Obama Budget to Include $634B for Healthcare Expansion, Obama Ends Funding for Yucca Nuclear Waste Dump, Obama Announces Locke as Commerce Nominee, US Nearing Deal to Increase Citigroup Stake, White House Intel Briefings Follow Economic Unrest, CIA Director Backs Pakistan Attacks, Rendition, Obama Nominates Weapons Critic for Pentagon Post, 50 Killed in Bangladeshi Mutiny, Palestinian Factions Hold Unity Talks, Israel Bombs Gaza, Blocks Food Aid, Attorney: Gitmo Conditions Worsen, Video Collective to Sue Over Police Harassment at RNC, Obama Awards Stevie Wonder with Gershwin Priz

In Depth

Providing a GOP response to Mr. Obama's speech to Congress, Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, began by sounding like Mr. Rogers and ended up telling lies and distorting facts like Mr. Bush in his prime. Either way, he must have thought he was talking to children with memory deficit disorders, as he attacked Obama's speech for saying what it did not say. Clearly, Jindal's speech was written prior to learning the details of Obama's speech. Say, sometime during the early Reagan years. In order to make any sense at all, Jindal was forced to disown his own party as corrupt Washington insiders, while saying that same party of corrupt Washington insiders would pull the nation out of the economic hell foisted upon the American people by the corrupt Washington insiders that make up his party. It must have been physically painful for Mr. Jindal, talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time.

"Our party got away from its principles. You elected Republicans to champion limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility.  Instead, Republicans went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington.  Republicans lost your trust -- and rightly so. Tonight, on behalf of our leaders in Congress and my fellow Republican governors, I say:  Our party is determined to regain your trust. We will do so by standing up for the principles that we share -- the principles you elected us to fight for -- the principles that built this into the greatest, most prosperous country on earth." History suggest that here, Jindal is talking about the GOP priciples of self-serving greed.

The Jindal lie that pulled me out of my chair was the one about the stimulus bill paying for a high-speed train between Las Vegas and Disneyland: "While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes...$8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland."

As the AP reports, this is simply not true:

"The Republicans attacking President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package point to a project they dub the "Sin Express" — a high speed rail link between Anaheim, Calif., site of Disneyland, and Las Vegas. Not so fast. In fact, competition for the $8 billion in mass transit construction is just beginning. Backers of numerous other planned high-speed rail corridors around the country are making their case for the money. They notably include a Midwest initiative long supported by someone with even more clout than Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who strongly supports the Anaheim-Las Vegas line. That would be former Illinois Sen. Obama."

Note: For documentation on the evolution of the Jindal Katrina/boat story lie, go < href="http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_nomoremister_archive.html" target=new2>here.

"We've got to have equal rights for everyone," Sean Penn

Airplanes flying 'cross the land and sea,
Everybody flying but a gay guy like me.
Uncle Sam says, "Your place is on the ground,
When I fly my airplanes, don’t want no queers 'round."

The same thing for the Navy, when ships go to sea,
They don't even got a mess boy’s job for me.
Uncle Sam says, "No apron for you son,
And I sure ain’t gonna let you shoot my big Navy gun."

Got my long government letter, my time to go,
When I got to the Army the man said "No."
Uncle Sam says, "When I ask, you don't tell."
But when trouble starts, we’ll all be in hell.

If you ask me, I think democracy is fine,
I mean democracy without the gay line.
Uncle Sam says, "We’ll live the American way,"
That means we gotta kill discrimination today.

Obama’s toughest political problem may...be coping...with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door....For all the gloomy headlines we’ve absorbed since the fall, we still can’t quite accept the full depth of our economic abyss....Nicole Gelinas, a financial analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute, sees denial at play over a wide swath of America, reaching from the loftiest economic strata of Wall Street to the foreclosure-decimated boom developments in the Sun Belt.

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. (Half the country, according to a new Associated Press poll, now fears unemployment.) But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts. The difficulty of walking this fine line can be seen in the drama surrounding the latest forbidden word to creep around the shadows for months before finally leaping into the open: nationalization.

Will Obama concede aloud that some of our “too big to fail” banks have, in essence, already failed? If so, what will he do about it? What will it cost? And, most important, who will pay? No one knows the sum of the American banks’ losses, but the economist Nouriel Roubini, who has gotten much right about this crash, puts it at $1.8 trillion. That doesn’t count any defaults still to come on what had been considered “good” mortgages and myriad other debt, whether from auto loans or credit cards....

