Tag: Pres. Obama

First Twitter Town Hall is Today

Trish

townhall

Kids, don’t forget to log on to America’s first Twitter-hosted* town hall meeting. It takes place today at 2 p.m. Eastern time, and Twitter is going large by having Pres. Obama field questions and comments on how to get the economy going and how to put people back to work.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) fired a preemptive shot with this tweet:

Republicans #askobama to outline plan #4jobs that doesn’t involve more spending, taxing, regulating http://j.mp/o1bpzE @townhall

Why is it Republicans feel the government should leave everything to the private sector except job creation, the one thing the private sector is best suited to provide? To Republicans, when employment is high, it’s because business is masterful. When employment is low, it’s because government is screwing up. I’m not in the right party to be able to follow this logic.

But to follow the town hall, search for @townhall and use the hashtag, as Speaker Boehner did, #askobama.

* Yes Buck, I know AP style says “host” is not a verb but Twitter itself is calling it that.

Halperin’s “Dick” Comment About Obama Gets Him Suspended

Trish

Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.

— MSNBC, in an official statement

I completely agree with everything in MSNBC’s statement about my remark. I believe that the step they are taking in response is totally appropriate. Again, I want to offer a heartfelt and profound apology to the President, to my MSNBC colleagues, and to the viewers. My remark was unacceptable, and I deeply regret it.

— Mark Halperin, pundit and regular contributor to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”

I thought he was a dick yesterday.

— Mark Halperin, in the original, on-air comment about Pres. Obama that got him suspended from “Morning Joe.” Halperin’s comment was made after full preparation, according to a transcript and video of the show, and was not in any way a slip of the tongue.

Republican Path to Victory in 2012: Take Down the Economy

Trish

Boehner-ObamaWe get that Republicans don’t care about folks like us. We know they are willing to stop Social Security payments, and payroll for the members of America’s armed services rather than raise the debt ceiling. We get it, we really do.

But to tank the American, and likely the global, economy just to give their lame candidate (whoever it might be) a chance at taking down Obama in 2012? Exactly that is starting to look to like their best strategy.

The Economist: ‘America is undermining its economy for no good reason’

It’s not just Americans drawing a line between a House vote not to extend the debt ceiling and economic setbacks. Our friends across the pond are making the same observation.

Blogger “R.A.” at Britain’s The Economist predicted with exact accuracy on June 1 that such moves would mire economic growth, and decried these self-inflicted wounds. Our stock markets dropped that same day.

R.A. begins with the big picture, the one tea partiers and FOX News miss.

[…]

You Actually Could Solve the Deficit Problem with Tax Increases

Trish

Maybe you heard this recent assertion, which swept through rightwing media outlets: Raising taxes on high income earners can’t solve the federal deficit problem because the deficit is higher than the entire taxable income of Americans who earn more than $100,000. But you likely didn’t hear that it’s not true.

Here’s what the Wall St. Journal said in an editorial, which got the ball rolling.

According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans – most of whom are far from wealthy – were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

And here’s what the WSJ said when it was pointed out by FactCheck.org that they were wrong.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the total taxable income of Americans earning over $100,000 in 2008 was $1.582 trillion. The correct figure is $3.4 trillion.

The projected deficit is $1.645 trillion. You do the math.

But Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Ok.), apparently can’t, because he repeated the false claim on a recent FOX News Sunday segment, with an added twist about the futility of including those who net between $100,00 and $250,000 after deductions. The point was to show that the deficit problem can only be solved by cutting spending, not by also increasing revenues. People who are not mathematically — or ideologically — challenged see that it will take both.

Pres. Obama is proposing $2 trillion in spending cuts and $1 trillion in additional tax revenue over 12 years. Seems reasonable to us.

GOP’s Blankley: Bush Deserves Credit for bin Laden Kill under Obama, Just As JFK Got Credit for Moon Landing on Nixon’s Watch

Jon Ponder

Blankley
Blankley
When asked on KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” last week whether Pres. Obama should get credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, the show’s resident conservative, Tony Blankley, said this:

My view — I wrote this actually in the Washington Times in a clever, I thought, article — that we give Jack Kennedy credit for going to the moon even though Nixon was president at the moment that it happened, because he was continuing Kennedy’s policies. And we should give George W. [Bush] a lot of credit for instituting a lot of the structures on the war against terror that includes the interrogation processes and all the rest — the black sites. And give Obama the credit that Nixon got on going to the moon — which is, he continued wise policies effectively.

Poor Richard Nixon. He just doesn’t get enough credit. And poor right wingers, they are the biggest victims on the planet, or so they say.

Of course, Blankley’s comparison falls apart when exposed to air. After declaring that the United States would go to the moon “in this generation,” JFK did not then lose the moon — as Bush lost bin Laden at Tora Bora — nor did JFK, after losing the moon, close NASA, as Bush did, analogously, when he closed the CIA’s bin Laden unit in 2005, around the time bin Laden was building the compound in Pakistan where he lived in undisturbed comfort for the rest of Bush’s term in office.

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CNN Confuses Osama and Obama

Trish

osama-obama

If you thought you had to turn to FOX News for this kind of stuff, think again. CNN is running a hyperlink that says, “CIA boss expects release of Obama pics.” When you click the link to the story, of course, it’s about whether the government will release pictures of a dead Osama bin Laden, not pictures of Pres. Obama.

You use the left index finger to hit the “b” CNN guys, and the left ring finger to hit the “s.”

No doubt the error will have been corrected by the time you read this.

Update: Yes it has.