Presented for your consideration, a couple of political foibles.
AIG
You probably heard all the outrage leveled at American International Group, the too-big-to-fail insurance giant that the government has spent $182.5 billion tax dollars on so far in its bailout tomfoolery.
AIG paid out some $165 million in bonuses after taking all that tax money.
Damn them.
President Barack Obama called it "stunning" and an "outrage."
Really?
Well the truth of the matter is that Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, stuffed the language in the TARP bill that allowed payout of the bonuses.
Why would he do that, one might ask?
Well, according to Dodd himself, in an e-mail he sent to Bloomberg news, it was because Obama told him to.
Bloomberg: "Dodd acknowledged ... that he 'weakened a provision dealing with executive pay in ... stimulus legislation at the request of the Obama administration.' The provision inserted in the bill instead expressly allowed companies that received taxpayer bailout money to pay retention bonuses that were part of employment contracts signed before Feb. 11, 2009."
Nice.
"I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment but I did so at the request of administration officials," Dodd told Bloomberg.
So President Obama, Dodd, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and probably everybody in Congress knew those bonuses were going to be paid long before they were paid.
They knew because they wanted it that way. They knew because they passed legislation that paved the way for it.
Yet they were all outraged by it. Whatever.
But it still begs the question, "Why would they do that?"
Well, perhaps I can shed some light on that for you.
AIG didn't only pay bonuses to its employees. It paid some pretty handsome "campaign bonuses" to politicians, as well.
Now, take a wild stab here. Who do you suppose are the top two recipients of AIG campaign bonuses?
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, President Obama received $104,332 from AIG during the last election cycle.
Dodd took in $103,900.
The next largest recipient received around $60K. All in all, AIG gave a total of $644,218 to federal candidates.
Is it starting to make sense to you now?
Censorship
There was a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court recently that is worth noting.
At issue was whether federal campaign finance laws apply to a critical film about Senator Hillary.
The film, "Hillary: The Movie" by Citizens United was intended to be shown in theaters and to cable subscribers.
It was a film - decidedly and pointed anti-Hillary - expressing opinions about whether Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a good president.
Citizens United sought an injunction against the Federal Election Commission in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Seems the FEC was going to apply the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act on the movie.
According to The Oyez Project, an archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work, the BCRA applies a variety of restrictions to "electioneering communications." Electioneering communication is "any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication which - refers to a clearly identified candidate for federal office; is made within 60 days before a general, special or runoff election for the office sought by the candidate; or 30 days before a primary or preference election, or a convention or caucus of a political party that has authority to nominate a candidate, for the office sought by the candidate."
Citizens United argued portions of the BCRA violate the First Amendment on its face when applied to the Hillary movie and its related advertisements.
It was during the oral arguments that things got a little weird.
According to a recap written by Lyle Denniston for SCOTUSblog, "When the argument turned to such First Amendment horrors as banning books, banning Internet expression, and banning even Amazon's book-downloading technology, 'Kindle,' the members of the Court seemed instantly to recoil from the sweep of arguments made by Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart.
"Even Justice David H. Souter, who tends to support government regulation of campaign spending, looked and sounded stunned when Stewart argued that the government would have power to forbid a labor union to use its own funds to pay an author to write a campaign biography that would later be published in book form by Random House. And, across the bench, incredulity showed when Stewart said the government could ban an advocacy group from using its own funds to pay for a 90-minute documentary if only the first minute was devoted to urging voters whom to choose, and the rest was a recital of information about the candidate without further direct advocacy."
Hey, I thought it was only us evil conservatives - not compassionate liberals - who want to censor stuff and trample the First Amendment.
