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.

The Republican’s have been so successful in their hostage taking tactics not because the GOP are amazing negotiators but due to the fact Obama wants them to have a hostages. The Obama administration is told the Republicans they are negotiating with that they don’t believe the 14th amendment grants it the authority to ignore the [...]

If we work together as a community, maybe we can get some criminal prosecutions for the crimes that caused the Great Crash. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Other countries get results from voting. We don’t. Here are two things you can do.

Bad News is a collection of essays edited by our guest today, Anya Schiffrin. It features chapters by Ms. Schiffrin, as well as by Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman, HuffPo Business Editor Peter Goodman, and others in the field from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The book examines the financial press’s version of the Veal Pen, or what Stiglitz calls “cognitive capture.” Just like the political reporters inside the Beltway have become slaves to access, Financial and economic journalists are just as dependent on their sources in industry and government for information and feel the need to keep those sources happy to avoid being cut off from the information flow that is the lifeblood of their production model.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is pushing the state attorneys general to quickly as possible “bring to bed” their investigations of the wide-scale systematic violations of law by the nation’s largest financial institutions–it is a great reminder that, in America, there is a very important theft-to-punishment inflection point for the super rich and powerful.

Peter Baker has an almost 6500-word article describing Obama’s efforts to fix the economy. But nowhere in this epic does Peter Baker once use the word “foreclosure.” Or “housing.” Or, god forbid, “HAMP.”

Tim Geithner has changed his tune somewhat, backing a bill that would clarify the Treasury’s right to allow Hardest Hit Fund grant money to be used for foreclosure legal aid, but it’s unclear whether there’s enough time in the end of the legislative session to get this done.

A month ago, Brad Miller and a dozen other Congressmen — including House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank — wrote the Financial Stability Oversight Council to ask that they look into the systemic dangers of foreclosure fraud. Timmeh Geithner just responded to that letter. His response makes it clear he actually read Miller’s letter — because he references the first item I’ve laid out above, though rather than actually respond to that request, he describes what the FSOC is actually doing instead of examining collateral loan files. His response to the second and third requests is even more insolent; he refuses to even repeat the second one, and rather than consider either one seriously, he just says FSOC will take action “if abuses are found.”

KORUS as a whole will contribute to the increasing financialization of our economy at the expense of our manufacturing base. Yet oddly, by leveraging payback for its various bailouts differently, the Administration has elicited cries of support from both the finance and the manufacturing industry.

Or maybe it’s just that unlike the UAW, the banksters have found a way to roll Obama over and over.