President Obama's Weekly Address - April 6, 2013

The President’s Plan to Create Jobs and Cut the Deficit

Quote of the Day

“Instead of doing everything he can to help Virginians and people on the East Coast recover from the loss of life and property that Irene dealt over the weekend, Cantor is parading around on Fox News talking about how he will hold federal aid hostage unless he gets to slash the budget. Anyone willing to play political games while people are suffering is unfit to be a congressman.”

~David Mills, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia.

@nprpolitics Sucks

Posted by JHW22

Slowly, many liberals have noticed that NPR isn't always free of spin to the right. Or spin to the fear. Or spin to the whatever is opposite of what they should be reporting.

Today I dropped @nprpolitics from my Twitter feed because of their choice of Tweet language in regards to the new deficit numbers.

First, notice how Mark Knoller, CBS News White House Radio Correspondent, Tweeted. He posted:

While Obama was speaking, Treasury Dept reported that federal deficit for the 2010 fiscal year just ended was $1.294-trillion.

He followed that with:

That's down from the 2009 deficit record high deficit of $1.416-trillion.

Here's how @nprpolitics reported the same information:

Federal Deficit Hits Near-Record $1.3 Trillion In 2010 http://n.pr/cbR5RZ

The article in link in the @nprpolitics Tweet states [emphasis mine]:

The Obama administration says the federal deficit hit a near-record $1.3 trillion for the just-completed budget year.

That means the government had to borrow 37 cents out of every dollar it spent as tax revenues continued to lag while spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits went up as the economy slowly pulled out of recession.

The eye-popping deficit figures provide Republican critics of President Barack Obama's fiscal stewardship with fresh ammunition less than three weeks ahead of the midterm congressional elections. The deficit was $122 billion less than last year, a modest improvement.

That's right. The deficit is better this year than last. But @nprpolitics is spinning it as if it's the opposite. Massive fail. I no longer follow @nprpolitics on Twitter.

Cartoon of the Day

Cartoon of the Day

McCain Economy Would've Been No Different - UPDATED

If things had turned out differently on a November night in 2008 and we had the pleasure of a McCain/Palin administration, the record deficit would have been the same or perhaps worse. So says John McCain's former economic policy advisor.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin argued that under McCain's stewardship economic policy would have been strikingly different than under Obama -- with a much smaller stimulus bill and government expenditures going down as opposed to up.

But the former Congressional Budget Office director did acknowledge that, even with these changes, the country "probably would still have a record deficit" as is projected under the Obama administration.

And we all know why.

...many of the deficit problems the current administration faces today are traced directly back to the policies of its predecessors. This, indeed, seems to be implicit in Holtz-Eakin's acknowledgment.

In December 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the then-$1.4 trillion annual deficit run by the government under Obama had much to do with the Bush administration's package of tax cuts, the wars it launched in Iraq and Afghanistan and its response to the recession.

I wonder if McCain would have "blamed it on Bush"?


UPDATE (4:15pm): Of course, no sooner does President Obama release his budget than The Maverick gets busy twiddling his thumbs to come up with this asinine tweet:



Maybe he should have spoken to Holtz-Eakin...

President Obama's Weekly Address - January 30, 2010

Reining in Budget Deficits

President Obama's Weekly Address - March 21, 2009

A Budget Equal to the Task Before Us

GOP Budget Message: "Homina Homina Homina"

Eric "The Squirrel" Cantor appeared on Meet The Press today to poo-poo Poresident Obama's budget while bringing up the fictional train from Disneyland to Las Vegas again, but he did say that the GOP was going to offer an alternative budget proposal.

MR. GREGORY: Are you going to vote for the president's budget?

REP. CANTOR: Listen, the budget process, as you know, David, is one that has just begun on Capitol Hill. There is a lot of, I think, reticence to embrace his budget on both sides of the aisle. This budget, frankly, doesn't have the focus that we need right now in this economy. The focus should be, job one, fixing this banking system and trying to get jobs created again.

MR. GREGORY: Right. But the, but the budget says there's $750 billion to help capitalize the banks. You, you have not offered a figure on what you think is necessary to do that, other than saying you got to do something to get private capital in.

REP. CANTOR: David, David, the Republicans will have a plan.

Meanwhile in Bensonhurst, Mitch "The Fish" McConnell was doing his best Ralph Kramden impersonation on This Week with George Snuffleupagus.

