Fifty days into the Barack Obama administration, his administration — not George Bush’s — has signed two pieces of legislation that equate to spending $1 billion an hour, 24 hours a day.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America.

1. America’s Mother-in-Law, Nancy Pelosi, Caught in Huge Lie

The Speaker Threatened to Cut Defense Budget If Her Demands For Private Planes Were Not Met

2. Sen. Harkin Turns Card Check ‘Hearing’ Into Union Rally

Union Backers Apparently Threw Things After Harkin Encouraged Them to ‘Express Themselves’

3. Card Check Threat Weakens WalMart Stock

Forcibly unionizing WalMart will hurt the poor. Democrats, naturally, don’t care.

4. Cramdown Housing Bill Hurts Families Trying to Save Their Home

Congresswoman Bachmann writes about the Democrats’ terrible deal for homeowners

5. Forbes: Obama Oversells His Mortgage ‘Rescue’

And His Administration Hides Information From the Press About It

6. Democrats Starting to Panic About Economy

And When Democrats Panic, You Pay

7. Senate votes to keep automatic pay raises

The Congressional automatic stealth pay raise system is just wrong.

FIFTY DAYS INTO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Consider one little factoid: He is spending $1,000,000,000.00 an hour.

Fifty days into the Barack Obama administration, his administration — not George Bush’s — has signed two pieces of legislation that equate to spending $1 billion an hour, 24 hours a day.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America.

1. America’s Mother-in-Law, Nancy Pelosi, Caught in Huge Lie

The Speaker Threatened to Cut Defense Budget If Her Demands For Private Planes Were Not Met

Speaker Pelosi, in February 2007, denied that she or anybody in her office demanded the DOD provide her with a larger plane than the ones already provided to meet her personal-use demands. According the transcript of her remarks:

“I have never asked for any larger plane….We’ve never asked for a larger plane, this is a myth that they are talking about on the floor,” she said. “No we haven’t asked for any larger plane. …this is not my request, it is a request of the Sergeant-at-Arms…

“We didn’t ask for a larger plane. Period.”

Unfortunately for Speaker Pelosi, her Clinton-esque outright denial of the charge that she demanded the DOD provide her with planes for personal use on the spur of the moment didn’t end the matter altogether. Instead of letting it die, Judicial Watch put in a FOIA request for the email traffic surrounding this issue — and, through that, found that the Speaker was (surprise!) lying.

The email records of Pelosi’s staff not only bear out the fact that she was demanding DOD resources for personal use, and that she wanted to make sure she was traveling only in the biggest, nicest piece of air transport she could, but that her staff was entirely serious about making sure the DOD knew what the consequences of not playing along would be.

“Could you send me a hard copy of the DOD budget documents on the fy 08 request and the fy07 supplemental request?” wrote Pelosi staffer Mike Sheehy in a February 5, 2007 email to the DOD, in direct response to having the speaker’s request for a bigger, nicer plane that could take her from San Francisco to DC without having to refuel rebuffed. This was an implicit budgetary threat issued to a department Pelosi and her staff wanted something from.

Further, Pelosi not only demanded to use military aircraft as personal-convenience transports, but also to use a military base in lieu of a public airport for arrival and departure from her home — something, as you can see from the emails below, that isn’t even considered for the Secretary of Defense.

SOURCE

2. Sen. Harkin Turns Card Check ‘Hearing’ Into Union Rally

Union Backers Apparently Threw Things After Harkin Encouraged Them to ‘Express Themselves’

You have to see it to believe it.

If union thugs are willing to boo, hiss, and throw things while a Senator is speaking in a Senate hearing room, with police on hand, what will they do to opponents of union organizing far from the cameras?

SOURCE

3. Card Check Threat Weakens WalMart Stock

Forcibly unionizing WalMart will hurt the poor. Democrats, naturally, don’t care.

Citigroup Inc. lowered its rating on Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to hold from buy on Tuesday, citing concern that legislation intended to make it easier for employees to unionize would raise the retail giant’s labor costs and hurt its competitiveness.

Deborah Weinswig, a Citigroup analyst, cut her price target on the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer to $48 from $53…

The proposed Employee Free Choice Act, a top priority for unions this year, could be introduced to the House as early as Tuesday by Rep. George Miller, D.- Calif., the analyst said. Wal-Mart would be the “primary target” if any such bill were to be passed, especially because the U.S. food retail industry has historically been unionized with the exception of Wal-Mart, the largest food retailer, she said.

If Card Check is a drag on the earnings of WalMart, is there any non-unionized company that would be any different? As the earnings of these companies fall, that would impede their ability to hire new workers, expand market share, and hold down the price of their products.

Of course, the flip side is that once unionized, a company like Wal Mart could join some of the other great union success stories of the last 50 years — such as the steel industry, the automobile industry, and other unionized sectors. In a few decades, Democrats will be bailing WalMart out.

