Happy Wednesday!
Hello everybody and welcome to the Shuster "Daily Briefing" for February 18, 2009. So, what do you think of the new twitter page?
Special thanks to the MSNBC arts/creative department for helping. The photo came from a Public Relations shoot in December.
We will show you some of the clips from the President's speech today followed by a live report from White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times. Following Jeff, we will bring on Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. Rep. Frank is the chairman of the House Banking Committee. As of last week, he was insisting that the foreclosure plan needed to be at least $100 billion, not $50 billion as the Obama administration was considering at the time. Does $75 billion work? Also, Sen. Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Senate banking committee, just issued a statement a few minutes ago condemning the Obama plan.
In our second block tonight, we are going to jump into the controversy swirling around a horrific cartoon in today's NY Post.
The cartoon appears to suggest that President Obama is like a chimpanzee that was just killed in Connecticut.
A lot of people on the blogosphere and elsewhere are justifiably infuriated at the NY Post. We will talk about that with Sam Stein of the Huffington Post and Jack Turner, co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics.
Every Wednesday is "Mythbuster Wednesday." And even though our friend and Newsweek colleague Daniel Gross is unavailable tonight (he's on vacation in Mexico) we are still going to bust a few myths. The topic tonight will be the Obama economic recovery plan. There have been myths pushed by Democrats in defending the plan and other myths pushed by Republicans in attacking the bill.
If you insisted last week that something needed to be done about the crisis and are now criticizing somebody for trying to tackle that problem, that's hypocrisy.
In our back half, we will be taking your twitter questions throughout. We will start with Tim Dickinson from Rolling Stone. He has a fascinating piece out on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As you know, she is taking all kinds of fire from Republicans and has had an intriguing relationship with the Obama White House.
They will talk about the Pelosi news and we will then talk about bipartisanship and whether it matters.
Also, there was some more news today involving troubled Illinois Sen. Roland Burris.
He keeps digging the hole deeper. Our panel will weigh in on the Burris latest. In our final segment, we will tell you about Sarah Palin's tax troubles, Shaquille O'Neal's shoe size (President Obama got a Shaq shoe as a gift) and why a former politician is now selling margarita mix.
Our "Quote of the Day" comes, appropriately, from Jimmy Buffet:
"It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad."
Thanks in advancing for watching tonight's show. "1600" airs at 6 p.m. in Washington, D.C.; and Margaritaville (Key West, FL); 5 p.m. in Dallas; 4 p.m. in Butte; and 3 p.m. in L.A.
Shuster