Is Obama a blithering idiot? Does he surround himself with morons and dickweeds? First he schedules his SAVING AMERICA speech during the Republican presidential debate and then is forced to switch the date. Now he is going up against the first game of the NFL season between two of the best teams.
I cannot wait to see the Ratings for Obama’s bullshit speech versus a football game. This fool demands a joint session of freaking Congress so he can announce that he wants to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits for another year. He will anounce more Keynesian bullshit infrastructure ideas. He will demand more money for education.
Here is the rub. This weasel just signed a debt ceiling deal to CUT spending in 2012 by a whole $22 billion out of a $3.8 trillion spending budget. Now he will go on national TV and propose to increase spending by at least $200 billion in 2012. He will declare that these are dire times and require BOLD action. Obama is a fraud. He has no clue how to create jobs because he has never worked a day in his life in a real job. He is being advised by Keynesian douchebags who are blinded by their theories and models.
The only bold action I’ll be watching that night is Aaron Rodgers hitting James Jones for a 60 yard TD. I suggest you do likewise.
Obama, Boehner spar on timing of speech
Thursday, September 1, 2011
By JIM KUHNHENN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In a sudden political shoving match, President Barack Obama asked Congress to convene an extraordinary joint session next Wednesday to hear his much-anticipated proposals to put jobless Americans back to work, but House Speaker John Boehner balked and told the president he ought to wait and speak a day later.
If Obama gets his way, his speech will upstage a Republican presidential debate scheduled for the same time. If Boehner prevails, the president’s address could conflict with the opening game of the National Football League season.
Wednesday evening the White House said it was in touch with Boehner’s office to resolve the sparring contest.
Obama asked Congress on Wednesday for a prime-time slot on Sept. 7, giving him a grand stage for a televised address and putting him face to face with Republican lawmakers who have bitterly opposed his agenda and vow to vote down any new spending he might propose.
His appearance also would be a political poke in the eye at GOP presidential candidates who are to gather for a campaign debate in Simi Valley, Calif., at the same hour as the president’s speech.
Usually, presidential requests to address Congress are routinely granted after consultations between the White House and lawmakers.
In this case, the White House notified Boehner’s office on the same day it released the letter requesting the session. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said Boehner’s office raised no objections or concerns.
But Boehner, in his formal reply, said that the House would not return until the day Obama wanted to speak and that logistical and parliamentary issues might be an obstacle. The House and the Senate each would have to adopt a resolution to allow a joint session for the president.
Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said no one in Boehner’s office signed off on the date and accused the White House of ignoring established protocol of arriving at a mutually agreed date before making public announcements.
Among the reasons the White House chose Wednesday rather than Thursday was that officials there didn’t want Obama to compete against the start of the NFL season. That game, between the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers, is being carried live by NBC at 8:30 p.m. EDT. NBC is also a co-sponsor, along with the newspaper Politico, of Wednesday’s Republican debate. Both sponsors said they would not postpone the GOP event.
Boehner’s letter did not mention the Republican debate on Wednesday or Thursday night’s Saints-Packers game. But the political gamesmanship was clear.
Tweeted GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich: “From one Speaker to another…nicely done John. ”
Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, had no objection to Obama’s request. “Sen. Reid welcomes President Obama to address Congress any day of the week,” said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman.
Obama is expected to lay out proposals to increase hiring with a blend of tax incentives for business and government spending for public works projects. With July unemployment at 9.1 percent and the economy in a dangerously sluggish recovery, Obama’s plan has consequences for millions of Americans and for his own political prospects. The president has made clear he will ask for extensions of a payroll tax cut for workers and jobless benefits for the unemployed. Those two elements would cost about $175 billion.
“It is our responsibility to find bipartisan solutions to help grow our economy, and if we are willing to put country before party, I am confident we can do just that,” Obama wrote Wednesday in a letter to Boehner and Reid.
The high-profile address illustrates how, in a divided, highly partisan Washington atmosphere, Obama wants to portray himself as the pacesetter for the national agenda.
Stucky says:
Both the football game AND Obama’s speech will feature fumbles, turnovers, illegal plays, and kicks to the groin. So what’s the point of watching Obama?
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1st September 2011 at 10:01 am
Muck About says:
Count on it!
It remains a fact that government can not “create” jobs. Period. They can take money (or print it) to hire people for government positions but that’s adding drones to the load and is never productive.
Rinse and repeat. Government can not create jobs. All they can do is get the fuck out of the way and let jobs be created by those with skin in the game and don’t steal from others to do it.
