RAF,
PLEASE, give me your take (partisan excuse) for this....
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http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/17/28...

It's called prioritization and expediency. I think the majority of any senator's constituents are concerned about jobs more than anything else right now, and they want it handled quickly and with bi-partisan cooperation. Any recent poll can tell you that much. Most Senate Republicans were already on board, or at least they had said they were, but when it came time to vote they jumped ship based on politics. Once again, the American people are left hung out to dry.

Wow, amendments are voted on an individual basis. So what is your problem. Senator's are doing what their voters want, that includes the repeal. Sir Harry's position to allow NO ammendments is hardly a way to be open to let the chamber vote as they wish. Just like how he refuses to let them vote on a real budget ; sad.

When the amendments they wanted put to a vote had nothing to do with jobs, Leader Reid did the right thing. As I already stated, one of the amendments they wanted to include was the repeal of the healthcare reform law. How many times are the Republicans going to waste American resources on the futile effort of trying to repeal that law before the election? 50? 60? 100? More political gamesmanship from the GOP when jobs are on the line.
“To 21 million Americans whose jobs could be the next ones sent to China or India, it’s a very serious proposal,” Harry Reid said. “And to the 2.5 million Americans who jobs have already been offshored, it doesn’t get any more serious than this. The only ones who aren’t taking this legislation seriously are Republicans in Congress.”

Walter did you see why the bill was held up? Perhaps if sir harry, the same guy preventing our nation from having a budget for the past three years, wouldn't stop ammendments from being voted on something could get done.

"Republicans were considering supporting the insourcing bill until Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he wouldn't include any GOP amendments."
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/se...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-13...

http://factcheck.org/2012/05/stimulus-mo...

And, as if on cue, the Senate Republicans filibustered the Bring Jobs Home Act. Why would they do that, you ask, when most originally planned to support the measure? Good question. Well, it turns out that they only planned to support the bill that would eliminate tax deductions for businesses for the cost of moving people and equipment overseas and giving a tax credit to businesses for all costs associated with moving jobs back from overseas IF they could attach an amendment to it that repealed the PPACA. Yet another example of Republicans playing political games instead of supporting potential American job growth.

"""There are plenty of people willing to fill positions in the public sector, and that includes the $150,000 per year bus driving ones!"""
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"""If this goes through Mr. President, you can tell all the kids that were taught and successful that they didn't earn it."""
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Two examples of hate-filled partisan crap.
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All of us not filled with hate and partisanship know that our President was specifically referring to the roads, bridges, internet, fire and police protection, etc...
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As for the bus driver...I dont' know the details and I am guessing others are in a similar situation. It is fair to say that the $150k was spent through and overtime system and the driver was providing a service.
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I have a question for the republican/conservatives...
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Why do you have such an issue with a bus driver making $150k while working overtime and providing a service while at the same time you (as a group) seem willing to defend a multi, multi, multi millionaire who hid his money in foreign countries to avoid paying taxes?
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Both are legal.
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How can a party get upset about a lapel pin but not care about money being hidden to avoid taxation? How can anyone be OK with Mitt only releasing 2 years of taxes? The same people that wanted to see John Kerry's wifes' taxes are now defending 2 years from Romney.
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This is the partisanship and hatred. Neither side is fair or objective and MSNBC and Fox along with talk radio lead the charge with their talking points. Like I said earlier, if we don't blindly hate our neighbors because of political purposes Fox, MSNBC, Rush, etc... are GONE.
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They have no audience because we ALL become disgusted with the inconsistancies from our politicans.
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We actually want news coverage. Even if it is biased news coverage; news coverage versus news entertainment would help this country greatly.

Repulsive? I thought it was a compliment.

Pharm, I tend to agree with your 10:18 Jul 18 comments, in regards to McCain and who won the election the economy was going to be bad, I even went as far and stated no matter which were elected they would be a one term due to the economy. That aside, what has happened, via govt policy, has created what we have today. The selection process from bailouts screws up the balancing process that the free market needs. By thinking something was too big to fail creates more problems than it solves.

