Arthur's the go-to guy on the fearmongering:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/200...

did not include anyone outside the Big Bankster Boiz comfort zone. Or, did I miss some outlier who has his ear? (Volker and Warren Buffett are not outside the comfort zone, imo.)

Does Obama have a real understanding of what he wants to accomplish, much less what needs to be done?

Obama just named team of econ advisers -- no list of names. Bloomberg has more:

President Barack Obama and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker today will name an advisory board drawn from business, labor groups and former government officials to provide an outside perspective on plans to revive the economy.

The Economic Recovery Advisory Board headed by Volcker will include former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson, former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, UBS Americas Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Wolf, General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt and Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, according to an administration official.

The announcement is Obama’s latest move to advance his economic agenda as Congress tries to finish work on his stimulus plan, which has been hitting resistance from Republicans. SNIP

Board Members

Also on the board are David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University; Mark Gallogly, founder and managing partner of Centerbridge Partners L.P.; Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group; John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Jim Owens, chairman and chief executive officer of Caterpillar Inc.; Monica C. Lozano, publisher and chief executive officer of La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S.; Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp.; Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO; Laura Tyson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein.

Austan Goolsbee, a top adviser to Obama’s campaign whom the president has picked for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, will serve as the group’s chief economist.

Obama, 47, and Volcker, 81, are scheduled to introduce the panel at 11:15 a.m. Washington time at the White House.

Several of the board’s members played a role in Obama’s campaign as donors and advisers, including Donaldson, Ferguson, Gallogly, Wolf, Burger and Tyson. Pritzker was the finance chairwoman of Obama’s campaign.

This is not good--Martin Feldstein is on the conservative side -- who's there to balance him???

As I said, one day does not a trend make with Obama. Same old, same old. Oh, my.

oversee legal policy and nominations to Justice Dept. From Seeing the Forest, where Dave Johnson's comment is, "No, no, no. What is going on here?"

From the LATimes, "Likely Justice Department nominee faces ethics hurdle":

The leading candidate to head the Justice Department office that oversees legal policy and judicial nominations recently has been a lobbyist for several business clients, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and would require a waiver from the Obama administration's recently imposed ethics rules.

. . . The likely nominee to head Justice's Office of Legal Policy, Mark Gitenstein, worked as a lobbyist for the chamber between 2000 and 2008, helping his firm earn more than $6 million in fees, according to federal lobbying records. The business alliance has pushed the White House and Congress to appoint judges and enact legislation that would make it harder for plaintiffs to sue large corporations and collect large damage awards, raising concerns from some activists.

Possible waiver guy, but WH aruging that he can recuse himself from issues on which he lobbied, so he doesn't really need a waiver....

Gee, we get rid of Repubs and our Dem prez finds people who represent their objectives for the Dem administration. (Should the Dem in Dem prez be in quotation marks?)

How're ya liking this so far, Dems?

(Of course, after reading her posts on econ stuff, along with the real unemployment number, just one antidote may not be enough. You can scroll through for other Antidotes du Jour...). Scroll down to the bottom photos...of kitten and birdie! Makes me smile just thinking about the Total Cuteness. And, in the 3rd photo, isn't that little kitteh actually smiling?

Hhhmmm -- I'd made a mistake and had today's unemployment report link pasted, the one showing the alternative unemployment numbers. The number which best approximates total un- and underemployment, U-6, has it up to 15.4%, up from 13.5% in December (not seasonally adjusted). Yikes.

There are a total of six alternative measures of labor underutilization. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest told me U-6 most closely emulates the full unemployment number which was used up to the Johnson administration. Atrios, iirc, concurs. It's a good number to know -- Obama and our representatives ought to know it by heart.

During the Great Depression, people who were working for the government make--work programs (which actually created jobs and people in those jobs created things of lasting value to the nation, such as parks all over the country, art works which let us see what life what like then, etc.) were counted as unemployed. So, how close are we to Great Depression unemployment levels? Not there yet, but....