Obama’s Cabinet Choices

As fast as I was researching this BLOG post Obama’s picks were dropping like flies. However not all that should of did. 

Governor Bill Richardson: Commerce Secretary (withdrew)

Bill Richardson on Sunday announced that he was withdrawing his nomination to be President-elect Barack Obama's commerce secretary amid a grand jury investigation into how some of his political donors won a lucrative state contract which is named after him (Governor Richardson Investment Partnership, GRIP).

Eric Holder:   Attorney General (should never have been picked)

(New York Times, George Lardner)

Erick Holder facilitated the Clinton pardon of Mark Rich. In 1983 Marc Rich was indicted along with his partner, Pincus Green, and their companies on 65 counts of defrauding the I.R.S., mail fraud, tax evasion, racketeering, defrauding the Treasury and trading with the enemy. (The last of these was for an oil deal with Iran while it held American hostages.) On hearing that they were about to be prosecuted, they fled to Switzerland. For the next 17 years, Mr. Rich ducked extradition requests as well as attempts by federal marshals to arrest him in France, England, Finland and elsewhere.

Eric Holder, (WSJ.com, Debra Burlingame) also facilitated the Clinton pardon of 16 members of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN (the Spanish acronym), a clandestine terrorist group devoted to bringing about independence for Puerto Rico through violent means. Its members waged war on America with bombings, arson, kidnappings, prison escapes, threats and intimidation. The most gruesome attack was the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing in Lower Manhattan. Timed to go off during the lunch-hour rush, the explosion decapitated one of the four people killed and injured another 60.

FALN bragged about the bloodbath, calling the victims "reactionary corporate executives" and threatening: "You have unleashed a storm from which you comfortable Yankees can't escape." By 1996, the FBI had linked FALN to 146 bombings and a string of armed robberies -- a reign of terror that resulted in nine deaths and hundreds of injured victims.

Timothy Geithner: Treasury Secretary (should never have been picked)

 (Politico)

The Wall Street Journal/New York Times reported that Geithner had failed to pay $42,000 in taxes and had employed a housekeeper whose work permit had expired. But minutes after the news broke, the Obama transition team pushed back with talking points -- distributed to Capitol Hill, K Street and congressional reporters -- in which it portrayed the problems as simple mistakes or oversights." He admitted that he had failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in federal self-employment taxes while working for the International Monetary Fund despite having signed paperwork acknowledging the obligation.

Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State (should never been picked)

Hillary simply cannot tell the truth. Here's her scorecard: (Dick Morris)

Admitted Lies

• Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (She was in bed watching it on TV.)
• Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. (She admitted she was wrong. He climbed Mt. Everest five years after her birth.)
• She was under sniper fire in Bosnia. (A girl presented her with flowers at the foot of the ramp.)
• She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the Futures Market.

                (The WSJ was not reporting on the futures back then)  

Whoppers She Won't Confess To

• She didn't know about the FALN pardons.

By Ron Kolb: Hillary Clinton, Terrorism and the FALN

Despite the Clintons' repeated denials, there is evidence that the pardons were offered to the terrorists with Hillary Clinton's full knowledge. In the Oct. 4, 1999, issue of the New Republic, Jose Rivera, then a New York City Councilman, is quoted as saying that he personally approached Hillary on Aug. 9, 1999. He said he gave her a packet of information about the FALN members along with a personal letter asking her to "speak to the president and ask him to consider granting clemency" to them.

Two days later, on Aug. 11, President Clinton would offer pardons to the terrorists.

(Dick Morris)
• She didn't know that her brothers were being paid to get pardons that Clinton granted.
• Taking the White House gifts was a clerical error.
• She didn't know that her staff would fire the travel office staff after she told them to do so.
• She didn't know that the Peter Paul fundraiser in Hollywood in 2000 cost $700,000 more than she reported it had.
• She opposed NAFTA at the time.
• She was instrumental in the Irish peace process.
• She urged Bill to intervene in Rwanda.
• She played a role in the '90s economic recovery.
• The billing records showed up on their own.
• She thought Bill was innocent when the Monica scandal broke.
• She was always a Yankees fan.
• She negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia (who were released the day before she got there).

