President Obama’s address to Congress Tuesday may not have won over many GOP lawmakers, but the public gave it strong reviews. Of a representative sample of Americans who watched the speech, 80 percent said they approved of Obama’s plans to handle the economic crisis, according to a CBS News poll. Before the speech, 63 percent of them approved. Also, 91 percent of those surveyed approved of the proposals Obama outlined in the speech, though only 55 percent thought he would be able to accomplish the goals.
It’s no surprise that reactions from conservative commentators weren’t as positive. Power Line blog said Obama was “surprisingly ineffective.” And Charles Murray of National Review complained that “it looks very much as if the president is oblivious to everything we’ve learned about social programs and educational reforms in the last 40 years” — that they don’t work, in Murray’s view.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel won’t have much free time for the next few years, so where he sleeps might seem beside the point. But the IRS might have another view of his rent-free basement digs in a house owned by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and her husband, pollster Stan Greenberg. The Chicago Tribune reports that “tax experts are divided about whether Emanuel would have an IRS liability for the free room.” Others have raised questions about why Emanuel didn’t list the room as income or a gift on congressional disclosure forms when he served in the House, and about Emanuel’s past use of Greenberg’s polling services. More basic is this question: Should the president’s go-to guy be living rent-free anywhere, let alone in the home of a member of Congress and a pollster?
Nationalizing banks is as American as apple pie, argued columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. “Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the FDIC seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the FDIC has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent.”
Krugman argues that the case for nationalization rests on three observations.
“First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary.
“Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.
“Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.”
One of the five Kansas road construction projects ripe for federal stimulus spending is a new interchange at 47th Street South and I-135, which has been discussed for decades and finally could begin construction as soon as early June. As the project will replace a deteriorating bridge, it will untangle traffic. And the new interchange is expected to fire up development nearby, such as the proposed retail and hotel development South Fork just south of 47th Street. It was great to see the underserved south side come out on top in the process of deciding where to spend Wichita’s $45 million for stimulus-funded transportation projects.
