BartBlog

Here’s the letter I sent to my senator, I suggest you do the same!

Dear Dianne Feinstein,
Chrysler is owned by the hedge fund, Cerberus Capital Management, L.P.
Why are taxpayers now being asked to bail out Chrysler when its owner refuses to do so?
I vigorously object to this auto bailout as long as it includes Cerberus. I shouldn’t have to bail out a hedge fund.
Please respond to my letter.
Sincerely

Below find info about Cerberus:

Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is one of the largest private equity investment firms in the United States. The firm is based in New York City, and run by 48-year-old financier Steve Feinberg. Former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle has been a prominent Cerberus spokesperson and runs one of its international units.
The company has been a very active acquirer of businesses over the past several years and now has sizable investments in automotive, sportswear, paper products, military services, real estate, energy, retail, glassmaking, transportation, and building products. In 2006, its holdings amounted to $24 billion.
On October 19, 2006, John W. Snow, President George W. Bush’s second United States Secretary of the Treasury, was named chairman of Cerberus.

Notable acquisitions
• Pharmaceuticals – In December 2004, the company announced the acquisition of Bayer’s plasma products business and renamed it Talecris Biotherapeutics.
• Paper products – The company acquired MeadWestvaco’s paper business for $2.3B in 2005 and renamed it NewPage Corporation. Cerberus also purchased, from Georgia Pacific Corporation, its Distribution Division/Building Products and all of its associated real estate. It renamed this new company BlueLinx Holdings, based in Atlanta.
• Government Services (Military, Energy, and Food & Drug) – owns IAP Worldwide Services, which bought Johnson Controls’ World Services division in February 2005, and Netco Government Services.
• Real Estate – Through investment affiliate Cerberus Real Estate, the company has been making direct equity, mezzanine, first mortgage, distressed and special situation investments in all asset types. It also controls Miami Beach.-based LNR Property, a large real estate development and investment firm through subsidiary Riley Property. Cerberus also controls Kyo-ya, a Japan based group of entities that owns several Starwood managed assets in California, Hawaii and Florida.
• Retail – Cerberus purchased 655 of the 2,500 Albertson’s, Inc., grocery stores, forming Albertsons LLC of Boise, Idaho, in June 2006. They also own Mervyn’s department stores, which was acquired from Target Corp. In June 2007, Cerberus acquired Torex Retail Plc., a retail solutions provider in troubled waters, for approximately 400 million US dollars.[2]
• Transportation – Acquired bankrupt ANC Rental, owner of the National and Alamo car rental chains, for $230 million in October 2003 and purchased DaimlerChrysler’s 45% share of debis AerFinance, an aircraft leasing business, in May 2005. Complete acquisition of debis AirFinance (later renamed AerCap) was concluded in July 2005. Also acquired North American Bus Industries, Optima Bus Corporation, and Blue Bird Corp. in the bus manufacturing sector. Cerberus also owns bus companies Coach America and American Coach Lines, which were acquired from Stagecoach Group.
• Automotive – Peguform, GDX Automotive, and Chrysler.
• Financial Services – General Motors sold a 51% stake in its GMAC finance unit to an investor group led by Cerberus Capital Management in November 2006. GM expected to receive $14 billion over the next three years from the sale of General Motors Acceptance Corp. In December 2006, Cerberus acquired the Austrian bank BAWAG P.S.K. for a reported EUR3.2 billion. In August 2007, Cerberus announced that it was closing one of their mortgage companies, Aegis Mortgage.
• Firearms – Acquired Bushmaster Firearms, Inc., from Windham, Maine native Dick Dyke for an undisclosed sum in April 2006, and purchased Remington Arms in April 2007. Under Cerberus direction, Bushmaster Firearms acquired Cobb Manufacturing, a well-respected manufacturer of large-caliber tactical rifles in August 2007. Cerberus also announced the acquisition of DPMS Panther Arms in December 2007.[3][4] Remington Arms acquired Marlin Firearms in January 2008.[5][6]
• Entertainment – Acquired a group of seven television stations, Four Points Media Group, from CBS Corporation in 2007.[7][8]
• Other holdings of the investment group include Formica, Inc., and the Aozora Bank in Japan; and cable operator Galaxy Cable.
• In 2007 Cerberus took over Corvest a promotional products company based out of Largo, FL with arms based in Simi Vally, Ca & Thorfare, NJ.

I hope you people aren’t too offended by the following. I’ve already been called names by one person.
Not exactly my idea of fun.
-Grim

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day, 10 men go out for beer and the bill for all 10 comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, using the “progressive” tax formula, the billing would go like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
(more…)

In 1960 Ghana had the same per capita income as South Korea. Today South Korea is the twelfth-wealthiest nation in the world while Ghana sits at number 100. Why? Because Ghana followed a socialist model while South Korea followed a free market model.

