At first blush, Donilon replacing James Jones as NSD, no big deal...

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

I mean, he's Biden's right-hand man, and Biden's one of our smartest Veeps ever, so the story goes...

But as we look a little closer, we find the usual incestual relationship between the elites of the ruling class (Codevilla*)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before President Barack Obama picked him to be his next national security adviser, Tom Donilon was a lobbyist for mortgage giant Fannie Mae and fought off congressional attempts to impose new regulations.

As Fannie Mae's legal counsel and top strategic thinker in the late 1990s to the middle of this decade, Donilon left his sizable imprint on the company long before its takeover by the government amid the wreckage of the housing market. By that time, Donilon had moved on, well before what critics said was a day of reckoning after years of inadequate regulation and lax oversight.

In early 2008, seven months before disaster struck, Fannie Mae and its smaller cousin, Freddie Mac, held in their portfolios or guaranteed $4.9 trillion in home-mortgage debt. The government took over Freddie Mac the same day. Their rescue has cost taxpayers more than $148 billion so far.

Obama announced Friday that Donilon, would replace Gen. James Jones as national security adviser after having served as Jones' deputy since January, 2009.

A longtime Democratic operative, Donilon for six years beginning in 1999 was a registered lobbyist and top executive at Fannie Mae, leaving in 2005. His tenure coincided with efforts in Congress to rein in the mortgage giant with tougher regulations and greater oversight.
David Jeffers, Donilon's former chief spokesman, says Donilon believed in strong regulation and oversight of the company, but maintains that many of the approaches that were circulating in Congress were not the right ones.

The main one was that Congress wanted to downsize its own creation, a government-sponsored corporation that had become a housing industry behemoth — one that some on Capitol Hill felt should be forced to sell off part of its portfolio.

"There were a variety of proposals during that time that had the intention of better oversight but undermined the basic strength of the structure of Fannie Mae," said Jeffers, who now is president of Collingwood Communications, a strategic communications firm in banking and housing.

...

At Fannie Mae, Donilon was the key player whose job it was to battle any regulatory initiatives from Capitol Hill, said two people familiar with Donilon's tenure at the housing mortgage giant.

Donilon designed and implemented Fannie Mae's public affairs strategy, which included Capitol Hill and anything that might affect opinion there, said one of the two people, a former Democratic Party official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly.

The second person, a former housing industry executive intimately familiar with of Fannie Mae's operations, agreed that Donilon was at the head of an unceasing anti-regulatory campaign that the company waged throughout his tenure.

The former housing executive said that on political issues, especially regulatory oversight, Donilon was the right-hand man to Fannie Mae chairman and CEO Franklin Raines. The former housing executive also spoke on condition of anonymity to provide a clear picture of Donilon's role.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got so big because the public perception was that they were too big to fail — that the government would bail them out in any financial disaster. That picture enabled Fannie Mae to borrow cheaply on world markets by issuing hundreds of billions in top-rated securities linked to mortgages.

One can only wonder what he's going to do with our national security apparatus...

For kbate's benefit, we also get another glimpse into what happens when you believe government regulation is better than the courts when it comes to keeping the people, or the environment whole; political decisions, as we clearly see, are designed to protect only the Ruling Class.

In this case, they protected us not one wit, but Frank, Dodd, Waters, Raines, Donilon, they just keep on keepin' on while George Bush, the guy who tried to do something about the impending train wreck gets ascribed blame for "General Republican Philosophy" (which, if you have observed any of my conversations with "conservative" moderates, isn't all that different form "General Democrat Philosophy, it's just a matter of degree...)

http://home.myhughesnet.com/news/re...ass&action=2&lang=en&_LT=HOME_BUNWC00L2_UNEWS

* http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Similarly kbate, we see in California, that when Government gets to pick the research for regulations, since there is never really any cross-examination of the research, we get errors in regulation of great magnitude...

California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state's clean-air standards, and scientists have spent the past several months revising data and planning a significant weakening of the landmark regulation, The Chronicle has found.

The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with researching and adopting air quality standards. The estimate was a key part in the creation of a regulation adopted by the Air Resources Board in 2007, a rule that forces businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.

The staff of the powerful and widely respected Air Resources Board said the overestimate is largely due to the board calculating emissions before the economy slumped, which halted the use of many of the 150,000 diesel-exhaust-spewing vehicles in California. Independent researchers, however, found huge overestimates in the air board's work on diesel emissions and attributed the flawed work to a faulty method of calculation - not the economic downturn.

