IMF Head Would Resort to Belly Dancing to Get Banking Reforms.

IMF Head Would Resort to Belly Dancing to Get Banking Reforms. (RN).

 The International Monetary Fund’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde joked before reporters Thursday that she would belly dance in front of the US Congress if it resulted in the banking reforms the institution is looking for, the Washington political insider’s newspaper The Hill reported.

“I have threatened even doing belly dancing. If that’s what it takes, then I will deliver it. But I hope it doesn’t,” the 58-year-old former French Finance Minister said in jest before the news conference, the source said.

Lagarde, who is participating in this week’s IMF and G20 fall sessions in Washington DC, pleaded with the US Congress, which she claimed was stalling the quota and governance reforms that had been proposed by the institution.

The proposals include doubling the requirements of members’ financial contributions to the bank’s general loan fund to a total of $755 billion. They also propose increasing the vote share of emerging economies such as China, Russia and India. This is something US Senate Republicans are reluctant to accept; as a result, the proposal has been blocked for nearly four years, despite support from President Barack Obama and most of the Senate Democrats.

The United States presently has a 16.73 percent vote share in the organization, giving it an effective veto power on amendments to the institution, which require an 85 percent supermajority in order to pass.

“Everybody knows that it is currently stuck before the U.S. Congress,” Lagarde said, cited by Reuters.

“We very much hope that the different branches of the U.S. authorities ... will understand the relevance of having an IMF that is representative of the global economy and includes the people that should sit at the table," she added.

The IMF chief’s comments were echoed in the Communique of representatives from the Group of 24 developing nations, which also met in Washington Thursday. The communique stated that the organization remains “deeply disappointed that the IMF quota and governance reforms agreed to in 2010 have not yet come into effect,” and urges “the U.S. to complete ratification.” The communique adds that “this remains a significant impediment to the credibility and effectiveness of the IMF and unjustifiably delays forward-looking commitments." Hmmm......Anyone else feels another 'executive order' coming?

Video - Judge Napolitano: It’s Difficult to See How ‘Fast and Furious’ Could Fall Into Protected Executive Privilege Categories.

HT: Fox News.

Fast And Furious: Executive Privilege Is Illegitimate to Shield Wrongdoing!

Fast And Furious: Executive Privilege Is Illegitimate to Shield Wrongdoing!(Heritage).By Todd Gaziano.As Holder surely knew all these past months, there is no privilege that exists between Congress and the executive branch to withhold documents except the constitutional executive privilege, which is based on the separation of powers. The slated House committee vote to hold Holder in contempt today was unfortunately necessary to get him to at least reconsider his lawless course of stonewalling. In a desperate attempt to prevent the contempt vote in the last few hours, Holder asked President Obama to invoke executive privilege to shield these 1,300 pages of documents from Congress, and the President apparently agreed to do so. Yet that is not the end of the story. Even if properly involved, the Supreme Court has made clear that executive privilege is not absolute. DOJ must provide an explanation why all those documents fit one of the recognized categories of executive privilege. It is questionable whether they all are legitimately subject to executive privilege, for several reasons.

First, the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon (1974) held that executive privilege cannot be invoked at all if the purpose is to shield wrongdoing. 

The courts held that Nixon’s purported invocation of executive privilege was illegitimate, in part, for that reason. There is reason to suspect that this might be the case in the Fast and Furious cover-up and stonewalling effort. Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and more. Even a proper invocation of executive privilege regarding particular documents is not final. But there is at least one helpful development in Holder’s request that the President invoke executive privilege to shield these documents: The President now owns the consequences of further stonewalling.The American people will now clearly understand that it is President Obama who doesn’t want them to know who is to blame for the Fast and Furious scandal—and whether his Administration has done anything to prevent it from happening again. Read the full story here.Todd Gaziano is the Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He previously served in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the Attorney General and the President on the invocation of executive privilege. He was also a chief oversight counsel in the House of Representatives