It wasn’t that I didn’t want to report on President Obama’s speech Tuesday night. I did. My computer crashed: A sinister approach to silence chatter in the blogosphere. Up and running today (Thursday Feb. 26), I browsed through the usual cast of websites and learned the speech has legs. People are still ruminating about it and the response from Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. I enjoyed Obama’s speech for its tone, specifics and upbeat rallying cry to overcome our...

President Barack Obama’s budget plans announced Thursday to reduce health care costs by $634 billion through savings to expand medical insurance coverage seems partially supported in a report being published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that the government is paying twice as much for treating a patient in Miami as in San Francisco. The dramatic cost differences paid by Medicare does not reflect seniors living in the more expensive areas receiving better treatment. Advanced...

Has it occurred to anyone that when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner speaks or aims a sledgehammer at the banking system, the stock market plunges? When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke issues a statement or addresses Congress, as he did Tuesday, the Dow rises by 231 points? And, Bernanke’s remarks to the Senate Banking Committee were not all that upbeat. Are we as sideline observers placing too much emphasis on the Dow Jones Industrial Averages, Standard & Poor and NASDAQ reflecting the whims...

President Barack Obama on Monday took initial steps to school Congress and the American public on his first budget which includes the goal of cutting the nation’s budget deficit in half by the end of his first term. As Yogi Berra is said to have uttered, it’s deja vu all over again. Former President George W. Bush promised the same thing with abysmal results. Is Obama falling into the same trap? The only broad outline Obama touched in reaching his goal is reducing government waste. Deja...

Former Major League pitcher and now U.S. Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky has thrown a political spitball claiming liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could die in less than a year from pancreatic cancer. In the arena of politics, it’s one thing to speak the truth about possible events we don’t want to hear. It’s another to forecast the death of a prominent public official in a crass pitch to win support for re-election. In a Saturday speech in Elizabethtown, Kentucky,...

Let’s put President Barack Obama’s Saturday weekly radio and Internet address in perspective. “Never before in our history has a tax cut taken effect faster or gone to so many hardworking Americans,” Obama said. He was referring to passage of one phase of the $787 billion economic stimulus package in which 95% working Americans will take home about an additional $65 per month as a result of tax cuts by April 1. Specifically, the $400 credit for individuals is to be doled out...

Republicans have redefined bipartisanship. At least it is different from the definition I learned as a political science major in college. As I recall it was politicians from opposing parties reaching a compromise to solve a hot issue. The classic example: Henry Clay. Agreeing with him or not on the slavery issue, historians once dubbed Clay “the great compromiser” and bestowed statesmanship honors on his shoulders. I was never comfortable with that label because as so often happens compromises...

As soon as I read President Barack Obama’s plans to tackle the foreclosure crises, I called my son who is one of 9 million Americans faced with losing his home. I asked if his home loan is backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the two mortgage finance companies now owned by the government and the only ones the president has tapped to help homeowners in this phase of the housing market collapse. He said he didn’t know. The question never came up because Aurora, his original lender, has...

As President Barack Obama switches from campaign to governing mode he is doing a rope-a-dope absorbing blows from friends and foes alike. As for fulfilling his campaign promises, he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. People with agendas and axes to grind fail to realize Obama is a governing pragmatist, not an ideologue. They refuse to accept he is president of all the people, not just a surrogate for MoveOn.Org or any other interest group that helped him win the election. The...

I’m no one to espouse the endurance of marriage since mine lasted only five years. However, I know a good one when I see one. Ones as endured by my parents, my brother Larry, my son Matt and, yes, Barack and Michelle Obama. The thing is, you never know what lurks behind closed doors in these marriages. Outsiders, including close family members, judge the marriages on the public face they project. And the public perception of the Obamas is one of a loving, give-and-take compact where one feeds...

Oh, those sneaky congressmen. This group receives automatic pay raises every year. Yet, they jerked the compensation cap of senior corporate executives from President Obama’s financial sector bailout plan and inserted it in the $789 billion stimulus package for his expected signature next Tuesday. It begs the question: Since when does cutting a banker’s earnings stimulate the economy? And, God forbid, what business is it of Congress to establish compensation guidelines in the private...

David Brooks, the conservative columnist writing for the New York Times, forecasts a gloomy future based on the Obama Administration’s model for economic recovery. I don’t subscribe to all his precepts but his column (http://NYTimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13Brooks/ is poignant in one crucial aspect. That is the economic models for recovery do not take into consideration the public psyche. Brooks contends the culture of borrowing as a result of easy credit is over. Burned badly, the public...

