Some random news bits that I picked up this morning. Some have connections, others don't. Read at your own risk, and apologies if any of these have been recently covered.
The General Accounting Office concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services illegally spent federal money on what amounted to covert propaganda...the GAO's legal opinion was not prompted by Democratic complaints. GAO officials said yesterday that they had decided on their own to examine the legality of the videos...as part of a separate review of advertisements the administration had produced about the Medicare law.
[Washington Post]
The steady drip of administration perfidy continues.
Meanwhile, CNNMoney reports two pieces of bad economic news: initial unemployment claims have come in above forecasts for two straight weeks, although the four-week moving average is at the lowest level since late 2000; in addition, the index of leading economic indicators for April are off.
Finally, Mr. Ritholtz at The Big Picture gives us a pair of insightful and informative posts; the first dealing with why oil prices are not like taxes, which also reads as a mini-manifesto on why rising gas prices are really, really bad right now. The second has a chart from the Federal Reserve detailing personal and corporate income as a percentage of national income; if you want to understand why economic confidence can be so low in a time of 'massive economic recovery,' you need look no further that this chart, which shows personal income as a percentage of national income at what appears to be an all-time low (the chart goes back to '78).