tarp – Moe Lane

The Mary Jo Kilroy (D, OH-15) Timeline of Lies.

Since Mary Jo Kilroy (D, OH-15) is apparently unclear about this entire causality thing, allow me to remind her of her recent history.

October 3, 2008. HR 1424 (TARP) is passed in the House.
November4, 2008. Mary Jo Kilroy is elected to Congress.
January 3, 2009. Kilroy is sworn in as Congresswoman.
January 21, 2009. HR 384 (TARP Reform and Accountability Act) is passed in the House. Kilroy votes for the bill, and thus preserving TARP.
January 22, 2009. (via Third Base Politics) A ‘resolution of disapproval‘ of releasing more funds to TARP is passed in the House. Kilroy does vote for this; however, this is after the Senate version was defeated, thus making it what CQ accurately called a ‘hollow gesture.’
December 11, 2009. HR 4173 (The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009) is passed in the House; a motion to recommit is defeated. Kilroy votes for the bill and against the recommit, and thus preserving TARP.
June 17, 2010. Video surfaces at the Jawa Report showing Kilroy claiming that she voted against TARP.

Continue reading The Mary Jo Kilroy (D, OH-15) Timeline of Lies.

Whatever happened to Neel Kashkari?

Who is Neel Kashkari? The TARP bailout guy for Bush and Obama. Yeah, that guy. Although he was just the public face of that particular… event. Anyway, he’s got a WaPo profile:

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

He’s currently living in a shack in the Sierra Nevada mountains; the stress apparently snapped him like a rubber band. I don’t know whether to be sympathetic, or use him as a Horrible Example of Why You Need To Stay Out Of Dizzy City. Possibly both.

Moe Lane

The Washington Post discovers fiscal responsibility.

The Washington Post, alas, gets this editorial wrong in the very first sentence:

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news — especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: considering the amount of time that the Right’s bloggers, pundits, and legislators have spent explaining why the Democrats in Congress needed to institute a Stop spending money we don’t have, you idiots policy, well. We do live here, too, so our liking is hardly unalloyed – but we did say that this wasn’t going to work*. Moving on:

And so the Obama administration did not exactly rush to publish yesterday’s required mid-session update to its federal budget estimates of last February. Still, once the numbers finally emerged in the dog days of August, they retained the power to stun: Instead of a cumulative $7.1 trillion deficit over the next decade, the White House now projects a $9 trillion deficit. These figures imply average annual budget deficits greater than 4 percent of gross domestic product through fiscal 2019, a rate of debt accumulation faster than projected GDP growth. This is not a sustainable fiscal path.

Continue reading The Washington Post discovers fiscal responsibility.