Shocking! Bank of America disses American hero and U.S. flag?

They got their taxpayer-funded bailout, but they can't show respect for a fallen Marine?

A South Carolina Bank of America branch is drawing criticism Thursday after an employee reportedly ordered the removal of American flags placed to honor a fallen Marine over fears that people would be offended.
The Palmetto Scoop received one eyewitness email claiming that the branch manager at Bank of America’s Gaffney branch at 1602 West Floyd Baker Blvd. “told a citizen who was preparing the route for a U.S. Marine killed in action in Afghanistan by placing small American flags along the roadway that the flags might upset some of her customers.”
Said the outraged tipster, “[The branch manager] took them down and made the citizen go in to get them if she didn’t want them thrown away.”
The flags were part of the funeral procession of Lance Corporal Christopher Fowlkes, 20, who died last week after an explosion in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

More on this shocking scandal at Political Byline.

UPDATE: The cowardly swine are finally forced to 'fess up about that crooked Merrill swindle:

Facing mounting pressure from multiple investigations, Bank of America’s board has voted to reveal the legal advice that the bank received late last year in its merger with Merrill Lynch.

Another relevant headline:

Obama quietly deploying 13,000 more US troops to Afghanistan

Yeah, and his corporate patrons at Bank of America are quietly trying to prevent citizens from honoring the sacrifice of U.S. Marines. What a bunch of creeps. It's like the Second Coming of LBJ.

Fear and Loathing at Lake Tahoe

"Just when you think the Obama Administration couldn't get any more ridiculous, it does. Remember how the stimulus was supposed to be used for job creation? Remember how it was supposed to be used for 'shovel-ready projects' to repair and build things like roads and schools? Well, it turns out, the stimulus is also being used to bail out the homeless and low income. As you all know, I am currently on vacation at my family's cabin near Lake Tahoe. While here, I have been getting my news from talk radio. This morning, while listening to Rush Limbaugh, I heard a story of how homeless and low-income Detroit residents are applying for up to $3000 (per person) in stimulus money. . . ."

ASSOCIATED PRESS: THOUSANDS MOB DETROIT CENTER IN HOPES OF FREE CASH

SIGTARP bites again!

Bailout Watchdog Says Treasury and Fed Knew Bailed-Out Banks Were Not Healthy

Michelle Malkin blogs it. Via Memeorandum. Background: "The War on Watchdogs," September print issue, The American Spectator.

No time for more. Hit tip jar. Kids demanding slushies now. Will update . . .

Another reminder that the MSM is in the tank for Obama, as if you didn't know that

Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute headlined this "All is well because Obama is in charge," which elucidates a point that the New York Times carefully endeavors to obscure:

A study to be released Monday of financial news coverage this year found that government, Wall Street and a small handful of story lines got the bulk of the attention while much less was paid to the economic troubles of ordinary people. . . .
Reviewing almost 10,000 reports from Feb. 1 to Aug. 31 in newspapers, on news Web sites, on the radio and on network broadcast and cable television, Pew found that almost 40 percent of economic news reports dealt with the trials of the banking and auto industries, and the federal stimulus bill passed in February. . . .
Unemployment and the housing crisis accounted for 12 percent. And, the study said, “stories that tried to explicitly examine the broader impact of the economic downturn on the lives of ordinary Americans filled 5 percent of the economic coverage." . . .
In February and March, the economy was the subject of nearly half of all news coverage, driven mostly by the stimulus bill and the uses of bank bailout money. After those fights died down, financial news coverage fell by more than half.
Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Pew project, said it was easier for the national news media to cover Washington “than to fan out around the country and measure the impact on real lives.”
“There’s plenty of reason to understand why a lot of this is a Washington and New York story,” he said. “But we’re talking about something that affected almost every American in some way.”

All of which is to say, with unemployment at 9.8 percent and no prospect of it going down in the next six months, the MSM have been ignoring this turd in the punchbowl and pretending that recovery is just around the corner.

What has actually been happening in the economy, of course, is that the way the TARP bailout was structured, it pumped massive liquidity into Wall Street. This inevitably led to a rise in stock prices -- a "sucker's rally" -- that I believe is the main reason we haven't seen a consumer price increase as a result of the Fed's insanely inflationary monetary policy. Relatively little of that extra currency is going to Main Street. Instead, it's been siphoned off into the financial sector and we're seeing an inflationary stock bubble.

