The White House hosted a huge Halloween party tonight. There were about 2,000 local area kids who lined up to get treats from the White House, some from President Obama and Mrs. Obama.

Take a look for some photos...

President and Mrs. Obama hand out Halloween treats to children in the East Room of the White House (Travel Pool photo)

Keep Reading ...

You may have heard there's going to be a Halloween party at the White House tonight. If you're wondering how the White House has celebrated Halloween in the past take a look at the White House Historical Association website. They've got some great pictures and stories about how other Presidential families went BOO!

http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_shows/holidays_halloween/index.html

            The White House has just posted a link on their blog to some 500 records listing visitors to the White House from January to July of this year. This is in keeping with their self-imposed promise to release every White House visitor's name.

            This first batch comes from before they instituted that policy. For now, the White House is answering specific requests for records created before the White House instituted the practice. You may remember the other day, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that by December, the first official FULL batch of names will be released. Keep Reading ...

How do you measure success? When it comes to the economy, many use the job metric, which still lags well behind other factors.

Friday afternoon, that metric was given a real number: 640,329. That's how many jobs the administration contends were directly saved or created by the national economic stimulus from its inception in February through September 30th. Keep Reading ...

 President Obama overturned a decades-old policy Friday that he said was "rooted in fear rather than fact," when he announced the lifting of a rule barring HIV-positive people from entering the US.
"Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat," the President said. Keep Reading ...

Today, President Obama will sign the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009 after receiving his usual daily briefings.

Later in the day he will meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Afghanistan and Pakistan as he continues to contemplate his strategy.

President Obama's Public Schedule:

9:30PM The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:00AM The President receives the Economic Daily Briefing

10:30AM The President meets with senior advisers

11:50AM The President signs the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Extension Act of 2009

1:30PM The President meets with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Expected attendees include:

Vice President Biden; Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; General James Jones, National Security Advisor; Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ; General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff; General George W. Casey, Chief of Staff of the Army; General James T. Conway, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps; Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations ;

General Norton A. Schwartz, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force; Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security; Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

The Obama administration (White House and Transportation Depatment) did some heavyweight policy sparring with Edmunds.com today over criticism that Cash for Clunkers might have cost taxpayers $24,00o per vehicle sold.

Edmunds.com came to that figure by estimating that only 125,000 of the Cash for Clunker program's 691,000 documented vehicles sales were a direct result of cash incentives.

The White House fired back as did DOT, arguing in pretty strong language, alleging that Edmunds' was calculating mystery auto sales on Mars and missing real show-room deals in the grand old USofA (okay, it didn't say the USofA part).

I asked top White House economist Jared Bernstein about the Edmunds.com flap late Thursday. Here's his answer.

"It may well be the case that some of the sales in Cash for Clunkers were sales that would have occurred anyway, but wouldn't have occurred when they did. In other words, I'm sure that some of those sales were pulled forward - maybe a quarter, maybe 6 months, maybe a year. And that's okay,   especially when you look at today's GDP report where we are posting positive growth and where consumer durables including autos is a big contributor, we really need that growth now. Pulling sales forward is actually helpful."

Late today, Edmunds said this in response to the White House:

"The White House claims that our analysis was based on car sales on Mars and that on Earth, the marketplace is connected. We agree the marketplace is connected. In fact, that is exactly the basis of our analysis.

It is also claimed we missed the possibility that Cash for Clunkers generated excitement and consumers bought vehicles even if they didn’t qualify for the program -- a claim that has been widely supported by anecdote but by little analysis. It does, after all, seem a bit odd that masses of consumers would elect to buy a vehicle because of a program for which they don’t qualify -- doubly so when you add in the fact that prices shot up during Cash for Clunkers, creating a disincentive to buy.

Finally, the White House claims that the increase in fourth-quarter production reported by the car manufacturers can be attributed to Cash for Clunkers. But here is a better reason: the economy is recovering accompanied by improved car sales. No manufacturer increases production -- a decision with long-term consequences -- based on the 30-day sales blip triggered by an event like Cash for Clunkers.

With all respect to the White House, Edmunds.com thinks that instead of shooting the messenger, government officials should take heart from the core message of the analysis: the fundamentals of the auto marketplace are improving faster than the current sales numbers suggest.

Isn’t this a piece of good news we can all cheer?"

I also asked Berstein if Federal Reserve moves to keep interest rates at record lows played any role in the postive Q3 GDP numbers. He said no. He said low interest rates helped keep the economy from slipping deeper into a hole, but it was stimulus dollars -- and those alone - that generated growth.

"The is very much a Keynsian (John Maynard) demand-side program to help to produce jobs for the American people, to create economic activity that wouldn't be there in the absence of this package. We're talking about the greatest recession since the Great Depression. That's kind of on the demand-side of the equation. At the same time, the Federal Reserve, by injecting liquidity into the financial side of the economy, is trying to thaw some of those credit lines out there helping to stabilize the financial sector. So, in one sense the stimulus gets the heart beat of the economy's demand going, where the federal reserve sort of clears out the blood stream, gets the blood flowing again."

University of Maryland economist Peter Morici says the White House has it backward.

"The Fed is much more responsible for the improvement in the economy than the stimulus. Most of the stimulus money was either saved, or it's not spent yet. The fed keeping interest rates at rock-bottom levels made the Wall Street banks very profitable. (That) helped a lot - although now they're not sharing those profits, they're stuffing them in their pockets, and they're not loaning money to small businesses."

See stimulus amounts paid-out to date here

Moreover, Morici fears the solid Q3 GDP numbers are a blip in what may prove to be a painfully slow recovery.

"Three-point-five percent is a terribly deceptive number. A good deal of that was Cash for Clunkers, which won't repeat.  We're probably going to be growing at 2 to 2-and-a-half percent a year going forward and that's not enough to bring down unemployment. We should really have a number of 5% or 6% coming out of a recession like this. That's the norm, this means the economy is not healthy at all."