The fallacy on obamacare numbers gets funnier each day. As the program further progresses and more details emerge it has become clear how wrong the initial fiscal projections were. The result of the court ruling over the medicare portion of the law exposes a huge gap in financing. The admin/congress tried to push a huge amount of the costs to the states and off the federal books to make the program look cheaper than it really is. As the layers are pulled back this onion just makes more eyes water.

Mooshoo

Excuse me....but I think the name you just used in your comment is extremely repulsive.

you get 4 more years of good leadership under Obama :)
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That statement is hilarious. The thought of the ignorance behind the statement is scary.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/...
Jobs created/saved by stimulus.

I just consider the source to discount your statement about you creating/saving jobs.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-silent-tax-c...
Moodys was one of the economic companies that released figures comparable to CBO about jobs created/saved.
95% of taxpayers received a tax cut in the stimulus bill.

walt,

http://www.cbo.gov; http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/20... http://www.recovery.gov/pages/default.as...

attached are links. Notice that the number of jobs created or saved noted by the whitehouse is much different from the claims...but don't let those pesky details get in the way of a good fairytale!

TCB,
Links to all these wild claims would be nice. Let us read from the same source you get your information. Otherwise it just sounds like you're sitting at your computer and typing whatever you hear come out of Rush, Fox News or Charlie Sykes.

pharm,

economic companies? Please name some?

Lets assume that the CBO is correct-they also said the Obama stimulus cost 821 Billion and it may have created or saved 1.4-3.6 million jobs. The cost 228K to 586,000 per saved job? Funny how not a single job at Solyndra was saved or created? What about in Denmark or Mexico? A lot of stimulus money went to windmill manufacturers in Denmark and solar panel manufacturers in Mexico...how much went there? Obama outsourcing windmill jobs to europe? Why?

787 Billion was the amount of the obama pork package. Tax cuts are not spending-my guess is that you don't know the difference between a rate cut and a tax cut or a reduction in the rate of spending or a tax rebate or a tax transfer. By the way, I just saved or created 100 jobs or was it 1000? (no way to disprove this statement)

787 Billion was the amount of the obama pork package. Tax cuts are not spending-my guess is that you don't know the difference between a rate cut and a tax cut or a reduction in the rate of spending or a tax rebate or a tax transfer. By the way, I just saved or created 100 jobs or was it 1000? (no way to disprove this statement)

787 Billion was the amount of the obama pork package. Tax cuts are not spending-my guess is that you don't know the difference between a rate cut and a tax cut or a reduction in the rate of spending or a tax rebate or a tax transfer. By the way, I just saved or created 100 jobs or was it 1000? (no way to disprove this statement)

And your qualifications to question saved/created jobs above and beyond CBO and economic companies are? About 40% of the stimulus was tax cuts, the other $400 and some billion were spending, did not add up to a trillion.

pharm,

The stimulus saved 0 jobs or it created 4 million jobs-there is no objective measure to calculate "saved jobs". The obama administration and its talking heads tried to sneak this phrase into the modern lexicon without challenge---it failed.

What we do know is that every job "created" cost around $250K per job. By any objective measure this is a failure.

Govt spending is not a tax cut. Pharm look into your crystal balls and enlighten us-what would have happened if the federal govt chose to do nothing? Where would the economy be today, what would unemployment be? What would the total debt and deficit be? How many jobs saved or created-if the govt did absolutely nothing and let the market respond?

Stimulus saved/created 3 to4 million jobs according to CBO and independant economic companies. The stimulus was almost 40% tax cuts
Obamacare cuts the deficit.
Losses on those loan guarantees of a few companies totaled less than $3 billion when up to $10 billion was forecast, and they were not Obama donor companies.
Anybody eligible for any government program should be able to get information on how to get it. Even under McCain, with the bqd economy, food stamps, unemployment, etc., would have gone up. As for easing the welfare/work requirements, states asked for that power, most aggressively, Republican led states.

24 hour news and talk radio is to blame. Their ratings depends on have and division.
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pharm -- there are no reasonable policy ideas from this administrations. Especially economic ones.

