The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee went after Reps. Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Erik Paulsen on Wednesday for their votes last year against taxing bonuses of bank executives who received TARP funds from the federal government. The DCCC jumped on…
The latest political clamor over AIG, poised to combust next Wednesday at a House hearing on backdoor payments to banks that made risky deals with the company, centers on the Federal Reserve’s effort to conceal details of those payments. But senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have so far evaded a key question: Why were AIG’s trading partners fully paid with taxpayer money instead of being told to take a loss?
Here’s an enigma for Easter Sunday. The popular Paas brand egg-dyeing kits advertise their contents as including nine (or sometimes a dozen) “silly circles” and the same number of “egg holders.” The circles are punch-outs from…
Minneapolis’ own Prince is pulling lyrics from the headlines again, particularly in a new song he performed on Jay Leno’s TV show last week. “Ol’ Skool Company” references America’s financial bailouts, with a local angle: “Fat cats on Wall…
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann may have started it last fall with loopy comments on national TV about her congressional colleagues’ “anti-American” views. Last week, she again tried to “out” fellow lawmakers, this time for supporting AIG’s bonuses, while a…
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann — famous for urging the media to expose anti-Americans in Congress – did her own probing today, pressing AIG CEO Edward Liddy for names of her colleagues who had foreknowledge of AIG’s controversial bonus payments. “Did…
AIG CEO Edward Liddy told the U.S. House Financial Services Committee that he has asked AIG executives who got bonuses “to return at least half of those payments.” Some want to return 100 percent, he said. C-SPAN3 is streaming the…
U.S. Reps. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., and Leonard Lance, R-N.J., are among the lowliest members of the House Financial Services Committee. Yet some politically astute casting elevated the freshmen to GOP point men in response to the AIG bonus scandal. The pair are among that rarest of species in Congress: newly elected Republicans from districts that favored Barack Obama for president.
Americans’ anger over AIG’s publicly funded executive bonuses may make this the last “Why are we not rioting?” post. First, one more observer remarks on the stateside calm, blaming low levels of unionization while seeing sparks of resistance…
During the 2008 cycle, Sen. Norm Coleman has received three and a half times more in campaign contributions than Al Franken from interests in the so-called FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sector at the heart of the continuing financial crisis–and over twice as much from the principal players in this week’s Wall Street drama.
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