Obama speech tonight...

That's new? Obama said those projects were "shovel ready" in 2009 and we each gave him $3,000 to do that. Was he lying in 2009 when he said he was going to do it then? What did he do with our trillion dollars?

I'm pretty sure that's not new, but "more of the same". I'm also pretty sure that if we give him another half trillion he won't fix any more bridges than he did in 2009. Maybe the "new" part is that THIS time he won't give bridge repair money to the renamed ACORN?

Actually, even before Obama said he was going to spend all if that money on road and bridge maintenance, the department of transportation already had a $65 billion budget. The US DOT has been doing roads and bridges since 1967. So what's new? Anything different from 2009 or even 1967?

It doesn't matter what Obama put forth. The Republicans announced that they were opposed to it before they even knew what it was. If Obama is smart he will put these ideas of his out in small parts. There are things that both sides likely agree on and he could easily get passed then they can fight over the stuff they don't agree on. However, likely what will happen is that nothing will happen. The republicans have stated time and again that their number 1 priority is getting Obama out of office. Even if they succeed at that they likely will not win the senate and there are some experts who say they are in danger of actually losing seats in the house. Do they think an angry, democrat controlled senate will just go along with whatever they want and even if they do, well, things worked out swimmingly last time the republicans were in power.

I don't see any end to this gridlock any time soon and I don't think any plan put forth by either party is really going to help that much.

Mark Cuban once said that the economy of this country is stronger than any one political party. We have to hope that he is correct and over time it can right itself because clearly there is no help coming from Washington.

Make no mistake. We the people are on our own.

Typical response from you. However badly Obama fucks up our economy and his inability to deliver is OK because 'look at what Bush did'.





Don't worry, when the economy is even worse than it is now he will give another great speech and sure enough, have someone else to blame.

What happened last time is that money just got tossed around and was never really properly designated for. The Daily Show had a woman on whose job it was to follow where all the stimulus spending went. She resigned when the process got so convoluted that she could no longer follow it. There was a city in Oklahoma that was giving a few million dollars supposedly for a "seaport" renovation. I'm not a scholar, but last time I checked Oklahoma was not on the sea. What became of that money nobody seems to know.

In theory if this money actually puts people to work and gets them out there doing these jobs it isn't a terrible way to spend money, but I won't be holding my breath.

Btw I think I was mistaken. Obamas radio ad wasn't the "go after corporations" line, he said that somewhere else. In the radio ad he promised to double tax small businesses just as large corporations are double taxed. (The business and it's owners both pay taxes on the same income.)

Bush and Obama were simply bad choices for president.

Granted, the economy was growing quite slowly when Bush left office. People thought we might be headed toward recession. Obama turned slow growth into negative growth, actual recession.

Republicans preventing him from doing his job, eh? Ok, so you realize he hasn't ben doing his job. Do you also realize that for his first two years DEMOCRATS corralled the house, the senate, and presidency. They controlled EVERYTHING. Repuicans couldn't even bring a bill to the floor until a few months ago when they took the House.
Think about that. Democrats had complete control and Obama didn't do his job. He was just a bad pick. Republicans about they made a bad pick with Bush. Democrats should have enough intellectual honesty to admit Obama was a poor choice.

Powell should have been the historic first black president, perhaps.

The $800 billion stimulus bill from 2009 added somewhere from 1 million to 2.9 million jobs, and kept the unemployment rate from climbing as much as 1.6 percentage points higher. I cant wait to see what the new $447 billion program does for the 14 million that are still out of work and broke.

Agreed

The republicans just arrived in the House a few months ago.
What's his excuse for his first two years of utter failure, when the democrats had complete control of the House, the Senate, and presidency?

It's like calling in an exterminator for a rat problem, then when he gets there you blame the exterminator for the problem. The republicans just got there, sent by the voters to clean up the mess!

He is to blame. The republicans basically promised to filibuster anything and everything he wanted to pass. They took the stance that if he was for it, they were against it no matter what it was. He and the democrats could have forced them to act by forcing them to actually follow through with these filibusters and making themselves look bad, but instead he and the democrats lost their backbone and caved in.

I think he felt like they would sweep in, pass healthcare reform, get the stimulus package done and then they could go to work on whatever else needed to happen, but after the fights that those two things took he started adopting a philosophy of trying to make the republicans happy and that was never going to happen so he did little or nothing and just hoped everything would work out okay.

But I ask, the republicans have now been in control of the house for 1.5 years. Where is their jobs bill? All they really have passed was a deficit reduction plan that they knew had no chance of going anywhere. They don't seem to have any desire to fix the problem either. They seem only interested in getting rid of Obama. Having the economy in the shitter gives them the best chance of doing that so they have no motivation to work with him.

you invent as you go ....

Just an added note. In my post above it should say that the republicans have been in control of the house about 9 months now. . . not 1.5 years.

1.5 years? January 5, 2011 is when the Republicans took over the Lower House. And they cant have a Jobs bill without control of the Upper House, all they can do is piggyback on what the Upper House and Barry already have in place.

Even the german news reportet about it. It must have been a great speach.