I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist Dr. Pangloss in Candide, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Ezra Klein is up with another post defending Obama with this same basic argument.

I’m not sure if this is information we already knew from the Fed audit, or an additional set of data, or maybe just the specifics that came out of that Bloomberg FOIA request. At any rate, Bloomberg has presented it in a very direct manner with a very provocative title: “Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans.” I think some activist snuck into the Bloomberg offices and wrote this report.

In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement’s public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide.

President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning to respond to the dismal jobs report that showed unemployment rising to 9.2 percent over 18 months after the recession supposedly ended. He responded by not mentioning that number or grappling with what it means.

Instead, he continued the excuses and pseudo-economic gibberish that makes sense only to Tea-GOP Zombies and which explains why we’ve made virtually no progress in regaining the jobs we lost.

Sounds like times are tough for the banksters after all, right? Well maybe not so much. Fortune had this post which called the Bank of America $8.5B settlement a “win,” apparently because it allows BoA to “look forward” and all that. According to this from Reuters, BoA will take write-offs of a bit over $20B in total in the 2nd quarter of the year, giving them a loss for the quarter. It is figures like that that show just how skewed things are. One bank takes a write-off/loss of over $20B in a fiscal quarter and will still most likely be profitable for the year!

Ho hum. Here we are once again. The weekly report of Initial Unemployment Claims is out, jobless claims for last week are up “more than expected,” the figures from last week’s report have been revised upwards again, economists are surprised and water is wet.

When I was a kid, I used to love double-dips. I’d go to the doctor and afterwards, we’d stop by the drug store soda fountain for my free ice cream. Summers, there would be all the ice cream suppers at the churches with fresh home made ice cream and cake. Double-dips of chocolate ice cream and cake!

Unfortunately however, today’s double-dip will be a recession.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech yesterday to the International Monetary Conference in Atlanta, GA. Only one speech. Yet looking around the Toobz at the various headlines at news sites on this speech, it must have been an all things to all people speech as I’ve found at least four different perspectives presented, some of them directly contradictory.

Bernanke knows that both parties are interested in or at least resigned to passing an austerity budget that will hit in the second half of the year, creating that self-defeating “sharp fiscal consolidation” in the near term. About the best he could do with a cover story is to blame slow growth in the first half of the year on the Japanese earthquake.

• Twelve corporations that made $171 billion in pre-tax profits between 2008 and 2010 paid a negative tax rate over that period. This includes companies like GE, Exxon, IBM, Yahoo and Boeing.