Hmm. Let's see how McCain might have done things differently. Well, there's the stimulus for starters ($1 trillion), ObamaCare (another couple trillion when you have to pay for 10 years benefits with 10 years of taxes), ballooning of food stamps (running ad campaigns to get more people to use them, further running up the debt), easing disability requirements, easing welfare to work requirements, dozens of bankrupt energy companies owned by Obama Donors given millions and millions and millions of taxpayer dollars borrowed on the backs of our children, billions in aid to corrupt foreign governments.

All from a guy who said he'd cut the deficit in half in his first term and go through each budget line by line.

He was either ignorant or a liar. Either one not a great option for the man who leads this country.

If you really think every policy idea from the administration, Republican or Democrat, comes only from the president you are sadly mistaken. When politicians say things like"deficits don`t matter", even when their own economists say they most certainly do as was the case in the last Bush administration, then you will see how politics affects policy, not just economic facts. Please tell me what McCain would have done different besides, cut taxes, extend the Bush tax cuts, TARP. All things Obama did. The economy was projected to be horrendous no matter who had won because of the housing bust, subsequent recession, and policies already in place.

pharm,

Obama inherited a bad economy and his policies have made it worse. Obama is not the first President to be elected and inherit a bad economy. His inability to understand basic finance-how jobs are created demonstrates that Obama is a rank amateur incapable of developing and executing a plan to stimulate growth.

"Hint. If you increase spending, even a little, while receipts drop, it will add to the deficit and later the debt." Maybe if someone in the previous administration had listened to that quote our problem would not have been as big as it is.

Yes, budgets are based on both. Yet for the last three years, as receipts have DECLINED, the current policy via continuing resolutions has been to keep spending.

Hint: If you increase spending, even a little, while receipts drop, it will add to the deficit and later the debt. Ignoring it in no way makes it go away. He inherited what he asked for and was part of the process of making/forming while a member of the senate. None of this changes the fact of what has happened while he has held the position and the US Senate, under Reid, has failed to do their job.

Continuing resolutions,just like budgets, are debated, amended, cut, added to, and have to be passed by the House{shame, shame, shame!} and the Senate.
http://factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-spen...
Obama inherited a terrible economy, and has only increased spending minimally. If he had averaged a 7% a year increase like Bush, we would be spending $4trillion next year.

Many seem to ignore any budget bill was/is exempt from the filibuster rules. The first two years one party had full control over spending, nothing could be done to stop it. Surprisingly they have since refused to put forth and debate a national budget on the senate floor. By doing this, they can continue the elevated spending levels from the previously passed budgets through continuing resolutions; shame shame shame.

"the most liberal - far left president in the history of the country"

Get real and get a little perspective on history. To the true left winger, Obama is practically a republican.

TCB, Democrats could not always have won a cloture vote in the 111th Congress. You're talking about two short periods of time in the 111th Congress when that majority (with Independents required) existed. Don't make it sound like the filibuster didn't kill legislation.

Just today the Republican filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act resulted in that disclosure legislation failing to be brought to a vote. 360+ times in 5 years. And the vast majority of that time the Democrats unable to approve cloture with a partisan majority.

Basically, Republican Senators have changed the structure of the Senate voting system. The filibuster used to be a rarely used tool to bring increased attention to a very weighty issue. Now, the Republicans have made the cloture vote (requiring a 3/5 super majority, 60 votes) the rule rather than the exception. Just watch. IF the Republicans become the majority in the Senate and the Dems follow the Republican example, the GOP will be screaming "OBSTRUCTION!" all day long.

poo,

Difficult but not impossible. Again, the dems determine what Bills if any will receive a vote. Not the republicans. Republicans were powerless to introduce or stop legislation-all the den senators need to do is call a cloture vote to stop the filibuster.

Nobody's crying for President Obama. It's just ridiculous to try to charge our current president with single handedly reversing the polarized nature of American politics that has been developing over decades. He's only human. How long do we really expect someone to keep getting kicked before he kicks back? The obstructionist Republicans who have been ignoring jobs and the economy while being laser-focused on making Obama a one-term president and the brainless, mouth-breathing (and, yes, sometimes racist) birthers all of a sudden want to act shocked when the President releases a few negative campaign ads.

