[Fox News] A United Nations document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations “information note” on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an “effective framework” for dealing with global warming.

Can you blame them? If the Obama Administration can spend $4 trillion in a just a few months (which is 8 times as much as it took the Bush administration to spend in 8 years!), the U.N. must figure they can get a piece of that action too. And now that Obama is in office, the Global Warming fearmongers are no longer — ahem — afraid to show that their intentions were always about wealth redistibution and never about the environment. That was just a ruse bought up by the Day After Tomorrow Hollywood fools.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Health and Human Services nominee Kathleen Sebelius recently corrected three years of tax returns and paid more than $7,000 in back taxes after finding “unintentional errors”—the latest tax troubles for an Obama administration nominee. The Kansas governor explained the changes to senators in a letter dated Tuesday that the administration released. She said they involved charitable contributions, the sale of a home and business expenses.

Ho hum, another Obama appointee can’t remember to pay enough in taxes. But they sure expect you to. So, either Washington is filled with cheats or the tax code is waaay too complicated. Perhaps a bit of both.

One wonders how all the liberal members of the business community who donated massive amounts of money to Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 must feel now at the realization of a monster they helped spawn.

Here’s a scary couple of paragraphs from the D.C. Examiner:

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to “prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards,” according to the bill’s language. That includes regular pay, bonuses — everything — paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

In addition, the bill gives [the treasury secretary] Geithner the authority to decide what pay is “unreasonable” or “excessive.” And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate “the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates.”

Yesterday, Congress wanted to control the salaries and decisions of just business executives whose companies received bailout money. Today, they want to expand it to ALL EMPLOYEES at any firm that received bailout money. What of tomorrow?

Might tomorrow it expand beyond bailout recipients? Might it expand to any private sector that receives any public funds or grants? Once Congress is so empowered, why stop at just bailout recipients? After all, how many private sectors receive subsidies and government money? Farming and agriculture. In a big way. What else? The auto industry. Sugar on top, Congress already determines fuel standards and safety standards, they dictate what cars consumers want instead of consumers dictating that. The airlines. Energy? Science? Constuction? You betcha. Even child care. Maybe they’ll determine how you raise your kids too. Secretary Geithner can tell you if your child rearing is “unreasonable” or “excessive.”

[Houston Chronicle] At Monday’s hearing, [Senate Foreign Relations Committee] committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said he had been shocked to see killings and beheadings “just a stone’s throw across the Rio Grande from where we’re sitting this morning.”

Across the border, thousands of Mexican soldiers patrol Ciudad Juarez, which saw about 2,000 murders in 14 months.

Kerry called for a ban on the imports of assault rifles, such as the AK-47, into the United States.

Say what? So, in order to combat Mexican drug cartels Sen. Kerry proposes making it more difficult for American citizens living on the border to protect themselves and their families. The senator is going to have to better explain such backwards logic to us. The only thing more gun control laws will do is make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves, not more difficult for criminals, who don’t follow any laws in the first place. That’s why we call them “criminals,” Sen. Kerry.

Just so we’re all clear. We’ve got a bunch of Congressmen and administration officials who brokered these bailout deals with the financial community, were aware of and approved of retention bonuses, then once the deals came to the public light have the gall to act outraged.

If you haven’t yet read the open resignation letter by AIG executive vice president Jake DeSantis to CEO Edward Liddy, make sure you do. DeSantis is right: The people who need to be punished are long gone from AIG’s ranks. It’s people like DeSantis who were asked to salvage the company, for a salary of just $1 and a retention bonus, which our politicians knew about but now want to tax at 90%. Any outrage should be aimed at Congress, for starters.

• Now guys like our TAX CHEATING Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner want to use this government-made “crisis” to expand their power to heights not seen since the Politburo.
• Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd, was, to borrow from Michelle Malkin, “For AIG bonuses before he was against them.“
• Worse, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, “made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.” Where’s the outrage of his bonus for this monstrosity?
• Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were the first domino to fall in this credit crisis. The fox is running the henhouse. The head of the Senate Finance Committee, Barney Frank, perennially blocked all attempts to reform Fannie/Freddie.