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all. Wall Street’s last barons still seem to believe that they can hang on to their old culture by scuttling corporate jets, rejecting bonuses or sounding contrite in public. Ask the former Citigroup wise man Robert Rubin how that strategy worked out.

We are now waiting to learn if Obama’s economic team, much of it drawn from the Wonderful World of Citi and Goldman Sachs, will have the will to make its own former cohort face the truth. But at a certain point, as in every other turn of our culture of denial, outside events will force the recognition of harsh realities. Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word — depression — is next on America’s list to avoid.

Obama Doesn't Want To Give Up Dictator Bush's Powers, Jerry Politex

At least since FDR wanted to pack the Supreme Court with men who would do his bidding, and Truman ran against Dewey by castigating a "do noting Congress," the power of the presidency has grown to the point of being a dictatorship under Bush. Our 43rd president took Nixon's famous belief to heart: If the President does it, it's legal. The 8 years of Bush were filled with Cheney-initiated ways to turn our democracy into a dictatorship under the guise of being in a permanent state of war against terrorism. While it's doubtful that Obama will have to declare in signing statements that he will not follow the rules that a compliant Congress sets down in its bills, it now appears that he is perfectly willing to keep Bush's dictatorial use of "executive privilege" in the name of the office of the presidency. This was something Bush Watch had predicted. American Presidents are reluctant to give up their powers, no matter their legitimacy.

"Addressing the executive-privilege dispute [with respect to an aspect of rendition, White House counsel] Mr. Craig said: “The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened. But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency."... "The [Obama] administration has...put off taking a stand in several cases that present opportunities to embrace or renounce Bush-era policies, including the imprisonment without trial of an “enemy combatant” on domestic soil, Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking legal opinions about interrogation and surveillance, and an executive-privilege dispute over Congressional subpoenas of former White House aides to Mr. Bush over the firing of United States attorneys," writes Charlie Savage in the Feb. 17, 2009 NYT.

This is not to say that Obama's unwillingness to give up dictatorial powers created by Bush-Cheney is his sole reason for continuing some of them, since he may have subscribed to them prior to becomming President:

"Mr. Obama has clashed with civil libertarians before. Last July, he voted to authorize eavesdropping on some phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant....The A.C.L.U. says the program is still unconstitutional.... Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the sequence of 'disappointing' recent events had heightened concerns that Mr. Obama might end up carrying forward 'some of the most problematic policies of the Bush presidency.'...The administration’s recent policy moves have attracted praise from outspoken defenders of the Bush administration. Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page argued that 'it seems that the Bush administration’s antiterror architecture is gaining new legitimacy.'"

Members of the Obama administration have cautioned that they can be trusted to use their powers more ethically than those in the Bush administration. Our history suggests that Americans have learned to look at such promises as so much hot air. For example, confirmation hearing statements by the nominees for solicitor general and attorney general both defined "battlefield" as pretty much any place in the world, not an actual battlefield, "a core Bush position. Civil liberties groups argue that people captured away from combat zones should go to prison only after trials," which the "battlefield" law does not provide.

The NYT story does not address the fears that Bush Watch and other civil libertarians have about the growing dictatorship of the presidency under a never-ending state of war, that the use of executive privilege, signing statements, and the like, initially used under the guise of being in a state of war, will jump over to non-wartime circumstances as well. We've been watching representatives of our government, both lawyers and judges, making that jump for years, and signs from Obama and his administration are not good:

"For example, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department last week told an appeals court that the Bush administration was right to invoke 'state secrets' to shut down a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees who say a Boeing subsidiary helped fly them to places where they were tortured. Margaret Satterthwaite, a faculty director at the human rights center at the New York University law school, said, 'It was literally just Bush redux — exactly the same legal arguments that we saw the Bush administration present to the court.'”

Are You Ready For The Second Great Depression? (Part 2), Jerry Politex

Months ago Paul Krugman wrote that two aspects of Obama's stimulus plan could signal an oncoming depression: too little and two late. Part 1 established that his proposed plan was too little. Since then, the Congress approved bill that Obama is ready to sign as a "victory" has been further watered down: direct stimulus aspects favored by Dems have been removed in favor of more non-stimulus taxes favored by Repubs. This, by the way is exactly what happened to FDR's stimulus plan at the start of the first great depression.

