"you know you're not going to find a guy who's sort of sucking his thumband doesn't know what to do"

[Pirate Smile]

This quote just kind of grabbed me :):

Brookings scholar Colin Bradford, a former chief economist at the U.S. Agency for International Development, says he tells people from other countries that with Obama, as opposed to Bush, "you know you're not going to find a guy who's sort of sucking his thumb and doesn't know what to do."

Obama's ball as G-20 punts

By VICTORIA MCGRANE | 11/16/08 5:09 PM EST

With coordination between leading economies effectively on hold during the American presidential transition, little was accomplished at the much-hyped summit of world leaders last week besides passing the buck to incoming president Barack Obama.
"I don't think the G-20 summit changed anything," Berkeley economist Brad DeLong said in an e-mail.

The Group of 20 will reconvene on April 30, Obama's 101st day in office. With the economic landscape giving way underfoot, the new president will have little time to fashion the policies that may well determine the success of his presidency.

-snip-
Obama, though, should arrive at the April summit of the group, a collection of the finance ministers and central bank heads of 19 of the world’s largest economies (the European Union is the 20th member), in a position of strength, Simon Johnson, a MIT economist and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, told Politico.

Congress appears poised to enact a sizable stimulus package quickly after Obama takes office Jan. 20, and the new president is also likely to take more aggressive action to combat the ongoing mortgage foreclosures, which some experts say is needed to begin turning the larger economic crisis around. His Treasury Department may also begin allocating the second half of the $700 billion bailout.
That spending should allow Obama to ride into the April summit and essentially show that "America is back," said Johnson, who is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

That summit is slated to take up the idea of nations’ coordinating monetary policy — intended to avoid a repeat of the sometimes competing policies that emerged as a crisis that began in the American real estate market spread across the world’s markets — and of a new global regulatory body for financial markets.
While Europe has pushed for both these moves, President Bush has successfully resisted the changes, and it’s not clear in any event that a commitment from the outgoing head of state would have satisfied those seeking them. Obama has yet to signal his position.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15672.html

[BrklynLiberal]

1. One of the most accruate descriptions of prez shit-for-brains...

a guy who's sort of sucking his thumb and doesn't know what to do."

[Ilsa]

2. They know the score about the President-Elect and the President-Inept. nt

[Pirate Smile]

3. kick