Even given my strange perspective, there are some mornings I wake up in America and I feel that like Alice I am seeing the world through the looking glass. Today was one of those days.

According to the liberal New York Times: “Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.”

I am shocked!

According to the almost as liberal NY Daily News: “President Obama said Thursday the nation's economic woes are not as dire as they seem and said his economic policies will get the country back on track. "I don't think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say…Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy…They're not as bad as we think they are now…I don't like the idea of spending more government money, nor am I interested in expanding government's role”.

Oh, really?

Just 6 days ago according to the AP: “President Barack Obama challenged the nation Saturday to not just hang in there but rather to see the hard times as a chance to ‘discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.’”

$787-billion stimulus plan, $410 billion spending bill for the current fiscal year, proposed 2010 budget increases the deficit to about $1.8 trillion.

And then there is this from the Financial Times: “Jack Welch, who is regarded as the father of the “shareholder value” movement that has dominated the corporate world for more than 20 years, has said it was “a dumb idea” for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains.  The former General Electric chief told the Financial Times the emphasis that executives and investors had put on shareholder value, which began gaining popularity after a speech he made in 1981, was misplaced.”

Mind boggling.