.

As I’ve said before – I want more of this from conservatives. For too long they’ve pretended to stick up for the middle and lower classes while doing the upper crust’s dirty work. Show your champagne biases, boys!

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The Washington Post Makes Up News For The Front Page

3:52 am EST March 17th, 2009 | Media | 28 Comments

When the Washington Post writes stories like this (“An Imperiled Agenda: Anger Over Firm Depletes Obama’s Political Capital”), coming on the heels of them publishing a clearly fraudulent column by George Will, a survey of Washington opinion spanning the right to far-right, and the ongoing advocacy on their part in favor of the Iraq War, I wonder if they too deserve the fate of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. Let’s not kid ourselves, it ain’t like the Washington Post is thriving.

President Obama’s apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.

Now, this story is a great example of DC establishment journalism and why the mainstream press is regularly disbelieved or taken with a grain of salt, especially by the left. Nowhere, not a single place, in the entire article does the venerable Washington Post cite any data quantifying what they characterize as a “blow” to President Obama. In fact, the entire enterprise sounds as if it could be sketched from a Boehner-Cantor-Limbaugh cocktail party. Nowhere, not a single time, does the article even quote someone in the Democratic or Republican parties taking President Obama to task over the AIG issue (at best it cites Sen. Dodd saying that the entire enterprise is bad, something the President made clear he agreed with). Nor are any independent voices or watchdogs cited. Instead, the article simply states that the President’s agenda is threatened by derailment. It just asserts this, as easily as it could have asserted that the Lincoln Memorial was constructed of Jello.

It just… says.

The entire article is 897 words, but it gives a paltry 37 to the President’s clear and direct statements addressing the issue at hand. And the Post commits this act of cowardice in the hinterlands of paragraph 5.

Now, at the same time The Washington Post wrote this story sans any actual evidence to back up the central assertion of the story comes some data in the form of polls.

From Pew, where the President dropped a few points in overall approval to 59% (Oh by the way, this is supposed to also be catastrophic according to the right. Yes, the same members of the right who would have danced in the streets if Bush had cracked 30% for the last three years of his presidency.) comes this on the economy:

Obama generally receives favorable marks for doing as much as he can to try to fix the economy. Six-in-ten express this view, which is substantially greater than the percentages saying that about George W. Bush in January 2002 (48%) or George H.W. Bush a decade earlier (21% in March 1992). For the most part, the public says that Obama’s economic policies have had no effect on the economic situation so far (64%), with much smaller proportions saying his policies have made economic conditions worse (15%) or better (14%).

Also in this poll congressional Republicans dropped to a 28% approval, compared to a 47% approval for their Democratic counterparts. This did not make A1 of the Post like the story without data did.

CNN’s poll also came out yesterday.

Obama’s job approval rating stands at 64 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Monday. That rating is down 3 percentage points from mid-February.

When asked about the economy, 59 percent of respondents approve of how Obama’s performing, with 40 percent disapproving.

A lot of people, especially on the left, have done some hand-wringing about the state of newspapers now that so many of them are gasping for air and dying. While I feel badly for the people affected, stories like this make it hard to give a damn about an industry so unconcerned about it’s core mission: Collecting and investigating information and presenting it to the public. The news media, and newspapers in particular have given up on this core mission.

I’ve got nothing against an entertaining and lively newspaper, and even when my guy is the subject I’d rather they get to the heart of a matter if the alternative is dreck like this that is simply hyperbole, garment-rending, and whining in search of a Drudge link or a few hours of hashing out on Fox News.

The honeymoon is over. But not for President Obama. It’s between the mainstream media and the audience whose intelligence it abuses with alarming frequency.

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“Urging” AIG?

2:50 am EST March 16th, 2009 | News | 27 Comments

On Meet The Press, White House Council Of Economic Advisers Chairperson Christina Romer said that Sec. Tim Geithner is “urging” AIG on the bonus issue. We – the American people – own 80% of the company. We’re past the point of “urging”. We need to TELL those bastards what to do.

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