I suppose there are few of us who hadn’t guessed this, but it would have been nice to have it reported before the administration committed to a bailout:

It’s sure to be a stretch. For the United States to fully recover its investment, the value of General Motors stock will have to reach levels it has never before attained.

“I’m not going to predict it — that’s not my job today,” GM chief executive Fritz Henderson said in a recent interview.

“I don’t know how much we’re going to recover,” a senior Obama administration official said as the company headed into bankruptcy last month.

This uncertainty stems from the difficulty in valuing the 60 percent GM stake that the United States will receive in exchange for the public investment. The government also gets preferred shares and other compensation.

The stake will be worth enough to fully cover the government’s direct investment only if GM’s stock rises above $68 billion. Even at its recent 2000 peak, GM’s stock was worth only $56 billion.

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Note: I was asked why I’m posting the full list if we’re less than 12 votes away from beating Obama on this. The reason is because over the weekend I expect the Democrats to pull some tricks and make some promises to wavering Blue Dogs. We need to keep the pressure up today so they don’t go wobbly over the weekend.

Get on the phone ASAP. The vote has not happened and it looks like it won’t until next week. Why? Because we are bringing pressure to bear and the Democrats are having a very hard time keeping a majority on the legislation.

We absolutely cannot falter on this. We must keep up the continuous pressure headed into the weekend. See the list of names below and call, call, call.

We should not be bailing out European national banks. We are less than a dozen votes away from being able to kill this. Call these members of Congress ASAP.

Call the members of Congress below. Ask each one to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.

Let us know in the comments what each one says.

The Blue Dog Democrats are wavering on supporting H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act. How do I know? Sources tell me Rahm Emanuel is trying to sweeten the package.

Remember: H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act, will provide funds to the International Monetary Fund to bail out European banks. We can stop it.

Target their home offices. Below, find your state, find your Congressman, and call them. Call their local offices. Tell whoever answers the phone that you want your Congressman to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.

BE QUICK ABOUT IT. WE CAN’T WASTE ANY TIME.

It is bad enough that we’re bailing out domestic banks. Barack Obama now wants to bail out European banks via funding for the International Monetary Fund (”IMF”).

Humorously, there is a unique coalition forming on this because part of the legislation is also tied to war funding and the Graham-Lieberman amendment to stop the release of photos showing alleged torture. The whole thing has gotten rather convoluted. The Republicans in the House will probably vote against it en masse.

The Blue Dog Democrats are being forced to vote for it by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, but the pressure is only just mounting. If we mount pressure now by calling them and pinning them down, they’ll most likely change their mind and side with the GOP. There are enough of them to kill it.

Additionally, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are going to grind the Senate to a halt unless their amendment to prohibit the release of the photos gets enacted into law one way or the other. So one way or the other we’ll still get Graham-Lieberman, which is a good thing.

Call the members of Congress below. Ask each one to vote against H.R. 2346, the 2009 Supplemental Appropriations Act.

Let us know in the comments what each one says.

I don’t like to encourage masochism, but if you were ever going to watch Keith Olbermann, tonight is probably the night. After all, given Olbermann’s tendency to quit his meds and start frothing at the mouth over corporate hypocrisy, he has a juicy target today. Who’s the latest fat-cat to get wealthy from taxpayer bailout money? Why, it’s the pride of Cownell - Keith Olbermann. If you feel inclined, go sign the petition.

While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same “class economic rape” that you accuse them of.

Please heed your own advice and stop accepting taxpayer money to subsidize your nightly diatribes. Resign or return the balance of your excessive raise to the U.S. Treasury.

To express this in terms even Olbermann might understand, how dare you sir!

Too bad for Olbermann - he can’t even use the defense that the AIG bonus recipients did. He can’t claim to have earned the money. Those bonuses were awarded pursuant to a prior contract; Olbermann’s was a new deal. And if you look at his track record, it’s hard to argue that Olbermann is doing anything right.

Olbermann has a lot of nerve taking taxpayer money while he rails against others for doing the same. If he has any integrity, he’ll follow the lesson set by the executives he has attacked. When the AIG bonuses approved by the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress caused public outrage, those execs by and large returned the money. Olbermann has to do the same. He’ll still be a joke, but at least he won’t be a conspicuously hypocritical joke.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is prepared to recommend billions in new ‘loans’ to America’s automakers, as long as they meet certain requirements. But once you get past that headline, something very disturbing becomes apparent: Obama’s task force never really considered a bailout on the merits, but concerned itself only with how to structure it. The decision to pour tens of billions more into Chrysler and GM was apparently made before the team was ever named.

Interviews with task-force members indicate that the administration doesn’t want to let General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC slip into bankruptcy protection, a course advocated by some critics of the industry. Instead, the task force is expected to say that it sees viable futures for both GM and Chrysler, but only if there are sacrifices from their managements, unions and GM’s bondholders. The team will also lay out a firm timeline for action.

The government is prepared to lend the companies more money. The two companies have requested $22 billion more — including $9 billion for the second quarter. But the task force may not disburse new aid immediately, choosing instead to preserve that as leverage…

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Democrat Ben Cardin wants to bail out newspapers.

Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.

Because newspaper profits have been falling in recent years, “no substantial loss of federal revenue” was expected under the legislation, Cardin’s office said in a statement.

Keep in mind that local newspapers and the Wall Street Journal actually are not doing too bad. Why? They tend not to have the left-wing bias that Ben Cardin wants to prop up.

As it is right now, there is zero need to pay attention to a bunch of newspapers that all maintain the Democrat Party line.

Likewise, let’s not forget that the newspapers are going out of business because of the internet. Were Ben Cardin alive in the 1500’s, he’d no doubt want to subsidize monks whose work was becoming obsolete because of the printing press.

One last thing to note: Since Barack Obama intends to wipe out tax deductions for charitable giving, this isn’t going to do much good.

Newt Gingrich is out today with some helpful pointers for the Obama Administration. he wants an end to the bailouts that keep getting us into bigger messes.

Thanks to the Bush-Obama-Geithner policy of bailing out failing companies, we now have the worst of all possible scenarios: A taxpayer subsidized, government supervised private company; an unsustainable public/private hybrid that is too public to make its own decisions and too private to be responsible to the taxpayers that are keeping it alive.

Outrages like the fat cat bonuses currently dominating the headlines will only continue as long as the rule of politicians supplants the rule of law on Wall Street.

Congress should rethink this entire process. The dangers of a domino-like financial meltdown are real. But so, too, is the danger that the outrage of the American people will reach the point that we no longer trust the dire warnings — or the righteous indignation — coming from Washington.

You can check him out here.

Welcome Andrew Sullivan readers! Remember: PETA likes pleather, not leather.

I am sitting in a Dean & Deluca enjoying a café au lait (hey, I’m from Louisiana, deal with it) looking out at the scrolling news sign at NBC News. The headline that just scrolled past read “Bernie Madoff Spends First Night in Jail.”

We have a guy who ran a ponzi scheme that stole billions of dollars from people to fund God knows what. Granted the American people elected him President, but compare what Barack Obama is doing to what Bernie Madoff did and I fail to see a substantial difference beyond Obama having a “mandate” from voters and Madoff not having one.

Both Madoff and Obama have put people out of work. Both Madoff and Obama have destroyed the financial health of lots of people. Both Madoff’s and Obama’s schemes have convoluted accounting schemes designed to obfuscate the criminal mismanagement of other people’s money.

The difference is that Madoff did it to powerful billionaires who are now millionaires. Obama did it to the rest of us.

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