Were these all right-wing names one can bet the conspiracy theorists would no doubt be successfully arguing that government created this crisis to expand its power.

Here’s Mark Levin:

“Now we have a guy that couldn’t remember to pay his social security taxes, couldn’t remember to pay his Medicare taxes, even though he was subsidized to pay them, told to pay them,” Levin said. “He’s smarter than everybody else in all these industries, and now we have another czar.”

The appointing of czars, he said, has been a trend according to that doesn’t comply with the powers set forth in the founding document,

“We have an administration full of czars, full of people who don’t comply with the constitution. The question today is, ‘What is your authority, Mr. Secretary, to do this?’” Levin said. “I would like to know what’s the president’s authority to do this?”

The Obama administration and its proponents say that a lack of government involvement in financial sector is what caused the current woes of the economy, specifically the banking system. Levin insisted it was just the opposite – that the banking system was never a “free market” and that’s how it got to this point.

“The problem is, we didn’t have a free market in the banking system,” he explained. “The banking system is the most regulated system next to the automobile industry. So there is no free market in the banking system. It is heavily regulated. We know about all these toxic loans thanks to Uncle Sam – pushing them as fast as they could, bundling them, encouraging the free market to respond with all kinds of packages and then they pretend it’s something wrong with the free market.”

Levin labeled advocates of the Obama agenda as “statist,” explaining that it is part of their desire to control every aspect of certain segments of the U.S. economy.

“That’s the way the statist operates and that’s what I explain here,” Levin said. “There are no limits on our government today. They’ve close to nationalize the automobile industry. Frankly, they basically nationalized the steel industry. They control the labor unions in giving them the authority that they give them. They control the products that are produced. They control what comes out of the chimney. They control what goes into the chimney. Now they want to control executive pay and they’re not going to limit it to bailed out companies.”

New Alliances In Iraq Cross Sectarian Lines
Political Jockeying Suggests An Emerging Axis of Power

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 20, 2009; A01

BAGHDAD, March 19 — Six weeks after provincial elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has allied himself with an outspoken Sunni leader in several provinces and broached a coalition with a militant, anti-American cleric, suggesting the emergence of a new axis of power in Iraq centered on a strong central government and nationalism.

Negotiations are still underway in most provinces, distrust remains entrenched among nearly all the players, and agreements could crumble. But the jockeying after the Jan. 31 elections indicates that politicians are assembling coalitions that cross the sectarian divide ahead of parliamentary elections later this year, a vote that will shape the country as the U.S. military withdraws.

“There is a new political map,” said Anwar al-Luheibi, a Sunni adviser to Maliki, who is a Shiite. “And I anticipate this map will be far better than the one we had before.”

The negotiations and dealmaking mark a departure from politics that have hewed almost exclusively to ethnic and sectarian lines, fomenting the discord that brought Iraq to the precipice of civil war in 2006 and 2007. They represent the first round of a great game that may resolve a question unanswered since Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003: What coalition of interests will find the formula to wield power in Iraq from Baghdad?

What’s significant about this article? First is that The Washington Post actually bothered to publish any good Iraq news on page one. Had McCain won the presidency one wonders if that would have been the case. But even more significant is that it undercuts the pre-war notions championed by the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department that “externals” or Iraqi exiles and exile groups would never have the popular support needed to lead the country after Saddam Hussein’s removal from power.

In his memoirs, Former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith labeled the notion a “prejudice” against externals. What’s interesting is that neither the State Department, nor especially the CIA, had any factual evidence to support their claim. It started prior to the War in Afghanistan when a former CIA operative named Milton Bearden made the argument in a end of year 2001 Foreign Affairs magazine that the U.S. should not utilize the Northern Alliance because they were seen as too outcast in the eyes of common Afghans. Feith reminds us that “our partnership with the Northern Alliance neither pushed the Pashtun tribes into the Taliban’s arms nor rekindled a civil war” that Bearden and others argued would occur.

