"Largest event held in Washington, ever"

In my lifetime, I have never seen such a spontaneous, self-organized rally of up to so many  ---  2 million people according to the Daily Mail, 60,000 according to ABC News.  The spokesman for the National Park Service is quotes as saying,  "It is a record.... We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

It was a remarkable event by ordinary people who are rightly alarmed about what's happening and not happening in Washington. 

Nick Gillespie on the scene says

First, the crowd was truly huge. Second, the crowd was from all over the place (both geographically and ideologically). And third, the crowd, well-behaved and stunningly normal in the main, was genuinely pissed off at out of control spending and government policies. "Stop spending," was the basic answer to any questions about what Congress and the president should do come tomorrow. Throw the bums of either party out come next fall was the second most-common answer.

I'm with them, the people pushing back.  The government is not fixing the economy, but making everything worse.

The president's chief economic advisor Larry Summers warns that the unemployment rate could stay "unacceptably high" for years  which means no new jobs are being created in the private sector.

Already, 2 out of 5 Californians don't have a job!

So the idea we are starting a trade war with China at the behest of the steelworkers' union is mind-boggling because it could so easily "ratchet up into a full-blown trade war and inflict serious economic damage on both countries."

The problem that got us into this mess, the bad regulation of the financial services sector, has not and is not being fixed.

Bloomberg reports that  Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist  says 

the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Which brings me to health care.    Why doesn't the President just fix Medicare and Medicaid which will go broke in the next 10 years?  Why does he want to cut benefits to seniors by cutting the only part Medicare that is competitive?

Medicare  for Dummies says the Wall St Journal, with "contradictions worthy of the Marx Brothers"

No cuts, for anyone—except, that is, for the 24% of senior beneficiaries [who] are enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program, which Democrats want to slash by $177 billion or more because it is run by private companies. Mr. Obama called that money "unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies—subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don't improve the care of seniors."

In fact, Advantage does provide better care, which is one reason that enrollment has doubled since 2003. It's true that the program could be better designed, with more competitive bidding and quality bonuses. But Advantage's private insurers today provide the kind of care that Mr. Obama said he would mandate that private insurers provide for the nonelderly—"to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventative care."

Advantage plans have excelled at filling in the gaps of the a la carte medicine of traditional Medicare, contracting with doctors and hospitals to coordinate care and improve quality and covering items such as vision, hearing and management of chronic illness. If seniors in Advantage lose this coverage because of the 14% or 15% budget cut that Mr. Obama favors, well, that's "waste and abuse."