It's Not Just One IG, At Least 3

Yes, I'm aware. The president has to give a reason to Congress as to why he fired the IG. Congress can like the reason, dislike the reason, but really can't do all that much about it.

Here is the specific language.

Does it say anywhere that Congress can object?

Nice to return to our regularly scheduled invective.

To return to the topic at hand, 0bama fired someone for investigating a crony of his. The person fired was not one of the AG's who could be fired for no cause, but instead was a inspector general (Not Gogol's inspector General {a movie Danny Kaye just ruined}) who could only be fired for cause (0bama's notice of cause was pretty darn flippant) with notice to congress with a 30 day holding period before termination.

Bush fired AGs for political reasons, as is his perfect right. (0bama's too, for that matter) 0bama is firing an IG who caught a friend of 0bama's with his hand in the cookie jar without following the rules on executive level firings that he wrote.

Now, I personally think that the law regarding this is pretty goofy. I also think it would have a hard time passing muster in the courts, as we went through this foolishness before with President Johnson and Secretary of War Stanton quite a while ago. But it s the law now, and 0bama is the one who came up with the concept, so he should pay it some kind of lip service.

Yeppers on all counts. Yet we KNOW he will NOT be held accountable. Are we seeing articles about his being one of the sponsors of the bill? Nope.

You only sound really dumb with that kind of comment, del. Biden can run circles around anything the Republicans have to offer. He calls a spade a spade and kicks ass Truman style. So what? I thought you guys preferred blunt talk rather than practiced propaganda.

Timing of Treasury Department challenge, AIG probe raises concerns
The challenge to TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky's authority came as he began an investigation of the department's role in approving bonuses to executives of insurance giant AIG, sources say.
By Tom Hamburger

June 19, 2009

Reporting from Washington — A Treasury Department challenge to the authority of government bailout watchdog Neil M. Barofsky came just as he had begun a sensitive investigation of the department's role in approving bonuses to executives of insurance giant AIG, sources said Thursday.

Department lawyers had sent a message to Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, suggesting that lawyer-client privilege could restrict some of his inquiries.

Within a day, Barofsky was assured there would be no impediment to his audits, and all requested documents were provided to his office.

But the proximity of the department's challenge to Barofsky's investigation has raised concerns about the timing of the two events.

And though the matter was resolved for the AIG inquiries, it leaves open the possibility of conflict in the future as audits of the massive program multiply.

Asked why Barofsky's legal authority was challenged by the department just as the AIG inquiry began, Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams said: "It is entirely a coincidence."

Treasury Department lawyers say they are still unclear about the legal authority of the special inspector general and have requested clarification from the Justice Department.

Williams said that the decision to send the question to the Justice Department was finalized only after Barofsky, who is responsible for identifying fraud and waste in the government's bailout of the financial system, was consulted and said he had no objection.

The department's skepticism about Barofsky's authority was first disclosed in a letter Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) sent Wednesday to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner asking for information about a "dispute over certain Treasury documents" that he said were being withheld on a "specious claim of attorney-client privilege."

At the time, it was not known that Barofsky's inquiry focused on the Treasury Department's role in approving AIG bonuses -- a fact confirmed Thursday through sources familiar with the investigation....

no, i'm not, but feel free to declare victory and run along.

Interesting thing about the whole mess is that 0bama is pretty much making this a big part of his method of administration. You ask inconvenient questions, you are gone. It was the way he ran his campaign, both for Senate and POTUS. This is the kind of thing folks were voting FOR.

Now, if you are an employee of the Justice department, what does that tell you about what your job is?

This whole exercise is going to be one of cleaning out the honest, and bringing to heel anyone with any concept of independence.

chicagotribune.com

Obama's political play should shock no one

John Kass

June 21, 2009


It's amusing to watch the Washington political establishment feign shock, now that President Barack Obama's reform administration has used a clay foot to vigorously kick one inspector general and boot another out the door.

One inspector general foolishly investigated a friend of the president. Another inspector general audited those juicy bonuses given to AIG executives as part of $700 billion federal bailout of the financial industry.

It's a decent man-bites-dog story, at least until North Korea tries lobbing a few missiles toward Hawaii. But until that happens, the political talk shows will buzz about Neil Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the financial bailout.

Barofsky now claims that his autonomy will be compromised if the Obama Justice Department rules that he is merely a functionary of the Department of Treasury.

"An adverse ruling ... could potentially have a serious impact on the independence of our agency and our ability to carry out our mandate," Barofsky wrote in a letter to ranking senators on Friday...

...But our president is from Chicago. Obama's Media Merlin David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel come right from Chicago Democratic machine boss Mayor Richard Daley. They don't believe in fairies.

Daley can't wait to be rid of his own inspector general, David Hoffman, who had the audacity to question why Daley's nephew received $68 million in city pension funds to invest. The mayor insists he didn't know anything about it. Nobody with a functioning brain believes the mayor.

The second that Hoffman's term expires, the mayor will change the locks on his office doors and move Hoffman's house plants out into the cold. Daley might even send some of the same political tough guys who helped elect Emanuel to Congress years ago, all in the name of reform.

It's the Chicago Way. Now, formally, it's also the Chicago on the Potomac Way....

...During the presidential campaign, the message expertly spun by Daley's mouthpiece, Axelrod, was that Obama would bring hope and change and transform the cynical politics of the past.

The Washington Beltway media pack, exhausted after the cynicism of the Bush years, was eager for change. Many fired up their Hopium pipes and waited, glassy eyed, for the rapture, all but chanting "Yes We Can." Now they're coming down hard.

So here's my question:

What's the big surprise? What strange, exotic land do they think Obama comes from?

Do they think Obama learned his politics in Narnia, while cavorting with gentle forest creatures, some of which have hooves and serve tea and cakes to journalists and well-mannered English schoolgirls on snowy winter afternoons?

Did Obama learn politics in Camelot, the magical kingdom where federal czars sit at a great round table, all for the good of the simple peasants? Or did he learn politics along that famous highway, you know, the one that's always paved with good intentions?

No. Obama learned his politics in Chicago.

And now all of Washington can learn it, too.

For the narcissist it is always a zero-sum game he or she plays with other individuals. From the perspective of the narcissist, if someone else "wins", the narcissist "loses". It cannot be otherwise, since on some level they know that their own talent and skills are way overblown. Hence, they cannot hope to "win" based on those talents alone. Thus, the behavior of the classic narcissist is mostly directed toward making others lose so they can win by default. To that end, there is no behavior or tactic that is considered out -of-bounds or over-the-top.

The state of political discourse in this country was bad enough, with the ubiquitous personal attacks that have become the trademark of all political campaigns; but Barack Obama has taken this to a higher plane of being-- and destroying.

I don't think this is a matter of "Chicago Politics." I think something a great deal worse is at work here.

The rise of the narcissistic sociopath

We are definitely seeing a pattern in the way 0bama does things. Laws are broken, circumvented, evaded. Anyone who questions is not debated, because there really has been nothing to debate. Those who question are smashed.

I posted Rush's comment before that when 0bama read 1984 he took notes as to his method of administration. And one of the interesting ideas he took was the two minute hate. This is going to be an amazing four years, and the way things are going, and as young and healthy as 0bama is , an amazing 40 years.