Comments on Belmont Club "Who me?"

Gordon,
I think that Dodd, or his evil twin Skippy, inserted a provision protecting the bonuses from further review, and made sure to do it before Obama took the oath of office. If it had been done after the bonuses were paid it would have been ex post facto and unconstitutional. The fact is that Obama signed the bill so even if his flacks try to make an issue that some negotiations happened on Bush's watch it means nothing, nada, zip. Carolyn Maloney is full of baloney when she proposes a special ex post facto law to recover the money, Anyone who advocates such a law should be deemed mentally and morally incompetent to vote or hold office. That particularly holds for Senator Schumer. BTW Schumer funded his initial run against Al D'Amato using his muscle from when he was on the House Banking Committee, that's right he roosted with Barney Frank. Schumer went into Wall Street board rooms and the line I heard was that he did not suffer from subtlety. Something on the order of "Cough it up" was mentioned. We should be careful not to get overheated here but it is true that this frays the line between America and random dictatorships. If Congress can pass ex post facto laws to take away specific people's money, at the same time that the President is announcing that he is changing the rules to make military veterans pay for their service connected injuries, then it becomes conceivable that somewhere some Colonel among the thousands will wonder if we really are any different. More likely and equally disastrous is that if Congress did pass such a law the entire banking and financial system would collapse on the spot. Every Director of every corporation would retire to the country, possibly a foreign country, on the spot. Cows could start grazing in NY's Bowling Green again.

Regrettably I have not found it on Youtube but in the movie Captain Horatio Hornblower there is a scene where El Supremo rants and raves waving his arms, as the Royal Navy methodically demolishes his ship around him. The sharks are starting to circle around Obama and they may not be as polite as Gregory Peck.