Because the MSM desperately wants to believe in the unicorns-and-rainbows magic of Obamanomics, they've highlighted the stock market rally and twisted the headlines about other economic news -- "We only lost 200,000 jobs last month? Great!" -- in an attempt to manufacture consumer confidence.

Alas, consumer confidence isn't magic, either. At some point, the fundmentals actually matter and, as I have occasionally had cause to remind you, the fundamentals still suck.

MSM decline: Not a bug, but a feature

Stole that line from Dafydd ab Hugh in the Green Room, who relays this from The Hill:

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.
“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

My senators from the People's Republic of Maryland, who are aiming to bail out the disastrously mismanaged (and transparently biased) Baltimore Sun. You'll notice that nine times out of 10, when my buddy Jeff Quinton at Baltimore's Inside Charm City blog posts a scoop, it's first reported by WBAL, which runs circles around the Sun's anemic online operation. As always, the Welfare State ignores success and rewards failure. Carolyn Tackett comments:

It seems the way to get taxpayer money these days is to make nice with the Administration. This is certainly true of this country's newspaper industry which has either ignored, downplayed or buried stories critical to the administration. It is highly doubtful that the industry will be more likely to view the administration with a critical eye if the are being propped up by the government.

More at Memeorandum, Toledo Blade, JammieWearingFool and RedState.

Wonder what Obama would say if Republicans sponsored a bailout for Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com?

Auguries of Economic Apocalypse

Last week was an excellent week for gloom and doom, not least because idiots were optimistic, a topic addressed in my latest American Spectator column:

Six months into a stock-market rally, Wall Street apparently saw more good news last week when a Labor Department report showed employment had jumped to 9.7 percent in August. Exactly why Friday's news -- joblessness at a 26-year high -- produced a 97-point gain in the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a good question, but if the stock market were perfectly predictable, we'd all be rich. . . .
First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have pumped hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the system, justifying the stimulus-and-bailout policy as necessary to avert a financial cataclysm. Yet the augurs who study the entrails of the economy are muttering darkly about the inauspicious omens.
Last week, Vice President Joe Biden gave a happy-talk presentation -- "Rainbows! Unicorns! Recovery!" -- about the miraculous effects of the $787 billion stimulus package that President Obama rammed through Congress in February. Once more trotting out the administration's rhetoric about jobs "saved or created" (pick a number, any number), Biden declared, "In 200 days, the president's Recovery and Reinvestment Act isn't just working . . . it's working toward something: It's working toward a more resilient, more transformative economy."
Surely, many economists greeted this declaration with arched eyebrows. What, exactly, is a "transformative economy," and in what sense is it "more resilient"? Never mind. Being liberal means never having to define one's terms.
Biden showed himself adept at the art of ambiguity when he proclaimed to his Brookings Institution audience: "The Recovery Act has played a significant role in changing the trajectory of our economy, in changing the conversation about the economy in this country. Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we're talking about the end of a recession eight months after taking office."
Well, who is "we"? It is by no means universally agreed that the U.S. economy is now bound for the sunlit uplands of prosperity, and many of the financial augurs perceive that we may be approaching an economic abyss. . . .

Read the whole gloomy thing. And expect further omens of catastrophic Obamanomics at NTCNews.com. The revolution will not be televised, but the apocalypse will be blogged.

UPDATE: Doug Ross anticipates Zimbabwe USA.

UPDATE II: Taxpayers get screwed:

The federal government is unlikely to recoup all of the billions of dollars that it has invested in General Motors and Chrysler, according to a new congressional oversight report assessing the automakers' rescue.
The report said that a $5.4 billion portion of the $10.5 billion owed by Chrysler is "highly unlikely" to be repaid, while full recovery of the $50 billion sunk into GM would require the company's stock to reach unprecedented heights.
"Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is unlikely they will recover the entire amount," according to the report . . .

In other words, the auto bailout was a taxpayer-funded swindle, cheating the legitimate stakeholders on behalf of the UAW bosses. Oh, and here's some more cheerful news: Inflation's back!

UPDATE III: Read Max Baucus's lips: More New Taxes!

What the Baucus proposal means in real terms is that a family of four with a household income above $66,150 would face a tax of $3,800 if they do not obtain health care, while an individual with income above $32,490 would face a tax of $950.

Meanwhile, Cato's Andrew J. Coulson explains how Obama's stimulus spending on public schools is actually hurting the economy. Man, this is turning out to be a great day for gloom and doom!

They got the gold mine . . .

Guess who gets the shaft?