Rinse and Repeat one last time: Governments can not create jobs..
They know it. They ignore it. They’re in it for power and to rip off the citizens who can create jobs. They are in it to enrich themselves and screw everyone else.
Not my America any more. Now we live in a Fascist police state where parents are charged with child neglect when they allow a minor to ride a mile to school on a bicycle.
I am really getting pissed about all this..
MA
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1st September 2011 at 10:03 am
Welshman says:
Admin.,
You mean cut 22 billion out of 3.8 trillion budget ?
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1st September 2011 at 10:12 am
Stucky says:
“Not my America any more. ”
That’s a pretty damn significant statement coming from a citizen such as Muck.
I’m telling you all the damn truth. Pre 9-11 I couldn’t possibly image ME saying the same thing. I was a gung-ho, America is #1, uber-patriot. But, no longer. I also say, “this is not my America anymore.”.
You probably couldn’t find two more patriotic America-loving immigrants than my parents. Their near constant refrain when I visit them is, “what happened to the America we once knew?”.
Ms. Freud, most of her friends, and virtually all of mine are saying the same thing as Muck.
Something bad is stirring in the air amongst the most ordinary of Americans.
Some may say, “if you don’t like it, leave”. Some may accuse me of bashing America. Unfortunately, both these types of people simply don’t get it. I believe they live with their heads in the sand. They just don’t get it. The “it” is a deep sadness and the feeling of loss of what we once knew.
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1st September 2011 at 10:18 am
Dave says:
I wonder if the repubs will be sreaming that the football game is only on one channel, like the dimmies screamed that the debate was only on one channel. Fucking joke!
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1st September 2011 at 10:20 am
Administrator says:
Welshman
I always do that. Thanks for the catch. I fixed it.
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1st September 2011 at 10:27 am
scott says:
If I were a Congressman I wouldn’t show up for Obama’s speech. Football game is live and demands real time attention. Obama’s speech is canned, contains nothing new and if it did and it was important why wait a week to give it. Surely, if Obama has found some way to create real jobs, those in need of work shouldn’t have to wait another week to learn how.
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1st September 2011 at 11:20 am
Lisa says:
A billion is the new ‘million’
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1st September 2011 at 11:28 am
Thinker says:
You’ll love this…
TIME’s MICHAEL SCHERER , in the forthcoming issue — ‘Can He Step Up His Game? Obama’s next move: if he can’t fix the economy, make sure the Republicans get the blame’: ‘In June, … White House chief of staff Bill Daley arranged a secret retreat for his senior team at Fort McNair … Historian Michael Beschloss went along as a guest speaker to help answer the one question on everyone’s mind: How does a U.S. President win re-election with the country suffering unacceptably high rates of unemployment? The historian’s lecture provided a lift for Barack Obama’s team. No iron law in politics is ever 100% accurate, Beschloss told the group. Two Presidents in the past century-Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984-won re-¬election amid substantial economic suffering. Both used the same two-part strategy: FDR and Reagan argued that the country, though in pain, was improving and that their opponents, anchored in past failures, would make things worse. … The President’s aides, all but resigned to unemployment above 8% on Election Day, now see in Roosevelt and Reagan a plausible path to victory. They intend to make sure voters believe a year from now that their fortunes are improving, and they plan to persuade the American people that a Republican in the White House would be a step backward. … Obama will try to divert the public’s frustration with Washington toward his main enemy, the GOP.’
Imagine that, talking to a historian. Think anyone is concerned about being compared to Hoover and Buchanan?
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1st September 2011 at 11:45 am
Administrator says:
Thinker
I think Obama needs to read The Fourth Turning and he can then pull an LBJ and decline to run. There is no way he is re-elected in 2012.
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1st September 2011 at 11:51 am
Thinker says:
Admin,
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Except I think they’re too delusional for common sense…
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1st September 2011 at 12:18 pm
Administrator says:
HERE COMES THE TSUNAMI OF KEYNESIAN BULLSHIT – HOLD ONTO YOUR WALLETS – BIG GOVERNMENT PROPOSING TO GET BIGGER
WASHINGTON (AP) — A national infrastructure bank that would entice private investors into road and rail projects could be a major part of the jobs package that President Barack Obama hopes will finally bring relief to the unemployed.
The White House hasn’t divulged the contents of the package that Obama is to unveil in an address to a joint session of Congress next Thursday. But the president has pushed the idea of an infrastructure bank in recent speeches and has praised Senate and House bills that create such a government-sponsored lending institution.
Whether the bank, which would need time to organize, could have any real impact on the jobs situation in the coming year — and particularly before the November 2012 elections — is in dispute.
Obama seems to think it would.
He said at a July news conference that while the bank he is proposing is “relatively small,” he could imagine “a project where we’re rebuilding roads and bridges and ports and schools and broadband lines and smart grids, and taking all those construction workers and putting them to work right now.”
But Janet Kavinoky, director of infrastructure issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cautioned that “even in the next two years I don’t believe the bank is going to be that kind of job creator.”
The best way to spur job growth in the short term is for Congress to pass long-stalled bills to fund aviation and highway programs, she said.
The Chamber of Commerce strongly supports the infrastructure bank. Kavinoky said the United States is one of the few large countries that lack a central source of low-cost financing for construction projects. But she said it’s going to take time to get it running and come up with a pipeline of projects where funds can be invested.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who’s sponsoring an infrastructure bank bill, argued that “we have projects all across America that are ready to go tomorrow.” He said the bank “could have money flowing in the next year easily.”
Michael Likosky, senior fellow at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge and author of “Obama’s Bank: Financing a Durable New Deal,” says he is working with transportation agencies in California and New York that “are waiting for the federal government to say they are going to support these projects.”
A commitment to a national infrastructure bank could also provide a positive spark to financial markets and encourage investment, he said.
The bank would supplement federal spending on infrastructure by promoting private-sector investment in projects of national or regional significance. The private sector currently provides only about 6 percent of infrastructure spending.
Supporters, which range from the Chamber of Commerce to the AFL-CIO, say pension funds, private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds have hundreds of billions of dollars ready to be invested in low-risk infrastructure projects.
It’s better than having pension fund money go to Treasury bonds, Likosky said. “It’s really about changing our approach; we’re in tough economic times and we will be for a while. We have to make sure the money we have goes further.”
The Kerry bill would require $10 billion in start-up money from the government to get the first loans going and cover administrative costs. The bank would be government owned, run by a board of directors, independent of any federal agency and self-sustaining after the initial expense. Public-private partnerships, corporations and state and local governments would be eligible for the loans.
The bank’s directors would pick which projects to finance based on an analysis of costs, benefits and revenue streams, such as from tolls or fees, for repaying the loan. Once the terms of the loan, including interest rates and fees to cover risk, are set, the Treasury Department would disburse the loan.
Urban projects would have to be at least $100 million in size, rural ones $25 million. The infrastructure bank’s loan could cover no more than 50 percent of a project’s costs.
“There is going to be a revenue stream for payback and therefore the project is going to stand on its own because it will be a good enough project to attract private-sector funding,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, one of several Republican co-sponsors of the Kerry plan.
Supporters estimate the bank could set up as much as $160 billion in government loans over a decade and anchor as much as $650 billion in projects.
In the House, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., has a similar bill that relies on $25 billion in start-up money and makes use of bonds as well as loans to stimulate construction projects. Both Kerry and DeLauro would cover transportation, water and energy projects.
DeLauro would also include communications projects. She says her bill is modeled after the European Investment Bank, which has been financing infrastructure projects for 50 years and last year invested more than $100 billion.
Obama, in his 2012 budget proposal, envisioned spending $30 billion to start an infrastructure bank within the Transportation Department that would provide grants as well as loans to transportation projects.
That idea drew opposition from the House Transportation Committee chairman, Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. He said in a recent article in the congressional newspaper Roll Call that it would be better to increase help for existing state infrastructure banks “rather than increasing the size of the bloated federal bureaucracy, as some advocate, by creating a national infrastructure bank.”
Kerry pointed to a 2009 American Society of Civil Engineers report that said $2.2 trillion needs to be spent over five years to bring the nation’s roads, bridges and water systems up to an adequate level. He said Congress needs to both pass a new highway bill and agree on alternatives like the bank.
“If we can leverage $650 billion and get money going in the transportation bill, we can begin to nibble away at the problem,” Kerry said.
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1st September 2011 at 12:35 pm
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
“Is Obama a blithering idiot?.”
Yes, but he is ruthless, conniving, vindictive, narcissistic, corrupt and that can take you a long long way in the banana republic that our great country has become.
“Does he surround himself with morons and dickweeds?”
Yes. And they are also lickspittles and toadies, craven hypocrites, people that have never created a job in their lives or worked in the private sector.
Remember that <5% of his Cabinent, his 40+ Czars and all his other appointees have any experience in the private sector. ALL THESE PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT JOBS IS HOW TO REGULATE AND TAX THEM.
So, good luck with some kind of real world solution.
This blunder just makes Obama look weak and indecisive and inept, which he is, of course. The REAL problem is that our enemies are watching as well. And, as usual, we citizens are goining to pay the price.
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1st September 2011 at 3:16 pm
Anonymous says:
Admin – can you please get rid of the annoying search related popup? It really bites.
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1st September 2011 at 3:43 pm
ragman says:
How about turning the TV off and doing something constructive. Cleaning guns, reloading ammo, sharpening knives, and for you Yankees it looks like Hurricane Shaquanda just might be coming your way. Restocking the emergency supplies would be a good bet.
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1st September 2011 at 3:55 pm
Opinionated Bloviator says:
“Obama is a fraud. He has no clue how to create jobs because he has never worked a day in his life in a real job. He is being advised by Keynesian douchebags who are blinded by their theories and models.” and who are determined to push them to their logical conclusion of hyperinflationary collapse and economic implosion, after all the fact that every country that has gone down the “full keynesian” of spend and print until prosperity returns has ended up looking like Argentina in 2001 or Zimbabwe today just means they did not spend enough or should have printed MORE…
In another age Obama would have been termed a “useful idiot”, today I prefer the term HopeyMcChange.
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1st September 2011 at 12:01 am
Punk in Drublic says:
Why is this an issue? If the economy could be improved with a fucking speech it would have been fixed a long time ago. We have gotten more speeches and public appearances and twitter feeds…
All this guy has done is promise more money to more people and blow sunshine up our asses while he bends us over to service the banksters. Now he is having trouble doing that. Pathetic.
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1st September 2011 at 8:13 am
Mooncusser says:
My first comment.
He is doing what he always does, talking to the idiots in this country and there is a lot of them. I would not be so confident about 2012 election. He has about 40% 0f the people on welfare and buying off some so-called class “A” citizens. Also, encouraging illegal aliens to vote. That is a lot of people.
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1st September 2011 at 7:44 pm
A real american says:
The near fact that this article questions the importance of the Presidents Speech vs a football game, in the crucial times we are in shows that government is NOT the problem. Citizens are.
Someone says Gov can’t produce jobs… LOL Oh and the private market did a great job producing jobs during the bush era… LOL American citizens are the dumbest assholes… Go on hate on Obama. You’re only bringing the demise and slowing your own progress. Gov created 22,000 jobs in Aug., FACT. Misleading reports say “No jobs were created” because Verizon had 45000 emloyees on strike. Just like when these 45000 employees come off strike it will be misleading to say that there were 45000 jobs created..
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1st September 2011 at 10:25 am
Administrator says:
Real American
You are incorrect. Government reduced employment by 15,000 in August. FACT!!!!
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1st September 2011 at 10:31 am
TeresaE says:
Real American,
ah, you are a “real” American, versus the rest of us “pretend” Americans.
The ONLY reason the government created more jobs was because Georgie wanted to purse a policy creating a police state and in order to keep the American people scared – instead of noticing the dramatic rate that small to mid sized businesses (and their jobs) were being shipped to China – he had to ramp up employees to imprison, ‘er I mean protect, us.
Obama came in AND MADE IT WORSE. While non-union, mom & pop, small skilled tradesmen were regulated, taxed and run out of business, Obama INCREASED federal compensation, paid off our Congress’s workers’ student loans and REMOVED TARIFFS on Chinese made goods while increasing costs, rules, inspections, audits, regulations and fees on American businesses.
Wake up dude.
The government CAUSED the problems, or created the environment to grow the problems.
To think that either Red or Blue is a “solution” is insanity at best.
You are living proof of what decades of indoctrination and the intentional removal of reasoning skills has done to our general population.
For every dime the feds spend, WE THE PEOPLE have to go forth and earn three more to keep up. We are NOT keeping up now, increasing the drain won’t magically make us increase our dimes. It will, as every other time, have an exact OPPOSITE effect on the real economy.
We, the non-protected middle & working, have lost and “real Americans” like you refuse to see the empty parking lots, blackened buildings and loitering young people. Instead you turn on a flashy screen and let millionaires tell you how great it all is even while your personal opportunities, choices and futures shrink.
Real Americans like you are the reason why I am despondent. Clueless, never created a job, willfully uneducated and growing lazier by the day.
Scary shit.
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1st September 2011 at 11:08 am
eugend66 says:
Punk and Teresa, +1.
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1st September 2011 at 11:16 am