Forty years ago the leading Irish export was young people leaving for jobs outside the country. Today Ireland has a higher per capita income than Germany, and 160,000 temporary workers from Eastern Europe live in Ireland. As a result of a generation of cutting taxes, reforming education, investing in infrastructure, working hard, and reshaping its government to be friendly to foreign investment, the German Bundesbank now projects that Ireland is on its way to becoming the wealthiest country in Europe per capita. In fact, European Union bureaucrats in Brussels complained that Irish taxes were too low and that they were therefore cheating, which meant that in order to slow down to the rest of Europe’s rate Ireland needed to raise taxes.

Bad policies lead to bad outcomes. But the reverse is true as well.

If we have the right policies, policies that expand our free market sys tem, we can create better outcomes than we can imagine.

LONDON TO REPLACE NEW YORK?
America’s ability to win, and not just compete, in the global economy depends in part on our having the world’s most efficient capital markets. We need substantial reforms in this area if America is to be the

This is a page out of Real Change by Newt. Hope you enjoyed it; hope those of you who haven’t, pick up the book. Grimmy

Dear Mr President,

As per the article below, if people who have slipped in through our southern border kill americans, it will be your fault for not demanding controlled borders, and will be part of your legecy.

Do the right thing – build the fence.

WASHINGTON – Two more Iraqis with false Bulgarian passports were detained by Mexican officials in Monterrey – bringing the total to four this month. (more…)

I wrote this about 2 years ago. It still applies to me today.

As I walked through the grocery store on this day which many find so holy, I heard a song come over the radio. It was Walking in Memphis. There’s a verse in the song that goes like this
Now Muriel plays piano
Every Friday at the Hollywood
And they brought me down to see her
And they asked me if I would –
Do a little number
And I sang with all my might
And she said –
“Tell me are you a Christian, child?”
And I said “Ma’am, I am tonight”
This started me thinking, what am I tonight? (more…)

OK. You are a Libertarian and Union Carbide buys that land
behind your house. It was a city park when you bought your
house, but in a libertarian world, the city has no business running
parks, so the city sold it to the chemical giant. Of course the neighborhood
was zoned residential, but in a libertarian world, nobody can tell
you what to do with your own land, so there are no longer any zoning laws.

So, now Union Carbide begins dumping tons of green smoking
chemical residue into the creek where your children play,
because, in a libertarian world, no one is going to
tell companies what they can and cannot do. Your wife
delivers her latest child (at home, because, in a libertarian
world, there would be no public hospitals) and that
child seems to have an excessive number of appendages.
You suspect that it may be connected to the fact that the
creek behind your house glows at night.

What are you going to do? Sue Union Carbide? I don’t think
so. They have billions and you are employed by them for
$2.65 an hour because there is no minimum wage or anti-trust
legislation in a libertarian world. Your lawyer wants
$145,000 up front plus another $200,000 for the lab to test
the stream because, you got it, there is no government
testing in a libertarian world.

Ayn Rand was a fucking idiot and the followers of Ayn
Rand can’t get past the less government, lower taxes, let us
have our drugs and guns, mantra to consider what a looneytarian
world it would be.

–Dan–

In light of the New York Times’ revelations concerning the role of Alberto Gonzales’s “Justice” Department in sanctioning the use of torture, I thought it would be good to highlight something equally horrible: rendition, which allows Bush and Cheney to transport suspected terrorists to countries that inflict tortures that can only be called medieval. My “favorite” in this regard is Uzbekistan, one of the former Soviet republics. I originally wrote this in late December 2005, but it is still applicable.

Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan, is a murderous, brutal son of a bitch. He has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, which says something in itself. The merest summary of his crimes is appalling. Human Rights Watch keeps an extensively documented page devoted to the barbarism of the Karimov regime. You should go check some of these items out. Among the highlights:

(more…)

In light of Draft Dodging/Drug Addicted/Fat Assed/Pigboy Rush Limbaugh’s smear against any U.S. soldier who dares to question the wisdom of Dear Leader, and also in light of the outrageous, phony Move.on “scandal”, I’ve been thinking of something I saw earlier this year. It’s this piece by Digby that says it all: the savages of the radical Right can say anything, can utter any smear, can advocate butchering their political opponents, can spread any lie, and they will still be treated respectfully by the mainstream media. This is the same MSM that will wildly exaggerate any misstep by a Democrat and scream and shout about how “unhinged” the political left is in America.

