Probably appointing economic team...

It may seem that he's acting a little early, but given the economic state of this country, I don't think that's such a bad thing.

He also has a parent-teacher meeting just before that...good for him!

• Obama press conference coming up...sm - ms
  • I have a question regarding who the president chooses for his cabinet - Kaydie
    • Cabinet is nominated by president, then confirmed by Senate - by simple majority...sm
      • Thx - I didn't know - Kaydie
  • Response - sm
    • There is web site for the transition - sm
      • Cool. Thanks. It's helpful. - nm
    • I agree. Clinton did not let us know - Control.
  • I agree. Heard so much from news - Control.
  • Probably appointing economic team... - Just the big bad
    • Yea but he didn't have to pre-empt my favorite programs - Backwards typist

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The  IDEA of:

Rhambo is a piece fo work, sending a dead fish (that's what we Italians do) to a pollster he was angry with.  But stabbing the table at the Inaugural Dinner in 1992 once for each "traiter" who was now literally dead (his words, not mine) would've been quite the youtube moment.

Love the drivebys & the term they all decided for him:  "sharp elbows."  Classic drivebys!  What part of Bill Clinton turning against him don't people get?  Oh, that's right.  It's that change.gag thing.  That's another reason I rarely read or post on this board.  It's a bunch of DailyKos/HuffPost/moveon wannabes.

Obama has more threats than other presidents-elect
By EILEEN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer Eileen Sullivan, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president's security is so sensitive.

Earlier this week, the Secret Service looked into the case of a sign posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Obama's name and the offer of a "free public hanging." In North Carolina, civil rights officials complained of threatening racist graffiti targeting Obama found in a tunnel near the North Carolina State University campus.

And in a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited $1 entries into "The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool," saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. "Let's hope we have a winner," said the sign, since taken down.

In the security world, anything "new" can trigger hostility, said Joseph Funk, a former Secret Service agent-turned security consultant who oversaw a private protection detail for Obama before the Secret Service began guarding the candidate in early 2007.

Obama, of course, will be the country's first black president, and Funk said that new element, not just race itself, is probably responsible for a spike in anti-Obama postings and activity. "Anytime you're going to have something that's new, you're going to have increased chatter," he said.

The Secret Service also has cautioned the public not to assume that any threats against Obama are due to racism.

The service investigates threats in a wide range. There are "stated threats" and equally dangerous or lesser incidents considered of "unusual interest" — such as people motivated by obsessions or infatuations or lower-level gestures such as effigies of a candidate or an elected president. The service has said it does not have the luxury of discounting anything until agents have investigated the potential danger.

Racially tinged graffiti — not necessarily directed at Obama — also has emerged in numerous reports across the nation since Election Day, prompting at least one news conference by a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Georgia.

A law enforcement official who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that during the campaign there was a spike in anti-Obama rhetoric on the Internet — "a lot of ranting and raving with no capability, credibility or specificity to it."

There were two threatening cases with racial overtones:

• In Denver, a group of men with guns and bulletproof vests made racist threats against Obama and sparked fears of an assassination plot during the Democratic National Convention in August.

• Just before the election, two skinheads in Tennessee were charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxedos.

In both cases, authorities determined the men were not capable of carrying out their plots.

In Milwaukee, police officials found a poster of Obama with a bullet going toward his head — discovered on a table in a police station.

Chatter among white supremacists on the Internet has increased throughout the campaign and since Election Day.

One of the most popular white supremacist Web sites got more than 2,000 new members the day after the election, compared with 91 new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site, stormfront.org, was temporarily off-line Nov. 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, "I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed."

It is not surprising that a black president would galvanize the white supremacist movement, said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who studies the white supremacy movement.

"The overwhelming flavor of the white supremacist world is a mix of desperation, confusion and hoping that this will somehow turn into a good thing for them," Potok said. He said hate groups have been on the rise in the past seven years because of a common concern about immigration.

Click on the individual windows to get the complete plan. 

http://www.johnmccain.com/Issues/jobsforamerica/

the stock market is tanking again. It's down to -212. I have never seen the INDP as low as today at 7154. I think part of it is because they talked about nationalizing CitiGroup and Bank of America.

We all gonna drown. Hope you all have a life jacket.

