S&P And Justice Department Memos – Wingin’ It Wednesday

This morning on "Wingin' It Wednesday" panelist Mike Stagg, Warren Caudle, and Carol Ross joined "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" to discuss the S&P and the recent controversial memo from the Justice Department.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. The government filed a civil complaint against S&P. Absent from most reports on the feds suing S&P is any mention of the fact that of the top three major credit ratings agencies, S&P was the only one willing to downgrade the U.S.’ credit rating.  Do you think S & P is being singled out due to their downgrade of the US rating?

Carol Ross started us off:

This is the same justice department that doesn't go after voter fraud, Benghazi, or Fast and Furious, so why would they go after S&P? I think they're a couple of reasons. First of all, they isolate them, and make them an example to other rating agencies.
The second reason is, everything this administration is doing is geared at 2014, and the mortgage meltdown has really faded from people's memories, so this is a way to bring it back up and really hang it around congress' neck.
The only thing standing in the way of Obama and his complete distraction of this country is conservatives in the House, so everything they do from here on out is aimed at getting them out so he can have complete control.

Mike Stagg added:

Standard & Poors was at the heart of this whole economic scandal that led to this meltdown because they were paid to rate junk bonds higher than they were worth. That was criminal.
The question becomes, who paid them to downgrade the US debt? Because they were the only ones to do it and they did it when the Republicans were sure they were going to beat the President in the election of 2012.
This was a paid deal, they were mercenaries. What they were indicted for was the work they did contributing to the financial meltdown. The other debt raiding industries will get their turn.

Warren Caudle countered:

There are two excellent books to read about all this, one is "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis and the other is the book everyone in the financial business says is the best book ever written about it called "All The Devils Are Here", which goes back to the 1960s and takes this thing right on up to the financial meltdown.
There's culpability all the way across the board with all of them. The interesting thing that's going to come out of this is who paid them to come up with these ratings because somebody obviously did.

 

2. The U.S. government is authorized to order the killing of any American citizen who is believed to be a “senior operational” leader of al-Qaeda or “an associated force” regardless of whether that person poses an immediate national security threat, according to a confidential Justice Department memo. What do you think of this authorization?

Warren commented:

You're really on some slippery slopes when you start talking on such stuff. You keep coming across "the laws of war" and the "rules of war", I'm going to go back to what many have said, the last time we declared war was December 7, 1941.
Who is going to tell you who are the real Al-Qaeda operatives? You might have someone tell you Carol Ross is a big time Al-Qaeda operative, send the drone to her house. If you get that story from three different people it must be true. And that's my point, when you start going on the slippery slope of bombing people both outside and inside this country, there's so much fallout that can happen.

Mike responded:

These guys put out these videos calling for people to join the Jihad and attack America. They're pretty easy to pick out. Whether they're operational or not, they're pretty easy to pick out.
I think what prompted this was that cleric who originally lived in New York and was killed in Yemen in a drone attack with a couple other people.
Once you have a "War In Terror"  and you're attacking these cells of people who see as their mission in life of bringing down "the Great Satan", what are we supposed to do? Just let it happen?

 

Carol surmised:

If you read that memo, really just substitute president Nixon or George Bush for that and you'd see how liberals would go crazy.
The Justice Department memo, it's just unbelievable. "An informed high level official of the government may determine that the targeted American has been involved in recent activities that pose a threat". The memo doesn't define how informed this high level American is or how recent those activities are. This is unbelievable.
The ACLU said themselves that this is a profoundly disturbing document, hard to believe that this was created in a system of checks in balances.
Homeland security is the one that put out a document that said returning veterans can be terrorists.

Click on the play button below for the complete audio.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comment section.