The depth of the Right’s viciousness is almost beyond belief. Digby–and I–take them seriously. Some of her examples:

When Limbaugh said, “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for,” we didn’t doubt him anymore.

When Ann Coulter said “we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too, otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors,” to rapturous applause at the 2002 CPAC, we knew she wasn’t just kidding.

**********

It continues today. Dinesh D’Souza just published a book saying that liberals are the cause of terrorism. Ramesh Ponneru calls us “The Party of Death.” And when Michele Malkin then creates a career out of calling the left “unhinged” the Washington Post treats her like she’s discovered the Holy Grail.

This is why it is so shocking to us when we see people like Howard Kurtz and various others call for the smelling salts when some members of the left have reacted in kind by saying hateful, violent things about Dick Cheney’s assassination attempt. (These anonymous commenters, by the way, are not best selling authors making a personal televised appearance at a gathering that includes most of the Republican presidential candidates, members of congress and even the Vice President himself.)

I certainly agree that such appalling comments are not to be accepted. Indeed, I recall how my stomach turned when when I read what Coulter had to say at CPAC last year:

On Democrats: “Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts.” College professors: “sissified, pussified.” Harvard: “the Soviet Union.” John Kerry: the other “dominant woman in Democratic politics.” Her post-9/11 motto: “Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences.” For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court — with the liberal justices inside.

Then came questions. A young woman asked Coulter to describe the most difficult ethical decision she ever made. “There was one time I had a shot at Bill Clinton,” Coulter said.

And yet, vile scum like Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly, Hannity, Kristol, Savage, Beck, Cavuto, Gibson, D’Souza, Malkin, and all of their poisonous offspring continue to be feted by their friends in the so-called “mainstream media”. Democrats in general and liberals specifically are ridiculed and attacked relentlessly while Right wingers advocate genocide and war. Al Gore, WHO HAS BEEN 100% RIGHT ON EVERY ISSUE IN PUBLIC LIFE, is called mentally unbalanced by sneering little bastards like Chris Matthews while Bill Kristol, WHO HAS BEEN 100% WRONG ON EVERY ISSUE IN PUBLIC LIFE is promoted and given increasingly broad platforms from which to brand anyone who disagrees with his lunatic neocon agenda a traitor.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ann Coulter is wildly popular with the hardcore Right that runs the Republican Party. These people hate anyone who disagrees with them, and would sincerely like to see people like the readers of BartCop either killed or intimidated into silence. They routinely speak out for mass murder, as when Coulter suggested carpet bombing Iran, and yet continue to get a free pass by our media “watchdogs”. (And let’s not forget Ted Nugent’s vile death threats against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Dixie Chicks express embarrassment at George Bush and are publicly crucified. Nugent says Hillary and Obama should “ride out of town on my machine gun” and not one g-d damned thing happens.) We need to call these “watchdogs” on this sickening double standard loud and clear.

Shamefully, the Democratic Party’s congressional “leadership” lets this unrelenting slander against the those who oppose Bush, otherwise known as THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,  happen, either out of cowardice and ineptitude (like Harry Reid) or because they’re totally tied into the Washington Good Ol’ Boy system (like Dianne Feinstein). We need to call them out, too, even more loudly and more clearly. If these people don’t have the guts or inclination to fight back, let’s find Congressional leadership that will.

There can be NO COMPROMISE with the radical Right. There can be NO DIALOGUE with them. They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be talked to, they cannot change. These are the delusional 29% of the American people who actually think Bush is doing a good job as president. They cannot be engaged; they can only be utterly and totally opposed, crushed, and defeated. The murderous radical Right commentators are not at the fringe of the Republican party–they are the Republican Party. The sooner those of us in the sane, reality based part of America grasp this, the sooner these people will be politically destroyed for all time.

Rudolph Giuliani screwed the pooch big time when it came to getting his city prepared for a possible attack by terrorists. Despite the fact that the World Trade Center was bombed by terrorists in 1993, Giuliani insisted–against the advice of his top people–that the emergency command center for New York City be placed in the WTC complex. When confronted about this inexcusable mistake, Giuliani simply flat out lied about it. (Check out the YouTube video here to get the full depth of this story.) Giuliani’s stupid, criminally negligent judgment caused the unnecessary deaths of countless emergency workers, especially firemen, who basically hate his guts. As Jim Riches, Deputy Chief of the FDNY put it on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

“He’s runnin’ on his 9/11 leadership and it was lacking and there was none. And he’s not the hero of 9/11. The 9/11 heroes all died that day tryin’ to help people. His leadership is horrible. He just lies, and when you do find out more about him you won’t vote for him.”

(more…)