Obama violates the right to contract. Attorney Tom Lauria calls him a liar, and in violation of the separation of powers. Listen to his radio interview here.

Retired newsman Corky Boyd posts on this blog:

Yesterday (May 1) on Detroit’s Frank Beckman’s morning talk show (WJR), bankruptcy attorney Tom Lauria made the incendiary accusation that the members of the White House had threatened to use the “the full force of the White House Press Corps to destroy” his client’s reputation if it didn’t acquiesce to highly unfavorable terms of the government’s proposed Chrysler restructuring plan. Because of the strongarm tactics, Lauria’s client dropped its opposition.

Lauria: Let me tell you it’s no fun standing on this side of the fence opposing the President of the United States. In fact, let me just say, people have asked me who I represent. That’s a moving target. I can tell you for sure that I represent one less investor today than I represented yesterday. One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight. That’s how hard it is to stand on this side of the fence.

Beckman: Was that Perella Weinberg?

Lauria: That was Perella Weinberg.

There is a pattern here. Financial institutions holding billions of Chrysler’s secured debt are being held hostage by the TARP loans they are not permitted to pay back. They are being forced to accept just pennies on the dollar for loans they made in good faith less than two years ago. Just like mob loan sharks, the administration wants them under its thumb so they can extort more and more concessions.

This is an abuse of power that goes beyond Nixon.

Instapundit asks:

How does the supposedly independent White House Press Corps feel to know that it’s being wielded as a weapon by Obama’s operatives? Might it at least be interested in looking into these allegations?

Then there’s this, which sums up Obama’s priorities: give to the unions that helped ruin Chrysler, but take from the pensions funds etc. that invested in good faith in the company.

Anyone who owns stock or mutual funds is “Wall Street” in Obama’s world, so, folks, take your tax cut and then take your lumps.

DETROIT — Labor unions usually dread bankruptcy, and for good reason. Their pay, benefits and pensions typically suffer significant cuts, as airline and steel workers can attest.

But for the United Automobile Workers union, Chrysler’s Chapter 11 case, which began in New York on Friday, could turn out to be — if the company survives and thrives — the Cadillac of bankruptcies.

The U.A.W., for example, has received upfront protection from the Treasury Department for its pension plan and the fund that will take over responsibility for retiree medical benefits.

Moreover, that fund, called the voluntary employee beneficiary association, or VEBA, will control 55 percent of the equity in the new Chrysler once it emerges from bankruptcy, and hold a seat on the Chrysler board.

Charles Krauthammer:

…The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the “torture memos” noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist “chatter” had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can’t know that until we have information. Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other “enhanced interrogation” techniques — face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space — torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the “enhanced interrogation” program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from “the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together.”

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former attorney general Michael Mukasey) that “as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations.” Even Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded “high value information.” So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works.

Could we not, as the president repeatedly asserted in his Wednesday news conference, have obtained the information by less morally poisonous means? Perhaps if we’d spoken softly and sincerely to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we could equally have obtained “high-value information.”

There are two problems with the “good cop” technique. KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with “soon you will know” — meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now.

The other problem is one of timing. The good cop routine can take weeks or months or years. We didn’t have that luxury in the aftermath of 9/11 when waterboarding, for example, was in use. We’d been caught totally blind. We knew there were more plots out there, and we knew almost nothing about them. We needed to find out fast. We found out a lot.

“We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened,” asserts Blair’s predecessor, Mike McConnell. Of course, the morality of torture hinges on whether at the time the information was important enough, the danger great enough and our blindness about the enemy’s plans severe enough to justify an exception to the moral injunction against torture.

Judging by Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who were informed at the time, the answer seems to be yes. In December 2007, after a report in The Post that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, she admitted that she’d been “briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future.”

Today Pelosi protests “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what’s done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA’s rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do “in the future.”

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying “Don’t do it.”

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, “on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.”

…like someone punched our house.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE – A magnitude-4.4 earthquake with an epicenter six miles southwest of Westlake Village was recorded early Friday night, but there were no reports of damage.

People in parts of the Westside and the San Fernando Valley reported feeling the quake, which struck at 6:11 p.m.

