CAF In The News

pww.org — Fiscal responsibility, the code word for balancing the budget, is on everyone's lips in Washington these days. With a federal budget deficit close to $2 trillion inherited from the Bush administration, the Obama White House is eager to build a consensus in Congress for reducing the deficit, shifting budget priorities and reforming the process of federal government appropriations.

marketplace.publicradio.org — npr.org - President Obama is holding a meeting today to discuss ways to pay down the federal budget deficit, which tops nearly a trillion and a half dollars and is still growing. Ronni Radbill reports.

investors.com — Holding signs reading "Stimulate Business, Not Government," "Families Against Porkulus" and "Say No To Generational Theft," protesters opposed to the $787 billion stimulus package have been mobilizing across the country.

prospect.org — Until now, the Left has largely used the public plan as a way to sell the Obama/Clinton/Edwards health care plans to itself. In this telling, the public plan is a Trojan horse for single-payer health care. When socialism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the rhetoric of competition. That may prove to be true and it may not. But it's not going to fly in the Senate. Blue dogs don't vote for socialism (except, as we saw in the case of TARP, when they do).

nationaljournal.com — As Obama settles into the Oval Office, he faces a public more skeptical and mistrustful of the federal government than at any other time since polls have been taken. Even amid the Watergate scandal and President Nixon's resignation in 1974, a far higher percentage of people said they trusted Washington than say that today.

salon.com — Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton said goodbye to the Senate Thursday, in the only ways either of them knew how. For Biden, that meant a rambling, sentimental farewell speech that included impressions of long-dead Senate legends, a hefty dose of soft-focus history and enough of his patented rhetorical tics that anyone listening could tell he wasn't using a prepared text. And for Clinton, right afterward, that meant a careful, on-message, bulleted list of her accomplishments all around New York state, ticking off the exact number of state fairs (eight), parades (45) and counties (62) she'd visited along the way.

beta.investors.com — Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidents have tried to get their administrations off to a good start by making their first 100 days in office a whirlwind of activity. Barack Obama is keeping up that tradition with an ambitious early agenda. He has a good chance of getting a lot of it done too. Obama takes office with high approval ratings, expanded Democratic majorities and a clear sense...

washingtonindependent.com — Who knew, eight years ago, that compassionate conservatism would include the partial nationalization of the banking industry?

It happened today, and some supporters of Sen. Barack Obama hope the new wave of broader federal regulation will spill over into the health-care debate.

In an ad in today’s New York Times, the Institute for America’s Future, a liberal watchdog group, warns that Sen. John McCain’s health-care plan might do for patients what deregulation of the finance industry has done for homeowners and investors.

americanbanker.com — Banks are ramping up public relations efforts to calm consumers panicked by the credit crisis - and to distinguish themselves from the string of big-name institutions that have gone out of business.

Raymond P. Davis, the chief executive officer of Umpqua Holdings Corp. in Portland, Ore., posted a letter to customers Monday on the $8.3 billion-asset company's Web site and at teller counters in its branches.

"Although the current environment is unlike anything we've seen in many years, it's important to remember that it won't last forever," Mr. Davis wrote. "And we will continue to operate our company as we have for five decades - as a community bank committed to serving the communities we serve with financial resources that help them grow."

ft.com — This week, America discovered class war. Newt Gingrich denounced the Treasury's $700bn plan to flush the toxic debt off Wall Street balance sheets as a "very, very bad idea" and accused the White House of being bamboozled by its ex-Goldman Sachs advisers.

John McCain railed against CEO "greed" and said no boss of a corporation bailed out by the government should "be making more money than the highest paid government official". Rupert Murdoch's New York Post newspaper ran a two-inch-high front-page headline that simply read: "FRAUD ST". And that's just the voices on the right.