Fast forward in time to the debate on the Iraq War. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage moved preemptively to disenfranchise whatever possible voice Iraqi externals might have when he shut down the Information Collection Program, the program with which the Iraqi National Congress (INC) provided American intelligence services with both physical and human intelligence (spies). The INC was the most prominent of Iraqi external groups, but it was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who decided in the mid-1990s to follow through with a CIA-prepared coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, even though the Clinton administration pulled U.S. (and CIA) backing right after learning about it. Fortunately the Defense Department would later start the ICP back up. Even so, Armitage continued to argue that the externals in Iraq had less “weight” than, say, in Afghanistan.

According to Feith, “This was a momentous conclusion to reach on the basis of a vague metaphor — without supporting evidence.”

In light of the insurgency, it is remarkable that key U.S. officials believed that the Iraqi externals were the chief danger the United States had to guard against in post-Saddam Iraq. Yet the main idea behind the transitional civil authority was precisely to guard against the externals dominating the post-Saddam political scene in Iraq.Why should that have been a goal of U.S. policy at all? When challenged on this point, top State and CIA officials responded that all the leaders of the external groups were not skilled enough and, moreover, lacked legitimacy.

Calling this view “presumptuous and dangerous,” Feith remarks that within a few short years after Saddam’s removal those very external leaders were indeed elected by popular majority to rule Iraq, which “belies the influential CIA theory — one might call a prejudice — that the externals would be incapable of winning electoral support inside Iraq.”

The leaders included:

President Jalal Talabani (elected and reelected)
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (appointed in June 2004… later elected twice to parliament)
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
Abdulaziz el-Hakim (leader of Iraq’s main Shia political party)

In light of the Washington Post article last week (that began this post), one wonders at what point the CIA and State Department will ever concede their inaccuracy. If ever.

Then again, since we’re keeping score, it appears that the Obama Administration’s declaration that we’ll “save” money by “ending” a war in Iraq that appears already won — or at least won with continued management started by General David Petraeus — is far off base, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded recently that will “increase rather than lower Iraq-related expenditures during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion,” according to the report.

Finally, who was right or wrong and on what argument will become all for naught should this foolish release of detainees from Iraqi prisons occur with too much haste or without proper vetting. This report seems the equivalent of our border catch-and-release program, despite the gains of our surge, dangerous men such as Mohammed Ali Mourad are let go either by incompetence or for more nefarious reasons.

In other words, victory and defeat in Iraq can be a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy.

And the liberal community has the gall to claim that Rush Limbaugh, et. al. right-wing radio hosts, have too much say over the conservative community? Warner Huston wonders, “Since when do reporters ever come out with a more than 700 word piece to explain why they asked the president a question?”

Answer: Ever since the empowerment of the fringe Left, that’s when.

It seems CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent Ed Henry has been under siege ever since he dared ask our Lord and Savior president, Barack Obama, about his administration’s knowledge and reaction to AIG bonuses. You’ll recall the very Democrats now expressing (faux) outrage over these bonuses had full knowledge of them months prior to their full disclosure. Me thinks they doth protest too much.

Huston continues:

If you’ll recall, on Tuesday (March 24) Henry asked Obama why he waited days to react to the outrage over the AIG bonuses that Treasury Secretary Geithner wrote into the bailout plan. Avoiding the question, Obama replied with a surly “Because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.” This exchange had the extremists at DailyKos and the profane folks at Wonkette as well as the rest of the left-O-sphere worked up into a frothy lather over Henry’s low down, hornswoggling ways. How DARE he ask the Obammessiah a pointed question! Why it’s sacrilege, surely!

