Senate leaders race to draft debt-limit bill after House effort collapses

First, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew made up this arbitrary deadline (he felt the children in the government needed some guidelines) and second, we have PLENTY of money coming into the government to pay ALL of our obligations (including Social Security) but a default (which would be the first time in U.S. history and would be an impeachable offense for the president) would only prevent the spend-mad politicians from borrowing more money.

...it was unclear whether an agreement between Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could pass the Senate before the Treasury Department exhausts its borrowing power Thursday.

Timothy Geithner is an an unqualified propagandist who has fabricated a recovery from whole cloth...

Without small businesses generating jobs, there is no recovery.

Obama Administration making plans to take over nation’s 401(k)s to bail out their union backers and their bankrupted pension plans.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and members of the House GOP Savings Solutions Group sent a letter to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warning the Obama Administration that the government should keep its hands off of the retirement savings of Americans, and should reject proposals that would dismantle or nationalize the private 401(k) system in favor of a government-run retirement security regime. Several Administration officials, including the Vice President, have voiced support for efforts to create so-called “Guaranteed Retirement Accounts” or impose new government mandates which would undermine 401(k) retirement savings plans and jeopardize employers’ willingness to continue offering them to their workers.

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Hey, middle class! Guess what? Now Obama's going to have to raise your taxes after all (don't tell me you didn't see that one coming)

To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, "We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”

Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.

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This $17 Trillion Divorce Won’t Be a Pretty One!

“China is beginning to cancel Congress’s credit card,” [U.S. Congressman Mark Kirk] told Fox News on June 10. It “doesn’t want to lend much more money to the United States and especially is worried about the Fed’s policy of printing money to buy new debt.”

The TARP Report: should be read by EVERY taxpayer and EVERY American

On April 21, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Act of 2009--"SIGTARP"--submitted his quarterly report to Congress on his office's activities in relation to the TARP program. The report is a disquieting document that should be read by every American--certainly be every taxpayer.

The Inspector General's report documents the stunning and at least partly illegal expansion of TARP from the $700 billion originally allocated by Congress to what is now a $3 trillion complex of programs. This chart shows the various programs that are now included within SIGTARP's oversight, and how they have expanded from the initial $700 billion. Note that some of the programs are still incipient; $3 trillion is by no means a final number. Click to enlarge:

Read the whole thing!

Is Obama bringing Enron to Washington?

"Absurd" is a word that finds ever more frequent application to the Obama administration. The scary reality is that Barack Obama is nowhere near smart enough to pull off the schemes that he contemplates.

Read the whole thing.

Obfuscation: A tactic Obama uses to buy himself time

One problem with the Obama financial rescue plan is that it is almost as complicated and obscure as the problem it is designed to solve.

Transparent Obfuscation: A Rescue Plan With the Clarity of a Credit Default Swap

Shell Game: Will they get away with it???

Besides this being the greatest heist in history,

There is another component to this insidious plan that should also be all too familiar to taxpayers: President Obama and Congress intend to run the scheme off budget, meaning that its funding will not be part of the usual appropriations and budget process (just like Social Security).

Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, director of the White House national economic council, suspect that they cannot go back to Congress to fund their plan and so are raiding the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the remaining Tarp funds, hoping that there will be little public understanding and little or no congressional scrutiny. This is an inappropriate institutional use of the Fed, the FDIC and the Tarp.

And, lest anyone forget about the big difference between these two men,

Ronald Reagan arguably forfeited the mid term elections in 1982 by adopting a strict monetary policy to shrink the nation's money supply and end the high inflation that palagued the economy. This policy laid the foundation for a period of historic recovery and growth, but it was done at a serious political cost. Today the President and Congress have a similar duty to lead but they refuse to do so and instead offer policy that is borne of political expediency and cowardice. The disconnect between Congress and taxpayers has never been so stark.

Obama/Geithner Bank Plan Robs Tax Payers: Congress Drives The Getaway Car

EU to US: You are on "The Road to Hell"

“The US Treasury secretary talks about permanent action and we, at our spring council, were quite alarmed at that . . . The US is repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on,” he told a European parliament session in Strasbourg. “All these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell.”

...Other leaders of EU member states, including Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, disagree with US calls for big fiscal stimuli to battle the recession. But they have couched their opposition in more diplomatic language than Mr Topolanek’s.

The Czech leader was speaking eight days before Mr Obama was due to arrive in London for a G20 summit of the world’s developed and emerging economies.

Read the whole thing!

CONSPIRACY!

Dick Morris, former advisor to Bill Clinton, revealed and confirmed Monday night on The Sean Hannity television show that he believes that President Obama wants Timothy Geithner's rescue plan to fail so that he can NATIONALIZE THE BANKS!

And, he said, not nationalize them they it was done in Sweden, but really take them over by the government.

According to Morris, Obama has been purposely keeping a public distance from Geithner so that, when the plan fails (as it will according to liberal economist Paul Krugman yesterday in the New York Times), the failure won't be directly attributable to Obama.

We'll see.

My husband keeps saying: "This [Obama's presidency] is a bank job!" (As in "heist".)

Treasury knew about the bonuses in November 2008!

Not only that, but this: Obama violating law on TARP oversight?"

DOUBLE WHAMMY...PLUS A BLOW FOR TIMOTHY GEITHNER: ...everyone knew about these bonuses. Congress even knew enough about it to question Geithner on it, with remarkable accuracy on the total amount due to be paid out, on March 3rd — nine days before Geithner initially claimed to know about it.