As for the second great depression signal, "too late," how about "nat at all"? That is, the stimulus plan needed to pull the U.S. away from it's staggering path to a second great depression was DOA. "Too late" would be an understatement. Sad to say, it's clear that Obama was very much aware of his failure, jawboning the need for swift action every chance he got, and pretty much ignoring the inadequacy of the watered down contents of the bill. That's why his economic team was calling it just a first installment even before the ink had dried. Obama opted for a quick political "victory," rather than a bill that would have a better chance of turning the economy away from the cliff of depression we're headed towards.

Prior to sending the House and Senate versions of the bill to conference, Paul Krugman hoped that, somehow, the final version would be better, since he had doubts that Obama would be all that successful in getting additional help through a second stimulus package: "Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short." He also thought Obama had quit when the going appeared to be tough: "By coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small. Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself." Further, he saw Mr. O playing politics with the economic lives of the American people: "Rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. 'Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,' he declared on Saturday, and 'the scale and scope of this plan is right.' No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t."

Krugman's recent respose to the failed Obama stimulus package was tepid, to say the least, but he didn't bring up his previous prediction of a second great depression if the bill was too little and too late:

...W’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize even now. And I’m not just talking about the dwindling band of forecasters who still insist that the economy will snap back any day now....The policies currently on offer don’t look adequate to the challenge. The fiscal stimulus plan, while it will certainly help, probably won’t do more than mitigate the economic side effects of debt deflation....If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression....Since nothing like that is on the table, or seems likely to get on the table any time soon, it will take years for families and firms to work off the debt they ran up so blithely. The odds are that the legacy of our time of illusion...will be a long, painful slump.

An economic depression has been defined as just such a "long, painful slump," a long-lasting severe recession, with increasing unemployment and a decreasing money supply. The present facts speak for themselves. Clearly, more than an inadequate stimulus bill palmed off as a "victory" by Obama is needed to turn things around. --Feb. 16, 2009

Is Obama Determined to Pick Wealthy Corporate Insider For Health Cabinet Post?

First Daschle, Now This? Patients don't seem to matter to Gov. Phil Bredesen, who is presently being vetted by Obama for HHS head: "Advocacy groups don't matter nearly as much as the pharmaceutical groups, the hospitals, the doctors' groups. There's a lot of very powerful interest groups that will play in this thing."... Democracy Now!: "Criticism is growing over the possible nomination of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen to head the Health and Human Services Department. On Tuesday, the group MoveOn urged members to oppose Bredesen’s nomination. The group accused Bredesen of gutting Tennessee’s public health insurance program, causing more than 320,000 people to lose their health insurance. Bredesen has deep ties to the private health insurance industry. In 1980, Bredesen founded HealthAmerica Corp., which grew to become the country’s second-largest HMO before he sold it for $400 million....Report: 54 Million Americans Will Have No Health Insurance in 2019. In other health news, analysts with the Congressional Budget Office have projected the number of Americans without health insurance will grow from 45 million to about 54 million over the next ten years if there are no changes in federal policy."

Obama Dances the Lurch With Zombie Banks and Weaselly Advisors, Politex and Dowd

While Obama warns the country of "catastrophe" if the bailout plan is not passed swiftly, his Treasury Sec. has presented the plan without specifics, guarenteed to slow its passage down. “We need more details from Treasury on how exactly it plans to remove bad assets while protecting the taxpayer,” said Senator John Kerry. “We have zombie banks that are weighed down because their liabilities exceed their assets. Without a precise mechanism for addressing toxic assets, it will be difficult to increase lending.”

Representative Barney Frank added, “The secretary said the administration would present details of their foreclosure reduction plan in a few weeks, which is too much time." Wall Street's Ethan Harris criticized, “What’s striking is that these are not new issues that they are facing. “These are the same issues that the Treasury faced last fall — how do we price the assets?" Further, Treasury Sec. Geithner faced these very issues last year as a member of the leadership involved in the Bush bailout.

"The president himself had built up expectations that the plan would get ahead of the crisis — and not lurch from pillar to post as the Bush administration did last year, often in partnership with the New York Federal Reserve under its then-president, Mr. Geithner," writes Andrews and Labaton in the NYT. The general conclusion is that Mr. O is lurching.

There’s a weaselly feel to the plan, a sense that tough decisions were postponed even as President Obama warns about our “perfect storm of financial problems.” The outrage is going only one way, as we pony up trillion after trillion. Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets," writes Maureen Dowd.

"As Steve Labaton and Ed Andrews wrote in The Times on Tuesday, Geithner won an internal battle with David Axelrod and other Obama aides who wanted to impose pay caps on every employee at institutions taking the bailout and set stricter guidelines on how federal money is spent. Geithner prevailed over those who wanted to kick out negligent bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid. In a move that would have made his mentor, Robert Rubin, proud, Geithner beat back the populists and protected the economic royalists. The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world."

