President Barack Obama - Term 1 and 2 Thread

[Saint John]

Mubarak just fucked everybody up. Suckers.

He's gonna get himself assassinated. It's just a matter of time.

He thinks he's Tony Montana.

That son of a bitch sure looks good for 82. I wonder if he has a gaggle of predominantly fat fans constantly fawning over how young he looks like the very age-appropriate-looking Nostrildamus does?

[Rhiannon]

Mubarak: "I will not leave Egypt until I die."
Egypt: "WE CAN TOTALLY HELP YOU WITH THAT."

[Saint John]

Mubarak: "I will not leave Egypt until I die."
Egypt: "WE CAN TOTALLY HELP YOU WITH THAT."

Yeah, that is pretty much what's going on.

[bluejeangirl76]

That son of a bitch sure looks good for 82. I wonder if he has a gaggle of fans constantly fawning over how young he looks like the very age-appropriate-looking Nostrildamus does?

Hmm... Looks good for 82 and... well, Mubarak does seem to wear a lot of black... maybe that's a topic on www.moonyovermubarek.com

[Rhiannon]

Hmm... Looks good for 82 and... well, Mubarak does seem to wear a lot of black... maybe that's a topic on www.moonyovermubarek.com

Keeps the people guessing about what he's gonna do next... egads.
He's actually pulling more of a Leno.

But in all seriousness, SMDH. Poor Egypt.

[slucero]

Mubarek is gonna cause a revolution...

[Rhiannon]

Mubarek is gonna cause a revolution...

Gonna? Those wheels got going on January 25th. This is revolution in progress.

[bluejeangirl76]

This is revolution in progress.

"Well, you know, we all want to change the world"

[Don]

One of the first acts of Musa and Haji's Revolution was to break into the Cairo museum and vandalize ancient artifacts.

Can't wait for the Brotherhood Of Islam to ascend to office so they can start cracking heads.

[Melissa]

Must be in the same class as Fukitol

[slucero]

Mubarek is gonna cause a revolution...

Gonna? Those wheels got going on January 25th. This is revolution in progress.

The kind of revolution that throws the Middle East into turmoil .. and the DOW into the toilet kinda revolution... not the, "watch it live on CNN" kinda revolution...

[Don]

Looks like the military helped Mubarak with his decision to resign.

Hmm, the devil you know...

[slucero]

It's a good day for Egypt...

[Saint John]

The national unemployment rate is becoming an increasingly meaningless statistic when it comes to painting a true picture of economic and job growth.

While the December drop from 9.4 percent to 9.0 percent might have looked nice on paper, digging through the real numbers shows the actual jobs picture hasn’t improved at all.

In fact, the situation is at best stagnating, despite headline numbers that look like things are getting better.

At the heart of the unemployment rate deception are the nearly three million Americans counted as “marginally attached” to the labor force. Those folks would take a job if offered but actually aren’t actively looking and thus not counted in the government’s official statistics. There are a million more of them than there were in January 2008, thanks to the lousy job market that seems to be improving only at the margins.

So when you see a “drop” in the unemployment rate, like we did when the January nonfarm payrolls number came out, it’s best to measure carefully the grains of salt with which one takes the official government numbers.

“This is a significant number of people waiting on the sidelines,” Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, wrote in a must-read analysis of the labor force’s participation rate.

“Considering that there are about 7 million more unemployed now than three years ago, it suggests the pool of available labor could be 15% bigger than the unemployment figures suggest,” he concluded.

That puts the headline unemployment rate well north of 10 percent, even as the so-called “real” unemployment number—which takes into account an even broader swath of the working-age population—remains above 16 percent but in a modest decline. In fact, Ashworth attributes the drop from the cycle high of 10.1 percent unemployment to the current level “as much due to a contraction in the labor force” as any illusory improvement in the real jobs picture.

“The 836,000 decline in the labor force since (the October 2009 peak) is only slightly smaller than the 930,000 increase in employment,” he wrote. “Over the second half of last year, the labor force shrank by more than employment expanded. …In other words, the drop in the unemployment rate doesn't reflect an improving job market, but rather a decline in the labor force participation rate.”

In fact, the participation rate is shrinking, not growing, falling to 64.2 percent, which is an eye-popping 26-year low. That trend makes it even harder to reconcile a drop in the unemployment rate, and also makes laughable the protests of some economists that the paltry 37,000 nonfarm job growth for January was due to weather.

Economists who have held bullish outlooks for the economy are taking notice.

“Never before has such a sharp decline in the unemployment rate been predicated on an ongoing drop in the labor force. The participation rate has crumbled 1.5 (percentage points) since the recovery began,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch economists Neil Dutta and Ethan S. Harris wrote in a research note.

