At a time when many are questioning President Obama's commitment to transparency, he has announced that he wants to give more power to oversee systemic risk in the economy to the very non-transparent Federal Reserve:

Obama, in an interview shown on the CBS Early Show, said...

The Washington Post headline reads "Calif. Aid Request Spurned By U.S.":

The Obama administration has turned back pleas for emergency aid from one of the biggest remaining threats to the economy -- the state of California.

Top state officials have gone hat in hand to the administration,...

Jim McGovern on the supplemental appropriations bill, May 14 2009:

What is the exit strategy that brings our servicemen and -women home? Until someone gives me a credible answer, I will be voting "no."

Jim McGovern, June 10 2009:

We need to demand benchmarks and...

I can't understand for the life of me how Jim Cooper, Mr. Fiscal Purity, who brags that he will not submit any earmark requests for fiscal 2009, can now say he's going to vote "yes" on the supplemental.

Cooper voted "no" on the supplemental the first time...

In 2007, 82 Democratic members of Congress signed a pledge. They would never again vote to fund the war in Iraq without plans for troop withdrawal.

Republican critics accused them of demagoguing the war. Of using our soldiers as a political pawns, of not meaning what they said.

Those...

James Kwak cites Chrysler's May sales figures as proof that his predictions of last December are correct, and that a poll which indicated 91% of Americans wouldn't buy a car from a bankrupt Chrysler was just poorly worded:

In May - during which Chrysler was in...

Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post that President Obama is "killing the progressive movement."

He comes to this conclusion after observing lower turnout for this year's America's Future Now conference. But anyone who lived through the Clinton years should have been able to predict that if a Democrat...

New compromise measures supported by Diane Feinstein and Arlen Specter may pave the way for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

With 900,000 union members in the state of Pennsylvania, the Arlen Specter firewall appears to be crumbling.  He knows he can't win a Democratic primary...

John Kerry's Senate Committee hearing on the future of journalism evidently turned into a bunch of self-congratulatory wanking about how important newspapers are to our American way of life:

"High-end journalism is dying in America," testified David Simon, creator of HBO's "The Wire," who wore an open-collar...

There were already serious objections to the use of torture when the Bush administration made it legal in 2002 -- FBI chief Robert Mueller refused to let his agents participate in the CIA's "coercive interrogations" in June of that year, well before the Bybee memo made them...

One of the problems with demonstrations in the modern era is that no matter how many people show up, if the media decides it's not going to cover something, the impact is minimal.

The teabagger demonstrations were rather small relative to the hype and free media time lavished...

Michelle Malkin has a teabagger timeline. She seems to have left a few things out:

December 16, 2007 -- Ron Paul supporters have the first anti-tax Tea Party, reenact dumping of tea into Boston Harbor by tossing banners into a box.

August 2008 -- ChicagoTeaParty.com registered by...

Anyone who has watched Fox News of late has seen them talking about the April 15 "tea party" demonstrations, which they take pains to characterize as a spontaneous grassroots uprising against government spending that they are simply "covering."

Neil Cavuto said:

We are are going to be in the...

Interesting finding in the new Democracy Corps poll:

[N]early three-in-ten voters (29 percent) say that the AIG story raises no doubts at all in their mind about President Obama.

The same cannot be said for Geithner, as nearly half of voters (49 percent) report that the...

Melissa Bean of the Wall Street-friendly New Democrat Coalition led the effort to insert a huge loophole in a bill that would have forced TARP recipients like AIG to stop paying "retention bonuses" as long as they were being supported by taxpayer dollars.

Eighty-one percent of Americans favor such...

Timothy Geithner's new plan, like all his other plans, seems designed to shovel billions into the coffers of the very same bankers who got rich on the mortgage bubble. When the public gets a glimpse of the tip of this giant iceberg, as they did with the AIG bonuses, they're...

Tim Geithner needs to get his story straight. Yesterday he told CNN's Ali Velshi that in fact he did ask Chris Dodd to insert language in the stimulus bill that allowed the AIG bonuses to be paid:

The Treasury Department was concerned that legislation that would restrict...

Elijah Cummings shot huge holes through the stories of both Timothy Geithner and Edward Liddy yesterday during the AIG hearing on Capitol Hill.

Cummings isn't even on the House Financial Services Committee, he's on House Oversight, but he made a special request to question Liddy. Most of the attention...

President Obama's comments regarding the AIG bonuses were welcome, but in the context of recent events, a bit puzzling:

Under these circumstances, it's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How do they justify this...

The White House is worried about backlash over AIG's payout of $450 million in to executives in its high flying Financial Services Group, and that's just a fraction of the $1.2 billion it will pay in bonuses company-wide after losing $100 billion last year.

And well they should...