TCB, in the 111th Congress (2009-2010 which were Obama's first two years in office), there were 137 filibusters that the Democrats had to end - all but 5 of them by Republicans. You need to remember that often times it requires a bill being withdrawn to end a filibuster - effectively making it difficult to pass legislation. You can call the filibuster whatever you wish, but it surely is a part of the Senate parliamentary process and has come to be abused in recent years and used as an excuse by both parties for their failure to pass meaningful legislation.

Since 2007 when Democrats took control of the Senate, they have had to end Republican filibusters more than 360 times. A record number of filibusters. [ http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/referen... ]

poo,

The dems could have called the republicans bluff in the Senate and force them to filibuster-they didn't. That is, if the dems actually believed in obama's policies-instead, the dems fought amongst themselves. Rather than govern-Obama and the dems find it easier to blame Bush. The dems have had a majority since january 2007-and yet they still cannot pass the presidents Budget? that is leadership. Furthermore, they did have a super majority for a short period of time-(60 Dem senators) they could have passed any Bill without threat of filibuster-the dems passed nothing.

Dont blame the "threat" of a republican filibuster as the reason the President is ineffective. Leadership starts at the top and Obama has proven to be utterly thin skinned and ineffective-witness Obamas presence in Wisconsin during the Walker fiasco.

TCB, your assertion that "republicans were completely powerless to stop obama from doing anything" ignores the Senate filibuster rule.

Walter -- give me a break -- your saying that because you disagree with the most liberal - far left president in the history of the country you are a racist..... I am sick and tired of the race card being played.... If this were AL Bore we would be having the same discussion. He and Bore are some of the most fringe far left dems I have ever seen. He needs to go.

walter,

Obama had majorities in both houses when he was inaugurated. The only people who would not work with obama were democrats; republicans were completely powerless to stop obama from doing anything.

Specifically what did Obama do to "help" the country economically? His policies created more unemployment, more people dependent on the federal govt, more people dependent on food stamps, higher unemployment, cost of healthcare insurance continues to rise=despite the promise that it would decline 2500 per family? If Obama did nothing where would the economy be? Probably a lot better. Obamas policies have failed-this is his legacy.

Gerson is 100% that Obama is trying to define Romney. This is politics 101-define your opponent before he/she defines you. Nothin new here...
hope and change is more of the same liberal demagoguery.

Walter..sob sob! If you can't stand the heat, get out of kitchen. What happened to hope and change and transparency and publishing bills for so many days, etc., etc. And I remember how dreadfully disrespectful the Dems were to Bush. So what goes around comes around.

Republican leaders met on inauguration day 2009 for an intense discussion, not on how they would create jobs in a downward spiralling economy, but how they would obstruct & delegitimize the new president and prevent him from seeing a 2nd term. Throughout much of his first term, President Obama has had to face numerous unsubstantiated, outrageous and thinly veiled racist inquiries about his country of birth, the first President to have ever faced such a barrage regarding his citizenship. With all this going on around him, Barack Obama still helped keep this country from falling into a depression that easily could have been far worse than anything this country went through in the 1930s. Am I surprised that now, in the midst of a reelection campaign, our President is revealing that he hasn't forgotten how certain people have so disrespected him as he occupied the highest office in the land? Not at all. He has come out swinging and, sadly, he has sank somewhat closer to the grimy, disgusting underbelly being occupied by his political opponents and being represented by one Willard Mitt Romney. If I were him, I'd probably have given in a while ago. You can only take so many punches to the gut before you start to fight back.

I disagree with Gerson's assertion that Obama is "attempting to destroy Romney before Romney can define himself." As historians look back on this presidential election, I'd venture a guess the consensus will be that Romney destroyed himself and has nobody else to blame for how he defined and re-defined himself.

It's because Obama is arrogant and narcistic. He may be educated but he lacks civility and common sense. He has been a dismal failure. Run Hillary, please.