The communications challenges the administration faced this week were obvious and dominated the news.
But I'd like to pause a moment and raise my Saturday morning cup of tea
to the First Lady. She had a good week -- her idea to host an East Room
event celebrating women at and then to have many of her guests fan out
across the city to touch the lives of some students was excellent, and
the photographs of the surprised children were priceless. And her new
garden is exciting and perhaps will inspire others to try to do the
same in their own backyards, albeit on a much smaller scale. I'd be
happy if I could grow just one carrot on my rooftop - but still.
Often during the last eight years, Mrs. Bush would have that kind of
week while we frantically tried to manage multiple stories. She could
manage a book festival, a State dinner, read to students at a local
school, sp
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Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner will announce a plan early next week to relieve
failing banks of their toxic assets by attracting back private
investors rather than have the government buy up all the risk,
according to officials familiar with the plan.
Private investors, including hedge funds, will be able to bid on the
assets using a pool of capital from the investors and the government,
with taxpayers sharing in profits or losses.
The plan uses up to $100 billion of taxpayer funds to leverage up to $1 trillion in private capital, the officials said.
“We’re creating a market, not bailing out banks,” said an official
briefed on the plan. “Because we’re creating a market, we’re letting
the private sector set the price, which will likely be below purchase
price but
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Ken Lewis added
to critcism Friday of proposed legislation that would heavily tax
bonuses awarded to employees of firms receiving government assistance.
In a memo published in the online edition of The Wall Street Journal,
Lewis wrote that the proposed legislation, which would impose a 90% tax
on bonuses for employees making over $250,000 a year at companies
receiving at least $5 billion in federal aid, "have the potential to
damage the ability of the government to engineer a financial recovery."
Earlier Friday, reports surfaced of similar criticism of the proposed
tax legislation from Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Vikram Pandit.
Did
you miss President Barack Obama the other day discoursing on college
basketball on ESPN? Then perhaps you caught him instead Thursday night
chatting with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.”
Wondered how the first family stays in such fine shape in the White
House? Michelle Obama described their morning workouts earlier this
month in People magazine. Last winter, before taking office, the
president-elect and his wife also shared their thoughts on the family’s
eating habits for Parents magazine.
From CNN to Men’s Journal, Obama has decided to make himself the Everywhere President.
In the midst of a severe recession, with two wars overseas, a new
president is unavoidably going to be at the center of the news
universe. Obama has taken this intense public interest to
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President Barack Obama’s ambitious early agenda has freed him from a
typical obligation of presidents: Keeping the party's organized
interest groups happy.
On March 10, the labor movement’s prize legislation was introduced in
Congress, and President Barack Obama celebrated by chastising teachers’
unions. In February, he (again) skipped Tavis Smiley’s State of the
Black Union. And when he fulfilled a key promise to the abortion rights
movement, he did it with minimum ceremony, on a Friday afternoon.
“He’s not a president who checks the box and does what some people
would consider the minimum to keep various constituencies happy,” said
Bill Samuel, the chief lobbyist for the AFL-CIO. “He doesn’t have to,
because he’s doing very big things.”
But even as he's publicly keeping them at arms length and saying little
on so-called wedge-issues, he's been quietly
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Federal regulators seized two of the nation’s largest corporate credit unions late Friday after discovering the institutions'
losses on mortgage-related securities were greater than previously believed, the Wall Street Journal reported.
U.S. Central Corporate Federal Credit Union and Western Corporate Federal Credit Union were taken into conservatorship
by federal regulators. The two institutions, which provide services not to the general public, but to retail credit unions,
have a total of $57 billion in assets, the paper reported.
Michael E. Fryzel, chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, said that the government’s swift action was necessary
to ensure the stability of both the credit union system and the insurance fund responsible for backing up retail-credit union
deposits, according to the Journal.
John Stossel is the best-known libertarian in the news media. As the
co-anchor of the long-running and immensely popular ABC News program
20/20, auteur of a continuing series of specials on topics ranging from
corporate welfare to educational waste to laws criminalizing consensual
adult behavior, and author of best-selling books such as Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, Stossel brings a consistent message of liberty to millions of viewers on a weekly basis.
It
wasn’t always this way. Born in 1947, Stossel started out as a
standard-issue consumer reporter, working in Oregon and New York before
joining the staff of Good Morning America and, later, 20/20.
He did scare stories about everything from pharmaceutical rip-offs to
exploding coffee pots. Then, in the 1980s, he encountered reason, which radically changed his thinking about the benefits of laissez faire in economics and personal lifestyles.
“It was a revelation,” he writes in hi
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Washington D.C. has
failed us on many levels over the last many decades. We have allowed
our elected officials to serve as politicians instead of principled
leaders. Far from being "statesmen," they embarrass themselves and mock
our democracy by spending time raising money across the nation, instead
of indicating interest in their job, which is to govern, not constantly
run for office. Why does this happen? Most of them have such a strong
desire to win re-election that they will corrupt the system and abort
their duties as stewards to see to it that this happens.
Let's take our own U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd as a prime example.
As a ranking member of the all-important U.S. Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs between 2003 and 2008, Dodd accepted
donations from the nearly defunct insurance giant American
International Group totaling nearly $225,000. In 2008, while we looked
to him to represent our best interest
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As Congress and the Obama Administration consider legislation to limit bonuses at American International Group (AIG: 1.23, -0.36, -22.64%),
documents obtained by FOX Business show AIG bonuses and other
compensation were reviewed and changed by officials at the Treasury
Department and Federal Reserve in November, when the Treasury made its
first investment of taxpayer funds -- $40 billion -- in the company.
“Have your benefits team made any progress on the ‘soft’ issues, or heard anything from the fed [sic] on the bonus situation?”
a Treasury official wrote in an e-mail on Nov. 1 about the transaction.
Despite
their deliberations at the time, the Treasury and Fed officials, which
were part of the Bush Ad
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Germany is talking to possible Opel bidders: economy minister
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu
Guttenberg said on Saturday he was talking to potential investors in
troubled German carmaker Opel, rejecting a media report saying there
was not yet any serious bidder. "I can only repeat: Talks are being
held with serious and less serious interested parties," Guttenberg told
reporters at an event held by his Christian Social Union (CSU) party in
Erlangen, Bavaria state.
U.S. bank rescue plan could come on Monday: report
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government will announce as soon as
Monday a long-awaited plan to try to get bad assets off the books of
banks, a cornerstone of its efforts to tackle the credit crisis, The
Wall Street Journal reported. The Obama administration, battling a
deepening recession, is set to adopt a three-pronged approach to
ridding the financial system of so-called toxic
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The communications challenges the administration faced this week were obvious and dominated the news. 
Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner will announce a plan early next week to relieve
failing banks of their toxic assets by attracting back private
investors rather than have the government buy up all the risk,
according to officials familiar with the plan. 
Did
you miss President Barack Obama the other day discoursing on college
basketball on ESPN? Then perhaps you caught him instead Thursday night
chatting with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.” 
President Barack Obama’s ambitious early agenda has freed him from a
typical obligation of presidents: Keeping the party's organized
interest groups happy.