• Obama is demanding that the companies that received the most bailout money pay their highest-earning employees 10% of what they normally do. [New York Times]
• Oh here’s something new: everyone is worried about getting sick but is too lazy and/or too terrified to actually get a flu shot. [Washington Post]
• The weird Jett Travolta/Bahamas were not really so fun that one time/extortion case has been declared a mistrial. [CNN]
• Terrorists fired mortars at an airport in Somalia in hopes of killing the country’s president as he boarded a plane. They killed 20 people, but none of them were the president. [AP]
• Larry Summers has a good feeling about the the strength of the economy in general and the value of the dollar specifically. [Reuters]
• AT&T is really pulling out all the stops trying to keep this net neutrality thing from happening. [The Hill]

So it seems like fewer people are performing Google searches with the term “economic depression.” Or maybe it’s the same amount of people, but they’re searching less frequently? Ha ha, no one’s sure! Anyway, what does this statistic mean for America? Everything, essentially. And this is not just because a majority of Americans have been forced to sell or mortgage their Googles. In fact, college-educated Larry Summers believes this means that things are looking up. You see, earlier this year there were four times as many searches for the term, and now there are less, and therefore causality. It’s science. Google it. MORE »

The New York Times has a SCOOP, about Larry Summers! He is still a dick to everybody, and the rest of the White House economics team pretty much hates him — except for the President, who endures his terrible behavior because he is so BRILLIANT. MORE »

Barack Obama’s chief economic aide Larry Summers famously thinks that women are dumb, very dumb, so dumb at life that he doesn’t need to look in any way attractive to procure them, for mating. Today Summers told the Washington Economics Club (NERD FACTORY) that everything will be better in a few months, once all remaining American Money has been restored to Wall Street financial firms. But he looked so frightening when he was telling them this! MORE »

Larry Summers, one of Barack Obama’s chief money trolls, made a splash at yesterday’s “fiscal responsibility summit” by falling asleep, publicly, in front of everyone. Maybe he was drunk? Or tired, from pulling so many all-nighters in light of the recent and complete collapse of the world economy? Or: the thermostat was too high, which is always a killer in crowded conference rooms. At any rate, we’ll know who to blame when the Dow plunges another 700 points and the US Treasury goes bankrupt. [Financial Times]

The Washington Post has an extraordinary article today about why Tim Geithner’s press conference to unveil the administration’s bank rescue plan last week seemed to… suck? Is that the word? Well it wasn’t the plan, so much — as best we understood this vague monstrosity, it was something like, “Public private money tax blah blah uhhh force lending guarantee toxic gas blah blah blah uhhhhh TWO TRILLION DOLLARS,” so fair enough — so much as it was Geithner himself, who appeared to have no confidence in himself, the plan, or America. The Post reports that this is probably because he had ditched a different plan a few days earlier, and what you heard at the press conference was just some unreadable gibberish he threw together on the john a few minutes before taking the podium. MORE »

It was only a matter of time before the The New Republic stopped being an inevitability in this little feature. Well, the time has come—just one week in! Let’s take a look what worthwhile things are afoot in these storied pages this week, for our new feature, Thursdays Are For Magazines. MORE »

Barack Obama will have so many advisors telling him how to spend the nation’s billions! Let’s see, we’ve got this Geithner guy who financial types seem to like, and also the communist Larry Summers … who else? To answer these pressing questions, Obama will hold another press conference and respond to complicated financial inquiries with “I will buy you all a new puppy.” Stick with us! His magical press conference is due to commence at the top of the hour. MORE »

Did you know that Barack Obama is packing his economic advisory team with known communist associates? It’s true! Larry Summers, Obama’s likely head of the National Economic Council, had to resign from the presidency of Harvard University in 2006 for the grievous crime of being an asshole. After that he went to work part-time for the D.E. Shaw Group, a big fancy hedge fund run by intellectuals. D.E. Shaw “was founded in a small office over a communist bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1988.” COMMUNISTS EVERYWHERES, Q.E.D. When will Barack Obama apologize for this latest unseemly association? (Thank you, Thomas, for the tip!) [Wall Street Journal]

Well this is terribly disappointing! After a veritable two weeks of post-election speculation about our future Secretary of the Treasury, with an endless parade of sexist buffoons and kindly forest-giants to choose from, Barack Obama goes for some dude named Tim Geithner who appears to be of normal stature and possessed of no serious personality defects. YAWN. MORE »

Here is something weird, and thank you, First Read, for pointing this out recently: the press has already found out the identity of like half of the future Obama cabinet. And yet we have no idea who’s being vetted to fill one of the most important positions of all — Treasury Secretary. What is up with that HMMM? Will it be the kindly ancient giant Paul Volcker? The stouthearted Kansan Republican Sheila Bair? The repellent NAFTA whore Larry Summers? Nobody knows — or at least, nobody’s telling! Our prediction: Ron Paul, who will unleash a “money bomb” on the United States economy in February of 2009 and then sell us to the nation of Galt’s Gulch for 50 Ameros. [Washington Post]