"...Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure....Geithner’s own tax history — and his time as head of the New York Fed when all the bad stuff was happening on Wall Street, and when he left with nearly a half-million in severance — makes him a dubious messenger for the president’s pledge to keep the haves from further betraying the have-nots"

Addendum to Pt.1: Mr. O Has Not Learned From His Economic Blunder, Krugman

...Many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate. Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate. Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal. In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small. Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short. So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good. For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

Are You Ready For The Second Great Depression? (Part 1), Jerry Politex

A month ago we called your attention to's Paul Krugman analysis that Obama's stimulus plan would need two things to keep us out of a second great depression: "According to Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, Obama's own economic team sees his plan as being too little, too late: 'Obama needs to make his plan bigger. To see why, consider a new report from his own economic team [on] estimates of what the Obama economic plan would accomplish....The report...makes it clear that the plan falls well short of what the economy needs.' Elsewhere, Krugman warns of dire consequences, once Obama's plan gets watered down through Mr. O's bipartisan strategy in Congress: 'I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized....

'Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy — well, you can see where this is going. So this is our moment of truth. Will we in fact do what’s necessary to prevent Great Depression II?' Right now, even if Obama's stimulus plan is swiftly passed, his own economic team thinks it's too weak."

To date the House has passed a stimulus plan and it's reported that the Senate has agreed to a different stimulus plan and will vote on it this coming week: "The House version of the stimulus bill emphasizes helping states and localities avoid wide-scale cuts, while the Senate plan focuses more on tax cuts." (Herszenhorn, NYT). Krugman sees whatever will come out of the future House/Senate committee as being too little and misdirected:

"To appease the centrists, a plan that was already too small and too focused on ineffective tax cuts has been made significantly smaller, and even more focused on tax cuts. According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, are even more pessimistic. So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little....The plan should have been at least 50% larger.

"Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out. My [initial estimate] says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad."

So it's clear that Obama's stimulus plan, which should have been called his "job plan" is too little. In Part 2 we'll discuss if it's too late. --Feb. 8, 2009

An Obama Partnership With Limbaugh Republicans Not the Answer to Threat of Depression, Krugman

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again. It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world. Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving — a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now....

Meanwhile, our main line of defense against recessions — the Federal Reserve’s usual ability to support the economy by cutting interest rates — has already been overrun. The Fed has cut the rates it controls basically to zero, yet the economy is still in free fall. It’s no wonder, then, that most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we’re headed for a deep, prolonged slump. Some private analysts predict double-digit unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office is slightly more sanguine, but its director, nonetheless, recently warned that “absent a change in fiscal policy ... the shortfall in the nation’s output relative to potential levels will be the largest — in duration and depth — since the Depression of the 1930s.”

We’re already closer to outright deflation than at any point since the Great Depression. In particular, the private sector is experiencing widespread wage cuts for the first time since the 1930s, and there will be much more of that if the economy continues to weaken. As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on....

Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive. So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

Obama "Goes SPLAT," Gets Off the Arrogance Train, Dowd

Unlike W. and Dick Cheney, who heroically resisted acknowledging their historically boneheaded mistakes, President Obama summoned a conga line of [news anchors] Anderson, Katie, Brian, Chris and Charlie to the Oval Office to do penance, over and over. “I think I messed up. I screwed up,” he confessed to Couric.

He told the anchors that the man who helped make him president, Tom Daschle, had made “a serious mistake” by not paying taxes on a car and driver. (It should have been a harbinger of doom when Daschle began sporting those determined-to-be-hip round red glasses.) Mr. Obama admitted that “ultimately it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules. You know, one for prominent people and one for ordinary folks who have to pay their taxes.” It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Before he recanted, his hand forced by a cascade of appointees who “forgot” to pay taxes, his reasoning was creeping perilously close to that of the outgoing leaders he denounced in his Inaugural Address: that elitist mentality of “we know best,” we know we’re doing the “right” thing for the country, so we can twist the rules. Mr. Obama’s errors on the helter-skelter stimulus package were also self-induced.... Mr. Obama should have taken a red pencil to the $819 billion stimulus bill and slashed all the provisions that looked like caricatures of Democratic drunken-sailor spending.... Mr. Obama protested to Brian Williams that the programs denounced as “wasteful” by Republicans “amount to less than 1 percent of the entire package.” All the more reason to cut them and create a lean, clean bill tailored to creating jobs.

