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By Ned Sublette
$18.45
By David Rothkopf
$17.16
$22
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Matt Miller, a host of KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center,” has written a book full of necessary honesty and courage—a welcome effort to rid us of the nostrums and shopworn notions that cloud our thinking and constrain our politics.
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By Ellen Goodman — There are now 1,100 square feet on the South Lawn of the White House being transformed into a kitchen garden. If Americans follow the first family’s lead, the seed pack will become the new stimulus package.
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AP photo / Elizabeth Dalziel
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By Scott Ritter — Forget about terrorism for a moment. The potential catastrophe that climate change could unleash on America makes every other national security crisis pale in comparison. President Obama cannot secure the homeland without addressing this global emergency.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama needs to stop straddling and to threaten to veto any cockamamie tax scheme that emerges from Congress as retribution for the repulsive bonuses handed out at American International Group.
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Flickr / geerlingguy
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Sarah Palin is turning down about half of her state’s stimulus money, complaining that Washington is trying to engineer a bigger Alaskan government with funding for health care, energy programs and schools. Schools? How dare you, Washington?
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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We’ve seen a lot of Timothy Geithner lately in the news—usually looking concerned yet purposeful as he stands behind the president in photos and press conferences—but we haven’t heard a great deal straight from the source. On Thursday, CNN’s Ali Velshi managed to get the treasury secretary talking, but what Geithner had to say is distinctly underwhelming.
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AP photo / Evan Vucci
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After the top brass at AIG couldn’t be stopped from dishing out $165 million in bonuses to executives who didn’t exactly deserve gold-star treatment, Congress is attempting to recoup most of the money by slapping a 90 percent tax on such executive windfalls.
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By Amy Goodman — Taxpayers’ bailout money for AIG bonuses has rightfully provoked a massive backlash against AIG, Wall Street, President Barack Obama and his economic advisers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers.
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Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner —
Posted on Mar 16, 2009
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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AIG’s dishing out $165 million in bonuses to executives who played a part in bringing their company to near ruin is an “outrage,” according to President Barack Obama, who pledged to do whatever he can to stop the payouts at the bailed-out insurance giant. Updated
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listphile.com
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The tug of war continues between corporate financial giants and the federal government, and certain members of the former seem to have some trouble adjusting to their post-bailout status. AIG, for example, is still planning to reward its top 400 executives with a whopping $165 million in bonuses this weekend, even after the company was given more than $170 billion from taxpayers to stay afloat. Updated
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So, CNBC hyperpundit Jim Cramer was the very picture of contrition during his cringe-tastic appearance on Thursday night’s “Daily Show.” But let’s revisit this moment from 2006—when Cramer brought a much haughtier version of himself to TheStreet.com TV to discuss, among other delightful topics, how to “create a new truth to develop a fiction” whilst in “hedge-fund mode”—shall we?
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By Joe Conason — Things are bad, and very likely to get worse—but the Republicans seem determined to plunge us into a real depression, gambling that catastrophe would return them to power.
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By David Sirota — Republicans insist that “competition solves health care,” and tell us that government programs are worse than private health insurance. So, don’t they welcome a private-versus-public competition, believing that the former will trump the latter? Well ... uh ... no.
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fitsnews.com
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Wednesday will mark the day Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, rejected “some” of the estimated $8 billion in federal stimulus money his state is slated to receive. Sanford’s anti-deficit spending stand has sparked talk that the Republican may be eyeing a 2012 presidential campaign. Updated.
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truthdig.com
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The renowned filmmaker visited USC’s Annenberg School for Communication on March 3 to talk with Truthdig editors Robert Scheer and Kasia Anderson and their students about “Wall Street,” his 1987 classic—suddenly all too relevant again—and to give a panoramic take on his body of work and what the future holds for the movie industry.
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Has there been any good news in recent days? Robert Scheer thinks so and says why on this week’s “Left, Right & Center.” Arianna Huffington, meanwhile, has some questions about Barack Obama’s economic decisions, while Tony Blankley wonders if there aren’t too many banking types in the new government.
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a.abcnews.com
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Is Rush Limbaugh’s sudden elevation to the top tier of the Republican Party a naturally occurring phenomenon ... or a vast left-wing conspiracy? Some among the GOP’s ranks suspect that the latter is the answer.
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By Marie Cocco — It’s “a completely different world,” says the House speaker, delighted by “the fact that we have a Democratic president who ... put forth an agenda for America that contained many of the issues that we have been fighting for over the years.”
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By David Sirota — Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don’t remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s message was plain: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, oversight or public intervention.
