jobs

We need impeachment hearings NOW!

This morning, Fox & Friends joined the New York Post in attacking President Obama for using a paper clip. Read that again: They attacked Obama for using a paper clip.

The Post's story today on Obama's jobs bill is headlined "O gives jobs 'clip' service; $447B 'tax hike' plan bound by chintzy fastener," and its first two paragraphs attack Obama for his choice of document fasteners:

How dare that anti-American, mooslim, socialist traitor use a paper clip! He should have gone the much more costly route of having the bill professionally bound. I guess that’s what the right considers “cutting government waste”, instead of spending a few cents on a paper clip, you should spend a couple of bucks on binding.

This really serves as a reminder of how hated President Obama is by the right, including their media outlets. It’s like “feet on the desk gate” all over again. Remember that? How dare President Obama put his feet on the desk in the Oval Office, even though every other President had done the same thing before.

If you watch Fox news or read the right wing blogs, that’s exactly what you would think. Yesterday Fox ran this clip of Hoffa warming up the crowd for President Obama:

The “let’s take these son of a bitches out” is the big part the right is focusing on. You can see that by just looking at this thread on memeorandum or by reading Drudge:

But is that what Hoffa really said, or did Fox go into some creative editing? If you guessed creative editing, then you are the winner. Here’s the context Hoffa was talking in, which was conveniently edited out by Fox:

HOFFA: Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize,let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much!

Bob Cesca has posted the following chart, showing how the share of income labor sees is at a historic low:

What's interesting is how much the share dipped during the Bush years. During Clinton's term, the rate was on the rise, after a substantial fall during the Reagan and Bush 41 years.

So what does all that mean? Trickle down works!

Of course the trickle down I'm talking about isn't the one Republicans push. Instead it's one that see's the wealth of America rapidly decrease as the money trickles down to the mass population.

And speaking of Republican economics, this highlights another problem. Look again at the big dip in the Bush years. Republicans constantly told us how bigger tax cuts to corporate America would mean more jobs and better wages. Care to re-think that position?

In a world of supply side economics, the equating factor is simple - if the people have more money then they will buy more goods. Instead Republicans want you to think that if the big corporations have more money, they'll hire more people and put out more goods, even if those goods won't sell. It's that kind of thinking that will keep us in a recession and cause our middle class to keep declining. It's that kind of thinking that the media and right wing has pushed for years and so many Americans now buy into it, despite the historic numbers showing something totally different.

The nation’s largest private employer is seeing troubling times:

Wal-Mart's core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday.

"We're seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure," Duke said at an event in New York. "There's no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact."

If this goes on, Wal-Mart could be faced with either cutting hours and laying off employees. That too will add to our economic doom and gloom. It’s just a shame that our leaders in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, are to worried about petty crap and not focused on jobs or rising costs.

Following up on my earlier post, Speaker Boehner was just handed another defeat:

In a sign that some freshman Republicans were willing to cut military spending, the House voted 233-198 on Wednesday to cancel an alternate fighter jet engine that the Bush and Obama administrations had tried to kill for the last five years.

The vote marked another instance in which some of the new legislators, including members of the Tea Party, broke ranks with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, where the engine provided more than 1,000 jobs.

Many of the 87 freshman Republicans in the House had initially been hesitant to trim military spending as part of their drive to reduce the budget deficit.

It’s going to be interesting to hear the spin Boehner puts on this. Will he call it job killing, when he constantly tries to say that the government doesn’t create jobs? I am eagerly waiting to hear.

Finally we get some good news on the job front:

The U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in the final month of 2010 while the nation’s unemployment rate fell to 9.4%, the lowest level since May 2009, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Payrolls for November and October were also revised higher by 70,000 jobs, the government said. Read the full report.

What’s interesting there is that the job market was better in October and November than first anticipated. I’m sure a lot on the right will try to swing these numbers as being good for the GOP, but October was before the election. You can’t spin time, even though they do try.

In a time where the big discussion is rather or not we should extend tax cuts to the top 2% of earners in the country, this is what’s happening:

The poverty rate rose to 14.3 percent during 2009 from 13.2 percent the previous year as household income stayed flat and the number of people without health insurance reached its highest level since such data has been collected, the government announced Thursday.

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency started with 700,000 people losing their jobs each month and sensational reports of formerly middle-class families crowding tent cities across the country. The tent cities, it turned out, were there before the recession started, but the rise in poverty was real: For working age people between 18 and 64, 2009 saw the highest poverty rate -- 12.9 percent -- since 1965.

Remember all the crap about “redistribution of wealth” from the 2008 campaign? Well it’s still going on, but not in the way Republicans portrayed it.

BP's latest attempt is falling short of all expectations:

A cap placed over the gusher was collecting only a fraction of the oil, which had stained beaches with a waxy mess of tar balls and created an unusual orange foam in the surf.

Given the continous failures, it has become obvious that plans were never made for such a disaster. With that said, I firmly believe it's time for the government to order all offshore drilling suspended until more sound plans and safety measures be put in place. We don't need talking points or soundbites right now. Instead we need a collective effort to prevent any future problems.

So what could the answer be?

Well the small percentage of oil we actually get from offshore drilling, a good plan would be to require relief wells on all existing and future wells. Yeah it would take some time to complete, but it would also prevent a bunch of people losing their jobs, as well as giving us an instant access to "bottom kill" should another accident happen. This is actually a requirement in Canada, and should become one here as well.