SOURCE

4. Cramdown Housing Bill Hurts Families Trying to Save Their Home

Congresswoman Bachmann writes about the Democrats’ terrible deal for homeowners

hough 92% of mortgage holders continue to pay their mortgages on time, they worry about joining the growing ranks of the unemployed, recovering their savings, and making the next mortgage payment. The doom and gloom reporting from mainstream media and speechifying from Washington figureheads has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, pulling us down deeper into the spiral instead of lifting us out of it. As former President Bill Clinton advised current President Obama: America’s leaders must project optimism in the face of today’s uncertainty.

And, that would be good advice for President Obama’s friends in Congress as well. Last week, the House passed mortgage cramdown legislation – a seriously misguided bill that will actually add more instability and uncertainty to the housing market.

Under the current system, it is in the best interest of both borrowers and lenders to rework mortgage terms to prevent foreclosures. Lenders want to be repaid and borrowers want to stay in their homes. Cramdown removes incentives for struggling borrowers to rework the mortgage terms with the lenders since they could simply go to a bankruptcy judge and get a cheaper deal. Under the bill, a judge would virtually have carte blanche to wipe out part of their principal, reduce their interest rate, and stretch out the term of their mortgage.

Eventually someone will have to pay for it. Sadly, it will hurt the very same people this legislation is supposed to assist—middle-income homeowners. Allowing bankruptcy judges – who will certainly see an increased caseload under this law – to permanently reduce the principal owed on mortgages for primary residences, reduce interest rates, and adjust the mortgage terms at whim could result in a 2% increase on interest rates for all homebuyers as lenders increase their rates to compensate for such unpredictable risks.

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have raised real concerns about whether giving bankruptcy judges the power to modify home loans could discourage fresh investment in that sector. Moody’s Economy’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, is reported in Dow Jones Newswires as saying that “tinkering with the bankruptcy code could lead to unpredictable results.”

SOURCE

5. Forbes: Obama Oversells His Mortgage ‘Rescue’

And His Administration Hides Information From the Press About It

According to Forbes Magazine, the Obama administration is overestimating the number of homeowners who will be helped by their mortgage plan. Instead of helping 9 million homeowners as Obama claims, the greatest number that could be helped is closer to 5 million.

While the Obama administration says it will use taxpayer money directly to encourage borrowers and investors to rework 3-4 million subprime loans, no more than 2 million are likely to cooperate. And while Obama promises to refinance about 5 million FNMA/FMAC loans, there are no more than 3 million eligible for refinancing. So while Obama promises to help 9 million homeowners, the fact is that he’ll help no more than 5 million.

And the total cost to taxpayers is estimated to be about $275 billion. On top of the trillion dollar stimulus bill. On top of the $410 billion omnibus bill. On top of $500 billion for transportation projects. On top of the bill for nationalized health care. On top of the bill for the second ’stimulus.’ On top of the TARP II plan. On top of education ‘reform.’ On top of cap and trade. On top of the energy rationing plan.

SOURCE

6. Democrats Starting to Panic About Economy

And When Democrats Panic, You Pay

Democrats in Congress are set to draft another ’stimulus’ package — one that will waste hundreds of billions of dollars on projects that were too sketchy to make it into their first trillion dollar spending bill. They would have you believe that just like the pork-filled first bill was justified, so is this boondoggle. But it looks more like Democrats are simply too panicked about the slow pace of ‘recovery,’ so they’re looking to throw more of your money at the problem.

House Democrats would do well to take a page from George Bush’s playbook. When it became clear that Republicans would take an electoral beating in 2006 because of disappointment with the war in Iraq, Bush stuck to his principles and persevered in Iraq regardless of the political consequence. Democrats today fear they may take a political beating in 2010, and their response is to waste more than a trillion dollars on projects that they hope will distract voters.

Here’s the thing: if Washington borrows and spends enough money, the unemployment rate will go down. It’s impossible for it not to. You can’t spend $2 trillion without hiring a lot of people. But while you may hire millions, you won’t be making the country any better off. You’ll explode the deficit and force our children and grandchildren to bear the pain, all in order to pay people to pass out condoms or re-sod the National Mall.

That’s what House Democrats seem willing to do - all to make you think the economy is humming along, so you’ll send them back to Washington next year.

SOURCE

7. Senate votes to keep automatic pay raises

The Congressional automatic stealth pay raise system is just wrong.

During the Senate’s consideration of the most recent Congressional spending orgy — the 1,132-page, $410 billion, nearly 9,000 earmark-infested Omnibus spending bill, Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter forced the Senate to vote to keep their automatic annual pay raises.

Unfortunately, the Senate voted 52 to 47 to kill Vitter’s amendment and keep their automatic pay raises.

SOURCE