I think we had enough of this from the Bushies:
Representative Rahm Emanuel, left, President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, called the president of an Arab-American group today to apologize for comments his father made to an Israeli newspaper.
In the remarks, Benjamin Emanuel discussed the potential impact of his son’s new position on U.S.-Israeli relations.
“Obviously he’ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House,” the elder Mr. Emanuel told the Israeli daily Ma’ariv, according to English-language reports in The Jerusalem Post and The Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Obviously Rahm isn’t responsible for what his dad says, and his quick response is laudable.
But the Bush Administration and their neocon progenitors created a culture of fear, hatred, torture and endless Middle East intervention on a scaffolding of racism that largely went unquestioned during the past 8 years.
Some early, loud public gestures and pronouncements that this is no longer the guiding US mindset would be very welcome in setting things right. Rahm is now in a perfect place to make them.
Related posts:
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About Firedoglake
Advanced search
Seems to me that Rahm is perfectly capable of landing himself in hot water without his Dad’s help.
G’morning, Jane!
Bullseye Jane.
I hope somebody in Obama’s transition team is paying attention.
The outrage from the Arab-American group is entirely understandable, and Rahm’s response and apology was suitably appropriate.
But the guy should keep a roll of duct tape handy, just in case his dad decides to speak publicly again.
Hey, Bob.
How about our Joe, huh?
Sure would like to get the Kiss Float down here for Tuesday.
Who could have thought that Rahm or his father would have gotten themselves into trouble over Israel?
digg
Alternately, perhaps the Caucus could adjourn and reconvene in the Lower Ninth Ward.
I really think Rahm wanted to CoS job, because he knew he was going to face a stiff primary from the left in 2010.
This is strike one. Two more, Rahm’s out.
Rahm Emanuel was in the Israeli Army and holds dual citizenship. Not too many allegiances!
Damn, that’s racist!
maybe Rahm could book dad passage on the Mitt Romney Cruise to Nowhere
ps – the sentiments expressed well reflect those of the constituents in Rahm’s home district
Heh. Issa’s got Kashkari on the ropes. Luv to see them eat their own.
Rahm would do well to tell deal old dad to put a sock in it. This kind of thing won’t play well – and it certainly doesn’t play well with me.
ot – news flash: hell freezes over. again. issa is doing a good job on kucinich’s hearing with kashkari on tarp.
Over at Thinkprogress, Luntz makes a case for why Congressional GOP leadership should not be reappointed.
I think that applies to Lie-berman, don’t you?
that would be “dear” old dad
damn right
You owe me a Coke. See my 13.
IOKIYAR
I wonder if Mel Gibson is available as press secretary?
I’m personally glad that this is up front early. Rahm now has to know that any special pleading regarding Israel that isn’t part of efforts to move toward a viable two state-solution are going to be scrutinized.When one becomes CoS to the President one gives up all other allegiances except to the United States.
He was all kissy face with kucinich in his opening too!
A hope expressed as a forecast?
ot – news flash: hell freezes over. again. issa is doing a good job on kucinich’s hearing with kashkari on tarp.
Amazing but true. Issa is pointing out that Kashkari gave away money to banks buying preferred stock at above market prices. Issa uses the word “subsidize” and “discount capital”.
I left this downstairs, but don’t know if you have seen it :)
For monetary wonks and others.
Check out the stuff under ‘Economic Data- FRED’ ( menu bar). Way, way over my head, but I’m sure some-one/lots of someones :) here will find it useful.
‘The Research Division’s goal is to promote quality economic research and contribute to economic policy discussions while expanding the frontier of economic knowledge around the globe in the areas of money and banking, macroeconomics, and international and regional economics.’
http://research.stlouisfed.org/
bwaahaaahaaa …was gonna include some snark about the two of them getting together for a talk show, fair and balanced doncha know :D
Now Issa is saying talking about how private capital is staying out of recapitalizing banks because the Treasury offered them such sweetheart deals that terms like those that Warren Buffett got from Goldman aren’t on the table. So the government is actually keeping other money out by Paulson’s practice of crony capitalism.
thanks!