Precisely one year ago, we lucky taxpayers took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants that contributed mightily to the wild and crazy home-loan-boom-turned-bust. . . . According to the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement, the Treasury will, by Sept. 30, have handed over $45 billion to shore up the company’s net worth. . . .
As a result of the Fannie takeover, taxpayers are paying millions of dollars in legal defense bills for three top former executives, including Franklin D. Raines, who left the company in late 2004 under accusations of accounting improprieties. From Sept. 6, 2008, to July 21, these legal payments totaled $6.3 million. . . .

Read the rest. Meanwhile, let's talk jobless "recovery":

Many experts envision a jobless recovery, in which the economy grows but job losses persist. . . .
After the government unleashed $787 billion to stimulate economic growth, and after it bailed out financial institutions and the auto industry, the unemployment rate exceeds worst-case projections envisioned by the administration early this year. . . .
If the jobless rate continues to climb, as is widely expected, that could generate pressure for another stimulus spending package. But given intensifying concern about the size of federal budget deficits -- now projected to exceed $9 trillion within a decade -- any new spending could be politically perilous.

And, hey, how's that stimulus workin' for ya?

It was just five months ago that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made the New Flyer bus factory [in St. Cloud, Minn.] a symbol of the stimulus. With several cabinet secretaries in tow, he held a town-hall-style meeting at the factory, where he praised the company as "an example of the future" and said that it stood to get more orders for its hybrid electric buses thanks to the $8.4 billion that the stimulus law devotes to mass transit.
But last month, the company that administration officials had pictured as a stimulus success story began laying off 320 people, or 13 percent of its work force . . .

Oh, yes -- the joy of misery!

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread (although omitting me so far).

'God Help Us'

So says Blue Crab Boulevard, surveying the catastrophic effects of Obamanomics. And that was before he learned of The Mother Of All Bailouts.

The O'Biden Happy Talk about the magical wonders of "stimulus" continues to deceive much of the MSM -- it's all unicorns and rainbows and "recovery," as far as they know -- but the financial press can't ignore the evidence of impending crisis.

One thing NTCNews.com has focused on is aggregating financial and economic news, which has required me to scour over Google Business News and other sources. Is the DJIA up or down? What about Treasury notes? Gold? Oil? Currencies? Banking? Housing? Employment?

Thursday, the stock market broke a 4-day slide, and gained again on Friday, after the much-anticipated August jobs report showed unemployment had risen to 9.7%. The average person sees these two facts -- jobs down, market up -- and asks, "How on earth is 9.7% unemployment good news?"

Beats me. If I could figure out the stock market, I'd be rich. Instead, I'm a blogger. However, facts are facts. Since peaking at 14,034.39 on Oct. 9, 2007, the DJIA has lost 4,593.12 points. Even though the Dow has bounced up some 3,000 points since bottoming out in March, we're still talking about a net loss of 32.7% in less than two years.

Combine that with the meltdown in housing prices, and it represents a massive devastation of asset-value, an economic cataclysm of historic proportions.

Now, consider that we are less than two years away from 2001, when the oldest of the Baby Boomers, born in early 1946, turn 65. Their retirement funds have been diminished by the stock-market collapse, and if they had planned to cash out the equity in their homes . . . Well, good luck with that plan.

Beginning in 2011, then, an increasing number of Baby Boomers will undergo the transition from taxpayers to tax consumers, eligible for Social Security and MediCare, a fiscal drain on the economy. Only by dipping into what remains of their asset value -- selling their homes or other valuables, spending out their IRAs, 401(k)s and other retirement funds -- will this exploding population of retirees be able to live above the minimum level provided by the government.

Without getting into a lot of complicated analysis (e.g., the growth-killing impact of just about anything the federal government might do to meet the looming fiscal crisis), the ordinary person with a minimal level of economic education who looks at this situation can only conclude: We're completely screwed.

Which is why, as I scour the financial news, I keep an eye out for omens and portents of the inevitable apocalypse, such as these items aggregated at NTCNews.com the past week:

Are We Facing a Banking Crisis? Is the Gold Price About to Explode?
-- Market Oracle, Aug. 31

"Oil prices fell to near $71 a barrel Monday as China's stock market tumbled and commodities investors questioned whether the U.S. economy can recover strongly in the second half."
-- Associated Press, Aug. 31

"AIG fell 17% after Sanford C. Bernstein dropped the stock to 'underperform,' on concerns that Washington will pull back on financial assistance as AIG recovers. The firm is still on the hook for $80 billion in federal loans . . ."
-- Forbes, Sept. 1

