Both sides control vast media. The president's more lovable, but Fox News is louder and on the air 24/7, so my money's on Fox. At the very least, this will just harden Fox's true believers and give them more fodder.

His communications chief, Anita Dunn, tells the NYT's Brian Stelter:

A cynical view of the American public from the Obama team, which must think that it nees to counter Fox directly and by name because the right-wing channel is duping many average Americans with its steady anti-president rants. And the Obama team is absolutely right about that.

Cisco's $2.96 billion purchase of Norwegian tech giant Tandberg "expands its lineup of videoconferencing products." Sorry to bring that development to staffers worldwide who will have to set up even more of those dog-and-pony shows. Tandberg's the world's largest maker of videoconferencing equipment.

Above, a video story about one of George W. Bush's rehearsals for a 2007 videoconference. Unfortunately, I can't locate the infamous October 2005 staged videoconference starring one of the Defense Department's flacks as a phony grunt lobbing a carefully rehearsed softball question to the president from Iraq — the identity of the flack was a fact that I revealed back then.

In a case of Okies-in-reverse, hundreds of thousands of Californians — busted and disgusted in their dead-broke, formerly golden state — are returning to the Dust Bowl. Yes, Californians are packing up their espresso machines and hauling ass to Oklahoma and Texas.

As someone who had to wait 18 years to escape from Oklahoma, I find this behavior inexplicable. I don't give a shit how bad it is in California. Oklahoma City cannot be an improvement.

But there's a lot happening in this country that just can't be explained. Unless you're a Russian TV talking head, and you're exploring the history of our Dust Bowl era.

State-run Russia Today's Boris Borisov, sick of his own country getting savaged for hosting a '30s famine, sticks it to America with an "investigation" into the millions of Americans he says "vanished" during the Dust Bowl '30s.

Borisov's got that smug confidence (even in translation) typical of nutcase ideologues like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But if he really wants to reach America's heartland to teach his version of heartland history, he's got to pump up the volume to at least "rant" level.

GM's cuddly "reinvention" ad blitz on its fellow Americans shows that love is ever and ever having to say you're sorry. But not forever. Only until the targets are either thoroughly brainwashed or just numbed out.

The agitprop may not really be aimed at easily duped American consumers, as Claire Beale points out in the Independent (U.K.). The ad agencies that serviced the "old GM" are among its biggest creditors in bankruptcy court (unless the Supreme Court, now reconsidering the Chrysler bankruptcy, says otherwise). After detailing the ad agencies that are lined up to get refunds, she writes:

Beale's not cynical; she says GM's "rebirth" is necessary for all of us, and for the global economy. But she nails the campaign, as only an overseas outsider can, by pointing out "the peculiarly American mix of contrition and chutzpah demonstrated by its reinvention ad campaign."

Before the ad blitz, headquartered at gmreinvention.com, reinvents your brain, see the spoof above, from gmretardation.com.

From the actual GM campaign:

From the spoof:

GM may need to use some of its bailout billions to hire Dr. Frankenstein's great-great-great-nephew and dig up Thomas Edison's corpse to actually reinvent this "new GM." Followed, of course, by a "re-animation" ad campaign.

In the meantime, here's the actual GM reinvention commercial:

Oh, what a joy it was to see this CNN headline last week: "Economists: Recession to end in 2009."

You could have watching Family Feud, on which the host regularly proclaims, "Survey says..." And the story, which said "the end of the recession is in sight," according to a "panel of 45 economists," has about as much connection to reality.

CNN's story contained more than just a whiff of woofness (see this item for a definition of this synonym for "bullshit"). I'd give it a 9 on the Woofness Index.

Why was it bullshit? On Seeking Alpha, Eduard Fischer points out why in "7 Arguments Against a Quick Recovery."

Obama may be a smoother talker than any of us could have imagined. The appointment of Roemer, a Democrat in name only, as ambassador to growing superpower India should be shocking to lefties and even moderates. So far, not a peep out of environmentalists about what you would think would be a controversial appointment to one of the world's biggest and most important countries.

Unless they've forgotten the furor in 2004 when the Wall Street Journal revealed the major role the tiny Mercatus Center (largely funded by the oil and gas industry) played in helping George W. Bush dismantle EPA rules and other government regulations on business and industry.

