Highmark

Often times they have their airlines uniform on.

Only now.

Yet if a significant portion of those oil reserves prove to be unrecoverable – either because climate-conscious governments or social movements compel fossil fuel companie Are you fucking kidding me.

God it must suck to be you MC. Go ahead and jump.

Obama had a secret email code name for when he communicated with Hillary thru her private email server. Secret email codes are good. Especially when dealing with classified information at the highest levels of govt. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/24/obama-used-pseudonym-emails-hillary-clinton-fbi/ By Andrew Blake - The Washington Times - Saturday, September 24, 2016 President Obama emailed Hillary Clinton using a pseudonym while she served as his secretary of state, according to FBI documents released Friday. The president’s previously unreported use of a pen name is referenced in notes from federal investigators’ April 5, 2016 interview with Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides, contained within 189 pages of records released late Friday afternoon by the FBI concerning its review of the Democratic presidential nominee’s use of a private email server while in office. During that interview, investigators showed the aide an email exchange dated June 28, 2012 with the subject “Re: Congratulations!” “Abedin did not recognize the name of the sender. Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed ‘How is this not classified?’” according to the FBI’s summary of the interview. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.” The FBI’s revelation quickly spurred questions about the president’s past claims concerning his knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. Mrs. Clinton’s non-governmental email address was first revealed in 2013 when a Romanian computer hacker breached the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidant, and subsequently leaked messages to the media that were sent to an account operated by Mrs. Clinton’s outside of the .gov realm.

Of course Toyota wanted them to be saved. They knew the govt would protect union workers and have an advantage in their own non-union factories.

I did. Where did Cheney get all of his classified information? Did he pull a Sandy Berger and stuff documents in his sock stealing them from the NA's. Oops I forgot that was a Clinton guy.

Bingo.

So you don't think someone or group wouldn't have swooped in and purchased GM for the right price?

OMFG! Now they are posting what Cheney says as word of god.

The auto industry would have been scooped up and maintained for the right price. The govt did it for the Unions.

Lets not forget the $4.5 Trillion in QE the US has done. FUBAR

Polls. Only 3% regret voting for Trump. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/21/politics/donald-trump-republican-support/ Poll: Only 79% of Obama voters would vote for him again http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/poll-71-of-obama-supporters-regret-voting-for-his-reelection/article/2544165 Given a chance to do it all over again, only 79 percent of those who voted for President Obama would vote for him again and 71 percent of Obama voters now inclined to vote for somebody else “regret” their vote to reelect the president, according to a new poll.

So what. So did the Clinton's. This is pretty normal stuff. Obama's team did the same thing. http://nypost.com/2017/03/12/russia-confirms-envoy-met-with-trump-and-clinton-camps-during-election/ http://thehill.com/policy/international/323582-kremlin-spokesman-russian-ambassador-met-with-advisers-to-clinton

It was basically started under Bush. Bush did reach out to the Obama team as he knew it would crossover to Obama. Just imagine the chances of that going on today. BTW I disagreed with large portions of the bill. Non Essential items Conservatives, represented by House Minority whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., complained, “This was not a stimulus bill. It was a spending bill.” [19] Some of the "stimulus" proposals attacked by conservatives: $650 million for digital TV coupons $600 million for new cars for the federal government $6 billion for colleges/universities The plan establishes at least 32 new government programs at a cost of over $136 billion [20] $25 million for new ATV trails $400 million for the National Endowment for the Arts $400 million for global warming research $30 billion has been set aside for infrastructure spending $200 million for Dep. of Defense to acquire alternative energy vehicles. $1.5 billion for a CO2 Reductions $4.2 billion for community organizing [21] $3.5 billion for higher education facilities $400 million for HIV and chlamydia testing $150 million for The Smithsonian $81 billion for Medicaid $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits $20 billion for food stamps $83 billion for the earned income credit for non-taxpayers $54 billion to federal programs Economic Development Administration, the Small Business Administration, the 10 federal job training programs $66 billion for education $650 million coupons to subsidize digital television conversion $572 million for Coast Guard improvements [22] $1 billion to subsidize Amtrak $2 billion to help subsidize child care $2.25 billion for national parks $75 million for programs to help people quit smoking $44 million to renovate the headquarters building of the Agriculture Department $200 million for the National Mall, including $21 million for sod $53.4 billion for science facilities, high speed Internet, and miscellaneous energy and environmental programs. $32 billion for a "smart" electricity grid to minimize waste $13 billion for public housing, the homeless, renovate foreclosed homes $20 billion for quicker depreciation and write-offs for equipment $10.3 billion for tax credits to help families defray the costs of college tuition