"The American economy will suffer 'a long time' as a result of last year's federal bailout of the financial industry, according to Johan Norberg, author of a new book about the policies that caused the banking meltdown. . . . 'The bailouts . . . the debts -- we won't be able to pay them back. We're going to pay for it for a long time . . .' "
-- The American Spectator, Sept. 2

"FDIC head Sheila Bair told CNBC Tuesday evening that commercial real estate loans remain a "looming problem" for banks' balance sheets and she expects the area to increasingly be a driver for bank failures during the remainder of this year and 2010 . . ."
-- Reuters, Sept. 2

"U.S. banks are holding more than $1 trillion of mortgages backed by commercial property that is fast losing value."
-- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2

" 'Most participants saw the economy as likely to recover only slowly during the second half of this year, and all saw it as still vulnerable to adverse shocks,' the Fed said in today’s minutes. 'Labor market conditions remained of particular concern to meeting participants . . .' "
-- Bloomberg News, Sept. 2

"Gold prices reached their highest point in nearly three months as the U.S. dollar weakened and participants bought in a flight-to-quality bid based on economic uncertainty and concerns about the stock market . . ."
-- Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2

"Treasurys fell Thursday, sending yields higher, as stocks edged up and the U.S. government said it planned to sell $70 billion in Treasury bonds and notes next week."
-- MarketWatch, Sept. 3

UNEMPLOYMENT REACHES 9.7%
-- NTCNews.com, Sept. 4

"Tony Crescenzi, a market strategist and portfolio manager at Pacific Investment Management Co., manager of the world’s biggest bond fund, said the U.S. faces a slow recovery because unemployment is persisting . . . 'The key ingredient for a sustainable recovery is still absent,' Crescenzi said today in an interview on Bloomberg Radio. 'We need income growth to produce self-reinforcing expansion. . . . The duration of unemployment will be longer and will put downward pressure on wages.'"
-- Bloomberg News, Sept. 4

"Congress passed the Cash for Clunkers program in order to increase automobile employment and save jobs. . . . The employment report shows that -- despite the Cash for Clunkers craze, and the $2 billion Congress added to the program at the end of July -- motor vehicles and parts manufactures shed 15,000 jobs in August. That erased half of the jobs gained in July and continued the yearlong downward trend . . ."
-- Heritage Foundation, Sept. 4

FEDS SHUT DOWN 5 BANKS
-- NTCNews.com, Sept. 5

Given the serious underlying problems of the economy -- "The Fundamentals Still Suck," as I explained in May -- no amount of unicorns-and-rainbows "recovery" talk from the administration and its MSM sock-puppets can avert the inevitable consequences.

So NTCNews.com keeps an eye on the economy and readers who appreciate this service -- you can subscribe to the RSS feed in Google, Atom, etc., to get the latest updates -- are invited to support this project by hitting the tip jar.

"The revolution will not be televised, but the apocalypse will be blogged."

Ready for the Mother Of All Bailouts?

The FHA is on the hook for lots of "underwater" loans, taken out by low-income homeowners who got special low down-payment deals and -- in case you didn't notice -- unemployment hit a 26-year high in August, with no prospect the 9.7% jobless rate will go down any time this year. Dave Hogberg of Investors Business Daily reports:

FHA-insured loans have more than tripled from 530,000 in fiscal year 2007 to 1.7 million thus far in 2009. The Government National Mortgage Association, which securitizes FHA loans, has boosted its mortgage-related issuance to $287 billion from $85 billion. Yet during that same period, the FHA's loan delinquency rate has climbed to 14.4% in Q2 from 12.6% two years earlier.

OK, so guess what the consequences are now?

As job losses continue to mount, why would someone facing economic difficulties try to keep a home that is worth less than the money owed on it?

More at the Hot Air Green Room.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! This story has now been front-paged at Hot Air -- thanks, Ed Morrisey!

UPDATE II: Proving that some bloggers know more about economics than Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, Jimmie Bise explains this predictable disaster in four sentences:

See, it turns out that the FHA, prompted of course by Congress, gave out a bazillion loans to people who were on the very edge of being able to pay them back. As long as our economy kept booming, they'd probably -- probably -- be okay. But if the economy wavered even a little bit, they'd be hosed and all those loans would come back to the FHA so fast you'd think they were attached by rubber bands. That's exactly what's happening now and the FHA is watching their cash reserves dry up like a shallow mudpuddle in the middle of Death Valley in July.

Or, in three simple words: IT WON'T WORK!

