Bloodthirsty Liberal

I don’t think making retard jokes on Leno or cackling uncontrollably on 60 Minutes are President Obama’s best venues. He’s much funnier when making policy.

Hold your sides:

One of the people named this week to President Obama’s new Task Force on Tax Reform is a member of the AIG board of directors.

Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has been on the board of American International Group since 1988. He also was a prominent economic adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Asked about the AIG connection, a senior administration official said Friday that the White House declined to comment on the story.

Dick Cheney might have had the stones to do something so arrogant, so contemptuous of public sentiments (which is why I worship the man), but not President Bush. Hey, I guess Cheney and Obama really are cousins!

Of course, not everyone gets the joke.

The announcement of the tax-reform task force drew a cool reaction this week from the top Senate Democratic tax writer.

“We’ll certainly look at [its recommendations], but we’re the Congress, we’ll do what we think makes sense,” Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, told reporters.

“We’re the Congress, we’ll do what we think makes sense.”

Hey, Max Baucus made a funny himself!

Give that feline fatality a job!

It’s not like Tim Geithner can afford to lose any of the few officials who are actually working at the Treasury Department with him, but last night, he put one on leave.

The acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision has been put on leave pending a review of the agency’s role in the backdating of capital infusions by some banks, the agency said Thursday evening.

OTS said in a surprise statement that Scott Polakoff, who has been serving as acting director of the OTS, would be replaced by OTS Chief Counsel John Bowman during the review by the Treasury Department.

Office of Thrift Supervision: do they count paper clips and stockpile scrap paper?

Not exactly:

When Ben Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee that American International Group (AIG) “exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system” and that “there was no oversight of the Financial Products division,” it seemed to make sense. The Federal Reserve Chairman went on to say, “This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company.”

If nobody was keeping an eye on them, well no wonder it blew up.

But it turns out Mr. Bernanke was not quite accurate when he said “no oversight.” He made that statement on March 3rd.

…

“We were clearly responsible as a consolidated regulator for FP,” says Polakoff, and adds, “We, in 2004, should have taken an entirely different approach than what we wound up taking regarding the credit default swaps.” By now, the term credit default swap is practically a barbershop term, but basically it’s just a sort of insurance policy on another financial product like a mortgage-backed security (often stuffed with foreclosed mortgages, as we have all learned to our sorrow).

So when Mr. Polakoff says they should have taken a different approach, what he’s really saying is that the OTS regulators weren’t sophisticated enough to realize that FP was heading for BIG trouble. And why should they have been that prepared? OTS mostly regulates S&L’s which generally take deposits and then make loans for houses and other purposes. Would you expect these civil servants to really understand the risks attached to derivatives that are designed by Math PhD’s to play the odds on pieces of paper that “derive” their value from a mortgage backed security that can’t be valued itself (except maybe by another math nerd).

Who hasn’t backdated the odd multi-million dollar bank draft once or twice?

Or was he canned for speaking truth to power? It is certainly true that these derivatives are beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Why fire him for that? Why not just blame Bush, which is the default position of this administration for everything—and in this case might just be true?

You know who Lonesome Tim Geithner, holed up in the empty halls of Treasury, reminds me of? Remember the Once-ler from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax?

President Obama has a Goodfellas moment: “You think I’m funny? Do I amuse you in some way? … Like I’m some kind of clown or something?”

President Obama got testy when asked by Ed Henry why his administration took so long to respond publicly to the AIG bonus botch.

OBAMA: “It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”

Ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Take all the time you need, Mr. President. Anything worth doing is worth doing right:

The problem with this is that it took him a couple of days — and he still got it wrong. If you’ll recall, Obama and his team first claimed to know nothing about the bonuses, and then modified that claim to knowing nothing about the amendment in the omnibus plan that allowed them to get paid. Subsequently, we discovered that not only did Tim Geithner and Congress discuss the bonuses on March 3rd (and that Geithner wrote an e-mail about them while with the New York Fed in November), but that it was Geithner and his staff that directed Chris Dodd to make the necessary changes to the amendment that enabled the bonuses.

And why did Obama defend AIG CEO Edward Liddy the day before he was led to the slaughter in front of Congress?

What a tangled web you’ve woven, Mr. President.

Gee, I wonder where AIG got the idea to apply the merest cosmetic change to an intractable problem, thinking that the public would be fooled by a mere name change?

The struggling insurance giant AIG couldn’t even ensure its own good name.

Workers peeled off the large AIG sign at its Water Street offices in downtown Manhattan last weekend, part of a move to rebrand its core insurance business, according to reports.

The building had been mistaken for AIG’s headquarters around the corner, which has only a small brass name plate that reads “American International Building,” according to the New York Daily News.

AIG will now call its property-casualty company “AIU Holdings LTD” in an effort to “distinguish these well-capitalized businesses from AIG,” a corporate spokesman told Reuters.

“I think the AIG name is so thoroughly wounded and disgraced that we’re probably going to have to change it,” AIG CEO Edward Liddy told Congress last week.

May I suggest ECG, for the Enemy Combatant Group, since the Obama administration has abandoned the term?

We’ve thought about rebranding here, as well. Bloodthirsty Liberal seemed so right at the time—but there’s always been a confusion over the name. How can we, purveyors of Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, Claudia Rossett, and Shelby Steele, call ourselves Bloodthirsty Liberals when the likes of Barney Frank and Maxine Waters could easily be termed bloodthirsty liberals? We’ve explained it in the Why Bloodthirsty, Why Liberal page, but who reads that?

I’m thinking that since the name has been so devalued, I’d make a bid on aig.com.

What do you think, Bloodthirstani, ready to join the ranks of Albinos Into [Kenny] G?

No? Makes as much sense as Bloodthirsty Liberal.

Americans Interested in Graft?

All-Inclusive Guavas?