BabbleFest

In extracting the $20 billion dollar trust fund from BP for administration by the government, the Obama administration neglected to obtain an agreement from BP to forego the applicable tax credit, which amounts to roughly $10 billion. While BP will undoubtedly be cast as the villain for claiming a perfectly legal tax credit, blame for this fiasco rests squarely with the government.

BP PLC will reduce its contribution to U.S. coffers by roughly $10 billion due to a tax credit the company is claiming it incurred from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The oil giant said Tuesday that it is incurring a charge of $32.2 billion from the Deepwater Horizon disaster response, and as such, it is claiming a $9.9 billion taxation credit.

This is NOT some new issue that nobody could have anticipated. The recent settlement with Goldman Sachs included such a provision, and Congress has in the past complained about settlements that did not include such language. This is nothing more or less than complete ineptitude at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

I can’t help but picture BP’s lead counsel leaning in close to Tony Hayward after the agreement was reached and whispering “Amateurs.”

One can only assume that in their rush to get their hands on, and take credit for, the $20 billion fund the administration didn’t bother to do their homework.

Amateurs indeed.

More details are here.

Michelle Obama and daughter Sasha, 9, will be vacationing on Spain’s Costa Del Sol this August, on what has been described by the White House as “a private trip with long-time family friends.”

Thirty (yes, thirty) rooms have been reserved at a five-star hotel.

It is thought Mrs Obama has booked the rooms at the prestigious Villa Padierna, a golf and spa resort located along the coast from Marbella.

With a reputation as Spain’s most exclusive hotel, room prices start at 250 euros (£210) for a standard double and rise up to 5,000 euros (£4,175) for a private villa within the gardens.

At current exchange rates, that makes the starting price per room per night about $325.

Since most of the thirty rooms are undoubtedly for secret service and staff personnel, who will also have to travel and eat, it looks like the American taxpayers will fork over tens of thousands of dollars for Michelle and Sasha’s “private trip”.

More details are here

Wasn’t the idea behind big unions supposed to be equality and fairness in the workplace? Don’t they justify their very existence with the rationale that they prevent management from treating individual workers, or groups of workers, differently? I guess times have changed, and with a bit of paraphrasing, I submit that George Orwell pretty well sums up the current state of affairs.

Some union members are more equal than others.

“Fair share”. That’s a phrase Obama and his administration officials like to throw around. Everybody should pay their fair share. Everybody should get their fair share. Apparently, exactly what “share” is “fair” varies with the context. For example, among autoworkers at Chrysler and GM plants, after what the Washington Post describes as the “jury-rigged” labor agreement reached during the bailouts, new hires make exactly one-half the basic wage of those already employed, and have significantly curtailed benefits as well. All are card-carrying, dues-paying members of the United Auto Workers.

Among workers building the Jeep Grand Cherokee here, there are few obvious distinctions. Clutching lunch sacks and mini-coolers, they trudge together through the turnstiles at the plant’s main gate each day to tinker with the same vehicles, along the same assembly line, performing the same tasks.

Yet they fall into distinctly unequal classes: About half make $28 an hour or more, while the rest, the recently hired, make $14.

This oddity, which could become the norm in much of the domestic U.S. auto industry, arises from the jury-rigged labor agreement that the United Auto Workers, U.S. automakers and the federal government reached during the industry’s near-death experience last year.

Not mentioned in the Post’s article is the fact that retired Chrysler workers saw their existing retirement benefits slashed in order to facilitate retaining the status quo for current workers. These results, along with the transfer of assets from the actual investors in GM bonds, such as the Indiana teachers and policemen’s retirement funds, to the United Auto Workers, are dramatically different from the result that would have obtained had existing bankruptcy law been applied, instead of the hand-crafted “managed bankruptcy” by which the Obama administration circumvented the law and made the UAW, a powerful union supporter of the Democrat party, the big winner in the bailouts. All, of course, subsidized by the taxpayers.

(continue reading…)

That didn’t take long. Heads have begun to roll in Bell, California, the little town where the government officials get paid more than whole neighborhoods of the working stiffs they’re supposed serving.

We originally commented on this story a few days ago. Now comes word that in a closed-door city council meeting the three highest paid officials, the city manager, assistant city manager, and police chief have agreed to resign. Without severance packages. Looks like the Bell city council members have been studying somebody’s technique for tossing people under the bus to save your own hide. 