10.   Blissful ignorance.  "The economy is not my strong suit."

 9.    Ridicule.  In an interview with the Washington Post on 07/9/2008, McCain advisor and national campaign general co-chair Senator Phil Gramm was defining McCain's plans to reform the U.S. economy.  Gramm explained the nation was not in a recession, stating, "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," and "We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."  This would be the same Phil Gramm of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which allowed commercial and investment banks to consolidate.  The legislation allowed Swiss Bank UBS to purchase several American institutions. Gramm later became a lobbyist for UBS, collecting over 750,000 USD in fees. UBS alone issues over 18 Billion USD in subprime mortgages.  

 8.    Denial.  Black Monday, 09/15/2008.  John McCain:  "The fundamentals of our economy are still sound."  A worldwide stock market crash occurred as Lehman Brothers filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and major investment bank Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America. Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 500 points, which is the biggest point drop (up to that point) since September 2001.  FTSE 100 dropped 212 points, and it was the biggest one-day percentage drop since January 21, 2008. Hong Kong, Japan and Korea stock market suspended that day due to public holiday, and they fell over 5% on the following day.   Two weeks later, we had a blacker Monday (09/29/2008) with a 777.68 point drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

 7.    Political grandstanding.  Announcement of suspending his campaign to return to DC to "lead" Congress during economic bail-out negotiations.  This effort led to a defeat of the measure when the votes were cast.  Tried unsuccessfully to use the bailout as an excuse to postpone the presidential debate.  

 6.    Flip-Flop.  Claims to support regulation.  Record says otherwise. 

 5.    Incoherence.  Threatens to fire the chairman of the SEC if he were in office, even though the president does not have the authority to do so.   

 4.    Theft of intellectual property.  Claiming previously existing mortgage buy-out proposal as his own. 

 3.    Avoid / change the subject.  Greg Strimple, a McCain top advisor:  If we keep talking about the economy, we will lose." 

 2.    Engage the politics of division, hate, fear mongering and cultural warfare with high-gear Obama smear campaign:  Ayers, ACORN, Farrakhan, Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Hussein Obama, etc.      

 1.    McCain’s send message to voters is to stop whining about the economy and start focusing on attacking Obama.

and additionally says that we are a nation of "whiners.' McCains top economic advisor is Phil Gramm.

How do you feel about these remarks? Additionally have you or someone you know been experiencing tough times in the last year?

DHL said it was making the cuts to improve profitability and "to prepare the company for the economic challenges ahead."

The company said this latest action would add $1.9 billion to its restructuring costs, for a total of $3.8 billion over two years, most of it during 2008. The company said the cuts would reduce the annual operating costs of DHL U.S. Express to less than $1 billion, from its current cost of $5.4 billion.

DHL is owned by the German company Deutsche Post World Net.

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
  
  
  
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
  
  
  
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
  
  
  
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
  
  
  
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
  
  
  
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
  
  
  
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
  
  
  
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
  
  
  
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
  
  
  
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
  
  
  
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
  

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

As you read the piece (see link below) in the London Times, substitute "Obama" for Brown, and "Geithner" for "Darling".  Then multiply the billions in pounds by 1.5 to change them to US dollars.  You'll think you're reading about the US plan - and the same catastrophic results, among which the worst are:

1.  A burden on future generations of unparalleled and unprincipled proportions.

2.  An outflow of investment capital to other countries that do not penalize the engines of the economy.

What struck me about Brown's plan was his "soak the rich" approach, which exactly mirrors Obama's - i.e., hitting the "upper 2%" of the "wealthy".  It is more than passing strange to me that this is the precise percentage that Obama proposes - and is equally doubtful.  Given Brown's recent meetings with Obama, no one will ever convince me that he didn't get some tutoring from our superclown...er, I mean, superpresident.

Another thing that's striking is how Brown's proposals are structured so that the real pain will be imposed after the elections in GB next year.  In Obama's case, most of the real pain has also been scheduled for the "out years" - meaning that the public won't begin to feel them until beyond 2011. 

And finally, there is the criticism that Brown's program is based on a lot of rosy "recovery" predictions which are very doubtful.  Exactly the same criticism has been leveled at Obama's program, and in our case the criticism has come not from the opposition party but from within the government itself, i.e. the Office of Management and Budget - which is considered to be a very credible source of information on this sort of thing

Cut and paste, or follow the link at the bottom: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6168950.ece?Submitted=true

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