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Guy Benson calls this "the political quote of the year", but it may be more like the defining moment of Obamanomics and Barack Obama's fiscal policies. Paul Ryan destroyed interim OMB chief Jeffrey Zients in testimony before Congress this week already, deconstructing White House claims to have $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years when their contribution to that effort was only $400 billion, or roughly $40 billion a year. In this five-minute clip, Ryan points out that the budget he proposed last year actually eliminated deficit spending over the long term, while the budget Obama proposed...

"It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that -- that heals, not in a way that wounds." -- President Obama, speech at Tuscon memorial service, January 12, 2011. "The [Suskind] book amounts to a drive-by shooting of a president and his key economic advisers who deserve encomiums, not unfounded second guessing and inaccurate revisionist history." -- Former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, writing at the Politico, October 2, 2011 [emphasis added]. So less than nine months after President Obama pronounces pious words about talking "in a...

The Obama White House is a “hostile” environment for women even though they occupy many of the senior positions in the West Wing, according to a new book. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including President Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. The book portrays a White House in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. And top female advisers said they felt left out of key meetings or overpowered...

As noted here yesterday, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, in a Politico piece, lashed out at Ron Suskind, depicting Suskind's book on bad times in the Obama White House as a "drive-by shooting" of President Obama and his staff. That hardly seemed in the spirit of President Obama's pious call, in his much-touted Tucson memorial speech, for people to speak in a way "that heals, not wounds" . Joe Scarborough called Rattner out on the matter on today's Morning Joe. But Rattner blithely batted away Scarborough's depiction of "drive-by" as harsh and rhetorically inflammatory. View the video here.

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war. The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in...

Although I fell in love with Sarah Palin in 2008, she had begun to drive me a just a little bit crazy recently, often so inarticulate that I thought she was trying to make Barack Obama without a teleprompter look like Pericles. All is forgiven. Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president redeemed her. She did the right thing by her country, her party, and by herself. By not running, Palin preserves her status as a power broker in the Republican Party, which could have been diminished by a bad showing in the primaries. She will be big in...

WASHINGTON - Supposedly, this White House has just made a furious attempt to sink a book, "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, which came out Sept. 20. Jay Carney, the White House spinmeister, spoke ill of it. Numerous former White House staffers spoke ill of it. Carney said, "One passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia." Why would a respected writer want to do that? I suspect that the White House is going to be as effective in sinking Suskind as it has been in keeping President Barack Obama's polling...

A pair of years-old anecdotes, recently revisited, show that top economists in the White House and Obama’s cabinet expressed serious doubts about the White House’s emphasis on and approach to green jobs. Three top economic advisers, on at least two occasions, have sounded alarms about that agenda. In October 2010, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then-director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers warned that the oversight of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee programs – one of which financed defunct solar company Solyndra – was too lax, the Los Angeles Times reported [1]: At a White House meeting in late...

A claim in Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President, that the Obama Administration created a hostile workplace for his female advisors was met with denials from current White House Budget Director Jack Lew. “The contention that the President or any of his male appointees would denigrate these women in any way is mistaken. To the contrary, we all had a broad respect for these ladies,” Lew said as he struggled to suppress a titter over his use of the word “broad.” Former head of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer’s complaint,...

You want a quick and easy introduction to media bias? Just look at the reception given to author Ron Suskind when he appeared on NBC's "Today" show recently to promote his new book, "Confidence Men," which is critical of President Obama -- and then compare it to the reception Suskind received in 2004 when he appeared on "Today" to tout another book, "The Price of Loyalty," which was critical of President George W. Bush. Start with the new book. The newsworthy bits in "Confidence Men" are well known: Suskind reports the Obama White House is tough on women, with former...

I've been saying for some time that Barack Obama is the most economically ignorant president since Zachary Taylor, but I increasingly fear I've been doing the general a disservice. It's not just erroneous economics, but sheer ignorance of markets and economics. You see it in periodic comments of the President. Perhaps the most famous came when he said that ATMs and airport ticket kiosks lead to unemployment: “When you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at...