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By Marie Cocco — For someone who spent much of the Democratic primary season running against the Clinton era, Obama sounds an awful lot like President Clinton.
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Flickr/dsb nola
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Perhaps keeping an eye on the 2012 election, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has gone public with his critique of President Barack Obama’s proposed solutions to the country’s economic woes. ThreatDown!
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — After Obama began to campaign around the country for the stimulus, support for the package rose. Administration officials have taken notice. Count on this to be a road-trip presidency.
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Flickr / geerlingguy
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While just about every state in the Union is starving for funds, a small band of Republican governors is debating whether or not to reject the stimulus bill’s cash infusion, citing concerns over future taxes. This California editor says good. Give their stimulus money to my state. It’s broke.
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AP photo / Darin McGregor, Pool
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Despite the fact that he’s looking at a trillion-plus deficit for 2009 as he settles into his second month as president, Barack Obama has plans to cut the annual deficit by half by the time his first term ends.
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telegraph.co.uk
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In the face of angry protests outside its offices, the New York Post has apologized, with qualifications, for publishing a cartoon about the stimulus package showing a dead chimpanzee that many readers saw as representing President Obama. But in its half-hearted mea culpa, the Post made little direct reference to the racist stereotype that sparked the controversy in the first place.
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By David Sirota — It’s fitting that Barack Obama went to Denver to sign the stimulus bill. We’re just now starting to climb the challenging “Rocky Mountains” of this economic odyssey.
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AP photo / Frank Franklin II
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The employment market and the stock market both took major hits Thursday, with new jobless claims registering as high as 627,000 and market indicators like the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index dipping alarmingly low.
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By Marie Cocco — We seem to have spent our way—to the tune of $864 billion—into allowing our friends the Pakistanis to enter into a peace treaty, or something that looks like it, with the Taliban.
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By Joe Conason — Republicans congratulate themselves for remaining unified in defeat and whine about Obama’s refusal to capitulate—but in fact it is they who have failed in the initial episode of a confrontation that will certainly continue for four years.
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telegraph.co.uk
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The New York Post is no stranger to controversy, but the rag’s latest goes beyond its typically low standards: A cartoon shows two cops, one of whom points his smoking gun at a bullet-riddled, bloody chimp. His partner says: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
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White House / Paul Morse / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Congressional Republicans, with the exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush’s far more costly war on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise.
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Flickr / jphilipg
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ProPublica did some digging into the infrastructure spending bundled into the stimulus package—the $100 billion that promises have the biggest impact in terms of job creation—and found that Wyoming is getting more than $20,100 per unemployed worker while Michigan, a state on the verge of a labor apocalypse, is expected to have to make do with just $2,434.37.
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By Marie Cocco — This didn’t start with the mortgage and credit crisis. It all began with the wage crisis.
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama must deal with a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing big chunks of the private-sector economy.
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flickr/jeffrey beall
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It’s finally happening: President Barack Obama is about to sign the stimulus bill. Get ready, people of Denver—he’s going to do the honors at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, of course—where else?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama senses that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get, and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its “inflection points.”
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Flickr / Jeffrey Beall
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President Obama on Tuesday will sign the stimulus bill, which passed without the support of a single House Republican and with only three votes from the GOP in the Senate. With battle lines that stark, lawmakers have tied their fates to that of the bill.
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How stimulating is the stimulus, really? Did Obama bite off more than he could chew? Who wears the pants at the Treasury Department? Answers to these questions and more in this week’s episode.
Posted on Feb 15, 2009
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Apparently nobody wants to be President Obama’s commerce secretary. The second candidate for the post, Sen. Judd Gregg, has dropped out. The Republican senator cited “irresolvable conflicts,” including the stimulus package and the census. That’s what you get for trying to make nice with those fussy Republicans.
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Jon Stewart applies his usual comic talents to Barack Obama’s first news conference, complete with a showdown between Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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By Marie Cocco — Well, that didn’t work out. In pushing for a new financial industry bailout, Treasury Secretary Geithner came across like a banker trying to do a politician’s job. Obama owes us some hands-on involvement.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Obama administration keeps having to learn that bland centrism is not pragmatic, it’s not helpful in resolving a big crisis, and it certainly doesn’t buy you any love.
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By Joe Conason — Having allowed his Republican opponents to dominate the economic debate, Obama used his first news conference to rebut them—coolly and civilly, yet without leaving any doubt that he can strike back harder if necessary.
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It seems Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s stimulus compromise announcement was a tad premature, a fact that reportedly irked the most powerful woman in politics, Nancy Pelosi. “The speaker went through the roof,” a House Democrat told Politico, when she saw Reid’s alleged power play.
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