From the driver's seat to hot seat ( Christopher Dodd mentioned )

As the federal government keeps promising to come up with $14 billion or so to help the domestic auto industry keep one foot out of the grave, talk has swirled that there would have to be changes at the top.

A federal "car czar" is on tap to sweat the details, like which people and products stay and which go, so the CEOs have been in the crosshairs – with the bull's eye squarely on General Motors' Rick Wagoner.

Wagoner has headed what's soon to be the world's No. 2 automaker since 2000, closing down Oldsmobile, pumping up SUV sales and negotiating a more favorable deal with the United Auto Workers. Yet, some debating the bailout say he's gotta go.

"It's very ironic that Sen. [Christopher] Dodd [D-Conn.] is the one who called for Rick Wagoner to be removed," Cole adds. "It was Sen. Dodd who, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has said people who couldn't afford homes should have homes. So he is one of the primary causes of the nation's banking and financial meltdown."

In a column on the financial melt-down published around 11/30/08, New York Times columnist Thomas “The Earth is Flat” Friedman treated readers to yet more classic MISinformation so typical of the soon-to-be-bankrupt Times. Could their long history of historical revisionism be the reason they’re in trouble? But that’s a topic for another post.

Friedman portrayed the greedy bankers and Wall Streeters as the villains.

Yes, many of them may have gamed “the system,” bundling this “junk” into “derivatives” even PhDs in economics didn’t understand.

But if that “system” hadn’t been created in the first instance, the gaming would not have even been possible. Friedman conveniently failed to mention that the system was a creature of the 1977 Jimmy Carter sponsored “Community Reinvestment Act.”

Allegedly designed to make the American Dream of home ownership available to all, it was expanded in the Clinton years to include even those with virtually no prospect of repaying. Lenders who refused to “get with the program” were threatened with loss of their charters.

Until it unraveled, it was a brilliant Democrat vote-buying scheme.

And as it unraveled, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, et al stood silently by and watched. These clowns are either too stupid to hold public office or the new poster boys for UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

For all the pain they have caused with their idiocy, these alleged “leaders” should be hauled into a courtroom and tried. If found guilty, I think public hangings are in order.

Bin Laden and his ilk have long sought to bring this country down economically. With that job now done by Frank, Dodd, Reid, Carter, Clinton, et al, the Islamofascists can now devote themselves to full time bomb building.

And for those who think I exaggerate, here is some of the rare wisdom offered by a former President:

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic giant to step the ocean and crush us at one blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1837

Everytime I see that mortgage company ad on TV, with Christopher Dodd's picture emblazoned on the screen, it makes me think I have gone back in time to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia or somewhere else where there is unabashed government propaganda. That kind of ad could never have played in America a few decades ago.

It starts out "the President has signed the most important legislation in a generation". It doesn't say that the President is Bush, a Republican. It then goes on to say that Senator Christopher Dodd has said...blah blah blah, and then it keeps his picture up there the rest of the ad. That is unbelievable free publicity, and for the guy who caused the mortgage crisis to get a mortgage crisis lender to put his face on an ad directed to people who have suffered from the mortgage crisis is obscene.

There's another ad with Leahy on it that I see all the time. I don't recall ever seeing Republicans put their faces on public interest ads while they were in charge. They'll never be in charge again, so it really doesn't matter any more. Those of us with memories will slowly die out and then the truth will be a memory, too.

A federal "car czar" is on tap to sweat the details, like which people and products stay and which go, so the CEOs have been in the crosshairs â€“ with the bull's eye squarely on General Motors' Rick Wagoner... headed what's soon to be the world's No. 2 automaker since 2000, closing down Oldsmobile, pumping up SUV sales and negotiating a more favorable deal with the United Auto Workers... "It's very ironic that Sen. [Christopher] Dodd [D-Conn.] is the one who called for Rick Wagoner to be removed," Cole adds. "It was Sen. Dodd who, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has said people who couldn't afford homes should have homes. So he is one of the primary causes of the nation's banking and financial meltdown."

Thanks geo. It was that "more favorable deal with the UAW" that put him in the crosshairs.

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