44, Day Six

The first Sunday of the Obama presidency, which means the first batch of Sunday morning news shows for administration officials and its loyal opposition. The overall message: the country is feeling major pain, and it might not be over.

-Vice President Joe Biden on CBS: "We're off and running, but it's going to get worse before it gets better," he said. Later in the interview, when asked about being a team player, he acknowledged that some things are better left to his inside voice.

-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on ABC that she couldn't imagine that we'd be in a place where we'd be talking about the possible nationalization of the banks. Then she pretty much suggested just that, as she said government aid to banks should be tied in with some payback for taxpayers. "Because if you're a shareholder and you see what would be a dilution of your investment because now the federal government - if we're putting - if the taxpayer is putting money up, the taxpayer should have equity," she said.

-Larry Summers, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on NBC. "So even as we move to be as rapid as we can in jolting the economy and giving it the push forward it needs, we also have to be mindful of having the right kind of plan that will carry us forward over time."

-House Minority Leader John Boehner said some things in the administration's stimulus plan, like infrastructure spending, made sense while others (money to states for schools) just didn't. "I just think there's a lot of slow-moving government spending in this program that won't work," the Ohio Republican said on NBC. "We can't borrow and spend our way back to prosperity."

-Lastly, on Friday I poked the White House for its new lackluster website that proclaimed it would shine a light on the president's decision making, when it actually wasn't doing much. Today, there's finally a bloggy-feeling blog post that says they're still "digging" into the site. To that end, it posted about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a bill dealing with pay dscrimination that could make it through Congress in the coming week. Obama supports it.

by J. Jennings Moss