Ron Suskind’s controversial new book, “Confidence Men” reveals how President Barack Obama came to embrace “RomneyCare” as a model of reform.For example, it reveals that in a memo to President Obama concerning potential health care reform options, White House chief health care official Nancy-Ann DeParle, directed Obama’s attention to the only working model for reform in the country: Massachusetts, whose health care overhaul bill passed in 2005 under a brokered deal between then-governor Mitt Romney and the state’s Democratic legislature.” (p. 262) Suskind goes on to demonstrate that President Obama, who previously had not embraced the individual mandate, was...

Friction about the roles of women in the Obama White House grew so intense during the first two years of the presidentÂ’s tenure that he was forced to take steps to reassure senior women on his staff that he valued their presence and their input. At a dinner in November 2009, several senior female aides complained directly to the president that men enjoyed greater access to him and often muscled them out of key policy discussions. Those tensions prompted Obama, urged on by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, to elevate more women into senior White House positions, recognize them more during...

While co-host Ann Curry on Tuesday's NBC "Today" wondered if Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men" was "fact or fiction," on August 5, 2008, then-co-host Meredith Vieira touted Suskind's claim in "Way of the World" that the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war was "worse than Watergate." Speaking of Suskind's latest work on Tuesday, Curry described how Obama administration "top officials are lining up to say they were either misquoted or taken out of context by the author." She then wondered: "Did he get the story right?" In contrast, while Vieira noted the Bush White House labeling Suskind's book at that...

"Talk is circulating about an eye-opening new book on the Obama administration set to come out tomorrow. Confidence Men, by Pulitzer-prize winning author Ron Suskind, suggests that a handful of power-hungry, Wall Street-loving advisers undermined the president's quest for financial reform, according to an early look at the book by New York magazine. To boot, these advisers, including the "insubordinate" Tim Geithner and the "monomaniacal" Larry Summers, were "pretty awful to women," says New York's Adam Moss. A number of women, in contrast, come off as heroes--among them our own Sen. Maria Cantwell."

"Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, to be published tomorrow, could not have come at a worse time for Mr Obama. His popularity remains in the doldrums, he is struggling to implement a new economic plan and he faces a tough challenge to be re-elected next year. Larry Summers, a former top economic adviser is quoted as telling Peter Orszag, then Mr Obama's budget director, at a dinner in Washington's Bombay Club: "We're home alone. There's no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." Mr Summers was US Treasury...

A new book about Barack Obama, whose Pulitzer-prize winning author received extensive co-operation from the White House, portrays the American president as indecisive, out of his depth and facing insubordination from advisers. "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, to be published tomorrow, could not have come at a worse time for Mr Obama. His popularity remains in the doldrums, he is struggling to implement a new economic plan and he faces a tough challenge to be re-elected next year. Larry Summers, a former top economic adviser is quoted as telling Peter Orszag,...

Top female advisers felt left out by a boy's club in the White House where rampant infighting sabotaged the administration's economic decisions, according to a controversial new book. Sidelined and ignored in the West Wing, some women aides reportedly complained to President Obama about their treatment in 2009. In an excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, a female senior aide is quoted as calling the White House a hostile environment for women. Confidence Men: Wall Steet, Washington and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind, is due out in the shops next Tuesday. Former Communications Director Anita Dunn...

A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm....

The Obama White House is a "hostile" environment for women even though they occupy many of the senior positions in the West Wing, according to a new book. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including President Obama, for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. "This place would be in court for a hostile workplace," former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying, according to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy. "Because it actually fits all of the classic legal requirements for...

Like the discovery of gambling in “Casablanca,” the mainstream media is shocked, shocked! to learn there is chaos and back-stabbing in the Obama White House. The media missed the story for the same reason Capt. Renault missed gambling at Rick’s Cafe: They chose to. A cash kickback did the trick in the film. In real life, the Washington pack turns away from the truth for something less forgivable. Three years after President Obama took office, much of the national press corps remains remarkably uncurious about what has gone wrong inside the land of Hope & Change. Whether still mesmerized by...

