via Obama Budget Cuts: Will Order Cabinet to Quickly Cut $100 Million From Department Budgets.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama convenes his first formal Cabinet meeting Monday and will ask department and agency chiefs to look for ways over the next 90 days to cut $100 million out of the federal budget, a senior administration official said.
The Associated Press - Shill for the Right-Wing
So the President is back from his wonderfully triumphant, super-duper Latin American Summit and is holding a Cabinet meeting today. He’s looking for ways to trim the budget and some have already gone public. The AP itemizes them in the next two paragraphs. (Such and such agency trims x amount of dollars, blah, blah, blah for a few short paragraphs.) There’s no word in the article about Obama’s successes in Latin America.
The rest of the article is “What else is in the news about Obama?”
It is amazing that only two or three paragraphs were on budget cuts, yet the article earned HUGE headlines at HuffPo. I shouldn’t be surprised as this is a common trick that HuffPo throws out there everyday. This poorly written article jumps from budget cuts to Obama’s seemingly failed attempt to get a budget passed.
The AP is at it again by trying to turn a success into a failure for Democrats only six short one-or two-sentence paragraphs into the article:
Earlier this month, both the House and Senate passed companion budget plans giving Obama and his Capitol Hill allies a key victory, but 20 House Democrats from GOP-leaning areas abandoned him on the final vote because of unhappiness over deficits.
These sentiments are in Republican districts, mostly in the south, and are currently all lathered up against more taxes – a sign that they are listening to their Republican friends instead of reading the tax proposals themselves. Of the 20 House Members voting nay, 11 are from “red” states and a few more are from traditional red states, but won by Obama in November. A number of the nay votes are members of the Blue Dog Coalition.
These House Democratic Party “nay” voters simply voted their constituency which were mostly confused about issues as evidenced by recent “tea bag” protests. Obama’s budget looks big but remember, if Bush had put all the war supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan into his budgets over the years, there would have been numbers similar to Obama’s.
Fox news, with the help of the AP, have made strides in muddling the budget issue with the tax issue in some geographical ares, since the Republican party is now a regional party. Some of the protest signs portrayed Obama as being everything from Hitler (right-wing dictator), to Lenin (left-wing dictator). It was a messy conglomeration of anger balled up in a tea bag.
This extraordinarily bad article jumps from the budget, to the tea bag protests (in order to link the two), to Obama’s nominee for Health Secretary, to the CIA, to Rahm Emmanuel, and finally to the torture memos. And that is where I want to make my final point.
The Associated Press leads into the subject with the Republican, straw-man, Rush Limbaugh, bottom-feeder, nut-job talking point about releasing the memos makes us less safe and how the Democrats bought into that by pushing back hard:
Republican lawmakers and others contend that national security was undermined by the release of the memos. On Sunday, Obama administration officials pushed back vigorously against that claim.
“Republican lawmakers and others” are weasel words used here to reflect the author’s feelings which are bolstered in transference to those that may have some power, which the author lacks, to make any kind of difference .
Here’s David Axelrod speaking softly as he always does about our values as a nation and how we can honor those values (unlike the previous administration) and secure our interests simultaneously. See if you can find the “vigorous” rebuttal because I think it was handled with finesse:
“We are absolutely confident that we have the tools necessary to get the information we need to keep this country safe,” senior presidential adviser David Axelrod said Sunday. “And we don’t believe and the president of the United States does not believe that this is a contest between our values and our security. He thinks we can honor both and execute both. And that’s what he’s going to do.”
The point is, true to the Associated Press’ style, they shill for the neo-cons at the end. As the article ends, the author leaves the reader with the Republican or conservative viewpoint as a last impression:
Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under Bush, said the public release of the memos will make it harder to get useful information from suspected terrorists being detained by the United States.
They just could not end the article with David Axelrod’s opinion.
Follow me on Twitter!
A Second Look | Where Has All The Money Gone, Long Time Passing…
via Voices of Power: Elizabeth Warren – washingtonpost.com
Lois Romano interviews Elizabeth Warren, Washington Post, October 8, 2009
Elizabeth Warren is the Chairman of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel created by Congress to “review the current state of financial markets and the regulatory system.” Today she is interviewed by Lois Romano of the Washington Post. The interview was inspired largely by Warren’s appearance in Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Capitalism, A Love Story”.
If you think that our financial sector needs some oversight, you’ll love this interview. Warren cuts to the chase by explaining the steps the Treasury Department took to hand over large sums of cash to Wall Street without accountability for either Wall Street or the Treasury Department, who had the power to do so. Warren is a watchdog and a whistleblower. Without her panel’s investigation and reporting there would be no accounting for a very large sum of our taxpayer dollars siphoned through TARP. Here’s a piece of the interview:
The problem I’m having with the whole interview in general is the tone. Warren omits some things and emphasizes others that give the interview a anti-Big Treasury, pro-underdog slant. What she says is true, mostly, but accounting for the entire $700 Billion approved for the TARP program isn’t as mysterious as she makes it sound.
First of all, Congress hasn’t spent the entire amount allotted. Below is a great graphic that should have been included in the Washington Post interview. It is taken from TARP: Taxpayers on the hook for $200 billion from an article posted on CNNMoney.com October 3, 2009, current as of this week in honor of TARP’s one year anniversary.
Particular attention should be paid to the big blue piece of the pie, “Not yet committed”. That piece indicates that the $700 Billion figure that Warren tosses around is actually only $446 Billion. That is still a huge sum of our hard-earned taxes, but not as much as Warren would lead you to believe.
The next little bit of omission that I want to draw your attention to is the big orange piece of the pie called “Returned”. Warren never mentions, not even once, that 10 major banks and 22 smaller banks have paid back a large chunk, $78 Billion, of the money handed to them. As reported by Huffington Post back in June, 2009, Treasury approved $68 Billion in TARP money from 10 of the largest financial institutions to be given back.
Even though she doesn’t present the whole picture, the bulk of Warren’s interview is right on target and worth reading in its entirety. Her main point is about how we handed money over to the banks without any type of regulation or enforcement of policy. She says that Secretary Paulson didn’t ask AIG and others, “What are you going to do with it?”
There are opposite opinions of how the economic meltdown was handled and the value of TARP. From CNNMoney.com:
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/08/elizabeth-warren-the-midd_n_313798.html
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/09/tarp-repayment-treasury-s_n_213065.html
(NEW! YOU CAN NOW POST COMMENTS WITHOUT REGISTERING AND WITHOUT AWATING MODERATION)