The Super Majority

Murtha’s Defense Earmarks Draw Questions

Spring in Washington is “earmark season” – a busy time for Congressman John Murtha.

“That’s my business,” Murtha said. “I’ve been in it for 35 years.”

As head of a powerful Defense committee, Murtha controls hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, reports CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. And he’s not shy about directing money to those who give generously to his election campaigns.

CBS News has learned that this month, Murtha is steering new earmarks toward 10 companies that recently donated to his campaign.

Read the Full Article at CBS News

Nobody Listens to the Real Climate Change Experts

Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world’s politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as “an emergency summit on climate change” and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, “this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy”.

What worries them are all the signs that when the world’s politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Read the Full Article at Telegraph

Judge Allows Madoff’s Mets Tickets to be Sold Off to Raise Funds

A federal bankruptcy judge signed off Tuesday on a plan to raise tens of thousands of dollars for victims of the Bernard Madoff fraud by auctioning off pricey New York Mets season tickets owned by the disgraced financier’s investment firm.

Before signing an order allowing a court-appointed trustee to sell the tickets at the New York Mets sparkling new ballpark to the highest Internet bidder, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland playfully suggested that the team needed to rebound from its mediocre start to help the cause.

“Suppose the trustee would wait a couple of months to see if the Mets do well?” Burton quipped at a brief hearing in a lower Manhattan courthouse.

Read the Full Article at Huffington Post

Dream Mortgage Bailout Has a Darker Side

It will go down as one of the biggest — and most popular — bailouts of the credit crunch. But who will pay for it later?

The Federal Reserve is buying hundreds of billions of dollars of low-interest-rate mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The purchases, which so far amount to $250 billion and could grow to $1.25 trillion, have driven mortgage rates to historical lows, inducing house purchases and sparking a refinancing wave.

This serves key social and political goals: It helps shore up house prices, while the lower mortgage rates put extra money into the pockets of people who aren’t struggling to service their mortgages. This then makes them less likely to oppose taxpayer-funded moves to support homeowners facing foreclosure.

Read the Full Article at WSJ