Go back and re-read the WSJ story, "Rule Breaker: In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation":

Now, five years later, Obama's crew House has spun the truth clean out of this, describing Mercatus — the bane of the EPA — this way in the White House's mini-biography of Roemer in the official notice of his appointment:

Mercatus is regularly described by environmentalists as evil. The Clean Air Trust, for example, described Mercatus during the Bush Era as "an increasingly influential, anti-regulatory 'think tank' created by and subsidized by polluter money." That was in 2002, when the Clean Air Trust named former Enron board member Wendy Lee Gramm, the director of the Mercatus "regulatory studies program," as its "Villain of the Month." (Gramm is the wife of fanatical anti-regulator ex-senator Phil Gramm, who played a major role in abolishing the protections of the Glass-Steagall Act.)

Presumptive Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's economic record is "lost in a cloud of political rhetoric," as Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor rightly notes. The RGE points to scotusblog as a good source of background material on the 2nd Circuit judge. Which, as usual, it is. Her record is parsed in detail there.

More reaction to this historic Supreme Court brown decision is collected at BLT, the Legal Times blog, where the "tort reformers" are concerned, naturally.

Supporters of Sotomayor's nomination should hope that the attacks on her stay at the juvenile (and absurd) level of "she's not smart enough" and "just another example of affirmative action run amok." Otherwise, her voluminous record as a federal judge will become the focus. And business groups could actually get some meat on the bone there, although she doesn't seem, at first glance, to be much of a knee-jerk anti-corporate type, if she is one at all.

Even if she does have somewhat of a populist bent, that would just add balance to a court run by John Roberts, who definitely favors the rights of corporate citizens over those of human ones ("Supreme Insult," July 20, 2005).

As evidence, see how the Asian markets did ahead of this morning's opening bell on Wall Street. As the Dow wire notes:

Maybe the banks didn't play the government like a fiddle. As I noted Tuesday, "the Fed, the banks, and the White House are all gaming the public about this issue of whether the banks need more money to weather the recession." These "tests" — in which the banks got to self-report results with cheat sheets in hand instead of being audited, examined, or even proctored — could have been just a shrewd move by the Obama crew to not only make the banks scramble for outside money but also pump optimism — even if it's false optimism — into the markets.

If that's the case? Smart move by the Obama crew, at least in the short run. If the apparently good overall results merely mask a worse situation for the banks, then for the long run? Watch out.

Now, if the government merely got gamed by the banks in this process, the long run also looks bleaker. At this point, everyone's guessing as if they were onlookers at a craps game — which they are.

The notion that the banks have been spinning this "stress-test" bullshit all week long is not something that just occurred to people this morning. (Even I noted it in "Spinning out of control on the banks' stress tests" and "The Bart Simpson Effect: Banks change that "F" to an "A.") But today's Washington Post has a nice take on the gamesmanship — relying on the premise that the banks were gaming the government. In "Major Banks Negotiate, Spin, Chafe at Stress-Test Results," a trio of reporters writes:

If it does turn out, however, that Bank of America — which is in bad enough shape that it simply had to flunk itself — has to be nationalized, at least it won't have to change its name.

What if the stress tests turn out to be dead wrong? (They very well could be.) What if there's so much spinning of the tests that no one can tell? (That's surely true.)

Tackling the first question is Douglas A. McIntyre, over at 247wallst.com, who says:

As to the PR aspect of the stress tests, check out Simon Johnson's "Is Everyone Confused Yet? (Bank Stress Tests)," at Baseline Scenario. He breaks down how the banks' spinmeisters cleverly jammed their own signals to manipulate the press and markets. Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF who specializes in analyzing the American oligarchs' behavior, starts this way:

But the show must go on, as Douglas McIntyre notes in another post:

Early word on Citigroup's first quarter is that the bank will say that there is sunlight breaking through the clouds. ("Struggling Citi Posts Quarterly Profit," the Wall Street Journal just now says.) But hours before the opening bell, no more than a middling report was expected from Citigroup on its first-quarter results — unlike that supposedly brighter one from Goldman that lifted all boats (except the pirates') for a short time.

Despite the early news that the report will be sunny, analysts are likely to say, "Hmmm."

What Citi says about profits will be important, but not necessarily believed by analysts.

A concise preview from SmartMoney:

As for just the banks: No matter what Citigroup says, super-hedger George Soros says the U.S. banking system is "basically insolvent," as Seeking Alpha reminds us.

And Dwight Cass at breakingviews.com zooms in for a closer look at Citigroup even before the bank's conference call with analysts to note that Citi is "too big and troubled for the government to support ad infinitum." It has much more debt, according to estimates, than do Bank of America or JPMorgan, so beware of whatever bullshit emanates from CEO Vikram "Rhymes with Bandit" Pandit.