Obama's clearly better than the other guy; yet nobody should expect miracles and the economy back up on its feet by next Monday. Media people who said what Obama "should" and "must", would you kindly refrain to cry "he could but didn't"? In other words, STFU.

It frustrates me when people equate liberal or even progressive politics with the Democratic Party. It angers me that Republicans cast Democrats as liberal socialists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Liberal politics is about equality and leveling the playing field. This country ascribes to capitalism which in philosphy and concept is in direct opposition to liberalism. The closest that this country will ever come to liberalism is if there is a massive redistribution of personal wealth (not necessarily income) through taxes. No one will ever convince me that it is justifiable that 1% of the population should be able to control 95% of the wealth.

There is the expression, if we live by the sword then we should be prepared to die by the sword. We are a capitalist economy. If you fail for whatever reason, then you are not (or shouldn't be) bailed out. For thirty years voters have allowed Washington to radically redistribute wealth and power to a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everyone else. In a capitalistic society to the victor goes the spoils. Now that the sky is falling who is getting saved? Sure isn't the taxpayer or employee who did not cause the collapse of the world economies. Our government has set us up to be the victims of white collar crime. It's wrong!

and the stuff trickling down smells of ammonia.

And just how long do you think we can baffle them with this bullshit and/or blame Bush? Didn't he start this with Paulson? I've forgotten.

this guy will be the most reviled president in US history, hated by left and right.

There seems to have been a mass dissociative forgetting of the ability and possibility of making distinctions; and for adhering to a tight chain of logic which keeps the questions in focus with the answers. I have to say, though, on behalf of President Obama; that he is the first leader in my adult memory who is showing these long lost cognitive abilities. It may be that over time,(hopefully not too much time), that his example will reawaken these abilities in enough people in addition to you so that he will have the support he needs to use them. Remember how just a few years ago there had to be a righty and a not so righty on every news program on any subject debated, as if there was never any subject or principal that had ever been agreed upon or ruled on in a court? I heard the most inane arguments imaginable about whether torture was torture or sovereign was sovereign or privacy was privacy or was the executive branch absolute ruler or what? All the so called liberal media elite people participated in these inane so called debates and I was just thinking "What the?"

Obama could say "change we can believe in" with great confidence - but when it comes to the details, he's pursuing a corporate financial agenda that also suits the interests of some of the largest robber barons in the United States.

Obama is looking a lot more like Hoover than like FDR - Hoover used the policies that Obama is using, and catered heavily to Wall Street, as Obama is doing.

Why doesn't Obama instruct the Fed to reveal who got the $70 billion in bailout money? Is this the "new era of transparency" that he promised?

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Okay, that's sucking up to Big Finance and Wall Street - which was to be expected, look at Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner.

Energy reform? Obama promised 15 billion over 10 years - to begin in 2012??? Compare that to the $30 billion dumped into AIG overnight - what a joke.

How about Obama's support for coal and Canadian tar sands? He has worked hard for Exelon, using greenwashing tactics to cover up their tritium spills in Illinois, and he is good friends with Dorgan and Durbin and the rest of the coal-state Democrats - that's just raw corruption. Their FutureGen plant will never work, and is also wrapped in secrecy, with "proprietary technology" claims used to keep the project under wraps. You can't burn coal without generating waste and CO2 - it's impossible. FutureGen is one of the the biggest frauds that has foisted on the American people - and coal-state Democrats are leading the charge.

Look up your history - Obama isn't acting like FDR, he's acting like Hoover:

Faced with the financial meltdown of the Great Depression, the Hoover administration created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation that poured taxpayers money into the coffers of the influential Wall Street banks in an effort to save them from bankruptcy. Like today's Bush/Obama administrations, the Hoover administration used the "too-big-to-fail" scare tactic in order to justify the costly looting of the national treasury. All it did, however, was to simply postpone the day of reckoning: almost all of the banks failed after nearly three years of extremely costly bailouts schemes.

The same thing happened in Japan, and today?

...Despite these painful and costly experiences, the Bush/Obama administrations (along with the U.S. Congress) are following similarly ruinous solutions that are just as doomed to fail. This is not because these administration's economic policy makers are unaware of the failed policies of the past. It is rather because they too function under the influence of the same powerful special interests that doomed the bailout policies of the Hoover and Japanese governments: the potent banking interests.

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