Author: U.S. will take 'a long time' to recover from bailouts and deficit spending

Tuesday night, I attended an America's Future Foundation event featuring Johan Norberg, author of the new book Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation with Home Ownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. I interviewed him for The American Spectator:

Politicians, regulators and central banks in several nations -- including the U.S. Federal Reserve -- helped create the crisis that led to last year's massive Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout, Norberg said.
"They distorted all the incentives and inflated the bubble," the Cato Institute senior fellow explained . . .
"I'm afraid we're going to live with the consequences for a long time," he said. "The bailouts . . . the debts -- we won't be able to pay them back. We're going to pay for it for a long time. And it's not just what it costs, it's what we’re buying."
Norberg said the TARP bailout would have the perverse effect of encouraging lenders and other financial institutions to engage in the same kinds of risky behaviors that led to last year’s meltdown.
"If bankers make stupid mistakes and we bail them out, it encourages them to take big risks in order to make short-term gains, knowing that if they lose out, they can always send the bill to the taxpayers," Norberg said. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Norberg spoke yesterday at a book forum at Cato (video at the link) and you can buy Norberg's book:

'The Legs of a Potential Scandal'

New York magazine's Joe Hagan writes about the suspicions surrounding Goldman Sachs, insurance giant AIG, and last fall's TARP bailout:

The AIG rescue is the incident from which all other Goldman conspiracy theories spring -- the original sin, in a sense, of Goldman's current public tarring. It's the act that first made the average man on the street sit up and say, "Hey, wait a minute. The secretary of the Treasury [i.e. Henry Paulson], who used to be the Goldman CEO, just spent $85 billion to buy a failing insurance giant that happened to owe his former firm a lot of money. Does that smell right to you?" It also seems to have the legs of a potential scandal, with Neil Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, conducting an audit of the buyout.
Then again, if you’ve just posted $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits in an environment where, say, Morgan Stanley just reported a $1.26 billion loss, what does it matter what people say? . . .

Read the whole thing. These three facts -- (a) Goldman has spectacularly profited, at a time of rising unemployment, foreclosures and bank failures, (b) Goldman was the primary beneficiary of the TARP bailout, and (c) Goldman's former CEO was the driving force behind TARP -- are hard to reconcile in any way that doesn't raise the suspicion of corruption.

SIGTARP Barofsky's investigations are clearly raising questions embarrassing to the people who backed the bailout.

BTW, a friend e-mails to say that Barofsky's estimate of $23.7 trillion TARP liability is a number that "assumes The End of the World As We Know It, or Armageddon, in short." The e-mailer adds:

The number is correct, but the vast majority of the dollars are called, precisely, "contingent liabilities." They may, and they may NOT, become actual liabilities. [Bailout Nation author] Barry Ritholtz, who tends to be a lefty politically but a very hard-ass "numbers" guy pointed that out.
Yes, the bailout is unpopular and yes, it seems that Goldman Sachs has benefitted far beyond the laws of probability. Ritholtz agrees with that, too. And yes, CitiBank should be closed and sold for scrap.
But be careful with that $23T stuff.

The key part is, "The number is correct." The likelihood that taxpayers will actually be required to fork over $23.7 trillion is remote, but it's not a number that Barosky pulled out of a hat.

Oh, and speaking of scandal, Instpundit reminds us that today is the official publication date for Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption: Obama And His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies. It's the Best. Book. Evah! Today at her blog, Michelle looks at Obama crony Valerie Jarrett. This afternoon, Michelle will be on Sean Hannity's radio show and his Fox News TV show.

So buy two copies and give one to a liberal friend, just to annoy him.

Geithner and the Scapegoat Sweepstakes

Thanks to Smitty for watchdogging the latest headlines about SIGTARP Neil Barofsky while I was on the road to Richmond yesterday. It's important to see the big picture in this battle between Barofsky and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner:

The Wall Street bailout has been unpopular from its inception. . . . Now, we see unemployment soaring (more than 15% in Michigan, near 12% in California) and consumer confidence falling, while the stock market surges upward. You can't blame people for suspecting that massive taxpayer-funded assistance to financial giants like AIG, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America might have something to do with this widening chasm between prosperity on Wall Street and misery on Main Street. . . .
Polls indicate a growing perception that the Obama administration is mismanaging the economy, with special favors for politically connected Wall Street fat cats at the expense of ordinary American taxpayers. . . .
With another approaching crisis in banking and forecasts that unemployment will continue rising for months to come, Obama will eventually start looking for a scapegoat. Though once hailed as an economic savior, the nominee who was "too big to fail," Geithner is now odds-on favorite to win the Scapegoat Sweepstakes. SIGTARP Barofsky's watchdogging of the bailout "black hole" may be enough to push Geithner across the finish line.