Issa (R) and Cummings (sp) (D) are both calling Kashkari a weasel. Cummings calls it ring around the rosey. Cummings pointing out that people are losing their houses now, highlighting that while Kashkari and Paulson are throwing hundreds of billions at Wall Street they are doing nothing for ordinary Americans.
Kash: The bailout was to save “our” financial system. “Our” financial system is a house of cards. It is still a house of cards. What we are seeing here a clueless sap defending the status quo even though that status quo crashed and burned.
I’m watching. I’m not believing.
Elijah Cummings is doing a great job too, imho.
I don’t care how many hours a day or who hard they’re working. We know who they are working for. And, it’s not us.
Cummings: Small banks made good loans but all the money is going to the big banks that speculated like mad. So now the big ones who did it wrong are in a position to gobble up the smaller ones who did it right.
K: We have a program for all sizes of banks.
That doesn’t address the acquisition issue at all.
Cummings: The big hedge fund managers yesterday said Treasury needs to do a lot more for homeowners.
K: I share your perspective. blah, blah, blah.
re kucinich’s hearing. he’s given 10 minutes to each member for questions and there is only one witness. that works a lot better than 5 minutes per member for a panel of 4 witnesses.
Bilbray sez Kaskari is the best.
If nothing else these hearings will further discredit Paulson most of whose cred is already gone. Even the MSM is abandoning him. And Kashkari is a pale imitation of Paulson.
Completely OT question, but what is a Shadow Senator’? and who are the rest?
‘The office of Shadow Senator for the District of Columbia doesn’t come with many perks — such as, say, the ability to vote or enter the Senate floor — but the Shadow Senator does get an official U.S. Senate identification card.’
http://www.politico.com/blogs/….._cops.html
hell freezes over again: this bipartisanship i can live with.
Bilbray: Compares Kash to the end of Braveheart. Is being so incoherent that even Kash can’t follow him.
Caught part of the CNBC outrage after Paulson’s presser. It was a delight to behold.
OT – when did this Uncle Fester hair style become the cool look?
With Smashing Pumpkins?
Yes. I’m seeing representatives actually caring about the concerns of their constituents.
Think the election made them sit up and pay attention?
Looks like we gave these guys 700B and are paying them to fix the problems through trial and error.
Lost my feed for a minute.
Kash admits that credit remains frozen because Paulson wants to move into credit cards and other segments of the credit market.
more issa less bilbray.
i confess, i don’t understand kashkari either:
Um, what did Rahm say in response? The post doesn’t say.
Bilbray. Bilbray. That’s like a dildo, right?
Bilbray: The Administration is writing a lot of checks but not touching reforms.
K: Stabilize the system blah, blah, blah.
some of them, maybe. shocking.
WHICH PISSES ME OFF BEYOND BELIEF
the credit card companies have been sucking the blood out of US consumers for years and years — only recently have I stopped getting three or four new apps EVERY DAY.
and they want relief?! F*ck ‘em. Give the relief to their victims (you and me) and put the thieving execs in jail.
I bet his ear/s pierced
kucinich says there may be a third round. second round of questioning starting now with kucinich.
kucinich: did you know that national city was the target of short sellers?
kashkari doesn’t want to talk about individual companies, kucinich asks if kashkari is taking the fifth.
Kucinich: You picked a winner PNC and a loser National City. National City was under attack from shortseller.
K: I can’t talk about specifics.
Kuc: Are you invoking the 5th? Did you know?
K: Many banks were under attack.
Kuc: Lists a whole slew of info about how National City was set up.
K: Says he wasn’t aware of any of it.
What Kuc. is doing here is showing that Kash is either a clueless incompetent sap or a crook.
Heh. Ganging up on his to make him look like an idiot. Couldn’t happen to a better guy.
Yeah, me too.