WRONG! I'm not saying Bush and the GOP should not have done more but every time they wanted to regulate the books of the GSE's the dems cried foul and being unfair to the poor. If FM and FM were made to have better books in 2003 a lot would have changed. Like I said lots of blame to go around but to claim it was all Bush is simply ignorant of the facts. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae By STEPHEN LABATONSEPT. 11, 2003 The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry. The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios. The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt -- is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates. ''There is a general recognition that the supervisory system for housing-related government-sponsored enterprises neither has the tools, nor the stature, to deal effectively with the current size, complexity and importance of these enterprises,'' Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told the House Financial Services Committee in an appearance with Housing Secretary Mel Martinez, who also backed the plan. Mr. Snow said that Congress should eliminate the power of the president to appoint directors to the companies, a sign that the administration is less concerned about the perks of patronage than it is about the potential political problems associated with any new difficulties arising at the companies. The administration's proposal, which was endorsed in large part today by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would not repeal the significant government subsidies granted to the two companies. And it does not alter the implicit guarantee that Washington will bail the companies out if they run into financial difficulty; that perception enables them to issue debt at significantly lower rates than their competitors. Nor would it remove the companies' exemptions from taxes and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws. The proposal is the opening act in one of the biggest and most significant lobbying battles of the Congressional session. After the hearing, Representative Michael G. Oxley, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and Senator Richard Shelby, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, announced their intention to draft legislation based on the administration's proposal. Industry executives said Congress could complete action on legislation before leaving for recess in the fall. ''The current regulator does not have the tools, or the mandate, to adequately regulate these enterprises,'' Mr. Oxley said at the hearing. ''We have seen in recent months that mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight,'' the independent agency that now regulates the companies. ''These irregularities, which have been going on for several years, should have been detected earlier by the regulator,'' he added. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was created by Congress in 1992 after the bailout of the savings and loan industry and concerns about regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy mortgages from lenders and repackage them as securities or hold them in their own portfolios. At the time, the companies and their allies beat back efforts for tougher oversight by the Treasury Department, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve. Supporters of the companies said efforts to regulate the lenders tightly under those agencies might diminish their ability to finance loans for lower-income families. This year, however, the chances of passing legislation to tighten the oversight are better than in the past. Reflecting the changing political climate, both Fannie Mae and its leading rivals applauded the administration's package. The support from Fannie Mae came after a round of discussions between it and the administration and assurances from the Treasury that it would not seek to change the company's mission. After those assurances, Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chief executive, endorsed the shift of regulatory oversight to the Treasury Department, as well as other elements of the plan. ''We welcome the administration's approach outlined today,'' Mr. Raines said. The company opposes some smaller elements of the package, like one that eliminates the authority of the president to appoint 5 of the company's 18 board members. Company executives said that the company preferred having the president select some directors. The company is also likely to lobby against the efforts that give regulators too much authority to approve its products. Freddie Mac, whose accounting is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a United States attorney in Virginia, issued a statement calling the administration plan a ''responsible proposal.'' The stocks of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae fell while the prices of their bonds generally rose. Shares of Freddie Mac fell $2.04, or 3.7 percent, to $53.40, while Fannie Mae was down $1.62, or 2.4 percent, to $66.74. The price of a Fannie Mae bond due in March 2013 rose to 97.337 from 96.525.Its yield fell to 4.726 percent from 4.835 percent on Tuesday. Fannie Mae, which was previously known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie Mac, which was the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, have been criticized by rivals for exerting too much influence over their regulators. ''The regulator has not only been outmanned, it has been outlobbied,'' said Representative Richard H. Baker, the Louisiana Republican who has proposed legislation similar to the administration proposal and who leads a subcommittee that oversees the companies. ''Being underfunded does not explain how a glowing report of Freddie's operations was released only hours before the managerial upheaval that followed. This is not world-class regulatory work.'' Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing. ''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed. ''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

No but his biggest failure still was Iraq and that was a major one.

