The original exemption was limited to groups with more than one million members, active in all 50 states, that derive no more than 15 percent of their funds from corporations, and have existed for more than 10 years. After liberal Democrats threatened to sink the bill, Democratic leaders expanded the exemption to groups with more than 500,000 members.

No bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed

A bill of attainder (also known as an act or writ of attainder) is an act of the legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial.

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• Letting them fail.  If we let Goldman Sachs, AIG, etc. fail, we wouldn’t need to be worrying about regulating them now.  They wouldn’t be pulling in huge bonuses, once again, we wouldn’t need a $30/billion bailout insurance fund for them.
• Stop taking over private businesses.  If GM were allowed to fail, they wouldn’t have needed new government loans to pay off their original government loans just to have a commercial making look like they’ve really changed anything.  If GM failed, FORD (who just recorded a huge profit), might be doing even better.
• Fix the SEC.  Maybe instead of watching porn on the Internet, maybe they could have been checking to see if Madoff was actually making any trades, and perhaps they could have seen that these “too big to fail firms” had no idea of what garbage they were buying and selling
• Hold Barney Frank and his committee accountable.   Haul him in to a hearing and ask him why he kept pushing for mortgages people couldn’t afford and had no idea that the bubble would burst.
• Hold Chris Doddand his banking committee accountable.  Haul him in to a hearing and ask him what the heck his Banking committee was doing while all this was going on (besides getting campaign donations and sweetheart financing deals for themselves).
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac really dropped the ball.  They used the taxpayers money to guarantee all these bad mortgages.

These are the real root causes of our financial problems.   Creating new government agencies is not going to solve the problem.  Fixing or eliminating the current ones could.

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The judge based today’s decision on the fact that she did not like the rules the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has put forth with regard to the form to be used in these challenges. While we carefully followed the rules clearly stated by the Commonwealth, the bottom line is that an activist judge ruled on a technicality that had absolutely nothing to do with the merits of this case.

Whatever you think about the case, we should all be disappointed that the judge apparently based the decision on the “form” and not the merits of the case.  From the article, it looks like both Carlineo and Jones agree on that.  Judgements made on technicalities and/or what judges “like” or do “not like” is harmful to us all.

House Democrats are trying to save Murphy by waiving this carrot in front of the voters in the 8th district while also allowing him to “run to the center” during this election period.   As mentioned in my prior post, “Job Killing Policies”, Patrick Murphy is hurting both our district and our country.

On the upper right side of Opensecrets.org is a search box.   Enter the name of the person you want to investigate and click the “Search OpenSecrets” button.  You can see contributions by: industry, Political Action Committees (PACS), Donors, Geography.  You can also see what and who they spend these contribution funds on.   Be sure to check out the “heavy hitters”.  For example, you can see that AIG contributions totaled $9,745,132 split 50% to the Democrats and 49% to the Republicans.

FEC.gov is the site of the Federal Election Commission.  This is where candidates and PACS reports their contributions and expenditures.  This is the base data for sites like OpenSecrets.org.  Here you can find the nitty gritty details and informative summaries.

The next time you wonder why some representatives voted the way they did, or claim that their constituents don’t know what’s best for them, “follow the money trail” and you’ll probably find your answer.