But alas, it may be too little too late to save the council members, themselves knocking down around $100,000 a year for their part-time council jobs.  The citizens apparently are not entirely satisfied with the ouster of the three officials:

The crowd erupted in applause after the announcement but immediately yelled out questions about what would happen to the council members. Four of the five are paid close to $100,000 annually. When their questions were not answered, they shouted, “Recall!”

And in another strange twist, it now turns out that while four of the five council members are making around $100,000 for their part-time council jobs, Councilman Lorenzo Velez, who moved to open the meeting to the public but was overruled by the city attorney, is making just a little bit less than the others:

Velez, who makes only $8,076, has expressed shock at the amount his fellow council members are paid. Vice Mayor Teresa Jacobo said Velez makes less than the others because he was appointed, not elected. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office is looking at the salaries of council members to see whether they violate state law.

This has got to be one of the most corrupt and abusive groups of political hacks in the country. Or is it? Maybe citizens around the country had better start paying more attention to what their “leaders” are up to.

In any event, pass the popcorn. This is the best part of the movie. The angry citizens have just dispatched Igor the evil lab assistant, and now they’re after the monster and the mad scientist who created it.

P.S.   Kudos to the LA Times for exposing this cesspool. Now if only they’d spend a little time looking into the sewer in Washington, D.C.

Documents released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) reveal a startling pattern of “interaction” between sub-prime king Countrywide Bank (now absorbed by Bank of America) and officials at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

New documents released by Issa show 173 sweetheart deal loans from Countrywide Financial Corporation were given to 42 Fannie and Freddie employees as the company was negotiating exclusive agreement to sell Fannie Mae billions of dollars in questionable, sub-prime mortgages at a discounted rate.

Among those receiving the sweetheart deal loans were Jamie Gorelick, Vice Chair Fannie Mae, James Johnson, Chairman and CEO Fannie Mae, Daniel Mudd, Vice Chair and COO Fannie Mae and Franklin Raines, Chairman and CEO Fannie Mae.

173 loans to 42 officials. Somebody, maybe everybody, was getting sweetheart treatment on more than just their personal residence.

There’s much more here, including an email in which Coutrywide admits it is making a loan to an official at a loss, apparently in anticipation of benefitting in other ways.

I’m thinking the “Angry Mob Playset” may be a hot Christmas gift this year in Bell, California.

When residents of  that town, with a population of 38,000 and a per capita income under $25,000, found out from the LA Times that their city manager is making almost $800,000, their police chief makes more  than the Los Angeles police chief, and their part-time city council members were collecting $100,000 a year, the angry crowd that showed up at the next city council meeting overflowed out into the street, with those barred from the room banging on the door and shouting.

More details are here. It’s fun reading, if you like harrowing tales of government abusing the governed.

I’m guessing there may be some turnover in city government next election.

Headline:

US to set up secret ‘Big Brother’ surveillance system to monitor internet for cyber-attacks

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1293344/Perfect-Citizen-US-set-secret-Big-Brother-surveillance-monitor-internet-cyber-attacks.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0tUsFanxC

The immediate offer of assistance from the Dutch was ignored. A French company offered a fleet of oil skimmers, but got no response, finally leasing the vessels to a Florida company that will deploy them. Containment boom – miles of it – sat unused in a Maine warehouse while government officials with the authority to purchase it never even told officials “managing” the spill that it existed.

Oil skimmers used regularly in Europe and around the world have been offered and rejected because they skim, separate and return 99% clean water to the sea. U.S. government regulations require a higher purity level, so ships operating in the gulf skim, journey to shore, offload to landward purifying facilities, and then journey back out to go back to work.

Regulations idle vessels for days for required inspections to make sure they have the required number of life jackets. The vessels are finally released to go to work, without any inspections ever having been conducted. Vessels sit unused for days while U.S. crews – required to be union members – are trained to operate them, replacing the trained, experienced non-U.S. crews.

Louisiana is prevented from building barrier berms without federal approval. Weeks later the approval comes and work commences. Days later the work is halted so the government can “study” the effects of sand dredging and determine the best location for dredging.

Oil skimming vessels, almost 1,000 of them, and miles and miles of boom sit idle around the United States, because a 1990 law requires that they be available in case of a local emergency.