IQ test

Steve Steckler, Chairman and founder, Infrastructure Management Group (IMG):

...They set high expectations that they -- unlike Paulson and Cox --knew what they were doing and would point the way out. They don't..and they can't.

Sailors learn to use hand signals because when the wind is blowing like hell it's impossible to hear the captain's instructions. This administration badly needs some hand signals. While I want to give Obama and his folks the benefit of the doubt this early in the term, the confusion is of their own making. Trying to cram its non-recession square-peg agenda into a deep round recovery hole cuts means that neither objective will be achieved quickly, and certainly not before the resulting chaos becomes unacceptable to the American public.

This all started with Obama's and Geithner's surprising inarticulation on the banking and mortgage crises. By merely heaping blame on the Bush years, Wall Street and deregulation of any kind, they set high expectations that they -- unlike Paulson and Cox --knew what they were doing and would point the way out. The don't (at least any more than Bush's economists) and they can't, respectively, in part because their hands are contorted among relatively unrelated objectives. Repeated admonitions that insuring the uninsured, raising taxes on the entrepreneurial class and expanding federal intrusion into K-12 education are keys to ending the recession are close to becoming a talk show joke. Like a frustrated coach, the American public is about to scream "focus!!!"

End the recession first by the fastest, most effective and most politically-neutral means possible, even if that includes temporarily cutting capital gains taxes for the rich and payroll taxes for the poor. Doing otherwise will cost too many jobs and lost homes. Allocate a much greater share of administration's leadership to being smarter on the banking and credit system recovery (thus ending a string of PR disasters), and save most of the non-recession agenda for a time when the ship of state is not pounding wildly with the sails in all directions.

British Cabinet Secretary on U.S. Government: "There's nobody there!"

Gosh, aren't you much more reassured about everything now that Obama's president???

Britain’s most senior civil servant [UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown] claimed it was hard to find anyone to speak to at the US Treasury. Sir Gus O’Donnell, cabinet secretary, blamed the “absolute madness” of the US system where a new administration had to hire new officials from scratch, leaving a decision-making vacuum.

“There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is,” he told a conference of civil servants.

Atlantic stimulus rift grows

Not only a tax cheat, but an incompetent as well!

Remember when the Obama administration and its allies in Congress urged the confirmation of Tim Geithner despite his tax problems? They claimed that Geithner was “uniquely qualified” to lead the nation out of an economic collapse, and that no other candidate could possibly replace Geithner. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating must have thought the Democrats and American media had discovered a completely different Tim Geithner than the one he knew.

It's not you it's me

UPDATE (NOW IT'S TWO FROM TREASURY!) - Two candidates who'd been expected to take top positions at the Treasury Department are no longer being considered: Annette Nazareth, who'd been expected to be named as deputy Treasury secretary, and Caroline Atkinson, who been expected to be named as undersecretary for international affairs.

Citing personal reasons, two prospective Obama administration candidates have bowed out! This time, it's not taxes! (Hey, maybe the other guys, except for Timmy, just used the tax thing to get out of working with the Messiah).

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The person Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wanted as his chief deputy withdrew from consideration Thursday, dealing a setback to the agency as it struggles to address the worst financial crisis in decades.

Annette Nazareth, a former senior staffer and commissioner with the Securities and Exchange Commission, made "a personal decision" to withdraw from the process, according to a person familiar with her decision.

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(CNN) -- Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, has withdrawn his name from consideration as surgeon general of the United States, an administration official said Thursday.

"Sanjay Gupta was under serious consideration for the job of surgeon general," the official said in an e-mail. "He has removed himself from consideration to focus more on his medical career and his family. We know he will continue to serve and educate the public through his work with media and in the medical arena."

Sources said in January that Gupta met then-President-elect Obama in Chicago, Illinois, in November to discuss the post. Gupta has declined comment.

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Loose lips sink ships

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (you know, the guy who didn't pay his taxes even though he knew about them but still got a cushy Obama job) accidentally let slip that POTUS doesn't like his real job (protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States) as much as he likes his avocation: MESSIAH.

Mr. Geithner made a telling slip when he told the House Ways and Means Committee that the budget reflects what the president views as “a deep moral imperative to make society more just.”

Why pay taxes? It's not as if you're going to be Treasury Secretary someday!

Why Obama’s new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?

Martin Wolf of The Financial Times in London wants to know!

Why then is the administration making what appears to be a blunder? It may be that it is hoping for the best. But it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing. Trying to make up for this mistake by imposing pettifogging conditions on assisted institutions is more likely to compound the error than to reduce it.

Some interesting charts and graphs here!

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!!!

You know, I must say that Obama's presidency has been good for one thing and that is this: to remind people that DEMOCRATS ALWAYS WANT Y-O-U TO PAY TAXES...so they don't have to (but they take all the credit for the goodies they give away to bribe people to vote for them.)

Personal tax problems have tripped up three of President Obama's nominees for top administration jobs. Two nominees withdrew on Tuesday over tax issues, including Tom Daschle, Obama's choice head the Health and Human Services Department. The other withdrawal was chief performance officer nominee Nancy Killefer, who had a $947 tax lien filed against her in Washington four years ago for not paying unemployment compensation taxes for a household employee. She paid the debt less than six months later, District of Columbia records show.

(THEY CONVENIENTLY FORGET TO MENTION THAT TIMOTHY GEITHNER WAS JUST APPOINTED AS OBAMA'S TREASURY SECRETARY IN SPITE OF NOT PAYING HIS TAXES!!!)