George Stephanopoulos repeatedly pressed McConnell for a comprehensive Republican alternative budget. Each time, McConnell simply attacked Obama’s plan. He said that he and his colleagues would be offering amendments to “reframe” what the Democrats have proposed, but don’t plan on offering a comprehensive plan:

McCONNELL: [W]e are going to offer a number of amendments to the Democratic proposal. […]

STEPHANOPOULOS: But shouldn’t you have a comprehensive approach that lays out the trade-offs? If you just have rifle-shot amendments, you don’t have to make all the trade-offs that you have to make in an overall budget.

McCONNELL: Well, we’re just sort of getting down in the weeds here about procedure. Through the amendment process, we would absolutely reformulate the Democratic plan. Whether you have a comprehensive approach or whether you offer an amendment is something a parliamentarian can debate.

So what's the plan? Come up with an alternative, comprehensive plan to show you really want to play ball, or weaken the Democratic plan with crap ass amendments? Enjoy the wilderness, boys.

The Real Deficit

Ever wonder why no one made a big stink on the television invention about the vast amounts of money being used for Iraq and Afghanistan but wasn't included in the budget? George W. Bush would call it "emergency funding" or a "war supplemental" bill. They'd allocate billions and billions of dollars to the war on terror but not really show it on their balance sheets. They essentially had two sets of books. Well not anymore.

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.

But the biggest adjustment will deal with revenues from the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system enacted in 1969 to prevent the wealthy from using tax shelters to avoid paying any income tax.

...Mr. Obama’s banishment of the gimmicks, which have been widely criticized, is in keeping with his promise to run a more transparent government.

Fiscal sleight of hand has long been a staple of federal budgets, giving rise to phrases like “rosy scenario” and “magic asterisks.”

The $2.7 trillion in additional deficit spending, Mr. Orszag said, is “a huge amount of money that would just be kind of a magic asterisk in previous budgets.”

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” he said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

VOTE!

This is the time. There has arguably never been a more important election in the past hundred years in the history of our nation, quite possibly even since our country was founded. I know that may sound over the top or melodramatic, but think about it. Think about how we find ourselves as a nation at this moment in our history.

We find ourselves in the middle of waging two wars that has spread thin our once mighty military to the breaking point. One side looks to end the war in a logical, careful fashion and bring our men and women in uniform home, while the other side would have us continue the war indefinitely; a war built on a false premise through deception and faulty intelligence against a country that never attacked us.

We find ourselves in the midst of a deepening financial crisis, with a booming budget deficit, a nearly ten TRILLION dollar national debt; record job loss and obscenely high home foreclosures that threaten the middle class in America which thrived only 10 short years ago.

We find ourselves falling prey to health insurance companies whose premiums have increased at twice the rate of inflation in just the last year alone. Over 47 million Americans (and rising) go without health insurance in the only industrialized nation that doesn't cover all of it's citizens, yet pays six times more per capita than any of its peers - the U.S. now spends more on health care than it does on food.

We find ourselves still addicted to oil. Our track marks will not fade away so long as we need 25% of the earth's oil production but only provide 3% of it ourselves. We are a nation that develops solar panels and ships them overseas to other countries. One side wants to find alternative sources of energy to reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on foreign sources while he other side thinks that increased oil production in the U.S. will ween us off of our need for the dealers cloaked in the suits of Big Oil.

I could go on and on, but after almost two years of debating and campaigning, you've probably heard it all. If you haven't, then you haven't been paying attention. If you come to this site on a regular basis, then you know where I stand on the issues and who I'm planning to vote for, but I'll leave you with some some poetic words written by the Rude One because if the issues don't grab you, maybe this will:

What we're witnessing this election season is the ultimate triumph of American assholism: don't you fuckin' tell us we can't change things. Maybe the end result of selfishness is self-empowerment, the belief that, yeah, goddamnit, we are important enough to transform this shit. Because this ain't about McCain, this ain't about Obama. It's about us. That's what Obama has tapped into, and that's what we have responded to. Barack Obama hasn't asked us to transcend our asshole ways. He's asked us to use them, to turn the tools of egotistical expression into weapons, to act like righteous motherfuckers to those who have power. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground and the SDS were fuckin' jerks. The civil rights marchers were rude and impolite to the status quo.

Now is the time, this final confluence of events, that has allowed us to be able to say, "How dare you have done this to us. How fucking dare you." It's why for so, so many people race doesn't matter. It's why even the South and West are in play this year. Even an asshole can do what's right.

No policy talk here. No comparisons with McCain. Let's keep this clear: By making Barack Obama president, we return to a simple American idea, one that the Founders embraced when they were such jack-offs to the British: this land is our land, my land, your land. But it ain't fuckin' their land.

This is the time. Make your voice heard. Vote.

I'm Broadway Carl and I approve this message.