Situation Room

“AIG is so greedy it could win a Nobel Prize for evil” – Austin Goolsbee, Presidential Adviser

173,000,000,000 dollars total given to them.
165 billion is what they spend on bonuses.

“This is not just a matter of dollars and cents, it’s our fundamental values”
Obama

“Can’t attract the best and brightest? Best and brightest what, the company’s in the toilet. I mean the people running it have run it into the ground, and we’re on the hook us tax payers for hundreds of billions of dollars with these clowns and we’re supposed to pay bonuses to these people? You don’t have to be a politician, that flies in the face of elementary logic a third grade could understand.”
-Jack Cafferty

 “As part of my financial stability plan, the treasury department will begin purchasing up to 15 billion dollars of SBA loans through the troubled asset relief program TARP. We will immediately unfreeze the secondary market for SBA loans. And in crease the liquidity of community banks. I’ve also proposed as part of my budget that we will reduce to zero the capital gains tax for small or startup businesses expanding and making permanent one of the tax cuts in the recovery plan.”
-Obama

Russian Bombers within striking distance of the U.S.

La Orchila in Venezuela and Cuba.
This is just an attempt to remind people that Russia still does have international military power. - Steven Pifer

Some analysts say that they are merely trying to find enemies where they can to justify to their people more military spending.

Iran’s nuclear program. 

Recession will “probably” end this year.
The Special Sector is the first to suffer. Followed by Lending, and the housing market. The Job market lags quite a bit behind all those things.
Even people in the military are getting laid off. Especially the Navy.
Highest Retention rate in 10 years.
3000 sailors this year, next year 3000 more.

Many of the e-mails coming in state that a lot of the quality of the current recession comes from the publicity of …having a bad economy. When all people hear on the news is how bad everything’s going, it intensifies the entire situation.