When $400 is worth more than $600
The Anchoress provides the links for something my husband and I had been laughing about. Remember last year when Bush and the Congress sent out $600 as a tax rebate hoping to stave off a recession. This was what Michelle Obama's response was.“You’re getting $600. What can you do with that? Not to be ungrateful or anything. But maybe it pays down a bill, but it doesn’t pay down every bill every month.Now single taxpayers will get $400 and couples witll get $800 (but only if they earn less than $145,000). It all works out to about $13 a week.
“Barack’s approach is that the short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good. And it may even feel good that first month when you get that check. And then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings.”
The Bush tax rebate last year was $600 a person and $1200 a taxpayer with those in the higher income brackets not receiving the rebate.
See Betsy for more.
The White House's missing documents (JOSH GERSTEIN, 2/17/09, Politico)
In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama shut down his predecessor’s system for reviewing regulations, realigned and expanded two key White House policymaking bodies and extended economic sanctions against parties to the conflict in the African nation of Cote D’Ivoire.Despite the intense scrutiny a president gets just after the inauguration, Obama managed to take all these actions with nary a mention from the White House press corps.
The moves escaped notice because they were never announced by the White House Press Office and were never placed on the White House web site.
They came to light only because the official paperwork was transmitted to the Federal Register, a dense daily compendium of regulatory actions and other formal notices prepared by the National Archives. They were published there several days after the fact.
A Politico review of Federal Register issuances since Obama took office found three executive orders, one presidential memorandum, one presidential notice, and one proclamation that went unannounced by the White House.
Ed thinks there's a deliberate reason for not announcing the appointment of a 'climate czar' to an economic counsel.
I'm not imputing any evils motives in this lack of openness. I think it's like the bungling of the Iraqi Ambassadorship, or the poor vetting of so many nominees to Cabinet positions- inexperience and the fact that campaigning is not the same as leading a country. There are bound to be a few bumps of adjustment, although some of these 'bumps' were pretty rudimentary rookie errors, and some of the ambassador kerfluffle could have been averted by a basic courtesy course from Miss Manners.
It's also kind of funny to say these things were 'never noticed' by the press in the same breath used to talk about the alleged 'intense scrutiny' of that same press- this is a myth. They aren't looking for anything beyond what they are told; there is no intense scrutiny of the press in regard to President Obama. None. They are his public relations arm. In addition, mainstream media seems to have grown lazy, substituting press releases for investigative journalism in many cases (and I'm not talking about issues related to the Presidency, this is in general).
And this is kind of amusing:
the White House is looking to install a small video or computer screen into the podium used by the president for press conferences and events in the White House. "It would make it easier for the comms guys to pass along information without being obvious about it," says the adviser.
The screen would indicate whom to call on, seat placement for journalists, pass along notes or points to hit, and so forth, says the adviser.
Using a screen is nothing new for Obama; almost nothing he said in supposedly unscripted townhall events during the presidential campaign was unscripted, down to many of the questions and the answers to those questions. Teleprompter screens at the events scrolled not only his opening remarks, but also statistics and information he could use to answer questions.
From the American Spectator
Less amusing, Rahm Emmanuel's under-reported ethics issues.
R. Allen Stanford and Madoff.
What do these two frauds have in common (besides their fraud)?
Imagine how the press would be covering this issue if things were just a bit different.
Josh Marshall has a question:
From what we can tell, one of the big issues is that it's actually hard to find people with the requisite knowledge of banks and the capital markets who aren't also compromised -- either in policy or business terms -- by the housing bubble and the rest of the financial collapse. And that raises again as a question: why have none of the people who were financial orthodoxy dissidents and saw what was coming been brought in to the administration.
Is that a trick question? Those who predicted the financial collapse and saw the housing bubble coming are not Democrats. That's why those dissidents are not being brought in to the administration.
Those who have been brought in because they're indispensable have yet to demonstrate their indispensable qualities::
Geithner's aides are casting the blame on the fact that his staff hasn't been approved yet and that he made the plan in isolation from other experts in the field.
Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama's senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys.
Moreover, the department made a strategic decision to limit input from the financial industry and other outsiders, aiming to prevent leaks and avoid a perception they were designing the plan for the benefit of big banks. But that also meant they were unable to vet their plan with the companies involved or set realistic expectations of what would be announced.
Whose fault is it that there are no mid-level aides yet nominated? Obama has known since before November 5 that he was going to be president and we read stories in October on how they were planning for the transition. They couldn't come up with some nominees to be assistant secretaries for the Treasury when Obama recognized that his administration's major preoccupation would be fixing the credit crisis? And how long does it take bureaucrats to find their offices and get the BlackBerrys going? And they should stop opting for the appearance of ethical purity over the value of getting input from the people who know the most about the financial industry.
Wow. Even CNN's Jack Cafferty is disgusted with the way the spending bill went through:
What a joke. Your Congress has voted to spend almost $790 billion of your money on a stimulus package that not a single member of either chamber has read.
The 1,073-page document wasn't posted on the government's Web site until after 10 p.m. the day before the vote to pass it was taken. I don't care if you're Evelyn Wood, you can't read almost 1,100 pages of the lawyer talk that makes up all legislation in eight or 10 hours.
The criminal part of this boondoggle is divided into two parts. The first is the Democrats promised to post the bill a full 48 hours before the vote was taken to allow members of the public to see what they were getting for their money. Both parties voted unanimously to do this ... and they lied.
It didn't happen. Why am I not surprised? Congress lying to the American people has become part of their job description. They can't be trusted on anything anymore.
I'm sure part of the reason there was no time for the public to read the bill was the 11th-hour internecine warfare between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
When Reid first announced the compromise had been reached, Nancy Pelosi was nowhere to be seen. And it would take an act of God for this egotistical, arrogant woman to miss a photo op where she could take credit for anything. But she wasn't there.
She summoned Reid to her office, where unnamed sources said she blew her top over some provision for schools that she wasn't happy with. Pelosi's snit delayed everything.
It's really too bad President Obama couldn't figure out a way to jettison these two who are poster children for everything that is wrong in Washington. The Associated Press called the birth of the stimulus bill "sausage making" in the best tradition of Washington politics as usual.
The second part of the crime is the contents of the bill itself. Far from being only about jobs, infrastructure and tax cuts as promised, the stimulus bill stimulates a bunch of other stuff as well. Eight billion dollars for high-speed rail lines, including a proposed line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This little bit of second story work wasn't even in the House version of the bill. iReport.com: So many things to do, what would you fix first?
It started in the Senate as a $2 billion project, and came out of the conference committee costing a whopping $8 billion. Gee, now who would that benefit? Oh yeah, the Senate majority leader is from Nevada.
Dependency on government hand-outs is an ugly, ugly thing. It's addicting, debilitating, and results in nearly insatiable demands for more. See the auto industry. Pin It
