First thanks to all the folks who came here. We appreciate them all. And now some big news. Djournal.com is moving and this blog is coming to an end. The new site is NeMs360.com. Djournal.com will still be up and running for awhile, but Journal Publishing Company will gradually be moving to this much more modern more up to date site. You’ll find all the breaking news you grew used to here there. Hope to see you there. Thanks for being here.

Todd Vinyard
Online Editor

FBI agents late Thursday arrested Stanford Financial Group’s Chief Investment Officer Laura Pendergest-Holt on a criminal complaint charging her with obstructing the federal fraud case against Stanford.

Click here to read complaint against Pendergest-Holt.

To a nation reeling from recession and facing long-festering problems, President Barack Obama has a simple reminder: “We are not quitters.”

Whatever the problems, the new president promised in the first prime-time speech of his term, “We will rebuild, we will recover and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Standing before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Obama optimistically sketched an agenda that began with jobs, then broadened quickly to include a stable credit system, better schools, health care reform, reliable domestic sources of energy and an end to the war in Iraq. Specifics will follow, he said, although he conceded more billions may be necessary to stabilize the banking system.

Click here for link to text of the speech.

Comment below and give your thoughts.

Bob Wheeler, a country music historian from Baldwyn, Miss., tells how he started collecting albums and his passion for music.

Bob Wheeler, a country music historian from Baldwyn, Miss., plays one of the oldest records from his extensive record collection — “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” by Henry Burr.

Neighbors Editor Bobby Pepper put together these video of Bob Wheeler and his record collection. Read more about Mr. Wheeler’s collection by clicking here.

Thanks Bobby! Good to hear what a 100-year-old record sounds like.

IHL is in Oxford meeting with different groups about that today. What are your thoughts? Post what you think the new Ole Miss Chancellor should focus on in the comments below.

Daily Journal’s Errol Castens is providing updates from Oxford. Click here for the updates.

Click the video above to listen to Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat in this video produced by the school the day he announced he was retiring. Khayat talks about his decision to retire, his accomplishments while at Ole Miss, and his future plans.

Click here for more videos on Ole Miss at the school’s YouTube Channel.

We’ll have reports from Errol Castens later today on the Chancellor selection committee’s meetings in Oxford. Click here for a schedule of those meetings. If you attend any feel free to offer your views of how they went. If you don’t post what you would like to say if could go about what the group should be looking for in the next Chancellor at Ole Miss.

Sad news to report today – Longtime beloved Daily Journal columnist Phyllis Harper, whose tales of a place called Fawn Grove earned her a loyal following, was remembered by friends Friday. Harper died Thursday at North Mississippi Medical Center after a brief illness.

Share your thoughts about Phyllis Harper and her years at the Journal with comments below.

What did you think of President Obama’s press conference? Did it change your mind on the stimulus package? Comment below.
Also here is a Fact Check of some of what was said by The Associated Press.

FACT CHECK: Examining Obama’s job, pork claims

By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON — At least Route 31 is a road to somewhere.

President Barack Obama had it both ways when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana and later at a prime-time news conference. He bragged in Indiana about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.

Obama’s sales pitch on the enormous package he wants Congress to make law has sizzle as well as steak. He’s projecting job creation numbers that may be impossible to verify and glossing over some ethical problems that bedeviled his team.

In recent years, the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska came to symbolize the worst excesses of congressional earmarks, a device that allows a member of Congress to add money for local projects in legislation, practically under the radar.

Nothing so bold, or specific, as that now-discarded bridge project is contained in the stimulus package. That’s not to say the package steers clear of waste or parochial interests. Obama played to such interests Monday, speaking at one point as if he’d come to fill potholes.

A look at some of Obama’s claims in Elkhart, Ind., and the news conference called to make his case to the largest possible audience:

OBAMA: “Not a single pet project,” he told the news conference. “Not a single earmark.”

THE FACTS: There are no “earmarks,” as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork — tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.

For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other “priority procurements” by the Coast Guard.

Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on “roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on.” He added, “And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart.”

U.S. 31 is a north-south highway serving South Bend, 15 miles from Elkhart in the northern part of the state.

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OBAMA: “My bottom line is, are we creating 4 million jobs?” he told the news conference.

He said in Indiana, “The plan that we’ve put forward will save or create 3 million to 4 million jobs over the next two years.”

THE FACTS: Job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.

The president’s own economists, in a report prepared last month, stated, “It should be understood that that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error.”

Beyond that, it’s unlikely the nation will ever know how many jobs are saved as a result of the stimulus. While it’s clear when jobs are abolished, there’s no economic gauge that tracks job preservation.

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OBAMA: “They’ll be jobs building the wind turbines and solar panels and fuel-efficient cars that will lower our dependence on foreign oil and modernizing our costly health care system that will save us billions of dollars and countless lives.”

THE FACTS: The economic stimulus bill would allocate about $20 billion to help hospitals and doctors transition from paper charts to electronic health records for their patients. Research has shown that in some instances, electronic record keeping can eliminate inappropriate services and improve care, but it’s not a sure thing by any means. “By itself, the adoption of more health IT is generally not sufficient to produce significant cost savings,” the Congressional Budget Office reported last year.

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OBAMA: “I’ve appointed hundreds of people, all of whom are outstanding Americans who are doing a great job. There are a couple who had problems before they came into my administration, in terms of their taxes. … I made a mistake. … I don’t want to send the signal that there are two sets of rules.”

THE FACTS: Two of his appointees, former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle for health and human services secretary and Nancy Killefer as Obama’s chief compliance officer, dropped out after reports they had not paid a portion of their taxes.

Obama previously acknowledged he “screwed up” in making it seem to Americans that there is one set of tax compliance rules for VIPs and another set for everyone else. Yet his choice for treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, achieved the post despite having belatedly paid $34,000 to the IRS, an agency Geithner now oversees.

That could leave the perception that there is one set of rules for Geithner and another set for everyone else.

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OBAMA: “We also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.”

THE FACTS: This could turn out to be the case. But as bad as the economic numbers are, the unemployment figures have not reached the levels of the early 1980s, let alone the 1930s — yet. A total of 598,000 payroll jobs vanished in January — the most in nearly 35 years — and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.6 from 7.2 percent the month before. The most recent high was 7.8 percent in June 1992.

And the jobless rate was 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. Unemployment in the Great Depression ranged for several years from 25 percent to close to 30 percent.

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Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Jim Kuhnhenn, Kevin Freking and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.

It is down to three from the 12 talked about earlier …

By Patsy R. Brumfield
Daily Journal

COLUMBUS – Mississippi University for Women may become Reneau University, Waverley University and Welty-Reneau University.

The campus’ new-name committee, selected by president Dr. Claudia Limbert last fall, worked through more than 20 names today to come up with three finalists for further consideration higher up the decision-maker chain.

After talking some three hours about the top 11 names submitted via Internet set or via mail, the two dozen committee member settled on grouping names by “family” – Reneau, Waverly and Welty. A grouping of nearly a dozen other names fell into Number 12 because they each received about the same overall votes from the committee via e-mail a few days ago.

Sally Reneau was an ardent 19th century supporter of higher public education for women in Mississippi. Waverly refers to a novel about change by Sir Walter Scott or to the plantation near Columbus. And Welty is for MUW alumna and Pulitzer writer Eudora Welty.

The top three names go to Limbert and a smaller leadership group working with marketers to decide which name best suits the university for its future.

The name change also must be OK’d by the state Institutions of Higher Learning’s board, which runs the state’s eight public universities.

The proposed change has been controversial, drawing the ire of hard-core MUW alumnae, who don’t want the change and have opposed Limbert on other issues.

Each set of names had its detractors, but by about 5 p.m., they had decided which to send to Limbert.

What name do you like? Comment below …

President Barack Obama waves following his inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Click here for link to text of speech and more.

What did you think of the speech? Comment here.