Read the whole thing, which includes a "document dump" with Barofsky's quarterly IG report and other important documents on this important aspect of IG-Gate.

Rule 3 on IG-Gate (Plus, Notes forNewbies on Aggregation Method)

There's a Memeorandum thread this morning linking the Hot Air IG-Gate Update, which got Instalanched. and is also linked by Frugal Cafe. Note that the Memeorandum thread also includes Joe Weber's Washington Times interview with fired AmeriCorps IG Gerald Walpin:

"For a second I was thinking, 'Why do I need all of this?' I'll just resign and go back to my good legal practice in New York," Gerald Walpin told The Washington Times' "America's Morning News" radio show Tuesday.
"But I would then be part of the apparatus that is totally torpedoing the inspectors general," Mr. Walpin said. "The watchdog would not really be a watchdog. He'd just be afraid of his shadow." . . .

That's new stuff, see? It was linked together with the IG-Gate Update in a post at Right Wing News. If several different blogs aggregate that stuff together, it creates sort of a center of gravity in the 'sphere that is picked up by the Memeorandum algorithm.

And the Right Wing News post also includes today's Washington Post story about Neil Barofsky -- SIGTARP, special inspector general for the TARP bailout -- who raised hell on Capitol Hill yesterday. As of 7 a.m., that story was not included in the Memeorandum thread, but given that Sen. Chuck Grassley has been defending Barofsky's office against Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, (see Grassley's June 17 letter to Geithner in PDF) it's very much part of the same story.

Building up a Memeorandum thread, with everybody commenting on the same news stories and cross-linking, is what Rule 3 is about. Newbies should always hat-tip Memeorandum when they do this. Even if the increase in your traffic is not immediately significant, every time somebody links your blog, it boosts your Technorati ranking -- you did remember to install Technorati, right? -- and, eventually, you'll be showing up on Memeorandum's radar.

Think of it this way: When one dog in the neighborhood starts barking, they all start barking. That's why Jimmie Bise dubbed us The Million Hit Squad.

If you need more background on the IG-Gate story, try the Mother of All Updates.

UPDATE: Yet more juicy SIGTARP goodness:

Barofsky testified that taxpayers aren't being told what most TARP recipients are doing with their money or what their investments are worth and may never be told exactly how their taxpayer dollars are being used.
At a Government Oversight and Reform Committee hearing, one lawmaker compared Treasury to convicted Ponzi scheme artist Bernie Madoff, accused Treasury of trying to undermine Barofsky's independence and threatened to haul Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before the panel if he didn’t adopt the IG's recommendations.
“For us to get past this economic situation that we find ourselves in, the public has to believe that we’re doing the right thing,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). “If we can’t show them that we are doing the right thing with their money, we’re going to have problems." (Emphasis added.)

When Democrats start talking like that, you know it spells trouble for Geithner.

UPDATE II: Text of closing statement by Chairman Towns:

Earnings at the largest banks and the bank holding companies such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are up, yet lending remains down. It is unacceptable that profits go up, while lending goes down. The taxpayers have invested very large amounts of money in these banks, but what have we gotten in return? It remains unclear.
The taxpayers deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.
The Treasury Department needs to publish full and detailed information on the use of TARP funds and publish the value of the TARP portfolio on a monthly basis. They have that information and they should make it public.
Moreover, Treasury also requires the largest banks to file monthly reports showing the dollar value of their new lending. That should be made public also.
If Treasury doesn’t put this information up on its website, this Committee will. And if Treasury doesn’t turn over this information voluntarily, Secretary Geithner will be brought before the Committee to explain.
What we have heard today convinces me that one of the best things Congress did when it created the TARP was to also create the Special Inspector General to oversee TARP spending. I can now understand why the Treasury Department would like to rein in the SIGTARP. But we are not going to let that happen.

Heh.

UPDATE III: Just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who tells me yesterday's Hot Air IG-Gate Update is a big hit with Republicans. Speaking of Republicans, here's Rep. Darrell Issa:

The Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) Neil Barofsky testified today at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the Treasury Department has "repeatedly failed" to implement SIGTARP recommendations that would reveal how Treasury is using taxpayer dollars. At the conclusion of the hearing, Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) asked Chairman Towns to bring Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before the Committee to address the questions raised by SIGTARP’s report. . . .
"We heard today that full transparency, which we called for, the President asked for and this Administration promised, is being blocked by the bureaucracy which often says ‘just trust and we will deliver,’” Issa said. "Until we have full transparency, we will never be able to know how much risk Treasury is assuming on behalf of the taxpayers. This Administration promised an 'unprecedented' level of accountability and transparency. They set their own standard. Now we're going to hold them to it."