Man, this kind of thinking is making me feel old. :(
is he an aquaintance of Mel Gibsons dad”g’
OUR= his Paulsons,Mittens etc
Issa: PNC either are doing the takeover with their own money or the TARP’s. Whose funds are going to be used?
K: Generically, if you will let me speak generically I can be more candid.
Issa: No.
i have to choose? how about both?
Wikipedia deleted the information on Benjamin Emanuel. What I remember is that the family name was Auerbach until 1936 when a brother died fighting, that Ben Emanuel was a member of Irgun, and the floor mopping comment.
http://www.etzel.org.il/english/index.html
Issa: At the end of the day, Paulson gets to decide who lives and who dies.
K: In theory, yes.
Me: But really what happened? Whose money was used or promised?
more Jane
New Poll: Connecticut Hates Lieberman
issa: at the end of the day paulson gets to decide who lives and how dies.
issa attended a progressive caucus meeting! they must have put something in his drink.
issa: bill issac (former fdic) told us about other tools that treasury should be using why aren’t you? [was laughing so hard about the progressive caucus thing that i missed what the tool was].
Kash ‘n Karry is lying to the best of his ability to cover the ass of Goldman Sachs Paulson. This is making the Teapot Dome look like a penny ante card game.
K: We are having banks raise real money.
Issa: We are pretending that we have more money than we do. Debt is being moved from banks on to taxpayers.
Kash: When in doubt, I will mumble something about stabilizing the system.
i choose crook,another young entitled despot
Irgun were thugs, gangsters and killers.
There is no way Rahm Emanual had anything to with this statement. The way his father said this does nothing to help his son. In fact, it just sets him up to look bad. If the election were still going on, you see an ad with a cute kid saying ”My Daddy mopped floors at the Whitehouse”, Voice over – blahh, blahh, blahh.
nice fella
kashkari: the best thing we can do is to bring mortgage rates down so consumers can refinance at lower rates. and prices would stabilize.
me: what bank is going to refinance mortgages that are under water?
me: how will stabilizing housing at artificially high prices be a good thing for the real economy?
Kash: we are trying to bring down mortgage rates down. The best thing to help homeowners. Talks about how the Fed has been trying to free up credit but it’s stuck.
He never says how it is going to get unstuck but whenever it does it will eventually help homeowners so homeowners are being helped. Lame.
Ahhhhh. He’s putting his hany on his wittle chest, batting his eyes. He looks sooooo sincere.
Didn’t work. I still don’t believe him.
Cummings: Americans are running out of patience. What more authority do you need?
K: We have programs. They don’t work but we have strong incentives to encourage lending.
Incentive = you lend money or FDIC takes you over
Kash: If we help the system it will help the individual.
Ideology over reality. Trickle down banking?
bilbray up. time to get another cup of coffee.
If it is good for GM it is good for Amerika
here are the current members of the kucinich’s subcommittee:
thanks to the four who showed up.
kashkari: i don’t think anyone could have predicted….
Kash: Treasury is not a regulator. We were disappointed in having to intervene with Fannie and Freddie. Stabilizing etc.
Bilbray: In 2004 and 2005, there were concerns about Fannie and Freddie. Didn’t Paulson know?
Kash: No one could have predicted.
Kucinich: Winners and losers
Kash: We are not trying to consolidate the industry.
Yeah, it’s just happening on its own with the money Kash is handing out.
Kuc: Are you going to ask for the second tranche of the $700 billion?
Kash: No decision.
Kuc: Efforts by private sector to modify loans insufficient according to the lenders themselves. Why do you have more faith in them than they have in themselves?
Kash: Well the banking community would love it if the government guaranteed everything.
Kuc: So would millions of homeowners. Have you ever thought about that?
kash: negative equity is a very tough problem. hope program blah blah.
kucinich: i’ve been informed that there have only been 42 workouts.
me: are we the only people watching these hearings? the 42 workouts were discussed in wednesday’s hearing.
THE DEATH OF WALL STREET
a good read
http://www.portfolio.com/news-…..Boom#page1
we’re two threads behind. suggest we move up at least one?