Show's what you know. You do realize Clinton had significant cuts to capital gains taxes. By 2003, Mr. Bush grasped this lesson. In that year, he cut the dividend and capital gains rates to 15 percent each, and the economy responded. In two years, stocks rose 20 percent. In three years, $15 trillion of new wealth was created. The U.S. economy added 8 million new jobs from mid-2003 to early 2007, and the median household increased its wealth by $20,000 in real terms. But the real jolt for tax-cutting opponents was that the 03 Bush tax cuts also generated a massive increase in federal tax receipts. From 2004 to 2007, federal tax revenues increased by $785 billion, the largest four-year increase in American history. According to the Treasury Department, individual and corporate income tax receipts were up 40 percent in the three years following the Bush tax cuts. And (bonus) the rich paid an even higher percentage of the total tax burden than they had at any time in at least the previous 40 years. This was news to theNew York Times, whose astonished editorial board could only describe the gains as a “surprise windfall.” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/3/bush-tax-cuts-boosted-federal-revenue/ http://www.heritage.org/taxes/report/the-economic-impact-president-bushs-tax-relief-plan During the first four years of his Presidency, real GDP growth average 3.2%, respectable relative to today’s economy, but disappointing coming as it did following just one year of recovery from the 1991 recession, the end of the Cold War and the reduction in consumer price inflation below 3% for the first time (with the single exception of 1986) since 1965. For example, it was a half a percentage point slower than under Reagan during the four years following the first year of the recovery from the 1982 recession. Employment growth was a respectable 2 million a year. But real hourly wages continued to stagnate, rising only 2 cents to 7.43 an hour in 1996 from $7.41 in 1992. No real gains for the middle class there. Federal government receipts increased an average of $90 billion a year while the annual increase in federal spending was constrained to $45 billion. That led to a $183 billion, four-year reduction in the budget deficit to $107 billion in 1996. However, with his masterful 1995 flip-flop on taxes, President Clinton took the first step toward a successful campaign for re-election and a shift in policy that produced the economic boom that occurred during his second term. Welfare reform, which he signed in the summer of 1996, led to a massive reduction in the effective tax rates on the poor by ameliorating the rapid phase out of benefits associated with going to work. The phased reduction in tariff and non-tariff barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement continued, leading to increased trade. In 1997, Clinton signed a reduction in the (audible liberal gasp) capital gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. The 1997 tax cuts also included a phased in increase in the death tax exemption to $1 million from $600,000, and established Roth IRAs and increased the limits for deductible IRAs. Annual growth in federal spending was kept to below 3%, or $57 billion. The Clinton Administration also maintained its policy of a strong and stable dollar. Over his entire second term, consumer price inflation averaged only 2.4% a year. The boom was on. Between the end of 1996 and the end of 2000: Economic growth accelerated a full percentage point to 4.2% a year. Employment growth nudged higher, to 2.1 million jobs per year as the unemployment rate fell to 4.0% from 5.4%. As the tax rate on capital gains came down, real wages made their biggest advance since the implementation of the Reagan tax rate reductions in the mid 1980s. Real average hourly earnings were (in 1982 dollars) $7.43 in 1996, $7.55 in 1997, $7.75 in 1998, $7.86 in 1999, and $7.89 in 2000. Millions of Americans shared in the prosperity as the value of their 401(k)s climbed along with the stock market, which saw the price of the S&P 500 index rise 78%. Revenue growth accelerated an astounding 59%, increasing on average $143 billion a year. Combined with continued restraint on government spending, that produced a $198 billion budget surplus in 2000. Shared prosperity indeed! But one created not by raising tax rates on high income but not yet rich middle class families, and certainly not by raising the capital gains tax rate or by imposing the equivalent of the Buffett rule, a new alternative minimum tax of 30% on incomes over $1 million, nor by massively increasing federal spending. Rather, it was a prosperity produced by freeing America’s poor from a punitive welfare system, lowering tariffs, reducing tax rates on the creators of wealth, limiting the growth of federal government expenditures, and providing a strong and stable dollar to businesses and families in America and throughout the world. A shared prosperity can be achieved again. But to do so, the American people will have to overcome the envy feeding myth perpetrated by President Barack Obama and the spin-masters and leadership of the Democratic Party that raising tax rates on high incomes will somehow lead to more job creation, more opportunity and increased prosperity and security for the middle-class.

God I hope he did this. Time for other countries to keep up their end of the CONTRACT. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/27/trump-handed-merkel-374b-nato-bill-during-talks.html President Trump handed a bill to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for about $400 billion -- money he claims Germany owes NATO -- during their White House meeting earlier this month, according to a British newspaper. Trump has been outspoken about NATO countries not meeting their pledge to spend at last 2 percent of GDP on defense. He raised the issue publicly in the joint press conference he held with Merkel on March 17. “I reiterated to Chancellor Merkel my strong support for NATO, as well as the need for our NATO allies to pay their fair share for the cost of defense,” Trump said at the joint press conference. “Many nations owe vast sums of money from past years, and it is very unfair to the United States. These nations must pay what they owe.” But The Times of London reported Sunday that Trump had gone a step further and told officials to calculate how much German defense spending had fallen short of the target since 2002 -- when former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder committed to higher defense spending. The bill was then handed to Merkel during their private meeting, The Times reported, to the tune of more than 300 billion U.K. pounds – about $374 billion. Trump's colorful move was described as “outrageous” by a German minister. “The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister told The Times. The White House denied the report to Business Insider, with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer saying: “No, this is not true.” The Times reported that Trump had his staff prepare similar bills for other NATO members not meeting the 2 percent targets. If true, the hardball tactic may have had some effect, with Merkel reaffirming at the press conference her nation’s intention to keep the 2 percent commitment. “NATO is of prime importance for us, and it was not without very good reason that we said during our summit meeting in Wales that also Germany needs to increase expenditure. We committed to this 2-percent goal until 2024,” she said. “Last year we increased our defense spending by 8 percent, and we’re going to work together again and again on this.”

I agree and have said that all along but when you got so few taking up so much of the costs it makes sense to look at that as well.

All caused by the housing market crash that had little to do with GWB policies. In fact he tried to reign it in early in his first term only to be shot down by the dems. Lots of things/people/policies caused that. GWB had good growth and job creation up till 2008. He also had record tax revenue. Where he fucked up was Iraq. Should have stayed out of the quagmire or at a minimum had a much better plan on how to manage it. That is 100% on him.

for a president still searching for signature achievements. I had to laugh at that. Not even to the 100 day mark yet. Quote from Obama during his first 100 days. Obama stated that he should not be judged by his first hundred days: "The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference."[6]

Yep.

This makes a difference. Reality is the airport is filled with chicks that have no business being in yoga pants.

Its the economy stupid. 4-5% growth and HC fix failure will be forgotten in a hurry.