The Tuesday ‘BushWhack’ing

Today marks 8 weeks until President-elect Obama takes office, unfortunately that also means we still have 8 weeks left of the Bush presidency. Gotta take the good with the bad right now…

• The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve announced this morning that they have designs of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy… (about friggin’ time…). BTW, the Commerce Department reported this morning that the U.S. economy shrank half a percent in the third quarter. Experts say the shrinkage was “faster than previously estimated” and attribute it to consumer spending plunging to its lowest level in almost three decades…
• Since “President” Bush seemingly isn’t doing a damn thing for the economy, it’s up to President-elect Obama to start righting the ship. CNN.com’s Gloria Borger wrote yesterday that Obama has taken charge of turning around the economy by nominating Tim Geithner to head Treasury and Larry Summers to direct the National Economic Council. (Yesterday I lamented how people were criticizing Obama for not doing enough for the struggling economy, despite him not being the president yet. Turns out that maybe he is the president already considering that our current CIC isn’t doing a God-damn thing about anything… like a Senior during finals week, Bush has checked out and is biding his time until he’s done… too bad SCOTUS can’t speed up Inauguration Day…)
• PE Obama’s national security team is also starting to take shape…
• Ari Fleischer’s group, F*e*d*m’s W*t*h, is as dead as a kipper on a cracker…
• A replacement for Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s senate seat has been named, and it’s his former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman. Seemingly Kaufman will keep the seat warm for the last two years of the term before moving aside for Biden’s son, Beau – Delaware’s current Attorney General who is now serving in Iraq as a Captain in the National Guard – to make a run. Still nothing on a replacement for PE Obama’s senate seat…
• And have we mentioned? That “President” Bush has kept the, IMO archaic & monarchistic, presidential perk of pardoning alive? Like Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan and all others before them, Bush has started pardoning 14 people while commuting two. I won’t criticize Bush’s use of this perk because all other presidents have used it. I will say that for a government founded on the basis of checks and balances, allowing the president to do this is in direct opposition to why this country was founded…