Economy

I guess President Josiah Bartlet, the mythical president in The West Wing television series, would have been pleased. Jonathan Martin at Politico.com reports that the Obama Administration is concentrating lots of power at the top (bolds are mine):West Wing on steroids in Obama W.H. President Barack Obama is taking far-reaching steps to centralize decision-making inside the White House,…

While most mainstream media outlets continue to ignore racist statements made by Obama economic adviser Robert Reich two weeks ago, CNN's Lou Dobbs not only played them for his viewers Friday, but also pointed out the absurdity of the comments as well as the shameful way the press boycotted them.Despite Reich's January 7 remarks about stimulus spending and "white male construction workers" having…

You've heard it here, there and everywhere in the news media - the time is now for a big-government economic stimulus package, not only to revive the economy, but to salvage America's crumbling infrastructure. That's one of the selling points used over and over again by pundits, as they are paraded out repeatedly on broadcast and cable network news programs - that so-called "shovel-ready"…

Like him or not, this time he has a valid point. CNBC rabble-rouser and "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer questioned the merits of Timothy Geithner, President Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary-designate, and told viewers on CNBC's Jan. 22 "Street Signs" that, had he been in Geithner's shoes, he'd face criminal prosecution.  "I happen to have a meeting with my lawyers just to discuss this - with my…

A rather astounding statement was made a few weeks ago by an economic adviser to Barack Obama that went completely ignored by America's press: "I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs [hopefully being created by government spending] not simply go to high skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers."Such was uttered by Robert Reich, the…

Sometimes you learn a lot from commenters. I was going through the comments tonight at my Pajamas Media column about the Geithner nomination that went up earlier today, and came across this at Comment 39 from "Mike M": The deduction he took for the summer camp as a day care expense is EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED IN THE IRS CODE! That’s out and out tax fraud. Even Leona Helmsly (sic) is jealous in her…

"This Week" host George Stephanopoulos appeared on Wednesday's "Good Morning America" to claim that the stock market's 330 point drop on Inauguration Day indicated the need for a swift confirmation of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Stephanopoulos, a former top Democratic aide, asserted, "The reason they want to get Geithner confirmed and in place so quickly, they want to have a complete…

The Associated Press's 1:12 p.m. coverage (saved here, as the dynamic link changed during the drafting of this post) of the Senate Finance Committee's hearing on Barack Obama's nomination of Timothy Giethner as Treasury Secretary has plenty of discussion of Geithner's tax "mistakes" (the picture, but not its heading, is from a November 21 New York Times article). But as has been the case with…

Barack Obama not only made history becoming the first black President of the United States Tuesday, but he was also inhospitably greeted by the biggest January Inauguration Day stock selloff ever.At the closing bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over four percent, with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ indices plummeting more than five percent.As the Wall Street Journal's MarketBeat blog…

2008 was the safest year ever to be an American miner. The combined number of fatalities from all forms of mining was the lowest ever. 2007 (latest information available) also shows the lowest "all-injury" rate for miners on record by far. Yet Ken Ward Jr.'s early-January contribution at the Charleston (WV) Gazette to the spate of final-month Bush-bashing pretended that this data doesn't exist.…

Anne Applebaum said she was reaching for a metaphor to describe the dreamy Barack Obama when she started her Slate piece on January 19. Instead of reaching for a metaphor, however, she only got a handful of absurd hyperbole when she decided that Barack Obama was "just like" Captain C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the hero pilot that saved the lives of his entire planeload of people by landing it…

This is a hopefully good news, bad news post.First, the bad news: James Hansen, head of NASA's the Goddard Institute of Space Studies is still bloviating about the catastrophes that await us because of what yours truly and others refer to as globaloney (the belief that the earth is dangerously warming, that human activity is the cause of the warming, and that radical steps that would cause huge…

The Associated Press's record of running interference for Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner continues mostly unabated.My chronicle of AP's largely weak coverage, most of which has been previously detailed at NewsBusters (here, here, and here), is at the end of this post.No AP report I have seen has noted that Geithner applied for and merely pocketed partial "reimbursements" from the…