Due diligence–or flyspecking? There’s no small amount of tension between the White House and the Senate these days regarding the going-over that Obama’s nominees, and particularly their tax returns, are getting. Here’s my story on this most sensitive subject for TIME.com.
STRASBOURG — On Wednesday, I wrote about the undervalued role that trade imbalances, and the resulting capital flows, played in causing the current financial crisis. President Obama had raised the issue in a press conference Wednesday, catching some of his own advisers off guard. On Friday, Jon Ward of the Washington Times followed up with [...]
The House and Senate passed two $3 trillion+ versions of Obama’s budget late yesterday, handing the president a victory. Not a single Republican voted for the measures – not surprising since budgets are essentially ideological documents — but Dems declared victory that they held most moderates. Only two Dem senators – Ben Nelson of Nebraska [...]
UPDATE: I have corrected errors in this post in a followup post here. There was a promise in the candidacy of Barack Obama, sometimes explicit but more often implicit: The African-American with the funny name and the Kenyan father, the guy who had lived as a child in Indonesia, would be able to remake the [...]
Here’s a bailout idea from Senator Claire McCaskill: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) suggested today that the team tasked with overseeing distribution of economic stimulus funds should consider hiring recently laid-off journalists to help craft the tone and message of the government’s Recovery.gov Web site. The senator spoke as Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability [...]
Callie Shell’s photos of Obama’s trip to Europe are almost as good as being there, backstage, when it all happens. Don’t miss. Behind the Scenes With The Obamas Michelle Obama’s London Fashions Also, from previously, The Fashion of Michelle Obama And from other travelling photographers comes this essay, Obama’s Travels In Europe
My story on it is here.
In his press conference following the second day of the G-20 summit today, Obama told a Chinese journalist he wasn’t very good at coming up with catchphrases to describe his approach to foreign affairs. But if you were listening for some sign that the Obama era is going to involve a new orientation on the [...]
Word leaked out today that Obama has chosen Robert Groves to be the new census director, setting off the next political skirmish over how the 2010 census should be conducted. Groves is currently a professor of statistics at the University of Michigan, and Mark Blumenthal describes him as “arguably the leading authority on the subject [...]
I spend most days writing for TIME, for the magazine, for the web, for that infernal Twitter thing. Today, I spent the day writing for Michelle Obama’s pool, which meant traveling around London and writing dispatches about the first lady’s day mostly on my Blackberry, not for public consumption, but for the dozens of news [...]
