GOP Senator : Freeze The Bail Out!

There's a sucker born every minute, and some of them are twins - WC Fields.

James Inhofe ( R-OK), one of our sharper Senators has verbalized what a lot of folks are finally realizing - when it comes to the so-called bail out, we've been had, Bubba:

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Saturday that Congress was not told the truth about the bailout of the nation's financial system and should take back what is left of the $700 billion "blank check'' it gave the Bush administration.

"It is just outrageous that the American people don't know that Congress doesn't know how much money he (Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) has given away to anyone,'' the Oklahoma Republican told the Tulsa World.

"It could be to his friends. It could be to anybody else. We don't know. There is no way of knowing.''

Inhofe's comments, unusually pointed even for a senator known for being blunt, come on the heels of Paulson's shift in how he thinks the bailout funds should be spent.

Last week the Treasury secretary announced he was abandoning his plan to free up the nation's credit system by buying up toxic assets from troubled financial institutions. Instead, Paulson wants to take a more direct action on the consumer credit front.

"He was able to get this authority from Congress predicated on what he was going to do, and then he didn't do it,'' Inhofe said.

As you know, I figured this out awhile ago...and as I pointed out, if a credit freeze was the problem, it didn't take a trillion of our dollars to free it up.

What this was always about was funneling money to the Wall Street cronies of Congress, and making good on the paper sold to the Bush family's Arab clients that they bought through the Carlyle Group, where a substantial chunk of the Bush family's money is and where Bush Senior is Chairman Emeritus.

According to one of my notorious little birdies whose definitely in a position to know what he's talking about, the Arabs were reportedly livid at getting stuck with this garbage and threatened to pull all their funds out of Carlyle and dump the 10% stake they bought a few months ago for whatever they could get for it, which would have cost the Bush family millions...so now you know why the president was so anxious to get this legislation passed and signed.

The promised 'safeguards' and 'watchdog provisions' were never put on the funds, and in fact, instead of lending the money out a fair amount of it has gone to make acquisitions as the lucky and well-connected winners gobble up the less well connected losers. PNC's acquisition of National city was only one of the deals that was financed by our tax dollars.

Inhofe is going to try to use the lame duck session of Congress to try to get legislation passed to freeze the bail out in its tracks and recover at least part of the money,but it's uncertain how successful that's going to be, given the vested interest much of Congress has in continuing the giveaways as supplicants like the Big Three automakers and the City of Detroit line up with their hands out.

Inhofe at least deserves credit for trying to stop this legalized burglary. Compared to Paulson and the bail out shills in Congress, the guys who pulled off the Brinks Job were a bunch of sloppy amateurs.