I'm going to try to live blog Obama's speech- maybe it will force me to pay attention!
9:19 "We will rebuild"- makes it sound like USA has been hit by a nuclear bomb or something. He then praises our enterpreneurs- say, weren't they the same people who ruined the banks?
9:21 Says he'll tell us what went wrong. Then distracts with energy, education blah blah blah. Then goes into a laundry list of blaming [starting with tax cuts for rich, burying housing in the middle of the list]- President O. has a bad habit of laundry listing when he is being programmatic, instead of focusing on what is/was really important.
9:22 On stimulus: "Not because I believe in bigger government- I don't." When even O. attacks Big Government, you know that the Left was pretty much lost the argument on the role of government.
9:24 Lists good stuff about stimulus - mentions layoffs that were prevented, tax cut, etc. (I can't help wondering: why not just a tax credit for state taxes instead of all these little programs? States could raise taxes to avoid layoffs and get away with it, and consumers would be effectively taxed less and thus spend more).
9:25 Plugs recovery.gov to show how money will be spent. Talks about efforts to prevent state and local waste and fraud- but won't federal scrutiny just impose more bureaucracy and delay on states?
9:28 Good explanation of crisis- that its basically about banking and lending, not about housing any more. We've had housing recessions before (1991, 1992) but we've never had insolvent banks to this extent, at least not in the past 75 years.
9:30 Comes out against bailouts "with no strings attached"- nice false dichotomy, justifying bailouts by posing choice between bailouts with "accountability" (whatever that means) and bailouts without same, as opposed to bailouts vs. no bailouts.
9:32 Goes back to explaining why he needs to support banks- "its not about helping banks, its about helping people." This sounds like trickle-down economics to me- give money to the banks and they'll lend to you. (Though having said all this, its not like I have any better ideas!)
9:35 Stops talking about bank $ (no real specifics, I notice) and starts talking about budget.
