Monday, January 03, 2011

There you have it!

*  Mr. Big Shot Businessman, and former Lehman Brothers Vice President, John Kasich, has been very slow in filling his cabinet, according to Plunderbund.  Could it be that no one wants to work for him?


* Think Progress has more on Kasich's decision to kill the passenger rail project:
....Touting his plan to help the private-sector “quickly help create jobs,” Kasich insisted he would help “improve the atmosphere in our state for real business development” by meeting “the needs of businesses to overcome” governmental “snafus.” But Kasich undermined his rhetoric by killing Ohio’s high-speed rail project. In doing so, he derailed many businesses’ economic development plans and effectively killed the private-sector jobs he promised to create, leaving one businessman to call his decision “unbelievable,” “mind-boggling,” and “naive”: 


Locally, certain not to happen is construction of a $15 million
facility planned for Columbus by US Railcar Co. The plant 
would have employed up to 200 when fully staffed, said 
Mike Pracht, president and chief executive officer of the 
Columbus-based railroad-car manufacturer....

...But Kasich is “unrelenting” in his mission to overtly rebuke his campaign promises. While acknowledging that the train would create private-sector jobs, Kasich’s spokesman Rob Nichols scoffed Kasich wasn’t going to build a train that “will cost taxpayers.” A curious excuse given the fact that Kasich is perfectly willing to spend taxpayer money to “pay for security improvements” at his own private residence. Because Kasich is choosing to be “the first Ohio governor in a generation” to live in his private residence rather than in the already secured governor’s mansion, Ohioans will now pay for “around-the clock security at the Kasich home” as well as at the official residence....

Kasich still thinks he is operating in the secret deals of Lehman Brothers and Wall Street.

>>>> Here is an interesting tweet from http://twitter.com/BIGUNIVERSITY:

If Kasich sells State owned assets to cover his lies of reducing our taxes ... let's find out which one of his cronies receives finder fees.


That will be something to investigate.

****  Rep. Darrell Issa needs to be careful what he says. The Washington Post takes issue with something that Issa said recently:

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-Calif.), incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he misspoke when he called President Obama "one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times." Rather, Mr. Issa now says, Mr. Obama has merely presided over "one of the most corrupt administrations." That is hardly more restrained or more responsible. It is in fact patently false. 

Mr. Issa's evidence for his assertion is - well, it would be an exaggeration to call it scant. "When you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." 

There can be disagreement over the wisdom of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the fund proposed by President George W. Bush in 2008 to bail out financial institutions and, eventually, car companies during the financial crisis. But under Mr. Obama's leadership, TARP has ended up costing the taxpayer far less than originally anticipated; last fall the Congressional Budget Office estimated its eventual total cost at $66 billion. Similarly, it's fair to argue that the stimulus was misguided or ineffective. But evidence of corruption in its administration is negligible, impressively so given the enormous sums involved.... 

Really?  Corrupt?  Issa is wrong.  What about Issa's background?

Examiner
....Issa was arrested in February 1980 for felony auto theft by San Jose police. According to the New York Times, Issa, 57, "was charged with two long-ago auto thefts before eventually making a fortune selling car alarms.”

Prior to his auto theft arrest, Issa was arrested and convicted of possession of an unregistered handgun in 1972.

Issa may get support from another republican who knows his way around crime. Newly elected Florida Governor, Rick Scott, “admitted to 14 counts of Medicare fraud and paid the federal government more than $600 million dollars in fines for his fraudulent billing practices.”

What a guy!

> Then we have this from Talkingpointsmemo:


...The Examiner scoured military records and concluded that Issa's service on the squad "was marred by a bad conduct rating, a demotion and allegations that he had stolen a fellow soldier's car." It cited his 1998 campaign biography saying he served in the Army nine years, even though records showed he served just over five years. He was enlisted from 1970-1972 and was in a college Army ROTC program from 1972 through 1976, the Examiner reported. It also noted that an Issa press release said he was "detailed to the Army security team" which traveled with Nixon, and quoted from a 1990 San Diego Union story that said Issa "was on a bomb disposal unit for President Nixon and got to see the 1971 World Series because Nixon wanted to go and the stadiums had to be secured."
Here's the key part:
The records show that Issa's service on what he terms an "Army security team" amounted to less than six months on a bomb-disposal squad in 1971. That's scant experience to qualify him for presidential security duty, former GI bomb experts say.
Issa couldn't have guarded Nixon at the World Series because the president didn't attend, according to the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda....
For further details, check out the link above.