Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 6:07 PM
Obama to Nominate Jesus Christ to Supreme Court?
President Barack Obama is expected to nominate Jesus Christ, an immigrant
originally born to a virgin mother in Bethlehem, to fill the new vacancy on
the Supreme Court. Although Mr. Christ is over 2,000 years old, He is
immortal, so Democrats and Republicans expect that He will serve on the high
court forever or until He decides to start the End Times. Republicans are
expected to fight the nomination on the grounds that Mr. Christ would
radically move the Court to the left. The GOP is also concerned that,
despite decades of controversy and speculation, Mr. Christ has never
revealed his position on abortion. Mr. Christ, according to many
authorities, is expected to oppose the death penalty in all forms. Michael
Steele, the head of the GOP national committee, issued a statement: "Christ
is a complete mystery to us. He won't reveal His physical appearance and
many of His positions are unknown or the subject of speculation. He is a
stealth candidate. Why won't He reveal himself? Who does He think He is?"
Republicans are reportedly outraged that Mr. Obama even considered Mr.
Christ, who has been widely quoted for his sentiments supporting the poor
over the wealthy. In a Facebook post, former half-term Alaskan Governor
Sarah Palin called for an investigation into the Bethlehem chapter of ACORN
because of what she termed the "highly suspicious" coincidence that both
President Obama and Mr. Christ had each spent three years as community
organizers. In her post, Palin also wrote that "More and more of good
God-fearing smalltime Americans from hardworking smalltime towns from great
parts of this real America, West, South, East, North, are seeing more and
more every day that Christ is a community organizer. We don't need another
community organizer in the White House!"
Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) asked, "We're not even sure where He was born.
Why is He afraid to show us his birth certificate?" Bachmann also announced
that she would vote "no" when the Christ nomination came before the House of
Representatives. Later, her congressional staff released a statement saying
that the Congresswoman had forgotten that the House does not vote on
judicial nominations.
According to Rush Limbaugh, "Christ doesn't know anything about free
enterprise. This is part of the Obama conspiracy to drag us to socialism. If
this guy is approved, I'm moving to Costa Rica." Sobbing, Glenn Beck
attacked Christ's support for the separation of church and state, telling
his audience "You know who else wanted a separation of church and state?
Hitler."
Several Catholic priests were contacted for comment but refused to
discuss the issue, and, even though they weren't asked, all empathetically
denied that they had personally molested any children.
Democrats are optimistic about their chances of shoving Mr. Christ
down the throats of Americans using normal constitutional and parliamentary
procedures. Many Democrats are hopeful that Mr. Christ's past associations
with prostitutes will earn him at least one Republican vote, that of Sen.
David Vitter (R-LA).
If confirmed, Christ will be the first Supreme Court Justice who has at
least one American city named after him: Corpus Christi, Texas.
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_whistleblower_they_ignored_20100414/
The Whistleblower They Ignored
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: April 14, 2010
There aren't too many genuine heroes to come out of the banking disaster,
but Armando Falcon is one of them. You have probably never heard of him, but
his testimony Friday before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,
available on the commission's website, is must reading for anyone trying to
figure out why U.S. taxpayers had to bail out companies to the tune of
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Falcon was the chief regulator attempting to bring order to the houses of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the first four years of this decade, and
had he been listened to, a significant part of the housing crisis could have
been mitigated. Instead his agency was denied serious regulatory power by
Democrats in Congress including liberals such as Reps. Barney Frank and
Maxine Waters, both of whom assumed he was undermining public support for
more affordable housing.
He wasn't, and instead was attempting to call attention to the reckless
bundling of risky mortgages in which the government-chartered agencies acted
like the other too-big-to-fail behemoths that together almost wrecked the
entire economy. It was those on the lower end of the income scale who had
put their life savings into risky mortgages that were most hurt when the
bubble burst.
This is a guy whom Republican congressmen and the Wall Street Journal
editorial writers have lionized, and for once they got it right. At least
the part about Fannie and Freddie being out of control and their applauding
Falcon's past efforts to rein in the greed of their top executives. Where
they go wrong is when they attribute the company's misbehavior to the
alleged liberal do-gooderism of the mostly Democratic Party hacks that ran
the enterprises. The reality is that concern for affordable housing goals
was simply a convenient mask for unfettered greed.
Conservatives make much of those goals, which both Bill Clinton and George
W. Bush endorsed, but objectives of this sort had nothing to do with the
sordid behavior of the executives who ran the companies. Asked by the
commission to testify on the impact of those goals, Falcon responded:
"Your letter also asked me about the impact of affordable housing goals on
the enterprises' financial problems. In my opinion, the goals were not the
cause of the enterprises' demise. The firms would not engage in any
activity, goal fulfilling or otherwise, unless there was a profit to be
made. Fannie and Freddie invested in subprime and Alt A mortgages in order
to increase profits and regain market share. Any impact on meeting
affordable housing goals was a byproduct of the activity."
The problem with the so-called government-sponsored but essentially private
institutions that the conservatives are so happy to vilify and that liberals
feel the need to defend is that they represented the worst of both worlds.
Although originally chartered by the government, they had morphed into super
for-profit monstrosities run by executives whose huge bonuses depended on
the price of the company stock. As Falcon put it in his testimony:
"Ultimately the companies were not unwitting victims of an economic down
cycle or flawed products and services of theirs. Their failure was deeply
rooted in a culture of arrogance and greed."
In short, they behaved like the other financial conglomerates, but the
government-sponsored housing enterprises were protected by powerful members
of Congress and what turned out to be a strong guarantee that their bad
paper would be covered by the taxpayers.
They do deserve considerable blame for the banking disaster that ensued, and
while it is hardly the whole story, it gave the free-market conservatives a
convenient target. But it also presents them with a contradiction that they
refuse to confront. The housing enterprises failed not because they were
do-gooder pubic entities but because they weren't. Their top executives were
driven by the same desire for outlandish profit that their counterparts at
AIG and Citigroup had. As Falcon put it referring to then Fannie Mae's CEO
Franklin Raines:
"While all of this political power satisfied the egos of Fannie and Freddie
executives, it ultimately served one primary purpose: the speedy
accumulation of personal wealth by any means. . In the case of CEO Franklin
Raines, he collected over $90 million in total compensation from 1998 to
2003. Of that amount, $52 million was directly tied to achieving
earnings-per-share goals. However, the earnings goal turned out to be
unachievable without breaking rules and hiding risks."
It only adds insult to injury to blame the unfettered greed of folks like
Raines, and his congressional allies who were lavishly attended to by those
agencies, on a concern for the low-income homebuyers who were their main
victims.
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