Click here for Issa's statement.
Click here for Neil Barofsky's testimony.
Click here for a copy of the SIGTARP Report.

SIGTARP Strikes: IG Barofsky Report SaysTreasury Not Tracking Bailout Cash

The watchdog bites Tim Geithner:

The top watchdog over the financial bailout package said the Treasury Department is rejecting "common sense" by not requiring banks receiving billions of dollars in government money to say how they are using the money.
In a report to be released on Monday, Neil Barofsky said banks that have received money from the $700 billion bailout package passed last year are able to indicate how they are using taxpayer money and that Treasury should require banks to be more transparent. . . .
Barofsky is the Special Inspector General over the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) that was passed by Congress in October. . . .

Read the whole thing. This SIGTARP report is a perfect example of why the Obama adminstration hates IGs. The Democrats just want to shovel money out the door and don't care who gets it, except to be sure their well-connected friends get their share.

According to the liberal neo-Keynesian economic gospel, as long as the federal government does X-billion dollars of deficit spending, that will produce X-plus-Y amount of stimulus value (where Y = Magic Government Spending Multiplier Effect) without regard to whether the money ends up feeding orphans or supplying the mistresses of Goldman Sachs executives with bustiers and garter belts

Unfortunately for liberals, the stupid taxpayers can never seem to comprehend the nuances of neo-Keynesian theory the way Nobel Prize-winning genius Paul Krugman does.

No matter how many times they're lectured about this "stimulus"/bailout brilliance, the idiots who pay the taxes get a little miffed to discover that their great-grandchildren's future has been hocked to pay for new wallpaper and wainscoting in the executive lavatory of a giant banking conglomerate which -- as every expert in Washington explained last fall -- was so frantically in need of cash that the branch managers were sending tellers to sell plasma to the blood bank, merely to prevent a complete catastrophic meltdown in the global finance system.

Those stupid taxpayers are like that. They have a habit of remembering irrelevant minor details like those 90-point headlines on the front pages of all the newspapers:

CRISIS LOOMS: WORLD ECONOMY TEETERS ON BRINK OF FINAL APOCALYPSE; CONGRESS DESPERATELY FIGHTS TO AVERT ECONOMIC DOOMSDAY; PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS, FROGS FEARED

Damned idiot taxpayers. What do they know about economics and budgets and stuff that only people with Ivy League Ph.Ds can ever hope to understand?

(H/T: Memeorandum.)

VIDEO: Extended-Release Stimulusol(TM)

From The Nose On Your Face:

Just give me the Rohypnol and maybe something for the next-day discomfort after being forcibly gang-sodomized by SEIU, IRS, EPA, UAW, NEA, NARAL, ACORN, PPFA, AFSCME . . .

Going Postal? U.S. Postal Service SeeksBailout; Could Miss October Payroll

Via NewsAlert, this shocker:

Four unions representing the nation's postal workers are pleading for a meeting with the White House to address possible funding shortfalls for workers' payroll and retiree health benefits, according to a letter obtained by CongressDaily.
The presidents of the American Postal Workers Union, National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, National Association of Letter Carriers and National Postal Mailhandlers Union co-signed the Tuesday letter to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, warning that the U.S. Postal Service is at risk of defaulting on a $5.4 billion payment to prefund retiree health benefits at the end of September.
The letter alleges that USPS "may not be able to make payroll in October and will be forced to issue IOUs instead." . . .

Read the whole thing. Imagine that: A taxpayer-subsidized, union-dominated, government-regulated monopoly having financial problems . . .

It's a crisis! Wonder if the president has those cardigans ready?

Gay Motors and the Beefcake Bailout

Now that Obama has taken over GM, henceforth Chevrolet will be known as the Gaymobile:

For a local movie promotion a week ago aimed at gay buyers, General Motors' Chevrolet sponsored an online video on YouTube featuring the "Bumble Bee Boys in Briefs" -- a couple of buff "go-go boys" wearing only Speedo-type swimsuits with the letters CAMARO stitched across the behind. In the video, they are washing a Camaro. . . .
The video was produced to promote Chevrolet Gay Days at the Movies in Los Angeles, part of an ongoing outreach program to minority groups and the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender community. The movie was a screening of the new Transformers movie, chock full of GM vehicles including Bumblebee, a Camaro.

