United Liberty

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday over his involvement in allowing AIG to give billions in bailout funds to other financial insititutions…and he was hammered by members from both sides of the aisle.

Rep. John Mica (R-FL) hit Geithner on everything from AIG’s actions, which Geithner claims he had no involvement in, to his tax problems. Geithner was visibly irritated during Mica’s time and short and smug in his response back. In the end, Geithner blamed the previous administration, which caused Mica to accuse him of punting and failing to accept responsibility for his actions.

Rep. Stephen Hayes (D-MA) was much more vocal in his contempt for Geithner, telling the Treasury Secretary that his actions made him “doubt [his] commitment to the American people.”

In case you missed it, here is video of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. I’ll try to have some thoughts about the speech posted later today:

Here is video of the Republican response, given by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell:

Welcome to United Liberty’s live-blog of the State of the Union address. Our coverage will begin around 8:30pm. President Barack Obama will begin his speech to the joint session of Congress around 9pm.

The talking points from the Obama Administration are already out. The president will talk up jobs and focus on the middle class and other play up other populist talking points. Obama will also make another push on health care “reform.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi was floating ideas today such as incremental changes in the system just to get something through Congress.

Interestingly, he’ll call for transparency in Washington. That’s a laugh considering his campaign promises to televise health care negoitions on C-SPAN (and C-SPAN has asked for sunlight on this as well).

A 79 year old Republican Virginia Delegate Harvey Morgan is proposing a bill that would effectively decriminalize marijuana in the state of Virginia.

From wtkr:

New polling from Pennsylvania shows Pat Toomey (R) increasing his lead over Sen. Arlen Specter (D) to double-digits. This comes after last week’s Rasmussen poll showing Toomey with a 9 point lead.

Pat Toomey v. Arlen Specter

• Toomey: 45%
• Specter: 31%
• Other: 4%
• Not sure: 20%

Pat Toomey v. Joe Sestak

• Toomey: 41%
• Sestak: 19%
• Other: 3%
• Not sure: 37%

Specter’s job approval ratings are still dismal, according to the poll, “Only one in three (34%) registered Pennsylvanians say he is doing an excellent or good job as U.S. senator, and even fewer (29%) believe he has done a good enough job as senator to deserve re-election.” He does hold a narrow margin with independent voters over Toomey, though that group only makes up 9% of voters in the poll.

Earlier this month, I noted some skepticism of the National Tea Party Convention by folks that had been initially supportive of the tea party movement. The convention has been met with frustration over ticket prices and the rumored payout to Sarah Palin for the keynote speech.

All of this has caused another sponor to pull out of the event:

Philip Glass, the national director of the National Precinct Alliance, announced late Sunday that “amid growing controversy” around the convention, his organization would no longer participate. His group seeks to take over the Republican Party from the bottom by filling the ranks of local and state parties with grass-roots conservatives, and Mr. Glass had been scheduled to lead workshops on its strategy.

“We are very concerned about the appearance of T.P.N. profiteering and exploitation of the grass-roots movement,” he said in a statement. “We were under the impression that T.P.N. was a nonprofit organization like N.P.A., interested only in uniting and educating Tea Party activists on how to make a real difference in the political arena.”

Mr. Glass said he was also concerned about the role in the convention of groups like Tea Party Express, which has held rallies across the country through two bus tours, and FreedomWorks, a Tea Party umbrella. He called them “Republican National Committee-related groups,” and added, “At best, it creates the appearance of an R.N.C. hijacking; at worst, it is one.”

When I scanned the front page of the local paper here in St. Paul, Minnesota, something stuck out to me (and no it was not the headline about the devastating loss the Vikings suffered last night).  An article written by Rick Montgomery titled Poll: More Americans want U.S. to ‘mind its own business’ immediately grabbed my attention, especially the sub-title “Rising isolationism highest in people younger than 30.”

Of all of Ron Paul’s views, his non-interventionist foreign policy was the hardest for me to grasp. This was partly due to the natural complexity of the issue, but also my own lack of knowledge surrounding the topic. I read Paul’s “A Foreign Policy of Freedom” and was enlightened about some of the more intricate aspects of Paul’s views. He raises some great points and offers an argument that runs so against our current foreign policy that it is hard for an average American to grasp: our foreign policy has made us less safe and more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

What I read in Montgomery’s article was impressive:

To one poll question, roughly half of Americans agreed that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally” and let others get along on their own. To another question, 44 percent said “we should go our own way” and not worry whether other nations disagree.

Both questions are vague and mean different things to different people, the pollsters concede. But when asked similar questions in 1964, not even one in five Americans thought going it alone or staying out were good ideas.

According to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows the stimulus bill passed by Congress will now cost $75 billion more (from $787 billion to $862 billion) than taxpayers were originally told by the Obama Administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Here is the story from CNN:

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute makes the case against a second stimulus spending bill, which is already being pushed by Democrats in Congress and the Obama Administration: