Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke today held the first press conference in the history of his position. Going into the conference, a number of people said that they’d like Bernanke to address whether the Fed could do more to reduce the country’s unemployment rate, which stands at an unacceptably high 8.8 percent.

The Fed’s own projections don’t have unemployment falling below five percent for five or six years and the Fed’s QE2 program, which was meant to juice the economy, has been a disappointment. So Bernanke was asked by the New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum whether the Fed could be doing more to boost employment in the face of such dire projections.

But instead of answering the question, Bernanke simply explained the steps that the Fed has already taken to alleviate unemployment. His non-answer came even though he acknowledged earlier in the conference that the labor market in in bad shape and that the country has a “very, very deep hole” to dig out of in terms of job creation:

The pace of improvement is still quite slow and we are digging ourselves out of a very, very deep hole. We are still something like 7 million plus jobs below where we were before the crisis. And so clearly, the fact that we’re moving in the right direction, even though that’s encouraging, doesn’t mean that the labor market is in good shape. Obviously it’s not.

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As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt wrote today, the Fed absolutely has options that it could employ to reduce unemployment:

It could announce that it would keep its benchmark rate at zero for a few years, which would probably hold down long-term rates. It could say that it was comfortable with higher inflation for a limited period of time, given how low inflation has been since 2007 and how high unemployment is. Above all, Mr. Bernanke could make clear that he considers years of widespread unemployment to be unacceptable.

Paul Krugman added that “[Bernanke's] own theories — and for that matter the doctrine endorsed by the Fed itself — says that the central bank should be doing much more quantitative easing, not stopping with the US still facing high unemployment and the unemployed themselves increasingly desperate.” Peterson Institute economist and former Federal Reserve staffer Joe Gagnon has released a plan calling for $2 trillion more in Fed easing to boost the economy.

The Washington Post reported today that the Treasury Department is already juggling money around federal accounts in case Congress fails to raise the nation’s debt ceiling before it is reached in a matter of weeks. Allowing the U.S. to hit its legal borrowing limit would cause widespread economic pain, but Republicans have been demanding various concessions in return for their vote to raise it.

At the same time, however, GOP leaders fully acknowledge that the debt ceiling has to be raised. “”We’ll have to find a way to help educate members and help people understand the serious problem that would exist if we didn’t do it,” said Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) called failing to raise the debt ceiling “unworkable.” But both Boehner and Ryan have then attemped to extract concessions in return for doing what they’ve already admitted they must do in any case.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) joined this group today, first proclaiming that everybody “agrees that we’ve got to pay our bills,” before threatening not to raise the debt ceiling:

First of all, Joe, you know, America pays its bills. I think everybody sort of agrees that we’ve got to pay our bills, but I don’t think that that comes at the exclusion of trying to fix the problem here. We are in a debt crisis, I think the markets, global investors, the American people are expecting us to deliver on our commitment that we’re going to change the spending crisis in Washington. So together with that debt limit vote has to be some real reforms. And I mean real.

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But unless the debt ceiling is raised, America will fail to pay some bills. Treasury can, for a limited amount of time, ensure that interest payments on the debt are made, thus avoiding traditional default, but those payments would come at the expense of other promised payments, as the government could only spend whatever tax revenue comes in month to month. Inevitably, some obligations would not be met.

Everyone from banking executives to the GOP’s favorite economic validator have said that the debt ceiling has to be raised in order to avoid a slew of negative economic consequences. But Republicans are continuing to play chicken with the country’s creditworthiness.

Earlier this month, the White House floated the possibility of an executive order to require “companies seeking government contracts” to disclose contributions to groups that air political ads. And a few days ago, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) filed a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission to demand rules mandating donor disclosure.

The move by the White House has been met with a fierce denunciation by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which ran one of the largest ad campaigns using secret corporate money in the midterm election last year. In an interview with the New York Times, Chamber executive Bruce Josten compared President Obama to Muammar Qaddafi, claiming that the Chamber will fight the order with the same resolve as military leaders currently bombing Libya:

The lobbyist, R. Bruce Josten, said in an interview that the powerful business bloc “is not going to tolerate” what it saw as a “backdoor attempt” by the White House to silence private-sector opponents by disclosing their political spending.

“We will fight it through all available means,” Mr. Josten said. In a reference to the White House’s battle to depose Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he said, “To quote what they say every day on Libya, all options are on the table.”

The Chamber’s threat is not idle talk. As ThinkProgress exclusively reported, the Chamber’s lawyers recently met with a group of military contractors to devise a potentially illegal plot to sabotage liberal critics, including Change to Win, Chamber Watch, MoveOn.org, and even ThinkProgress. The plan included an effort to use fake online identities to hack computers and submit false documents to progressive groups in a bid to discredit the Chamber’s perceived political opponents.

Moreover, the White House’s disclosure rule threatens the entire existence of the Chamber. This is because the Chamber only exists to hide the identity of corporations seeking to fight nasty political battles without having their name or brand exposed. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the Chamber’s “most striking innovation has been to offer individual companies and industries the chance to use the chamber as a means of anonymously pursuing their own political ends.” The Chamber’s members include defense contractors, bailed out banks, and other donors likely to be affected by the government contractor campaign disclosure rule.

Questions about the legality of the Chamber’s own campaign contributors linger. Last year, we broke the story that the Chamber actively solicited dozens of donations from foreign corporations from India, Bahrain, and other countries. The money, according to documents we unearthed, were deposited in the same legal entity the Chamber later used to pay for political attack ads, mostly against Democrats. The Chamber admitted to the direct foreign donations, but never proved that the money was properly segregated from domestic money. The Federal Election Commission did nothing to look into the matter.