Foreign vessels available to help are refused because of outdated laws and regulations requiring U.S. crews to operate in U.S. waters, and neither the administration nor congress acts to relax these restrictions.

President Obama, busy golfing and, later, talking tough, never even speaks to anyone from BP until six weeks after the explosion, and the guy who should have been overseeing the government response from day one was unreachable for the first few days, on a “government business” whitewater rafting trip with his wife.

The response to the oil spill in the Gulf is a clusterf%&$.

BP’s containment and remediation efforts have been flawed, to be sure. But ultimately, all efforts are restrained and controlled by federal regulations and laws. Far from helping, the utterly incompetent, totally uncoordinated federal response has in fact made the situation worse, creating level upon level of dysfunctional bureacracy and an impenetrable web of red tape, preventing local officials from acting decisively,  and creating a paralysis which has enabled the disaster to spread further at every step at which it might have been limited or contained.

The headline is not my take on this, it is actually from the CNN-Money article.  According to the federal government, it is all the drilling companies’ own fault.

The offshore drilling ban imposed after the BP disaster is only supposed to hit operations in deep water — 500 feet or more.

But drillers in shallow water say they haven’t been issued permits since the April 20 explosion. The delay has already forced hundreds of layoffs, and many more could be on the way.

So why is it the drillers’ fault their rigs sit idle and they are being forced to lay off employees? Because they haven’t filed all the new paperwork, that’s why!

An Interior Department spokeswoman said there is no freeze on shallow water drilling. However, she said, new safety procedures were put in place following the Deepwater Horizon spill.

“Companies have to comply before we can issue them permits,” the spokeswoman said. “No one has fully complied.”

Well, OK, except that the government stopped issuing permits almost immediately, and didn’t even notify drillers that there were new requirement until June 8. That is almost two months after the fact.

Read the entire article here.

Dysfunctional government or intentional shutdown of offshore drilling?

Hopefully, when the Obamacare guidelines about when you can see a doctor are suddenly changed, the government won’t wait two months to tell you that there’s a new set of forms you have to fill out first.

UPDATE:  The Portland Tribune had this story in 2007 or 2008, and chose not to publish “an unconfirmed story”. I wonder if the Tribune also chose not to publish the unconfirmed – and false – story about McCain’s alleged affair during the 2008 presidential campaign? (see “Related Observations” below).

Portland officials have confirmed a story first broken by the National Enquirer detailing a complaint for “unwanted sexual contact” made against former Vice President and global warming huckster Al Gore.

A Portland massage therapist accused former Vice President Al Gore of “unwanted sexual contact” at a hotel during an October 2006 visit, but no charges were filed due to lack of evidence, law officials said Wednesday.

An attorney representing the woman contacted police in late 2006, said Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk. Schrunk said the woman — who has not been identified — refused to be interviewed by detectives and did not want the investigation to proceed.

The woman, however, contacted police in January 2009 and gave a statement, saying Gore tried to have sex with her during an appointment at the upscale downtown Hotel Lucia, where Gore was reportedly registered as “Mr. Stone.”

The incident occurred October 24, 2006. Gore was in Portland to give a speech on climate change. But it appears it was the condition of his own lower hemisphere that was on his mind:

In a transcript of the interview released by police, the massage therapist said she had an appointment with “Mr. Stone” at 10:30 p.m. but the hotel’s front desk told her he wouldn’t be available until 11 p.m. When she knocked on the door, Al Gore opened it, and when she asked what she should call him, he replied to “Call me Al,” the woman told police.

She said she was doing requested abdominal work on Gore when he started to moan and demanded she go lower.

I will not “go lower” and present the disgusting details of this lurid tale.

You, however, should by all means feel free to go ahead and read the full article here.

Related observations:

Clinton, Kennedy, Gore, Dodd, Edwards … are they all pigs, or are these guys the exceptions?

You may recall that it was also the Enquirer that exposed John Edwards hiding in a hotel bathroom. Have we reached the point where the National Enquirer is the only source of investigative journalism left in America? Or is it just the only one that doesn’t decide the “newsworthiness” of a story based on the party affiliation of the participants?

