February 12, 2009 – 4:47 pm
My colleague, Kendall Bentz, sends along this hilarious compilation of John Stewart and Jay Leno goofs on Joe Biden, and points out that until and if they figure out how to make fun of Obama, Biden seems to have been designated the comedic fall guy.
February 12, 2009 – 3:26 pm
Re: Ed’s two posts about the recent line up of bankers “like a murderers row” before their Congressional interrogators, that’s the whole point of these exercises — Congressional dominance and private sector submission, if not outright humiliation. In the classic film, The Great Dictator, Chaplin as Hitler ushers Mussolini into a chair with sawed off […]
February 12, 2009 – 3:15 pm
Apparently Senate Democrats are hearing Josh’s warning about the “socialist death spiral.” A well-sourced friend mentioned to me that Harry Reid has been trolling for a Republican – any Republican – to join Senators Specter, Collins, and Snowe in voting for the upcoming stimulus conference bill. Why? Because the original Senate vote scored 61 in […]
February 12, 2009 – 2:28 pm
Personally, I think Obama is driving this nation full speed down a socialist death spiral. But you’ve got to admire, in a grim sort of way, the élan with which he’s doing it – an élan that was on megawatt display when he answered Major Garrett’s potentially embarrassing press conference question about Joe Biden. To […]
February 12, 2009 – 11:39 am
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove – no slouch when it comes to Republican strategy – agrees with Josh and disagrees with me about whether stimulus opposition will be good for Republicans. I agree with Karl that Republicans successfully branded this particular stimulus package a bloated, ill-prioritized porker. But they overshot. They forgot to […]
February 11, 2009 – 4:57 pm
If you want to know everything – and I mean everything – that happened at today’s bank CEO hearing in the House, check out the Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal, which live-blogged the entire event. You’ll notice that at 1:32 pm (seriously, they blogged everything), the CEOs were asked to raise their hands if their company […]
February 11, 2009 – 3:36 pm
Update (3:35 pm) – I just received the press release with all of the details for tomorrow’s hearing. See them pasted below the jump. Call it the Geithner Effect: our new Treasury Secretary goes up to Congress (the very day the “stimulus” “ye dare not call it pork” plan passes) to unveil his new financial […]
February 11, 2009 – 11:22 am
Major bank executives are appearing before Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee this morning. Major messages: We are lending more; we won’t be foolish with TARP money. Bonus points if you can say you didn’t get a bonus last year. Morgan Stanley’s John Mack gets double extra credit for not taking a bonus in 2007 […]
February 10, 2009 – 9:11 pm
I have to disagree with Ed’s interpretation of President Obama’s remarks on tax cuts. When you consider the president’s comment in context, it seems clear that when he says “tax cuts alone can’t solve our problems,” he isn’t suggesting that the prior administration didn’t spend enough, but rather that the monies were not spent on […]
February 10, 2009 – 12:47 pm
Last night during his opening remarks, President Obama said: “[A]s we’ve learned very clearly and conclusively over the last eight years, tax cuts alone can’t solve all of our economic problems, especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few Americans. We have tried that strategy time and time again, and it’s only helped […]
February 10, 2009 – 10:52 am
As others have pointed out, one trillion dollars–which is what this stimulus “ye dare not call it pork” bill is going to cost–divided by 4 million jobs is……$250,000 per job! Where does one apply for one of these jobs? More to the point, wouldn’t it have been possible for at least one of our numerically-challenged […]
February 9, 2009 – 8:19 pm
I tuned into President Obama’s East Room statement/press conference this evening mainly to see if he’d use the teleprompter. He did use it during the first segment of his remarks and I think it hurt him. The prompter, as I noted earlier, is designed to help the speaker look at his audience more naturally. In a large […]
February 9, 2009 – 12:40 pm
On Friday I noticed that President Obama used a teleprompter when delivering his remarks on the economy in the East Room. I thought it was unusual because the East Room is a pretty intimate venue. I usually associate the teleprompter with bigger crowds and bigger spaces. I can’t think of a time when President Bush […]
February 9, 2009 – 10:25 am
Question: how does the spirit of bipartisanship jibe with Obama’s message (which I paraphrase only slightly), “You lost, we won, so stuff it!” Of course, the administration can count on the mainstream media to carry its water for them. The Washington Post seized on the total of three Republicans to go along with the stimulus […]
February 7, 2009 – 3:14 pm
According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the Obama administration is searching for a phrase to replace the “War on Terror.” Good luck. This, of course, is the classic bureaucratic backwards approach to communications, in which people desperately search for just the right word or phrase to communicate a policy they can’t explain or an objective they […]