The overestimate, which comes after another bad calculation by the air board on diesel-related deaths that made headlines in 2009, prompted the board to suspend the regulation this year while officials decided whether to weaken the rule.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/07/BAOF1FDMRV.DTL#ixzz11iqEfuN9

Government provides political solutions to imaginary problems where courts produce facts and redress wrongs giving everyone proper guidelines to follow in their own business practices.
__________________
When Government gets so powerful that its purchase price is cost effective, even imperative, to business, then business will purchase government indulgences.
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Think about yet another example we had this week when we think of McDonald's and a lot of other companies being given waivers against the health care law heading into an election...

__________________
Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

Political Realists see the world as it is: ... In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of common greed...; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.... In the world as it is, the solution of each problem inevitably creates a new one.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals

 

[Ishmael]

Obama is obviously tired of hearing unadulderated assesments, they're just to damn depressing. Donilon should help cheer him up.

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Light at the End of the Tunnel Is an Oncoming Train
By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
Posted on October 08, 2010 11:33 AM

The news today is that 89,000 stimulus checks — totaling $22 million — got sent to people who were dead or in jail. My first instinct was, of course, to giggle at the government’s business-as-usual incompetence. I mean, seriously, dead people? And my second (perhaps revealing) thought was to wonder about the policy implications. What are the “multiplier effects” for dead people? It might not be so bad. Stimulus didn’t work for the living so is it really any worse to try the dead?

Having checked those boxes, I turned to the fact that $12 million of the invalid checks were returned. This is truly astonishing and a tribute to the character of America. It’s a silver lining in an otherwise bad-news story.

Get ready, because the bad news is going to turn horrific. With stimulus checks, the goal was to send seniors $13 billion in checks, one time, using a well-honed check-writing machine (the Social Security Administration) to an easily-defined group. And it didn’t go so well.

So imagine what will happen with the new health-care law. Recall, the goal is to distribute about $466 billion in insurance subsidies over the next decade. This will require identifying who is eligible based on their income and whether their employer offers insurance (or perhaps offers “unacceptably costly” insurance). The subsidy amount will depend on income. It will have to be sent to the state of the individual’s exchange. It will have to be transmitted to the insurance company of the recipient’s choice. And it will have to be sent monthly in advance of the payment due date. So, the U.S. Treasury will have to parse through 300 million Americans; verify their income, employment, insurance status, location, and potential insurer; cut correctly over 10 million checks for just under $4 billion; and do so on a monthly basis.

It will never happen.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/249200/light-end-tunnel-oncoming-train-douglas-holtz-eakin

 

[RightField]

So, that means that $10 million of the $22 million issued to dead people weren't returned. That's a typical democrat project....50% to help people, 50% to graft or fraud.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Obama is obviously tired of hearing unadulderated assesments, they're just to damn depressing. Donilon should help cheer him up.

Ishmael

One has to wonder, having heard from our "moderate" Democrat friends that Obama's election rhetoric was just rhetoric and the significance and the reality of sitting in the WHite House was going to "moderate" him right into the Bill Clinton center...

They really so seemed to want Bill back, but I digress...

We see the new team he is assembling to replace the outgoing "success" stories and how he now plans for "hand-to-hand" combat and how to push his agenda around Congress through all the agencies and czars he has created and we return to wondering, "WHEN WILL HE MODERATE?"

Then I remind myself of my own personal opinion that Marxists never moderate, they just claim they were given too little to get the job done, as in "sure we spent a helluva lot of money we didn't have, but if we had spend ten times more, then we would not be in this mess we are in!"

In related news, in Japan, the logical outcome of Obama-style policies, we see this week that they announced yet ANOTHER 69 Billion Dollar Stimulus Plan aimed at all the usual infrastructure (friends of big government)...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

So, that means that $10 million of the $22 million issued to dead people weren't returned. That's a typical democrat project....50% to help people, 50% to graft or fraud.

You used the wrong word, project. The correct word is "success."

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

And it's not just Democrat. Despite all their bluster, Republicans have a pant-load of earmarks up their sleeves for when it's their turn to begin redistributing the graft to their contributors and buddies...
__________________
The more distant and powerful your government, the more likely it is to be dominated and controlled by just a very small group of people.
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Ishmael]

One has to wonder, having heard from our "moderate" Democrat friends that Obama's election rhetoric was just rhetoric and the significance and the reality of sitting in the WHite House was going to "moderate" him right into the Bill Clinton center...

They really so seemed to want Bill back, but I digress...