The Obama administration’s handling of the federal response to the BP oil spill is so fragmented, disorganized and leaderless that they are actually impeding cleanup efforts.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was frustrated in his attempts to get federal permission to construct sand bar barriers to prevent the slick from reaching coastal islands and wetlands. Those wetlands and islands are now covered in oil.

Miles of absorbent boom material lays unused in a Maine factory which anticipated the need and was ready to deliver, but could not get anyone to approve the purchase and deployment of the boom. This remained the case even after both Maine senators contacted federal disaster agencies, and Jake Tapper, days later, brought the matter to the attention of authorities by asking about it during a press conference. The response was that government officials actually managing the response to the disaster had never heard about it before Tapper asked the question.

And in a stunning example of the level of incompetence exhibited in the disaster management effort, we have this:

Those on the front lines of the U.S. Gulf Coast oil spill say they are forced to fight two battles — one against the crude washing into lush wetlands and another against needless bureaucracy.

Sixty-one days after the BP well began spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, angry local officials blame dozens of federal agencies involved in approving response plans, a maze of regulations and poor coordination for their struggles beating back the slick …

Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard shut down 16 vacuum barges that were sucking up crude from Louisiana marshes. The units, which consist of trucks and tanks on barges that suck up thousands of gallons of crude, needed to be checked for stability and if they had life jackets and fire extinguishers.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had asked officials to inspect them quickly without bringing them back to dock. But the units sat idle for 24 hours before being allowed to travel back to oil-fouled Barataria Bay, Bay Jimmy and Pass A Loutre.

After 24 hours, the barges went back to work, and according to media reports, no inspections were performed.

You know you are in trouble when even Reuters is willing to report that some are suggesting that the Obama administration needs to learn a lesson from the Bush administration’s handling of the Katrina cleanup:

As a guide, many point to the arrival of U.S. Army General Russel Honore in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The tough-talking military man was credited with taking control and kick-starting the city’s stalled rescue mission in the weeks after the storm.

Not only has the administration’s response been disorganized, it has been dishonest. Obama took to the airwaves to claim the government had been deceived about the scale of the leak by BP, and had no idea of the actual quantity of oil being spilled until weeks after the fact. In actuality, a government agency memo prepared within 48 hours of the explosion estimated the rate of oil flow at almost exactly the higher figure Obama claimed was unknown until weeks later. (continue reading…)

I know, silly question. I really meant it in a rhetorical sort of way.

Not only is the culprit Iranian, he’s an illegal as well! Two-fer!

http://www.newsregister.com/article/44432-arms%20cache%20tied%20mac

“Confronted there by agents, King initially agreed to let them search his vehicle. That search turned up two shotguns, two semiautomatic handguns and about 480 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition, which they believe he picked up in McMinnville.
When King revoked permission for any further search without a warrant, the agents obtained a warrant to search a storage unit he was renting at the facility. In it, they found a .50-caliber sniper rifle, two .308-caliber sniper rifles, three .300-caliber sniper rifles, eight law enforcement style .223-caliber rifles, three Glock semi-automatic handguns, 100 .223-caliber magazines, 3,800 rounds of .223-caliber ammunition, various high-powered scopes and other equipment.
Crabtree marveled at the find.
“Have you ever seen a .50-caliber round?” he asked. “That’s a big round — the stuff you shoot at airplanes and tanks. If a bunch off .50-caliber rounds started going off in McMinnville … ”

Quite a bit of firepower for a guy who just likes to hunt [infidels perhaps?].
So this sort of thing makes one ponder the possiblities of a more “practical” jihad that focuses on soft targets (shopping malls or D.C. sniper types of attacks) instead of the spectacular 9-11 variety.

The Newsweek staff is said to be “nervous”. I’ll bet “nervous” is an understatement.

You can almost see the entire staff flinging themselves from the windows. The very notion warms the heart.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/04/nerves-at-newsweek-over-prospect-of-purchase-by-conservative-media-company-newsmax/

“How come they have to drill in water a mile deep?”

If this leak was in 500 feet of water instead of 5,000 feet of water, it could have been plugged in 48 hours.

So I sent the above out as an email to a small group of friends, and almost instantly got the following reply:

“I’ll take — appeasing environmentalist wackos for a thousand.” (Thanx Lori – you are now eligible for the bonus round.)

That Sarah Palin is SUCH an idiot…there will NEVER be any “death panels” in Obamacare!

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/04/026189.php