I’m not at all liking the new President-elect Obama. He’s morphing into a candidate that, had I known who he would associate himself with after he got into office, I would absolutely not have supported him.
First, we (meaning a huge majority of the Democrat party) took it hard on the chin with the appointment of the biggest weasel in Congress -Raaahhhm Emanuel.
Second, we’re now being kicked in the groin by his active defense of Joe Lieberman.
And now, Clinton for Secretary of State?? That, my friends is nothing more than a big FU** You to the Left.
Emanuel, Clinton and Lieberman represent the very pro-war, pro-cluster bomb use, anti-Arab anti-diplomacy that drove millions of us to Obama in the first place.
Apparently A*I*P*A*C* now owns the White House, too.
Kuc: Industrial base being crushed by the credit freeze up. Will hold hearing on it next week.
Issa: Hypothetical making up a bank and will ask your people to help me get money for it. If a bank is not a good investment for the American people, why would you give money to another bank to buy that bank?
But the scarcity of truly crappy subprime-mortgage bonds no longer mattered. The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater.
The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short. “What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several times to me and said, ‘Short this market,’ ” Eisman says. “In my entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, ‘Short my market.’ ”
And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.
from the article
Jane, this was not a “quick response.” Emanuel took more than a week to acknowledge and apologize for his father’s disgusting, racist comment. If, say, Joshua Bolten’s father had been quoted calling Rahm Emanuel a dirty Jew, you can bet Bolten’s apology would have materialized within minutes or hours, not days.
best description of CDSs i’ve seen.
Lisa Derrick’s up with a new post: El Coyote: Anger, Tears–and Maybe Hope?
As a European, I am continually surprised that the US allows people with dual nationality (but only Israeli ) to occupy senior positions in Government.
If this isn’t the definition of a conflict of interest, then nothing is!!
BIG TIME.
Saw him on Washington Journal this morning, talking about the scary brown people. I had to turn him off.
I’d like to see us (US) be a little less pro-Israel and little more pro-Israelis. Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, as well as others, have suffered from a common malady – leadership not acting in the best interests of the citizenry. I wish there would be change we could believe in on that front.
Good for Rahm for speaking up. I think he is responsible for his father’s words personally.
Remember how the press continually attacked Mel Gibson for the anti-Semitic comments made by Gibson’s father when his film,”Passion,” was released? What if Obama’s Chief of Staff had been an Arab American like Rashid Khalidi and Rashid’s Palestinian father back in Palestine made the same anti-Semitc comments as Emanuel’s father?
How would members of the press react? I ‘m curious what people think of that.
More on Emanuel’s shady past with the Clinton administration
WMR has learned from U.S. intelligence sources additional details of prospective White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s ties with the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. We have also learned that President-elect Barack Obama is fully aware of the problems with Emanuel’s past security woes within the Clinton administration, but that the President-elect faced the problem of delivering on a few political IOUs he handed out during the campaign.
WMR has learned that Emanuel will be under a virtual probationary period as Chief of Staff and that if there is one whiff from the FBI or another law enforcement or intelligence agency that he is dealing with foreign intelligence agents, Obama will cut him loose as soon as practicable……
ENTIRE POST – http://my.barackobama.com/page…..son/gGxZM9
aka..terrorists..
..for many years now, apparently..
The litmus test I often force on such situation is to compare and contrast the knee-jerk reaction if the target was not Arabs. Irrespective of the faith or ethnicity of the parent, if he/she had made a comment about Blacks, Jews, Asians, Latinos, Catholics, Irish, Italians, or whomever, the societal outrage would have been three-fold and an apology would not only be expected from the son, but also the parent.
How abhorrent would it sound if the parent had stated “What is he, a Black? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.” “What is he, Jewish? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.”; “What is he, a Mexican? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House.” — you get the point of how “oh my God!” and unacceptable such a statement would have been. But why the tolerance of intolerance when it comes to Arabs? Why do they count for less?
I personally respect his courage to try to patch up what his father said.