We see the new team he is assembling to replace the outgoing "success" stories and how he now plans for "hand-to-hand" combat and how to push his agenda around Congress through all the agencies and czars he has created and we return to wondering, "WHEN WILL HE MODERATE?"

Then I remind myself of my own personal opinion that Marxists never moderate, they just claim they were given too little to get the job done, as in "sure we spent a helluva lot of money we didn't have, but if we had spend ten times more, then we would not be in this mess we are in!"

In related news, in Japan, the logical outcome of Obama-style policies, we see this week that they announced yet ANOTHER 69 Billion Dollar Stimulus Plan aimed at all the usual infrastructure (friends of big government)...

Obama could learn a few lessons from the real communists regarding foriegn policy. From Stalin forward the former Soviet Union enjoyed a great many foriegn policy sucesses, most notably in their ability to infiltrate the wests political and security infrastructures, a success never fully countered by the west.

Historically we can look back and one foriegn policy disaster after another on the part of the west, usually perpetrated by well meaning, socialist leaning, leaders. The list is well known and infamous.

When you get down to it the most important mandate that any government has is the insuring of national security and the implementation of a foriegn policy that furthers that goal. All of that requires a firm grounding in the realities of the various situations that exist at any given time globally and taking firm action to counter the policies of other nations that represent threats to your own. Those that have implemented foriegn policy as an excersize in politics have generally been crashing failures. And in that respect I expect Obama to be no more sucessful than Carter, or Chamberlain, or Hitler. (For the record, Hitler was a foriegn policy failure, his early sucesses were more as a result of weakness on the part of the UK and France than they were as a result of any soundness in his policies.) When a leader begins to surround himself with people that tell him what he wants to hear as opposed to what he needs to hear you can be certain that bad things are going to happen.

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

We're in real trouble here because he sees us as the problem and them as hapless, innocent victims, often with nuclear weapons...





__________________
"[W]hat limits ought to be set to the activity of the state," is "that the provision of security, against both external enemies and internal dissensions must constitute the purpose of the state, and occupy the circle of its activity."
Wilhelm von Humboldt

 

[Ishmael]

We're in real trouble here because he sees us as the problem and them as hapless, innocent victims, often with nuclear weapons...





__________________
"[W]hat limits ought to be set to the activity of the state," is "that the provision of security, against both external enemies and internal dissensions must constitute the purpose of the state, and occupy the circle of its activity."
Wilhelm von Humboldt

Pretty much. Not all together different than Carters handling of Iran. Carter was of the opinion that we should butt out because the nasty CIA/OSS had placed the Shah on the throne through and act of international interference with a foriegn nation, and that would be the truth of the matter. But he forgot the cardinal rule....You cannot base any action on the consideration of redressing past wrongs. Any, and all actions, have to be based on the situation that exists at that very moment and the consideration of the consequences of that action. One can only wonder what the world situation would like like today had we helped the Shah crush the radical Islamic minority.

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Saddam would have been just another Ghadaffi, Kahdaffi, loon in a tent...



Typical progressive, the present is unbearable, history is an indictment, and only weakness can produce a Utopia tomorrow...

Barack would have really liked the Alamanni...

A victim class!

 

[kbate]

]For kbate's benefit, we also get another glimpse into what happens when you believe government regulation is better than the courts when it comes to keeping the people, or the environment whole; political decisions, as we clearly see, are designed to protect only the Ruling Class.

We shall see the value of your vaunted courts, after a few elections with the unlimited corporate money flowing to politicians, buying both their seats and their loyalties. How long until those donors demand a favourable judiciary be appointed?

Or, in your fantasy world - do you think the court is somehow exempt from the influence of money? Are politicians going to rise to new heights of goodness and appoint only fair and balanced (objective?) judges - completely uninfluenced by their campaign contributers?

Clearly, you only look through your rose coloured eyeglasses - those that allow only Green and Red to exist.

 

[kbate]

Similarly kbate, we see in California, that when Government gets to pick the research for regulations, since there is never really any cross-examination of the research, we get errors in regulation of great magnitude...

You go work in a Massey Coal mine. Then decide if safety regulations are hurting or helping.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Or, in your fantasy world - do you think the court is somehow exempt from the influence of money? Are politicians going to rise to new heights of goodness and appoint only fair and balanced (objective?) judges - completely uninfluenced by their campaign contributers?

I've asked him the same question and his answer is always "Objective Law".

I think this refers to the Articles of Confederation or something.

 

[overthebow]

What?

No Jonestown jokes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown