Skip to main content

Acting like the president two months early?



http://news.yahoo.com Mon Nov 24, 3:00 pm ET

As Barack Obama said at his first press conference after winning the election, there can only be one president at a time. But, with two months to go before he's sworn in, Barack Obama sure has done a lot of "presidenting," to use the "Saturday Night Live" vernacular, in the past few days.

Sure, his presidential flexing has been in terms of the economy and not Iran, what his original comment referred to, but still. It's exciting to watch the puzzle pieces fall into place, with new information coming daily.

It started on Friday when NBC reported that Obama's Treasury secretary nominee would be NY Fed President Tim Geithner -- a report that sent stocks skyrocketing, with the Dow closing almost 500 points up on the day.

Speculation began mounting shortly thereafter that Geithner's name had been leaked on purpose in an effort to boost the volatile stock market.

Monday's full announcement of Obama's economic team came next, with Obama confirming that economic heavyweights Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers would play central roles in his administration as Treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council, respectively.

Some say it was an economic one-two punch designed to showcase the muscle that comes with being the president-elect.

"It's a move his advisers hope will calm the markets and send a signal that he's on top of the financial crisis," said ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Look no further than portions of Obama's economic press conference this morning to extrapolate why these announcements are happening at a quick-fire pace:

"If we do not act swiftly and boldly, most experts now believe that we could lose millions of jobs next year."

"With our economy in distress, we cannot hesitate or delay."

The New York Times summed it up, saying, "the president-elect sought to convey an impression of continuity and coordination, so that his administration can 'hit the ground running.'"

Monday's economic team announcement isn't the end of it, either. The president-elect said he will discuss in detail tomorrow what "cuts and sacrifices" will have to be made to the federal budget.

Meanwhile, the current president is also trying to deal with the financial crisis, announcing this morning that after meeting with current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, they have decided to give financial safeguard to the ailing bank behemoth Citigroup.

President Bush also said that he and Paulson are working closely with the president-elect as they negotiate the deal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Olympic Diet of Michael Phelps!

By Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD WebMD Health News Questions and answers about the high-calorie diet that fuels the Olympic swimmer's championship performance. Aug. 13, 2008 -- His body may resemble the trim, athletic figure of Michelangelo's statue of David, but the diet of Michael Phelps sure doesn't sound like the stuff of champions. The U.S. Olympic swimmer told ESPN that he eats roughly 8,000-10,000 calories a day, including "lots of pizza and pasta." In addition to stuffing down carbs, he's said that he routinely eats foods like fried egg sandwiches. So exactly how do all those calories help fuel the most decorated Olympic athlete in history? Here are some questions and answers about the Michael Phelps diet. How can Michael Phelps eat 10,000 calories a day and still be so lean? There is no doubt he packs away a ton of food, but it is unlikely that he actually eats that many calories a day, an expert believes. University of Pittsburgh Director of Sports...
Post a Comment
Read more

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...
Post a Comment
Read more