I generally watch CNN only when I can't avoid it—in airports or bus terminals or bank lobbies where the network's endless loops of “breaking news” and “expert analysis” can't be ignored.However, when I saw CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta's mug in the news yesterday with him being touted as the frontrunner to be the next Surgeon General, I couldn't help but smile. His “fact-checking” of Michael Moore's movie about the state of the U.S. healthcare system and subsequent run-in with Moore on “Larry King Live” was some of the best television comedy of 2007. As Paul Krugman noted, Moore got his facts right but Sanjay Gupta is fashionable and telegenic so of course he's taken more seriously... Meanwhile, conservatives are furious with Gupta because he had the temerity during the campaign to question how John McCain's mental health may have been impacted by being incarcerated as a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war for five-and-a-half years... Picking TV celebrities to fill high office has its downside as well as their every public utterance can be thrown back at them.Looking beyond the 24-hour news cycle, Obama may regret this pick in the longterm as well as Gupta owes him nothing and if Gupta drifts off-message or engages in one-too-many ethical lapses he can always skate back to his lucrative media career his celebrity status that much more enhanced.

While the chatter around Sanjay Gupta's possible appointment plays out, the outlines of how Obama intends to manage the economy is also coming into clearer focus. The stimulus plan will be loaded up with questionable tax breaks for business and people earning up to $200,000 per year and when it comes time to address the nation's trillion-dollar deficits, Obama and his economic team want to target programs like Social Security and Medicare. In a nutshell, Obama is unwilling to challenge the free-market, neoliberal orthodoxy that has guided this nation's economic decision-making over the past three decades. On Wednesday, The Indypendent's A.K. Gupta debated Obama's economic strategy on Democracy Now with Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. For more, click here.

To read Gupta's cover story (“Obamanomics: Why the Stimulus Plan Will Not Revive the Economy”) from the Dec. 12, 2008 issue of The Indypendent, in which he forecasts the Obama team's plans to attack social spending, click here.