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn't dispute a Harvard economist's estimate that each job in the White House's jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said the pricetag is the wrong way to measure the bill's worth. And he also pointed out, in an interview today with ABC News' David Muir, that there is no other option on the table for getting the economy moving and putting more people back to work. "You've got to think about the costs of the alternatives," Geithner said when asked about Harvard economist Martin Feldstein's calculation that each job created by President Obama's American Jobs Act...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including Obama, Geithner and other top officials for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President,"...

After months of speculation that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would step down after the debt ceiling was raised, he told the President on Friday that he would stay. "Secretary Geithner has let the president know that he plans to stay on in his position at Treasury," according to a statement issued by Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Jenni LeCompte. "He looks forward to the important work ahead on the challenges facing our great country." "The President asked Secretary Geithner to stay on a Treasury and welcomes his decision," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Geithner was heavily involved in...

The first official demand for a change at the top as a result of the S&P downgrade has come in, courtesy of Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who has just demanded the head of the most incompetent and tax evading Treasury Secretary in US history, on a silver platter. "President Obama should fire U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner over the debt downgrade. If Obama won't remove him, then the US Senate should withdraw its consent of Geithner's appointment to U.S. Treasury because someone in the White House needs to be held responsible for this disaster." Zero Hedge fully...

After the resolution of the debt-ceiling impasse, rumors have been flying that the last senior member of Barack Obama’s original economic team will call it quits. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refused to answer questions about his plans yesterday on ABC’s Good Morning America, which doesn’t exactly sound like a man planning on staying in the job much longer: Speculation is rife in Washington that Geithner, who has outlasted all of President Obama’s other original economic advisors, will resign now that the nation’s borrowing capacity has been extended to 2013 and a 10-year, $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction agreement enacted.Geithner’s consideration of a...

For a vision of how the Greek debt meltdown is going to end, look no further than the International Monetary Fund's post mortem into a similar crisis that came to a head almost exactly a decade ago - Lessons From The Crisis In Argentina. Substitute the word Greece for Argentina in the IMF's analysis of eight years ago, and you'd have a near perfect account of the present crisis The policy review document was originally published in October 2003 and signed off by then relatively unknown IMF official called Tim Geithner, now the US Treasury Secretary no less. Strangely enough,...

Imagine this, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner read from the U.S. Constitution as he sat onstage for an interview with Politico's Mike Allen at the Newseum in Washington May 25, 2011. Not to uphold the constitution, but to make a case for raising the U.S. national debt limit. A bitter partisanship is escalating between the White House and Congress over raising the national debt ceiling. Republicans want to cut spending, while Democrats and the White House want more government. So the Treasurer to make his point utilizes the U.S. Constitution. Holding up a U.S. Constitution pocket-book to his audience, he...

Forget the birthers, the latest conspiracy theorists to sweep Washington are the "default deniers," a growing group of conservatives who think the prospect of a U.S. default is a hoax. Leading the charge is U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), a Tea Party-backed freshman who claims the Obama administration has greatly exaggerated the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt to scare Congress into raising the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate heats up, Toomey's theory has gained surprising acceptance among some Republican lawmakers. Politico reports that nearly 100 House members and 22 senators have signed Toomey's Full Faith...

Just announced on the Treasury department blog...Today, the United States has reached the statutory debt limit. Secretary Geithner sent the following letter to Congress this morning alerting them to actions that have be taken to create additional headroom under the debt limit so that Treasury can continue funding obligations made by Congresses past and present. The Secretary declared a "debt issuance suspension period" for the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, permitting Treasury to redeem a portion of existing Treasury securities held by that fund as investments and suspend issuance of new Treasury securities to that fund as investments. He...

