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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to roughly $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday. "The new forecasts are based on new data that reflect how severe the economic downturn was in the late fall of last year and the winter of this year," said the official, who is familiar with the plans. "Our budget projections are now in line with the spring and summer projections that the Congressional Budget Office put out." The CBO said in June that deficits between 2010...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

Thought you be interested in this roll call vote on Sen. Tom Coburn’s proposal to allow traded-in Cash-for-Clunkers cars to be used to assist charities and poor families. Here’s the text of the proposal. [Amendment, quickly: The clunkers, instead of being destroyed, could be donated to charitable organizations] Here's the breakdown

So you can see the dealers are enjoying it. My local television stations are flooded with Cash for Clunkers commercials. Dealers are soaking it up. So the question then arises…with a cost per consumer of TWO HUNDRED AND TEN TIMES the rebate they are getting for trading in their car, is it worth it? Or is Cash for Clunkers just a plan to get some more money in the automakers pockets? It seems they are the ones benefiting from this, not the consumer.

<p>The new infusion means the troubled company has drawn a total of $45.9 billion of its $200 billion lifeline this year. Fannie Mae and its sister firm, Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500), were taken over by the federal government last September amid the global financial meltdown.</p>

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ----------------------------------------------------------------- For Immediate Release August 5, 2009 REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON THE ECONOMY Monaco Coach, Wakarusa, Indiana 11:55 AM. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much. Well, it is wonderful to be in Wakarusa. Thank you so much for the wonderful welcome. Herman, thanks for the great introduction. It is great to be back in Indiana. (Applause.) This is as close as I've gotten to home in a while. (Laughter.) And I flew out here with somebody who I think the...

Note:The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release July 29, 2009 REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT TOWN HALL Broughton High School Raleigh, North Carolina 12:05 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Hello, North Carolina! (Applause.) Thank you so much. All right, please, everybody have a seat. I am so excited to be back in Raleigh, to be back in North Carolina. (Applause.) This is a community and a state that has been so good to me. (Applause.) And I know that part of the reason is because I travel...

re than 4,600 new police officers are to be hired across the United States at a cost of one billion dollars as part of the country's economic stimulus plan, administration officials said Tuesday. The grants will be awarded to some 1,046 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and will provide the full salary and benefits for 4,699 officers for three years, according to a Justice Department statement. There is also a provision that departments receiving the funds retain the positions for at least a fourth year

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM Office of Communications & Outreach 400 Maryland Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 _______________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release July 24, 2009 PRESIDENT OBAMA, U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION DUNCAN ANNOUNCE NATIONAL COMPETITION TO ADVANCE SCHOOL REFORM Obama Administration Starts $4.35 Billion "Race to the Top" Competition, Pledges a Total of $10 Billion for Reforms President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that states leading the way on school reform will be eligible to compete for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top competitive grants to support education reform...

Note: The following text is a quote: Vice President Biden, Attorney General Holder Announce Recovery Act Funding to Support Law Enforcement Recovery Act Funds to Add Police Officers to the Streets; Build Safer Communities Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder today announced $1 billion in grants to fund the hiring and rehiring of law enforcement officers all across the country under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The grants will be awarded to 1,046 law enforcement agencies from all 50 states and will provide 100 percent of the approved salary and benefits for 4,699 officers...

Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu. Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines.

Freddie Mac Gets Another $6.1B from Gov't BY STEPHEN BERNARD | AP Business Writer You have entered an invalid email address From (email):* Required NEW YORK (AP) - Battered mortgage giant Freddie Mac received $6.1 billion in new funds from the Treasury Department to help offset its mounting liabilities, according to a regulatory filing submitted Wednesday. The company could also be close to naming a new, permanent CEO, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has been operating Freddie Mac since last fall, requested the funds for Freddie Mac after the mortgage...

One of President Barack Obama's most prominent Wall Street backers gives him high marks on just about everything except his approach to Wall Street.

By Glenn Somerville and Corbett Daly WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department said on Thursday it has put another $7.5 billion into auto lender GMAC to enable it to support both Chrysler LLC [CBS.UL], and General Motors Corp Corp (GM.N) car buyers and partly meet a shortage of capital. The widely anticipated action is intended to help counter a scarcity of credit that has helped drive sales of domestic cars into a ditch. The Federal Reserve also extended an exemption that will let GMAC keep lending to GM dealers and retail customers, which it normally would be...

Oregon Republicans offer no-new-tax budget by Harry Esteve, The Oregonian Tuesday May 12, 2009, 1:43 PM SALEM -- Oregon could pay for a full school year and protect its most vulnerable citizens without raising taxes, according to an alternative budget proposal released Tuesday by Republican legislative leaders. Their two-year spending plan, outlined in the broadest terms at a news conference, effectively gives most state agencies the same amount of money they got over the past two years and maintains a surplus to cover emergencies. "A rush to new taxes, quite frankly, is unnecessary," said Sen. Frank Morse, one of the...

At least $53 million in federal funds have gone to ACORN activists since 1994, and the controversial group could get up to $8.5 billion more tax dollars despite being under investigation for voter registration fraud in a dozen states. The economic stimulus bill enacted in February contains $3 billion that the non-profit activist group known more formally as the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now could receive, and 2010 federal budget contains another $5.5 billion that could also find its way into the group’s coffers. An Examiner review of federal spending data found that ACORN has received at least...

Reporting from Washington -- President Obama touted his plan for developing high-speed railways Thursday, detailing how $13 billion in federal money would act as a "down payment" on creating speedier passenger train service. "High-speed rail is long overdue, and this plan lets American travelers know that they are not doomed to a future of long lines at the airports or jammed cars on the highways," Obama said. "There's no reason why we can't do this." The proposal lists the long-planned rail corridor from Los Angeles to San Francisco as one that could receive funding, as well as a network featuring...

Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn't have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG's reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don't add up. The annual report of one major AIG subsidiary, American Home Assurance, shows that it owes $25 billion to another AIG affiliate, National Union Fire, Gober maintains. But American has only $22...

Books claiming that science disproves ‘young-earth’ creationism are very common, and books that claim the Bible itself does not mandate a literal interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis are not in short supply either. David Snoke’s book A Biblical Case for an Old Earth ostensibly falls in the latter group, though his main reason for rejecting biblical creation is really uniformitarian ‘science’. Books like these generally don’t pose a threat to informed creationists, and this one is no exception. In fact, Snoke could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had actually taken the time to...

D.C. officials say any federal stimulus funds provided for schools and bridges in the District will enable them to drop their own funding plans for such projects and divert the money to help plug other gaps in their 2010 budget. The officials argued at a meeting of the Federation of Citizens Associations of the District of Columbia on Tuesday evening that such action would not undermine the purpose of the stimulus package, which has been designed to move money quickly into projects where it will produce the most jobs. But some economists see the plan as an example of a...