The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks. Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money. Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers....

Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month....Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach....Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.

Obama, Congress, Fat Cats Are Failing Us, Herbert

Not even the terrible economic downturn that has gripped the country — a downturn that could be eased by a truly big-time surge of infrastructure investment — has been enough to get the leaders of the country to do the right thing. We’re rushing to bail out the banking industry for what? What kind of country will we have once the bankers are fat and happy again? The U.S. will still be a nation with a pathetic mid-20th-century infrastructure struggling to make it in a dynamic 21st-century world. It’s a blueprint for sustained national decline....

When you juxtapose this tremendous national need with the wholesale destruction of employment that has occurred over the past several months (and that is expected to continue for some time), you have to wonder why President Obama and Congressional leaders are not moving with extraordinary quickness to put together an infrastructure investment program that is both vast and visionary. Instead, we have infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation’s overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs....

The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve. The mantra (I can hear it now) will be that we can’t afford to spend any more money on the infrastructure, or on a big health care initiative, or any of the nation’s other crying needs. Suddenly fiscal discipline will be the order of the day and the people who are suffering now will suffer more, and the nation’s long-term prospects will be further damaged as its long-term needs continue to be neglected....

We’re suffering now from both a failure of will and of imagination.

Obama, You Promised! Spare the Rod, Spoil the Jackal, Maureen Dowd

Mr. Obama was less bracing than during the campaign, when A.I.G. executives were caught going to posh retreats after taking an $85 billion bailout. He called for them to be fired and to reimburse the federal Treasury. Now that he has the power to act, Mr. Obama spoke, as his spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, “like that disappointed parent that doesn’t embarrass you in the mall, but you feel like you’ve let somebody down.”

That’s not enough, not with the president and Geithner continuing to dole out what may end up being a trillion dollars to these “malefactors of great wealth,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it. USA Today wrote about “the A.I.G. effect:” executives finding ways to spend more discreetly, choosing lesser-known luxury hotels and $110 pinot noir instead of the $175 variety.

More than a disappointed parent, they need a special prosecutor or three. Spare the rod, spoil the jackal. Anyone who gave bonuses after accepting federal aid should be fired, and that money should be disgorged to the Treasury. Claire McCaskill popped out a bill to limit the pay of anyone at firms taking federal money to no more than the president makes — $400,000.

“These people are idiots,” she said on the Senate floor. “You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses. ... Right now they’re on the hook to us. And they owe us something other than a fancy wastebasket and $50 million jet.” One Obama official said her idea is catchy, but it won’t work “because no one would come to Treasury to participate, and that means our economy would continue to stumble downward.”

Senator Chuck Grassley urged the administration to snatch back the bonuses. “They ought to give ’em back or we should go get ’em,” the Republican told me. “If this were Japan and a corporate executive did what is being done on Wall Street, they’d either go out and commit suicide or go before the board of directors and the country and take a very deep bow and apologize.”...

Some Obama policy makers still buy into the notion that if they’re too strict, these economic royalists, to use F.D.R.’s epithet, might balk at the bailout, preferring perks over the prospect of their banks going belly-up. The president needs to think like Andrew Cuomo. “ ‘Performance bonus’ for many of the C.E.O.’s is an oxymoron,” he said. “I would tell them, a) you don’t deserve a bonus, b) where are you going to go? and c) if you want to go, go.”

Obama Stiffs Nation on Health Care, Paul Krugman

The whole world is in recession. But the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care. Which raises a question: Why has the Obama administration been silent, at least so far, about one of President Obama’s key promises during last year’s campaign — the promise of guaranteed health care for all Americans?...

...This is, I suspect, the real reason for the administration’s health care silence — there’s the political argument that this is a bad time to be pushing fundamental health care reform, because the nation’s attention is focused on the economic crisis. But if history is any guide, this argument is precisely wrong. Don’t take my word for it. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has declared that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed. F.D.R. was able to enact Social Security in part because the Great Depression highlighted the need for a stronger social safety net. And the current crisis presents a real opportunity to fix the gaping holes that remain in that safety net, especially with regard to health care....

