Where's the Outrage?

Tuesday Morning News Roundup

• It appears that Karl Rove will be testifying on Capitol Hill about the nine fired US attorneys. Executive privilege will not cover Mr. Rove anymore. Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, has suggested that Karl Rove will not take the fifth when testifying before Congress, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
• We may have just a little bit more insight into Timothy Geithner‘s thought processes. In spite of having spent weeks coming up with a plan to bail out the banks and dispose of toxic debt, he changed his mind at the last minute. He decided that his original plan was too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers. Unfortunately, he changed his mind at the last minute and did not have enough time to work out the details. Postponing the announcement may have been worse. This is very important. The combination of private and public funding to buy up the toxic debt has got to work.  There will be no second chance.
• General Motors and Chrysler are in the final stages of negotiation with labor unions and bondholders. They have to submit their plan for solvency to the Obama administration today, which is going to be extremely important for our economy’s recovery. This, in fact, may be the engine that drives the economic recovery for the next 18-36 months.
• A new poll of presidential historians was made public yesterday. The good news is that George W. Bush is not the worst president of all time. That honor goes to James Buchanan. He really didn’t do enough to try to prevent the Civil War. The best presidents of all time are, in order, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman. George W. Bush is currently ranked as the seventh worst of all time. I think, if we give the historians time, we will watch as Bush works his way closer and closer to the bottom of the list.
• California’s economic problems are serious. They have a $40 billion shortfall. California’s main problem, as I see it, is its diversity. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but in California there exist both hard-core conservatives and hard-core liberals and these two extremes don’t agree on anything. Ideology gets in the way of solving the state’s problems.
• The founder of an Islamic television station in upstate New York has confessed to beheading his wife. I find it awfully sad that someone could be so deranged.

Tags: Economy, Obama administration, Party Politics // 2 Comments »