Olympia Snowe

[Winter_123]

Obama directly bipassed the Republican leadership and invited Olympia Snowe to the summit meeting tomorrow. Let the record show that she declined.

As stated, you do not decide to run with Harry Reid and then try to take her down off the shelf when you need her. She is not that kind of person despite some of the pundits here who have "informed" me otherwise on occasion. And as I said back in the fall, before it is over, it will be Obama coming to Olympia on his hands and knees.

Obama threw his lot in with Harry Reid. As the Blackfeet Indians said, "you lie down with dogs. you get up with fleas." Olympia is a moderate though and she will eventually end out doing moderate things. That, however, does not make her a whore like the men and women from some of the other states. Olympia is a very high integrity person.

 

[somarco]

On another note, your beloved Olympia voted to waive the barely 2 week old PAYGO provision in order to pass the recent "jobs" bill. File that in your "hey, we were only kidding" folder.

Senate skirts new rules to pass jobs bill - Washington Times

 

[Winter_123]

On another note, your beloved Olympia voted to waive the barely 2 week old PAYGO provision in order to pass the recent "jobs" bill. File that in your "hey, we were only kidding" folder.

Senate skirts new rules to pass jobs bill - Washington Times

You will also find that Brown from Massachusetts is a moderate and will end out hating him before it is over too.

 

[sman]

Is "end out" a Maine thing? I've never heard that phrase before. Down here in the south we would say "end up".

You will also find that Brown from Massachusetts is a moderate and will end out hating him before it is over too.

 

[somarco]

ME is next to Canada, eh?

 

[Winter_123]

ME is next to Canada, eh?

Indeed. That would be Canada with the single payer system that we will be having before the decade is over because Republicans focused on excoriating anyone who went near the health reform process. rather than supporting a more moderate plan to head off a plan that will lead to collapse. Big mistake.

Fed review of premiums coming right up. Along with review will be approval. And then after that, the health insurance public utility regulators will tell you what the premiums will be. Maybe the republicans working on health care can fix that. Oh that's right, their work is to observe what Obama does and keep their ranks from getting involved in the issue.

Oh, oh. I have the answer. Let's all vote for Ron Paul or "throw them all out." Ballsy but no plan to go with it. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the lack of plan B is going to rip the system apart through piecemeal assaults. Probably Olympia or one of the republicans will attend a meeting to see if anything can be done. Let's get her. That will work and hold it off for at least another month.

Georgia. You can probably see Cynthia McKinney from your house.

 

[somarco]

Cynthia is hanging out in CA now with folks like Al3.

Snowe declined to participate in the summit. I wish the other 19 Republican's had done likewise.

As for Ron Paul, after his exchange with Bernanke yesterday, one would expect his next act to be something involving a grassy knoll.

 

[Justin Bilyj]

Whoa bob, that man has done WAY more than any congressman on that committee for liberty, and to somehow extract fairness from the FEDERAL RESERVE, who is sinking this house of cards this political establishment has turned our economy into. Bernanke is an ass-clown, and he deserves to be seriously grilled about the traitorous acts he and the banking/ political elite have done behind the scenes to tear down our sovereign constitution.
This is the problem with the GOP, they have gotten neoconned (Keynes) into a foreign policy and economic policy that wasn't theirs to begin with, and now are as bad as the liberal left in this country. Welfare or Warfare anyone?
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speaking of grassy knoll....

 

[somarco]

Must have been off his meds yesterday.

Paul - who is well known for his distrust of the Federal Reserve - was questioning Bernanke during a hearing in front of the House Financial Services Committee.

The Texas Republican went through a series of different issues before moving to talk about transparency at the Fed, which has been one of his most popular legislative initiatives in this Congress. That's when things went a bit off track.

"I would like to get more specific on the transparency bill because, it has been reported in the past that in the 1980s that the Fed actually facilitated a $5.5 billion loan to Saddam Hussein and he then bought weapons from our military-industrial complex," Paul said.

I was listening to two other things at the time, but that - shall we say - piqued my interest.

"A lot of cash was passed through, and a lot of people supposed it was passed through the Federal Reserve when there was a provisional government after 2003 invasion; that money was not appropriated money by the Congress as the Constitution says," Paul continued.

He wasn't done.

"Also there's been reports that the cash used in the Watergate scandal came through the Federal Reserve and when investigators back in those years tried to find out, they were always stonewalled and they couldn't get the information," said Paul.

It's not often that you hear a member of Congress pull together both Saddam Hussein and Watergate in back-to-back sentences.

"Would you grant that the American people deserve to know whether the Federal Reserve has been involved in this?" Paul continued, wondering aloud if the Fed was about to also move to bail out the country of Greece.

"It seems like if the Fed was not involved in this no matter at all, it would be to your advantage to say, 'No, we don't do stuff like that'. Why don't we open the books ten years back and find out the truth of these matters," Paul concluded.

By now, I had turned down the volume on my other recorders to see what Bernanke was going to say.

And with his customary, somewhat flat demeanor, the Federal Reserve Chairman did not disappoint.

"Well, Congressman, these specific allegations you've made are absolutely bizarre, and I have absolutely no knowledge remotely like what you have described," Bernanke told Paul.

