Flap's Blog – FullosseousFlap's Dental Blog

With all of the Obama Administration’s spending it would be more aptly dyed “RED.”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day anyway…….

The political honeymoon, that is.

President Obama’s apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.

Politicians in both parties flocked to express outrage over $165 million in bonuses paid out to executives at the company, demanding answers from the president and swamping yesterday’s rollout of his efforts to spark lending to small businesses.

The populist anger at the executives who ran their firms into the ground is increasingly blowing back on Obama, whom aides yesterday described as having little recourse in the face of legal contracts that guaranteed those bonuses.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, peppered with questions about why the president had not done more to block the bonuses at a company that has received $170 billion in taxpayer funds, struggled for an answer yesterday afternoon. He explained that government lawyers are “looking through contracts to see what can be done to wrest these bonuses from their recipients.”

And, with Obama about to seek even more $ billions to aid the financial system, political outrage is certainly not sufficient to mollify an angry public. The White House initially tried to obscure the flap by blaming President Bush but they have not answered as to why they failed to block these bonuses while they were authorizing an additional $30 Billion in new loans to AIG.

The AIG Bonus Flap has happened on Obama’s watch and he can either take responsibility and expend more of his his political capital or continue to make excuses and pass blame on the previous Bush Administration.

Which will it be, Mr. President?

And, NO Flap does not want to see either the current version of Robert Stacy McCain in his speedo – NOR Obama.

Previous:

The Day By Day Archive

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, worried about the fate of The Chronicle and other financially struggling newspapers, urged the Justice Department Monday to consider giving Bay Area papers more leeway to merge or consolidate business operations to stay afloat.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, released by Pelosi’s office late Monday, the San Francisco Democrat asked the department to weigh the public benefit of saving The Chronicle and other papers from closure against the agency’s antitrust mission to guard against anti-competitive behavior.

“We must ensure that our policies enable our news organizations to survive and to engage in the news gathering and analysis that the American people expect,” Pelosi wrote.

The speaker said the issue of newspapers’ survival and antitrust law will be the subject of a hearing soon before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy, chaired by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga.

Pelosi’s spokesman, Brendan Daly, said the speaker was moved by the recent announcement by the Hearst Corp., the parent company of The Chronicle, that it would be forced to sell or close the paper if it could not achieve major cost-savings quickly. Hearst has said the paper lost $50 million last year and that this year’s losses will likely be worse.

How stupid. Why should the newspaper industry which is failing in the marketplace be supported  by favorable anti-trust rules/laws set by the federal government?

Next thing you know, Pelosi will be asking for $500 Billion of taxpayer money to bail their left-wing friends in the print media businesses out.

How is that for freedom of the press?