If you see a guy driving a Chevy . . . well, NTTAWWT.

UPDATE: I'm thinking Chevrolet needs a new slogan: "We're here! We're queer! We're driving Chevy!"

UPDATE II: In keeping with their LBGT/Obama agenda, General Motors today unveiled a new logo:

IG-Gate Update

Fox News obtains notes from a meeting that led to the firing of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin:

The informal meeting notes, taken by CNCS Counsel Frank Trinity, said that board members were indeed concerned about Walpin's "behavior." . . .
But the account also shows that Chairman Alan Solomont stated concern about Walpin's accusations against the board and not his mental health as the apparent cause for the dispute that led to Walpin's termination. . . .
A congressional investigator who participated in a three-hour meeting with Trinity on Monday told FOXNews.com that it was clear the board sought Walpin's ouster because of hurt feelings and professional friction, even though inspectors general are supposed to be free to challenge staff at their respective agencies. The investigator, who requested anonymity, argued the White House did not thoroughly review the matter.
"It was the disagreements between the IG and the senior management at the agency that provoked the board to remove Walpin," the investigator said. "The senior people at the agency chafed under Walpin's oversight. ... They communicated this to the board, which rubber-stamped senior management. [The board] took it to the White House, which rubber-stamped the board."

Hmmm. Is Fox's source also my source? Then why . . . Never mind. As long as it advances the story, I'm not particularly concerned with who gets what. Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress are working to muzzle federal watchdogs in the financial sector:

Inspectors general at five financial regulatory agencies are objecting to legislation that would elevate their positions to the presidential-appointment level, arguing that the move would compromise their ability to conduct independent investigations.
The bill would elevate the five officials at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Credit Union Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

Lots of graft opportunities in those agencies, y'see. Don't need independent watchdogs snooping around while the Chicago Way is put into operation on Wall Street. And here's some news on the "SIGTARP" story I overlooked last week:

Congress did not legislate transparency for its own members' manipulation of the bailout fund, known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. . . .
[T]he Treasury Department steered $135 million in TARP money to a bank in Hawaii after Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted bank regulators on its behalf. Mr. Inouye, a Democrat, is Hawaii's senior senator. Nothing unusual so far: Members of Congress have been lobbying for home-state banks almost since TARP started -- so much so that congressional influence is the subject of a TARP inspector general report due out this summer. In one prominent case, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) arranged a meeting between regulators and OneUnited of Massachusetts, a bank in which her husband held shares. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) later wrote language into the bailout bill that effectively directed the Treasury to give special consideration to OneUnited, and he followed up with a call to Treasury. The bank got $12 million. (Emphasis added.)

That forthcoming report from "SIGTARP" -- special inspector general Neil Barofsky -- should be lots of fun.

I'm not sure this was part of the narrative

by Smitty (h/t Instapundit)

The Weekly Standard reports:

Senator Lamar Alexander introduced the "Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer Act" today, which would "require the Treasury to distribute to individual taxpayers all its stock in General Motors (GM) and Chrysler within one year following the emergence of the companies from bankruptcy proceedings.”

I see a few problems with this:

• The Treasury Department stole those shares fair and square. Loss of the asset could have deleterious effects on various graft, kickback, and corruption schemes. Distributing shares has not been deemed The Right Thing to Do.
• If people have something to lose, they may cease to vote as if they've nothing to lose. Thus, this is a violation of the 'total enslavement' doctrine.
• Some of the lumpentproletariat may even figure out the game, and become harder to manipulate. Heaven forbid, they may even become as educated as someone who went to Yale or Havard, given enough generations. This would not do.
• Lamar Alexander is a Republican, and thus cannot be permitted to diminish the glow of The One.
• He Who Must Not Be Named would be displeased.

The Fundamentals Still Suck

My latest American Spectator column:

It was Black Monday, Sept. 15, 2008. Major financial institutions were sliding into bankruptcy and the Dow Jones average was plummeting. Sen. John McCain, however, was speaking confidently. "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," the Republican presidential candidate told supporters at a Florida campaign rally.
A chorus of GOP mouthpieces echoed their candidate's assertion, but four days later, after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined the Bush administration's bailout plans, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin erupted in fury. "I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the 'fundamentals of the market are great!' line," Malkin declared. "The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged."
Malkin was right. The market closed that day with the Dow at 11,388.44, nearly 3,000 points below its October 2007 peak, but if you had sold all your stocks that day…

Please read the whole thing.