 

[Justin Bilyj]

EconomicPolicyJournal.com: Fed Chairman Bernanke Should Apologize to Ron Paul

It seems in vogue these days to apologize for wrong doings. I am not really sure why Tiger Woods apologized on worldwide television to golfers, his wife, his mother, to me, to you...to the entire world, for what appears a personal matter, but I tell you who needs to apologize publicly is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He needs to apologize for his snarky, condescending attitude toward Congressman Ron Paul when Paul ,

1. asked Bernanke about allegations that the Federal Reserve was involved in funneling money to Saddam Hussein, when Hussein was a favorite of the U.S.,

and

2. asked about allegations that the Fed was involved in transferring Watergate money.

Bernanke labeled the allegations "bizarre."

Naturally, mainstream media took up on Bernanke's cue, and are reporting Paul's allegations without the back story. Here is the back story.

Fed chairman Bernanke simply doesn't know Fed history as well as Ron Paul (Or the history conveniently slipped his memory). As far as Watergate, I always thought it was pretty common knowledge that the money ended up in the burglars' hands through some pretty fishy means. Even wikipedia has part of the story:

[Watergate burglar Bernard] Barker had attempted to disguise the origin of the funds by depositing the donors' checks into bank accounts which (though controlled by him), were located in banks outside of the United States. What Barker, Liddy, and Sloan did not know was that the complete record of all such transactions are held, after the funds cleared, for roughly six months. Barker's use of foreign banks to deposit checks and withdraw the funds via cashier's checks and money orders in April and May 1972 guaranteed that the banks would keep the entire transaction record at least until October and November 1972.​

Wikipedia, also states:

Investigative examination of the bank records of a Miami company run byWatergate burglar Bernard Barker revealed that an account controlled by him personally had deposited, and had transferred to it (through the Federal Reserve Check Clearing System) the funds from these financial instruments.​

Clearly, there were some very, very odd transactions that went down which may, or may not, have been abnormally facilitated by the Fed. Was this a normal Fed wire, or something more convoluted? My sense has always been that there was something a bit extraordinary about the way the funds went through the Fed system. It does smell, for sure, and to ask about it is not bizarre. It should be noted that the Fed chairman at the time was Arthur Burns, who would have sold his own children to a white slave ring if Nixon had asked. (In a recent report by Micahel Labeit, here at EconominPolicyJournal.com, Labeit details the speech of former Columbia University PhD student Walter Block, who during the speech reminisced about his years studying at the school ,Block specifically recalled how Arthur Burns in his class, instead of teaching, simply told stories of his dinners with Nixon.) Note, I don't think Nixon, himself, necessarily asked Burns to help in the transfer of the funds, but Burns would very likely have responded positively to a request from a Nixon lieutenant, given his adoration of Nixon.

Here's the late investigative reporter Sherman Skolnick reporting on the documents the Fed blocked Congress from seeing about its possible involvement with money sent to Hussein:

....in October, 1990, at the time of the Persian Gulf conflict, there was an unpublicized case in the Chicago Federal District Court (No. 90 C 6863). The Illinois Bank Commissioner sought an injunction against the Federal Reserve Board to stop them from turning over certain bank records to the House Banking Committee. The records were those of the Chicago branch of Italy's largest [bank], Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, owned in part by the Vatican.

Called BNL, it had records of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and his secret private joint business dealings with his partner, an American. A close crony of the Federal Reserve, Chicago Federal District Judge Brian Barnett Duff, ordered the return of any records from the Banking Committee, then headed by a Democrat,Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D., Texas).

The House Banking Committee was an intervening party-litigant in the controversy. Judge Duff so opposed the House Banking Committee's efforts to get those records, that the Judge would not listen to the Committee's attorney; did not want the attorney in the Judge's courtroom, the Judge calling him an 800 pound gorilla showing no respect for the court.

In May, 1991, right after the War ended in the Persian Gulf, the case ended up in the Federal Appeals Court in Chicago; a court dominated by Judges tied to the major banks and cronies of the Federal Reserve.​

From what I understand,the Illinois Bank Commissioner filed against the Fed at the request of the Fed! What were they hiding? Ron Paul's question wasn't bizarre, it was Chairman Bernanke's response that was bizarre, disrespectful and out of order. It's time for an apology by Chairman Bernanke. And let's see those Fed records about Hussein, the Chicago branch of BNL and the Fed!

Bernanke's response of total ignorance reminds me of the time former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy, Phil Swagel told me, with a straight face, he didn't know what a gold swap was.

When it serves them, these guys have very forgetful memories. Thank the heavens there are people like Ron Paul around to remind them.

UPDATE Here's more on possible Fed involvment in the Watergate money. From David T. Beito (Via LRC):

Well, it seems that Paul may have been onto something...or at the very least raised legitimate questions that deserve investigation. A few minutes on google news produced this 1982 story from the Milwaukee Sentinel by Richard Bradee of the paper's Washington Bureau

"Police who searched the room the Watergate burglars used found $4,200 in $100 dollar bills, all numbered in sequence. Proxmire asked the Federal Reserve Board where the money came from. As he explained in a letter to the late Rep. Wright Patman (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking Committee: "I got the biggest run-around [from the Federal Reserve] in years. They ducked, misled, lied, and gave me the *** treatment."​

UPDATE 2: More on the Federal Reserve cover-up of Saddam Hussein payoffs, here.