Tom Daschle: Secretary of Health and Human Services (withdrew)

(Bloomberg.com)

Daschle, who withdrew yesterday as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the cabinet post, spent four years helping friend Leo Hindery Jr. raised cash for purchases including 1970s hit dance show “Soul Train.” The appointment ran into trouble after he amended three years of tax returns for unreported income, including personal use of a car and driver provided by Hindery’s buyout firm. Daschle bowed out of the confirmation process, saying the tax issue had become a distraction.

Make way for Dr. Howard Dean.

Nancy Killefer: Chief Performance Officer (withdrew)

(Michelle Malkin)

Just before the Daschle announcement came the withdrawal of Nancy Killefer. She was tapped to be President Obama's "Chief Performance Officer," overseeing compliance, organizational effectiveness and waste management across every federal agency. But the former Clinton Treasury official and head of the prestigious Washington office of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Inc., couldn't be bothered to manage her own household help effectively. She failed for a year and a half to pay employment taxes and had an outstanding tax lien on her home. The lien was worth less than $1,000.

Janet Napolitano: Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security

Janet Napolitano was confirmed as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. She previously served as Arizona governor and is not in favor of a closed southern boarder and is against the Real-ID. She is not in favor of current laws calling for the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrants.

We will need to watch out, with her in this position.

Leon Panetta: CIA Director (should not have been picked because of no intelligence background)

(National Review On Line)

Before he was a Democratic congressman, before he was director of the Office of Management and Budget, before he was White House chief of staff, and certainly before he was President Obama’s nominee for CIA director, Leon Panetta was director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—the precursor to today’s Department of Health and Human Services. He was also a Republican.

Around the time he left HEW in 1970, Panetta may have been involved in leaking a secret White House document that caused a major embarrassment for the Nixon administration and had policy repercussions for decades.

Nixon, appointed Pat Moynihan—who had served as assistant secretary of labor for policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—as his urban-affairs adviser and all-around White House intellectual.

Moynihan suspected that a staffer at HEW had leaked the memo, and that HEW was responsible for leaking his authorship of the black family report five years earlier. (Decades later, Senator Moynihan would get some measure of revenge by having the Social Security Administration removed from HHS and made into an independent agency.) Although memos leak all the time, and the Leakers are rarely identified, The New Republic’sJohn Osbornereported in a March 1970 profile of Moynihan that Leon Panetta was a prime suspect in the leak.

How cool is it to have someone who suspected of leaking secret documents now ready to head up the CIA.

Hilda Solis: Labor Secretary (should not have been picked by Obama standards)

Hilda Solis was haven sent to Obama. She is one of the authors of the Card-Check Labor bill that she and Pelosi have been tying to get voted on since coming into power in 2004. Labor Unions are one of the major contributors to the campaigns of the Democrats.

What she forgot to tell the President was that she secretly was the non-paid treasure of the labor lobby group who has been funneling big money in their PACs, in other words she is another lobbyists that Obama said he would never have in his administration.

Comments in general

Remember, any Democrat bill that contains the words FREE or FAIR usually means the opposite.       

Obama certainly knows how to pick them, maybe it’s because of his own shady associations, and we will “PAY to PLAY” the price before the he ends the first two years of his first term.

Starting already with the new State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)

I knew there was a “Stupid University” in Washington now we know the Dean of Admissions. Obama signed into law on Feb. 4^th 2009, a bill which will expand SCHIP to children in families of four earning up to $80,000 per year. The Congressional Budget Office reports that 77 percent of such children already have private health insurance. The cool thing is that it will be funded by raising the cigarette tax up to a dollar. Aren’t we trying to convince people not to smoke? How will we pay for this stupid bill if smoking is cut in half?