Of Hopenchange, political ads and pension reform

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If Gail Collins of the New York Times lent the legacy media's hand in bringing down the curtain on Hopenchange last week, then a pro-Obama super-PAC did its part with this ad that somehow affixes blame for the cancer and death of a laid-off steel worker's wife to Mitt Romney.

Playing this disgraceful angle is an indication that desperation is in the air as even CNN finds itself somewhat perplexed that the ad was so easy to deconstruct.







Exit question: A man who wasn't even with the company when the layoff ocurred is somehow more responsible for providing healthcare insurance for that family than the man of the house?

Congratulations, sir. You are the male flip-side to Obama's composite statist love-child, Julia; a wholly dependent entity of the state.





Tangentially related: Recall back in June, Delphi, a parts manufacturer for General Motors, finally got their hands on documents from the federal government so that they could proceed with their lawsuit against the federal government for having their pension and healthcare plans terminated.

It would appear from obtained emails, that the Treasury Department was directly responsible for these actions.

From the Daily Caller:

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

Delphi, a 13-year old company that is independent of General Motors, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

Testimony from White House officials maintained that the decision to terminate the pensions was made by the rather ironically-named Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a goverment agency that handles private-sector benefit issues whose charter states it acts independently in the representation of pension beneficiary interests.

(ed. note: how far away from the concept of limited government are you when you have a government agency called a "corporation"?)

The emails suggest that the PBGC was acting at the behest of the Treasury Department and the White House.



Exit question Pt. II: To employ the logic held in the ad above, how many sick and dead Delphi employees are the Obama administration now responsible for?


And all this time, you thought the Obama administration was reflexively opposed to pension reform.


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