OCALA - A former restaurant owner and chef was arrested Friday for refusal to pay or file tax return, theft of sales tax and failure to file six consecutive sales tax returns. Loring W. Felix, 52, was picked up by Sheriff's Deputy Brian Haworth at 2811 S.W. 19th Court at 7 a.m. He was taken to the Marion County Jail, where he was booked in. The warrant was signed by Judge Willard Pope on Monday. Bond for the charges was $7,500. Felix's Restaurant had been a fixture at 917 E. Silver Springs Blvd. for close to a decade before closing...

NEW YORK—New headwinds—most notably oil prices—confront the U.S. march to recovery, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday. Unemployment, long a weak spot in the economy, remains "very high," and the economy feels "unfairly hard" to most Americans, Mr. Geithner said in comments that weighed on the dollar. He said oil prices at current levels, while challenging, weren't at levels that threaten to derail the recovery. First, though, U.S. lawmakers must agree to increase the debt limit, something some politicians have said they will not do unless there is broad agreement on massive cuts to a bloated federal budget. The...

If you think it's hard now to balance the budget, just wait until our credit rating gets trashed. Monday’s warning from the Standard & Poor’s rating agency -- that the U.S. government’s credit rating could be revised downward -- produced a firestorm in Washington. Republicans called it a "wake-up call," while the Obama administration's chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, lambasted Standard & Poor’s actions as purely "political." Credit ratings aren’t just a matter of national pride. Less dependable, risky borrowers have to pay a higher interest rate to get people to buy their bonds. Right now the our government only has...

Back in October, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gave a speech in which he answered a question about the U.S. dollar. Geithner said that America needed to "work hard to preserve confidence in the strong dollar." My, oh my, how quickly things change. This week, Geithner said he was "quite open" to the establishment of a new global reserve currency. The dollar plunged upon news of the statement, and one has to wonder, does the Obama administration really support America? In a column written in October, Lawrence Kudlow focused on Geithner's comments (or lack thereof) regarding the dollar. In fact, Geithner...

Sen. Jeff Sessions: “…Under your budget, the interest increases each year. It was $187 billion in 2009, under your proposal it increases to $844 billion” Treasury Tim Geithner: “Senator, absolutely, it is an excessively high interest burden, it’s unsustainable”

Round two of the economic crime of the century has begun. On January 12, Lawrence Summers, President Obama's designee to become director of his National Economic Council, sent a letter to congressional majority and minority leaders seeking the second half of the $750 billion approved by Congress last October.   Citing Obama's economic speech of January 8, Summers wrote: "As the President-elect recently stated, 'we start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any other we have seen in our lifetime.'" As you no doubt recall, last September Congress, fearing the wrath of constituents, rejected a bailout scheme put together...

The United States Treasury concealed $40 billion in likely taxpayer losses on the bailout of the American International Group earlier this month, when it abandoned its usual method for valuing investments, according to a report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “In our view, this is a significant failure in their transparency,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the inspector general, in an interview on Monday. In early October, the Treasury issued a report predicting that the taxpayers would ultimately lose just $5 billion on their investment in A.I.G., a remarkable outcome, since the insurance company was...

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner vowed on Monday that the United States would not devalue the dollar for export advantage, saying no country could weaken its currency to gain economic health. "It is not going to happen in this country." Geithner told Silicon Valley business leaders of devaluing the dollar. Geithner broke his silence on the dollar's protracted slide ahead of this weekend's meeting of finance leaders from the Group of 20 wealthy and emerging nations in South Korea, where rising tensions over Chinese and U.S. currency valuations are expected to take center stage. "It is very important for people...

It's a house divided that may not stand. A large proportion of the "fraudclosure" mess may lie at the feet of Fed Chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. There is currently a multi-bank nationwide moratorium on foreclosures as the banks wrestle with the fact that there has been widespread use or misuse of "robo-signing," the signing of an affidavit or attesting to the factual correctness of what was purportedly verified without actually having read it. So those who invented small print didn't have the time or chose not to take the time to read it. To further complicate...

Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and probability theory, told National Journal's Matthew Cooper that he did not listen to Geithner, who preceded him at the Washington Ideas Forum.

Apparently New York's Mayor Bloomberg was on the short list to be named Secretary Treasurer back in 2008, and now the White House is revisiting the idea. From the NYPost: "It's been the focus of a lot of discussion," said one Democrat. "He's very well-liked and well-respected on Wall Street." At least the second half is probably true. The roots of this rumor are in Martha's Vineyard. Asked about last weekend's four-hour golf game with President Obama on Martha's Vineyard, Bloomberg told reporters yesterday, "The economy was the main subject, other than discussing golf."

Economy: "Welcome to the Recovery," said the headline over an op-ed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the New York Times. At first we thought it must be a joke, maybe even a parody. It wasn't. Welcome, indeed. The very same administration that promised unemployment wouldn't rise above 8% if we passed the $862 billion stimulus has dubbed the tepid economic rebound "recovery summer." They seem to think they deserve credit for the mess. "The combined effect of government actions taken over the past two years - the stimulus package, the stress tests and recapitalization of the banks, the restructuring...

THE devastation wrought by the great recession is still all too real for millions of Americans who lost their jobs, businesses and homes. The scars of the crisis are fresh, and every new economic report brings another wave of anxiety. That uncertainty is understandable, but a review of recent data on the American economy shows that we are on a path back to growth. The recession that began in late 2007 was extraordinarily severe, but the actions we took at its height to stimulate the economy helped arrest the freefall, preventing an even deeper collapse and putting the economy on...

Diplomacy: When the U.S. sends its top diplomat and No. 1 economic official to the same country at the same time, it expects results. By that measure, our high-level overture to China this week was a big disappointment. The trip of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to China this week can only be called a diplomatic failure. The U.S. has several things on its plate right now that require Chinese cooperation. They include help in financing our soaring debt, which on Wednesday passed $13 trillion for the first time, and getting North Korea, a Chinese...

The Greek debt crisis is "not going to happen" in the U.S., Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Wednesday. Geithner rejected comparisons, advanced in large part by Republicans in Congress, between the fiscal situation in the U.S. and the debt crisis in Greece that has roiled the European Union, sent Greece to the brink of default and weakened the euro. "It's not going to happen in the United States," Geithner said during an appearance on CNBC. The Treasury secretary said a better-than-expected economy would help strengthen government accounts and stave off any parallels to Greece. "I think the important thing is...

“I find that the charge that — the myth that I worked in Wall Street all my life, somewhat amusing,” Geithner said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “But it is part of a narrative that hardened. People came to view the judgments we were making through the prism of a myth … it’s actually very damaging. It’s completely false, of course, and it, you know, should have been corrected a long time ago.” .... “What I say is that I never had a real job,” Geithner joked.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on CNN.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said in an interview Sunday, when asked about the Tea Party protests, that the Obama administration is paying more attention to the deficit than the Bush administration did. Tea Partiers, the Obama administration is on your side. That's been the message from the White House over the past few days, as top officials dispute charges that Washington is on a spending binge and encourage conservative protesters to count their blessings. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, when asked about the Tea Party protests, said in an interview Sunday that the Obama administration is paying more attention to deficit...

The U.S. unemployment rate, currently at 9.7 percent, will remain "unacceptably high" for some time to come, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Thursday. "The unemployment rate is still terribly high and it's going to stay unacceptably high for a long period of time," Geithner said on NBC's "Today" Show. The government reports its March unemployment figures on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters expect the report to show that the economy has added 200,000 jobs, which would mark only the second time jobs have increased since the recession started in December 2007. "The economy's going to start creating jobs...

After you read the excerpt below from Frank Gaffney's piece on Sharia-compliant finance published today at BigGovernment.com, you'll begin to understand the seriousness of the story and why I designed the new faux logo for AIG: