N.J. Gov. Christie Freezes Spending

With State's Budget In 'Shambles,' New Governor Slices Into School Surpluses, NJ Transit Subsidies; Dems Furious

Patrick Kennedy won't seek reelection

Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, the last member of his legendary family currently serving in Congress, will announce on Friday that he is retiring, according to Democratic insiders.

Kennedy, 42, was first elected to Congress in 1994. He did a stint as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1999-2000 cycle but has not served in the House Democratic leadership beyond that.

His congressional tenure was marked by repeated substance abuse problems, including a drunk-driving incident in 2006. He entered a rehab facility at that time and again in 2009.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32877.html

Obama Budget Rigs Healthcare Numbers

By Andrew G. Biggs Friday, February 5, 2010

LONDON -- Intelligence ties between London and Washington have been jeopardized by a British court's disclosure that a terrorism suspect was beaten and shackled in U.S. custody, diplomats and security officials said Wednesday.

Brown Announces Bill to Tax Wall Street Bonuses to Help Main Street Businesses

Bill Would Tax Bonuses at Companies Receiving TARP Funds from Taxpayers to Help Fund Small Business Lending Program

February 11, 2010

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced a new bill today that would tax bonuses given to executives at firms that received help from U.S. taxpayers in order to fund loans for small businesses. Brown’s bill would use revenues generated from taxing bonuses at firms who received assistance through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help small businesses expand operations and hire new workers.

http://brown.senate.gov/newsroom/press_releases/release/?id=D5BE8A1F-14F0-4E8A-8AB6-22F34D79B08C

Chevron Witch Trial Yields Bizarre $27 Billion ‘Environmental’ Claim

Chevron oil company is being sued in Ecuador for $27 billion. It’s a big number. The gross domestic product (GDP) of Ecuador in 2008 was $54 billion. So $27 billion is 50% of the GDP of the entire country. And the $27 billion claim is sheer fantasy. The damage claim against Chevron is based on a gigantic scam.

It goes back a while. Between 1965 and 1990, the old Texaco company developed oil concessions in Ecuador. (Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001, hence Chevron is now in the dock.) Between 1977 and 1990, Ecuador progressively nationalized Texaco assets, and transferred them to the state oil firm, Petroecuador.

In the early 1990s, Texaco and Petroecuador agreed to clean up a number of oil sites. Texaco kept its side of the bargain, and in 1998 the government of Ecuador certified that Texaco successfully cleaned up its share of the operations.

Nonetheless, in 1994 a group of U.S. attorneys sued Texaco in the U.S. They made novel legal claims for “environmental justice.” Eventually, the case was dismissed in the United States and a new case was filed against Chevron in Ecuador.

The Ecuadorean court appointed an “expert witness” to make factual findings and to calculate damages. Turns out that the “expert” is a mining engineer named Richard Cabrera, who has direct financial ties to the plaintiffs and as we learned this week, hidden ties to Petroecuador.

http://biggovernment.com/bwking/2010/02/11/chevron-witch-trial-yields-bizarre-27-billion-environmental-claim/#more-73614

Obama ‘Agnostic’ on Deficit Cuts, Won’t Prejudge Tax Increases

By Rich Miller

Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-11/obama-agnostic-on-deficit-cuts-won-t-prejudge-tax-increases.html

Dems Want CEOS On-Camera in Corporate-Financed Political Ads

February 11, 2010 2:16 PM

ABC's Z. Byron Wolf reports: Democrats have an answer to the Supreme Court’s decision that corporations have the same right to free speech as individuals, overturning generations of campaign finance law and allowing more corporate money to be spent closer to elections – force CEOs on-camera to endorse political ads sponsored by corporations.

Instead of the candidate sponsoring an ad saying “I’m X and I approved this message,” commercials on TV paid for by corporations or unions would instead feature the CEO or leader of that company saying he or she was sponsoring it. If the ad was paid for by a group taking a certain amount of contributions from a corporate donor, the corporate donor would still have to appear on-screen. Opposing viewpoints would get the cheapest possible ad rate to rebut corporate and union-financed ads.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/02/dems-want-ceos-oncamera-in-corporatefinanced-political-ads.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

• Bill Clinton Hospitalized

  URGENT: Former president in 'good spirits' after heart procedure at New York hospital, lawyer says

Ryan said his vote for the bailout was influenced by Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, a popular book among conservatives that argues that Nazism and other fascist movements were actually left wing in origin, and his belief that a second Depression would threaten capitalism—and rescue Obama's presidency.

"I'm a limited-government, free-enterprise guy, but TARP... represented a moment where we had no good options and we were about to fall into a deflationary spiral," he said. "I believe Obama would not only have won, but would have been able to sweep through a huge statist agenda very quickly because there would have been no support for the free-market system."

He couched his support for the auto bailout in similar terms, saying that he feared the bill's failure would have led the Obama administration to use TARP funds in order to rescue the industry with less congressional oversight instead.

“A lot of these votes are defensive votes," he said. "A lot of them are not votes you want to take but under the circumstances they're the best path forward."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-10/paul-ryans-sacred-cow-slaughter/2/