Why write about what people many miles away experienced? Answer: because the reporters have an LA mindset.

The epicenter was six miles west-northwest of Malibu and 36 miles from the Los Angeles Civic Center, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Officials with the Los Angeles Fire Department and the county fire department said no damage had been reported. However, the LAFD did go into earthquake preparedness mode after the quake was reported.

The quake was in Ventura County, but it’s nice to know LA went into preparedness mode. One wonders what that entails.

A magnitude-3.0 aftershock struck at 10:34 p.m.

Didn’t feel it.

John Broder in the NYT:

The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.”

The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”

EcoAmerica has been conducting research for the last several years to find new ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation and other initiatives.

Gawd, “green” messages are everywhere. Even Fox edits short green sermons between commercials in “24″. A kiosk of books at my pharmacy offered nothing but books on living green, making your family green etc.

But it ain’t working.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

Now, why would that be?

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

Or maybe just shut and go away.

by Burt Prelutsky 

I was born in 1940, which means that during my lifetime 13 men have been the president of the United States.  For many of those years, I was a Democrat.  As was the case with Ronald Reagan, I didn’t feel I had left the party, but that the party had gone stark raving mad and left me.

By and large, I don’t find the baker’s dozen to be overly impressive, either as leaders or as individuals.  There are only three or four of them I can even imagine being friends with or wanting to have as next-door neighbors.  But there are only two of them, Carter and Obama, whom I regard as unmitigated disasters.  While it took Carter four years in office and 29 years out to achieve his greatly deserved recognition as an incompetent, a phony and a sanctimonious anti-Semite, Obama has pulled it off in just a few short months.

He has managed this by displaying his general incompetence by surrounding himself with clowns like Joe Biden; the seriously corrupt, such as Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle; and too many tax cheats to list in the space available.

Obama has also proven himself to be a liar of such proportions that if he had started out life like Pinocchio, his nose by this time would stretch from sea to shining sea. He has fibbed about everything from barely knowing Bill Ayers to never listening to a Jeremiah Wright screed, from banishing pork and lobbyists to providing transparency and change we can all believe in.  On top of all that, while spouting the usual political piffle about economizing and saving the environment, he hosted the largest, most expensive inauguration in history, and from the way he and his posse jet around on the fuel-guzzling Air Force One, you’d think he was a rock star.

All of that would be no more or less than business as usual, Washington style, if he weren’t also working overtime to simultaneously bankrupt the country and turn America into a socialist state patterned after Castro’s Cuba.

The scariest part of all this is that so many Americans continue to root him on.  Those of us who are opposed to his agenda are accused, like Rush Limbaugh, of hoping America fails.  Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.  What we’re hoping for is that America can somehow survive this frontal assault on our freedoms, and that our economic system can remain basically intact in spite of the combined efforts of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Dodd and Geithner, to destroy it.

When I hear people in and out of the media who should get down on their knees and thank God or at least their ancestors that they were lucky enough to be born in America, instead parrot left-wing insults about this country, I want to slap them silly.  I sometimes wonder if those folks who, in the 1950s, nattered incessantly about the Communist-inspired fluoride conspiracy were right.  Perhaps there was something in the water that turned so many brains to mush.  I mean, why else would so many of my fellow Jews be so utterly convinced that Barack Obama is the messiah we’ve been waiting for?

For what it’s worth, now that the president has fired CEO Rick Wagoner and taken over General Motors, do you suppose it will henceforth be called Commander in Chief Motors, and that Cadillac, Buick and Chevrolet, will be re-named Michelle, Natasha and Malia Ann?  Which reminds me, it’s still nothing but a rumor that Obama fired God earlier today, claiming that the universe isn’t big enough for both of them.

My old friend, Pat Sajak, who, when not busy spinning his wheels, is politically savvier and wittier than any of the talking heads you find on TV, has revised the question that plagued Richard Nixon 60 years ago to better fit GM’s new chief honcho: Would you buy a new car from this man?

Although I am not usually given to omens, I can’t help feeling it means something that the next presidential election will take place on November 6, 2012, the day before Gen. David Petraeus turns 60.  I, for one, can’t think of a more appropriate birthday present for the man and the nation than giving him a well-deserved promotion.