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January 8, 2010
Exclusive: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up! (1/8/10)
Whenever you think general incompetence by those who purport to serve by the consent of the governed can’t get any worse, think again:
“Phantom zip codes also found in Pennsylvania ” (Washington Examiner, 1/6/10)
As much as $9.5 million in federal stimulus dollars went to 14 zip codes in Virginia that don’t exist or are in other states, Old Dominion Watchdog (http://virginia.watchdog.org) reports. The fake zip codes were listed on Recovery.gov, the federal Web site that is supposed to track how the stimulus money is being used.
The phony zip codes are a new wrinkle in Recovery.gov’s increasingly tattered credibility. In November, Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said a rash of phantom congressional districts found on the website were the result of confusion by fund recipients, who apparently didn’t know who their congressman was.
But who would give millions of dollars to somebody who doesn’t even know their own zip code?
(read full article here)
“Who would give millions of dollars to somebody who doesn’t even know their own zip code?” Who indeed? Call us cynical, but we believe that the stimulus package has less to do with stimulating the economy than stimulating the pocketbooks of political cronies.
“NCTC director Michael Leiter remained on ski slopes after Christmas Day airline bombing attempt” (New York Daily News, 1/7/10)
The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day, the Daily News has learned.
Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, decided not to return to his agency's "bat cave" nerve center in McLean, Va., until several days after Christmas, two U.S. officials said.
"People have been grumbling that he didn't let a little terrorism interrupt his vacation," said one of the sources.
(read full article here)
Come on, people! Ski vacations are pretty pricey. Who wants to lose out after laying out all of that dough? Besides, no one else rushed back to Washington – so why would Leiter have thought his immediate presence was necessary?
“Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure” (Bloomberg.com 1/7/10)
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.
“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.” President Barack Obama selected Geithner as Treasury secretary, a post he took last year.
(read full article here)
We were promised transparency with this administration, and yet one of its top officials – who, by the way, is a tax cheat himself – is discovered to have pressured a bailed-out entity to suppress information from the very public whose tax dollars pulled its fat out of the fire during his tenure as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Nothing to see here, folks, move along…
Brought to you by the editors and research staff of FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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