I just finished digesting Congress’s apparent $789 billion stimulus package and burped twice. The first was a case of mild heartburn. The second was indigestion caused by the feeling it isn’t enough. In trying to jump start our failed economy, the prevailing view among economists is the Keynesian approach: Beg, borrow, steal and print so much money to prime the pump that something is bound to work. Memo to Nobel economist Paul Krugman: You better be right. Just thinking of the politics...

Contrite executives of eight major banking institutions pledged thanks to a series of Congressional hearing panels Wednesday in what amounted to little more than a dog and pony show. The bankers said they used $118 billion of the $350 billion Troubled Asset Relief Funds to increase consumer loans and said they are eager to help ease growing public rage over how they are using government aid. The Congressmen in turn related horror stories from constituents how banks had screwed them and forced millions...

It would be premature to comment with much authority on Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s national press conference Tuesday because it lacked too many details. Generally, it was greeted by a sour response from the banking industry and investors. The Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the tech-heavy Nasdaq each fell more than 4 percent in late afternoon trading. My focus was on President Obama’s proposal to limit senior executives...

Mexico’s murderous drug cartel rampage has reached the United States big time and we still act like no one gives a damn. An Associated Press story Monday quotes U.S. law enforcement officials claiming the cartels have set up operations in 230 U.S. cities with a resulting effect of increased killings, kidnappings and home invasions. Why this hasn’t triggered a national call to arms blows my mind. No question Washington’s agenda is jam packed with economic chaos, two wars and a band...

The media coverage of the financial crisis has been horrible with its penchant for painting a broad brush that all bankers are evil. This poppycock is dispensed by clueless politicians — President Obama included — and spread to consumers whose confidence in the system is the lowest in more than a quarter century.

On the campaign trails and during the debates, presidential candidate Barack Obama argued the power of lobbyists had to be curbed and the Washington political culture changed. I said at the time, and I quote myself accurately, “lotsa luck, fella.” Nary a honeymoon, not the first 100 days, but just 15 short days into his new administration, President Obama finds himself strangled by the same old Washington two step. Not that he hasn’t tried. And, yes, he admits he “screwed...

Wells Fargo Bank has a prestigious reputation as the best managed financial institution in America and yet its chief executives still don’t get it. The bank Tuesday cancelled a celebration bash in Las Vegas to honor and award its mortgage brokers after a backlash of the news ripped through the business media and halls of Congress. Wells Fargo was one of eight major banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program funds from Congress in October. The $25 billion it reluctantly received was used...

Good news out of the failing financial sector, finally. Wells Fargo Bank reports it will pay back the federal government $371.5 million in its first quarterly bailout installment. Wells Fargo is believed to be the first major bank receiving TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) to do so. In an internal memo obtained by The Remmers Report, Wells Fargo said the quarterly dividend of $14,861.11 per share is payable Feb. 15. The feds purchased 25,000 shares of Fixed Rate Cumulative Perpetual Preferred...

Howard Fineman, the Washington-based political columnist writing for msnbc.com, contends the honeymoon between President Obama and Congress is over. Not so fast, Mr. Fineman, whom I consider one of the better political observers in the media. A political honeymoon is the brief period the president gets what he wants from Congress with almost no questions asked. That’s a political urban legend. Ask any bride and groom. Obama’s $825 billion stimulus plan is being challenged not only by...

The idea of defamed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich skipping his impeachment trial and appearing on the tabloid news shows makes me barf. Shame on him. Shame on the television producers. Shame on the American public watching this crap. The man is a disgrace. Blagojevich tarnishes everything that is good about government. He’s in this position for himself and only himself. He says the impeachment is a kangaroo court. Some observers following his bizarre ordeals say he is tainting the jury pool...

If you ask a thousand economists how to solve the banking crisis, you’ll probably receive 999 different solutions. One of the earliest endeavors announced by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was buying up all the bank system’s toxic assets. After several weeks of pushing his $750 billion financial sector bailout he nixed the idea, deeming it a can of worms. Unraveling the paper trail of whom owned the defaulted mortgages was akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. The...

If President Obama wants to see his $850 billion stimulus package approved by 80% of Congress, perhaps he should throw dissident Republicans and conservative Democrats a morsel of meat to nibble. That would be House Republican leader John Boehner’s call for deeper tax cuts. Boehner proposes lower federal income tax rates in the two lowest brackets rather than provide a $500 per worker tax credit, as Obama wants to do. The Republican plan would also give tax breaks to small businesses, home...

The depravity of the Mexican drug wars has surpassed the horrific and bizarre. The Mexican military Friday said they arrested a man for dissolving at least 300 bodies in acid for one of the cartels for $600 a week over the past decade. Mexican officials in Tijuana paraded the man, identified as Santiago Meza Lopez, in front of reporters and said he had confessed. They prodded him when he mumbled as he told them he dumped the bodies in graves, poured acid on them and let them dissolve underground. One...