barack obama

Today President Obama will push for letting the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000/year expire. Before he even addressed his plan. Mitt Romney has already fired back with this:

President Obama’s response to even more bad economic news is a massive tax increase. It just proves again that the President doesn’t have a clue how to get America working again and help the middle class. The President’s latest bad idea is to raise taxes on families, job creators, and small businesses. Almost half a million fewer Americans are working today than the day Barack Obama took office, and we’ve just come through the worst job creation quarter in two years. Unlike President Obama, Governor Romney understands that the last thing we need to do in this economy is raise taxes on anyone. He has a plan to permanently lower marginal rates, help middle-class Americans save and invest, and jumpstart economic growth and job creation.”

Those families, job creators and businesses Romney is so concerned about accounts for less than 2% of the total tax base. Over 95% of small businesses make less than $250,000/year, but Romney isn't worried about those. Instead Romney would rather see taxes go up for 98% of us, while cutting taxes for the other 2%.

It's all part of the "tax and spend" Republican platform we have become so accustomed too. We saw it under Bush and we'll see it again under Romney.

At a campaign event here in Ohio a supporter of Mitt "no plans" Romney decided that the first amendment should only apply to certain people:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sent two GOP heavyweights to northern Ohio Thursday to beat President Barack Obama's similar bus tour to the punch.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, traveling on Romney's campaign bus, stopped at Parma's Kentown Plaza to emphasize what they say is a gap between what Obama has promised and what he has delivered.

But a physical clash between Romney supporters and protesters overshadowed the Parma campaign stop by the prominent pair, who are often mentioned as possible running mates for Romney.

The quarrel broke out as soon as Pawlenty took the stage before about 200 people at the strip shopping center.

"Pawlenty go home, Pawlenty go home," the protesters chanted over the former governor's speech.

Here's video of the attack:

Yesterday the Washington Post's fact chcker, Glenn Kessler, awarded the Obama Campaign 4 Pinocchios for this ad:

Here's how Kessler characterized it:

The Obama campaign apparently loves to ding former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney with the charge of “outsourcing.” On several occasions, we have faulted the campaign for its claims, apparently to little avail.

But wait! As I posted in my last entry we now know that this is true:

Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This wasn't posted by some lefty blog or conspiracy group. It is from an actual article that appears in today's Washington Post, Kessler's employer. So it now looks like Kessler gets his own "4 Pinocchios"

With the a contempt vote set to take place anytime against Eric Holder over the Fast and Furious gun running program, President Obama has finally taken a stand:

The White House granted Attorney General Eric Holder with executive privilege regarding Fast and Furious. Regardless of the action, Rep. Darrell Issa, R.-Cal., head of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee indicated he is moving forward with a contempt vote of the attorney general.

Executive privilege enables the Justice Department to withhold documents from Congress, even if Congress has issued a subpoena, as Rep. Issa has.

In a letter to Rep. Issa, Deputy Attorney General James Cole wrote, "Although we are deeply disappointed that the Committee appears intent on proceeding with a contempt vote, the Department remains willing to work with the Committee to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution of the outstanding issues."

Of course the right is up in arms over this. The are acting like no President has ever done this before, despite Bush doing the exact same thing six times and the wingnuts championed it every single time.

Of course if I was Obama I would take it a step further. Instead I would turn over documents pertaining to Operation Wide Receiver, the name of the program back in 2007. Oh but Issa and the GOP don't want to hear anything about the inception of the program because there was a white Republican in the White House then and he did no wrong in their eyes.

There has always been something about Republicans and their circling the wagons around the younger George Bush.But you would think that even the "fiscally conservative" members of America's right would cut their loses when it comes to Bush's economic performance. Instead they have constantly defended him and even attempted to rewrite history making the current economic situation start under Barack Obama.

Of course they are totally wrong and today Bruce Bartlett, a man who worked for Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul and even daddy Bush. tallies up the tab of Bush's damage:

Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000.

Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011.

And how Bartlett gets to this conclusion is the most interesting part. He highlights just how bad Republican policy is fiscally:

The projected surplus was primarily the result of two factors. First was a big tax increase in 1993 that every Republican in Congress voted against, saying that it would tank the economy. This belief was wrong. The economy boomed in 1994, growing 4.1 percent that year and strongly throughout the Clinton administration.

Whenever President Obama says he inherited a bad economic situation the right instantly starts crying about "blaming Bush". If you listen to right wing talkers like Fox and Limbaugh, they would have you believe that we had the best economy ever until the day Barack Obama took office. These are the lies that have been pushed for the past 3 1/2 years and are meant to do nothing but deceive voters into electing a Republican for President (or maybe even a white guy).

But Obama isn't the only one who blames the guy before them for economic woes. We now have someone else doing the same:

Mitt Romney has been dogged by an unfortunate statistic for his entire campaign: When he was governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation. President Obama’s campaign has ramped up the attack this week in response to Romney’s assertion that he knows how to create jobs — a fact he says is backed up by his record in the private sector. Sunday, Romney’s campaign struck back with a new line of defense: Romney stepped into a serious situation and improved it.

And the situation under Obama has been improving as well. But look at what Mitt had to work with, or didn't. He didn't have a right wing noise machine blasting every policy he comes up with, even if they are Republican policies. He didn't have a Senate that the minority engaged in a record number of filibusters to shut down the President's policies, nor did he have a Republican leader in the Senate admitting that tanking the economy was in the GOP's best interest.

No!

Instead Mitt Romney had a state legislature willing to work with him. That makes a big difference as the President (or Governor) alone doesn't have the power to really affect the economy.

It's amazing how Republicans complain about the wasting of tax payer money, but when it comes to one of the most asinine conspiracy theories ever, spending that money is fine:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio's volunteer investigation into documents pertaining to President Barack Obama's residency status now includes the services of a taxpayer-funded deputy, according to Arpaio.

The deputy joined Mike Zullo, a volunteer member of Arpaio's cold-case posse, in Hawaii this week in part due to "security issues," according to Arpaio, and because the investigation has progressed.

"It's one deputy, so what? We have security issues, too, that I can't got into," Arpaio said on Friday. "For six months we were not spending any money. When you're doing investigations sometimes things change, you put more resources into it."

The cold-case posse has spent about $40,000 on the investigation so far, according to the Sheriff's Office. The posse is funded through donations.

Arpaio has in the past touted the investigation's total reliance on donated funds and volunteers, but the investigation now requires the use of a sworn deputy.

Maybe someone should ask Sheriff Joe to produce his birth certificate.

The AP has done some great fact checking into a speech Mitt Romney gave yesterday on the economy. It turns out, to no shock, that Romney is echoing many of the lies that the right has constantly been pushing for the past several years. Here's one of my favorites:

ROMNEY: "America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That's roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.