Mr. Obama really, really doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, whose health care push failed politically partly because he moved too slowly: by the time his administration was ready to submit legislation, the economy was recovering from recession and the sense of urgency was fading. One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful. The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

Obama's Reversal of Specific Bush Policies

9. Reverses Bush administration appeal of an air pollution case, signaling that the government will embrace tougher rules to cut mercury emissions from power plants
1. Begins process of closing the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year; ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prisons; and requiring all interrogations to follow the noncoercive methods of the Army Field Manual.
2. Ends the Bush ban on giving federal money to international groups that perform abortions.
3. Orders his government not to rely on any legal opinions concerning interrogation, incuding torture, produced by the Justice Department or other agencies between Sept. 11, 2001, and Tuesday, when he assumed the presidency.
4. Executive orders mandate new limits onlobbyists and demand that the government disclose more information.
5. Appointment of two permanent envoys to major trouble spots—George Mitchell to the Mideast and Richard Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan. A sign that Obama intends a 180-degree reversal from the ultimatum-heavy approach of the Bush administration, which saw diplomacy mainly as an exercise in stating terms for surrender.
6.Moves quickly to undo Bush "midnight regulations," some designed to relax large swaths of environmental rules.
7. Appointed Bush's fiercest critics of his use of executive power to head up the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel.
8. Directs regulators to tighten auto standards on emissions and fuel economy. Allows states to craft tighter standards than fed rules.
(above items quoted and paraphrased...tbc)

Top Twenty Actions Obama Should Take by 2010, Jerry Politex

Now that the executive and legislative branches of government are in the hands of the Democratic Party, here are the top twenty actions the Dems should take by 2010, if they expect the voters to remain loyal.

1. Stop the government's socialization for the rich policies. Such as: halt all tax cuts that are in the various Bush bills but have yet to be instituted and create rules designed to put teeth in economic regulations.

2. Call a halt to all earmarks --REPEAT: ALL EARMARKS-- until the national debt is zero, and do likewise with whatever loopholes the bloodsucking members of Congress come up with.

3. Raise the minimum wage by a substantial amount, allow federal employees to freely unionize, and cut the interest rate on student loans.

4. Rescind that part of the Bush Martial Law: HR 5122, section 1076, that makes Bush and future Presidents dictators.

5. Rescind the Bush Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122), that allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder," making Bush and future Presidents dictators.

6. Force Bush to follow the perfectly adequate FISA law and stop illegal NSA spying on innocent american citizens. --Kim Anderson

7. Begin oversight hearings on 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Energy meetings, Valerie Plame, Pentagon money contracts, congressional ethics, and [insert horrible event here]. Pass the entire 9/11 commission recommendations and point out how it took 6 years for it to be done. --Randall Roberson, Reba Peters, R. O'Connor

8. Impeach Bush and Cheney, or at least make an attempt, to win back a little of our once good name in the world. --Ben Seni, Thomas Roy

9. Figure out some way to outlaw or curtail "signing statements," which [are being used by Bush to] effectivly circumvent the constitution and make the exective the all-powerful branch (dictator) in the US. --Karl Scott

10. Hire new inspectors and enforcement officials to replace those laid off under Bush at the FDA and other agencies. --Bob Mawn

11. Get out of Iraq as fast as possible, and restart the middle east peace process, where we should have been concentrating our efforts all along. --Cherie

12. Congress really needs to push for reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine and encourage the FCC to use its oversight to limit (if not reverse) the mass media consolidation of the last 10-25 years. --Bob Hunter

13. Ensure on a national basis that voting can be verified with paper receipts; just because Dems won - doesn't mean the voting isn't fixed. --George Lacy

14. Appoint Jimmy Carter or Al Gore as chairman of a group to clean up the environment, create an energy policy that's not a boondoggle to the corporations, and rescind all portions of relevant bills to do so.

15. Slave Labor: Create a fair immigration policy that does not penalize the American worker, nor creates a guest worker program, but provides greater oversight and penalties with teeth for those who hire illegal immigrants.

16. Voting machines: get open-source code & a paper trail and whatever else the nonpartisan experts say. Put the whole process in public, not private, hands. --Gib

17. Get rid of "No Child Left Behind", [because it's generally unfunded it does just the opposite. In fact, let's do away with all bills, like Bush's illegal immigration fence bill, that is not unfunded.] --Sahib Khalsa [and Jerry Politex]

18. The strongest support, 92 percent, was for lowering drug prices for retirees on Medicare by allowing the government to negotiate directly with drug companies. --Newsweek Poll after elections

19. Draw up and pass some sort of a bill that will put us on the road to universal health care and take health care out of the control of for-profit corporations.

20. By 2010, provide the voters with a rational explanation why a Dem-controlled federal government has been unable to carrry out all of the above.