So CNN has dutifully whimpered no mas and tried to smooth the waters with this odd article explaining away why that darned ol’ Ed Henry had the temerity to ask The One a question. It’s an obvious effort to appease the gods of the left-O-sphere and other zealots of the Obamanation. Henry must want a talisman to warn off the lefty heebie-jeebies awfully bad to go this far.

… Since when do reporters ever come out with a more than 700 word piece to explain why they asked the president a question? Did any reporter ever feel it necessary to offer a mea culpa or an “explanation” after having asked George W. Bush a “tough” question? Or did they rather do a few victory laps with the hearty back slapping of colleagues and moonbats alike, defiant in their revelry?

Ah, but not this time. You see, this time we are talking about The One and anyone asking Speaks-with-TelePrompTer a tough question gets the whole tribe up in arms. So, Henry hastened to his word processor to slam out an apologia that is as much asking his pals on the extreme left to stop hitting him as it is trying to get them all to understand that he was just “doing his job.”

Indeed. A pretty sad state of affairs for our modern mainstream media.

Here’s Stephen Hayes on another Obama double standard, this one on intelligence gathering:

So, the Obama administration has buried a report on recidivist Guantanamo Bay detainees that would cause political problems but it is seeking to release “torture” memos that could prove politically beneficial. Those Bush-era memos, according to Newsweek, would be released “over objections from the U.S. intelligence community.”

Surely we will read stories in the Washington Post and New York Times this week about the Obama administration “politicizing intelligence,” no? Especially because Obama advisers have overruled “intelligence professionals” before, right?

As the old journalism axiom has it: Three is a trend.

It would be most interesting to see Obama explain the double-standard tonight.

Read the rest.

Those Bush-era memos, by the way, were just that: memos written by White House staff to discuss and debate in 2002 and 2003 their options on intelligence gathering, detainees, policies, etc. They weren’t executive orders, as is often portrayed by the slanted press. Imagine if every staff meeting conversation you had at work ended up on the company-wide distribution list…

Here’s the Wall Street Journal, following on the same theme as my post below:

In its bipartisan rage, the House saw fit last week not merely to punish the employees of AIG’s Financial Products unit that the company still needs to safely unwind credit default swaps. The Members voted, 328-93, to slap a 90% tax on the bonuses of anyone at every bank receiving $5 billion in TARP money who earns more than $250,000 a year. A draft Senate version is even broader. Never mind if the bonus was earned last year or earlier, or under a legally binding employment contract. The confiscatory tax will apply ex post facto.

Never mind, too, that such punitive laws were expressly deplored by America’s Founders. In Federalist 44, James Madison warned that “Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation.”

In 1827 in Ogden v. Saunders, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar warning about legislative limits under Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution: “The states are forbidden to pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law, by which a man shall be punished criminally or penally by loss of life of his liberty, property, or reputation for an act which, at the time of its commission, violated no existing law of the land,” wrote Justice Bushrod Washington.

“Why did the authors of the Constitution turn their attention to this subject, which, at the first blush, would appear to be peculiarly fit to be left to the discretion of those who have the police and good government of the state under their management and control? The only answer to be given is because laws of this character are oppressive, unjust, and tyrannical, and as such are condemned by the universal sentence of civilized man.”

Yes, Article I, Section 10 applies to the states, and this is a federal law. Congress may also figure it avoids the “bill of attainder” objection by applying the law to individuals at several companies receiving TARP money. But Congress’s willingness to wreak such vengeance against a specific class of Americans is still as offensive as a matter of principle as Justice Washington and the Federalist Papers noted. The Founders feared the punitive whim of the legislative mob as much as they did the tyranny of a King.

[IHT] The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation, government officials said.

One can be outraged all they want about AIG bonuses, et. al., but having the government determine how much or by what measure a private sector executive should be paid is beyond ridiculous and is not even rational. It’s outrageous. It certainly isn’t anything remotely near what our country was founded upon. And, need one be reminded, the government can’t even keep track of IT’S OWN FINANCES (i.e. your hard-earned taxed earnings), let alone someone else’s.