At least they've moved on to baseball and aren't asking him about college football anymore.

Fucking lawyers...

'Change we can believe in' is going to haunt this fool like herpes unless he starts to get the important stuff right.

Honestly, He's also gotta explain to us why pissing on this economic wildfire is going to work and I am not satisfied with the "at least we'll have new bridges if it doesn't work" reason. IMHO, in less than one year, Road crews (etc) will find themselves being paid the cost of a loaf of bread as hyper inflation makes their contract-driven salaries worthless.

Sure this may be the best action to take if you must take one on a budget, but it doesn't mean it has even a small chance of being effective given the mountain of debt and related instruments that have essentially come due. The numbers just don't make sense.

As Boo has mentioned, the scale of this package may be off by a few fold. I can't see it coming close to having any real effect until it is at least an order bigger(!): We keep talking about stimulus in proportion to our GDP. What does that have to do with anything? It has to be taken in proportion to the total bad debt. The worst number aggregating global debt and derivatives is over $1,000 Trillion dollars. We need to be talking about percentages of that number, applied globally, in concert, spent by all real players. If no one can afford that, why try?

It's become quite obvious that the right actions will not even be discussed because they don't hold out some fantasy of eventual taxpayer profit or magically fix everything for pennies.

The game is over.

Obama had his very limited chances, and it is indeed unfair that he was greeted with these conditions upon his inaugural. But I am afraid he's blowing it. Bigtime.

Honestly, he never had a chance.

I'm afraid Bush's "madness" was always as more about this coming crisis than the now obvious red herring of 'terror'..

From an article I wrote in late 2002:

Once again proving he is like a wonderful love-child of Herbert Hoover and a second term Ronald Reagan, President Bush has continued to bravely ignore the threats of a total erosion of the lower and middle classes' economic stability and an impending credit derivatives crisis of vast proportions likely to be paid off by taxpayers (more money!) with few punished. He's acheived all this while steadfastly defending the upperclass's right to bilk millions out of publicly traded companies' shareholders and pensioners. Americans saved nothing during the Clinton Boom and have little or no faith in their earnings future while they also carry some of the largest person debt burdens since the Depression. Oh, and they are going to change the laws to make it harder to declare bankruptcy...

C'mon - are you telling me lone nutballs have been getting the signal right for almost a decade and the gov't isn't even thinking about this stuff?

I honestly wonder what they think they are up to in DC.

Declaring the bottom is the only way back up..

Ridiculous, illogical, and dishonest. Lets say, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that Iran IS pursuing nuclear weapons. He doesn't think maybe the fact that Israel has hundreds of nukes, has been acting increasingly irrational, and has actually threatened to attack Iran, including explicit threats of a nuclear attack? How can it be Iran that could set off a nuclear arms race in the region when it is surrounded by countries that have significant nuclear arsenals, some of which are not all that stable - Russia, Pakistan, India, China, and the aforementioned Israel, unquestionably the greatest threat.

And then, of course, there are the threats from the United States, and the evidence having nuclear weapons just might be a deterrent.

The reality, of course, is that there is absolutely no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and abundant evidence that it does not. Iran is acting 100% within its rights under the NPT. It has every right and reason to develop nuclear technology for domestic civilian use, which is exactly what it is doing. Weapons grade Uranium is around 90% U-235, fuel grade typically around 3-5%. Iran is enriching to the 3-5% level, and has committed no violations of the NPT.

And so what if Iran were to get a couple of nuclear weapons in 5-10 years? Contrary to the propaganda, the leaders of Iran are not a bunch of wild-eyed nihilists who are going to ensure turning their country into a series of glass-lined craters by launching a few pathetic bombs at Israel, or stupider yet, the U.S. The Iranians are rational actors who are not interested in territorial expansion or military domination. Israel, not so much.

1) we no longer prosecute for war crimes as we did after WW II (we executed waterboarders)

and

2)  we accept the "Nuremberg defense."

I am sick at heart.