By Paul Cloos
Religion News Service
(RNS) When the Auburn Tigers won the BCS college football championship against the Oregon Ducks, Auburn coach Gene Chizik thanked God. The team's star quarterback, Cam Newton, said he felt his performance showed what God can do.
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WASHINGTON — The Republican National Committee says it is $23 million in debt as it prepares for the 2012 elections.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Monday his committee owes about $8 million to vendors and $15 million to various lenders. Priebus recently succeeded Michael Steele, who oversaw big GOP victories last fall but was criticized for management problems that included poor fundraising and mounting debts.
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Sometimes party loyalty asks too much, even among today's rigidly unforgiving Republicans.
In December, the four Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) appeared to accept the Republican agitprop explanation, or "narrative," of the financial crisis: government regulators, under pressure from liberal Democrats like Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, bullied banks into making foolish, "politically correct" loans so poor folks could buy homes that they couldn't afford. But when the FCIC issued its final report last week, three of the four Republican commissioners flinched, apparently unwilling to sacrifice forever their scholarly reputations to the cause of partisan hackery. Instead, the three Republican commissioners argued that the financial crisis was caused by a combination of dimly understood macroeconomic forces, an unforeseeable "perfect storm."
Was this crisis preventable? "We don't know," said Republican FCIC commissioner Keith Hennessy. That argument has also been justly mocked by economics bloggers as "hoocoodanode?" ("Who could have known?"), but is far less laughable.
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WASHINGTON -- Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned on Sunday that if House Republicans, in an effort to flex their fiscal conservative muscles, held up passage of a budget this coming March, it could send the United States into a deep recession and possibly a depression.
The New York Democrat, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," said that the GOP was "playing with fire" by threatening either to not fund the government or not raise the debt ceiling unless they were first placated with deep spending cuts.
"On March 4 the government-funding resolution expires and it seems that a lot of Republicans in the House want to risk a shutdown of the government if they don't absolutely get their way," said Schumer. "That was a mistake when [former House Speaker] Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995. It would be a bigger mistake now. It is really playing with fire.... you can risk the credit markets really losing some confidence in the United States Treasury and that could create a deeper recession than we had over the last several years or, god forbid, even a depression."
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Happy "Earned-Income Tax Credit Awareness Day"! â¬The GDP grew 3.2 percent last quarter and will no doubt exceed that number next time thanks to all the Egyptian tear gas and Obama birth certificate tickets we'll be producing. Dennis Kucinich extended the de-pitted olive branch of peace to the Capitol food services provider he sued. And we tried in vain to find the lyrics to the Bangles' next single, "Rise Up En Masse And Demand Basic Human Rights Like An Egyptian." This is HUFFPOST HILL for Friday, January 28th, 2011:
MUBARAK DISSOLVING GOVERNMENT, NOT STEPPING DOWN - After a day of civil unrest in which demonstrators largely ignored a state-issued curfew and MSNBC bravely cut away from its coverage of a maniacal Turkey, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak addressed the nation and announced that he will not step down but will instead dissolve the government tomorrow. "My first responsibility is homeland security [and I] cannot allow this fear to grip our people," he said. "I have requested the government to step down today and I will appoint a new government tomorrow. I will not be lax or tolerant. I will take all the steps to safeguard the security of our people." Mubarak's incoherent speech will likely squash his White House ambitions, forcing him to return to the Louisiana governor's mansion. [HuffPost]
EGYPT HAS DEEP TIES WITH K STREET - As any ecosystem-destroying multi-national corporation or African despot or monolithic arms manufacturer or Melanie Sloan can tell you, you ain't nothing if you ain't got a "government relations professional" in your corner. And the Egyptian government, with all those tear gas canisters we gave them, sure ain't nothing. As Chris Good astutely notes, the government currently driving armored trucks through crowds of unarmed civilians has signed contracts with a number of leading D.C.-based lobbyists, including the namesakes behind the Podesta Group, the Livingston Group and the Moffett Group. The government's contract with the three state that they would "provide assistance and advice, as requested, to the Embassy in the task of securing and further enhancing the interests of Egypt in the United States in the political, economic, military and other fields." We hear Voldemort is quite taken with the selection of sparkling and mineral waters in Akin Gump's waiting room. [The Atlantic]
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In a report released today, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that "reckless" Wall Street firms, an abundance of cheap credit and "weak" federal regulators caused the crisis.
"This financial crisis could have been avoided. Let us be clear," chairman Phil Angelides said at the Washington press conference marking the official release of the report. "The record is replete with evidence of failures. None of what happened was an act of God."
Former California treasurer Angelides confirmed that the bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution.
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