“This labor force detachment tell us two things that should give even the most bullish of market participants room for pause: (1) structural unemployment is rising and (2) the potential rate of growth in the US is slowing.”

What’s more, those glibly dismissing inflation threats also could be in for a surprise.

“More structural unemployment and weak potential growth imply less slack in the economy and raise an inflation risk,” the BofAML team wrote.

Just today, Neal Soss, head of the economics team at Credit Suisse, said the drop in people looking for jobs is unlikely to abate for years.

“One arithmetical consequence of a subdued labor participation rate is that it requires smaller job gains to achieve the same amount of decline in the unemployment rate. Thus, the decline in the jobless rate tends to overstate the improvement in the labor market,” he warned clients.

So what’s it all mean?

Extrapolating from Soss’s analysis, we should be careful how easily we dismiss future rounds of Fed easing, political climate be damned.

“The Fed seems to share our concerns about the mathematical calculation of the unemployment rate and is beginning to downplay the improvement in that statistic in its assessment of America's jobs problem,” Soss wrote. “We expect the Fed to maintain its accommodative policy stance until the unemployment rate drops for a good reason: because monthly job gains move to a much higher plateau.”

[hoagiepete]

Uhh...hstily ordering Guantanamo Bay closed BEFORE you figure out what to do with the prisoners was unwise, IMO.

i think he is going to give them a shovel and make the prisoners build roads and bridges,thats what i would do

Why take jobs away from taxpaying Americans?

[RedWingFan]

Muslim Brotherhood Official: We Want Sharia Law in Egypt
Posted by Jim Hoft on Monday, February 14, 2011, 5:50 AM

A top Muslim Brotherhood official announced in an interview this weekend that the organization wants Sharia law in Egypt.
Islam in Europe reported:

Issam Al Aryan, spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, said in an interview with VRT that the MB wants to legislate Shariah law, with court supervision, of course.

The Rubin Report added: The Muslim Brotherhood’s aim is to restore a caliphate, a global religious government aimed at fighting the `non-believers’ (specifically, Christians, Hindus, and Jews) and at spreading Islam. The group opposed the existence of any secular states in all Muslim societies throughout the Middle East.

[Behshad]

Uhh...hstily ordering Guantanamo Bay closed BEFORE you figure out what to do with the prisoners was unwise, IMO.

i think he is going to give them a shovel and make the prisoners build roads and bridges,thats what i would do

Why take jobs away from taxpaying Americans?

I think he meant using them as the materials to build those roads & bridges

[slucero]

“The Fed seems to share our concerns about the mathematical calculation of the unemployment rate and is beginning to downplay the improvement in that statistic in its assessment of America's jobs problem,” Soss wrote. “We expect the Fed to maintain its accommodative policy stance until the unemployment rate drops for a good reason: because monthly job gains move to a much higher plateau.”

Its highly suspect that now the unemployment numbers aren't moving the way that Bernanke & Fed want that there's a media (and Fed) push to paint the once so important (to Bernanke & Fed) unemployment rate as now "irrelevant"

hmmmmmm.......

[Seven Wishes2]

House passes sweeping cuts to domestic programs

The Republican-controlled House passed sweeping legislation early Saturday to cut $61 billion from hundreds of federal programs and shelter coal companies and oil refiners from new government regulations.

The $1.2 trillion bill covers every Cabinet agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, imposing severe spending cuts aimed at domestic programs and foreign aid, including aid for schools, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsidies for the poor.

Senate Democrats promise higher spending levels and are poised to defend Obama's health care bill, environmental policies and new efforts to overhaul regulation of the financial services industry.

Changes pushed through the House on Friday and Saturday would shield greenhouse-gas polluters and privately owned colleges from federal regulators, block a plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and bar the government from shutting down mountaintop mines it believes will cause too much water pollution, siding with business groups over environmental activists and federal regulators in almost every instance.

-- From the AP.

Wow, wow, and wow.

It never ends with these assholes, does it? It's even worse than I could have imagined. ALL the GOP cares about is pandering to their small but wealthy base and big business. They don't give two shits about the ordinary average every day guy, the environment...but they sure do want to grease up Big Oil, Big Industry, and the military (no cuts proposed to that massive budget). Way to go, assholes.

[Saint John]

The $1.2 trillion bill covers every Cabinet agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, imposing severe spending cuts aimed at domestic programs and foreign aid, including aid for schools, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsidies for the poor.

Not really sure about the rest, but the part above is great news. That was just wasted money. Domestic programs and foreign aid packages are severely abused, aid for schools is not needed as it's time for the PARENTS of underperforming schools to step up, nutrition programs are nothing more than common sense and don't need funding, poor people are, by and large, already catered to far too much, and while I love keeping the environment clean and functioning, I would bet that the money allocated toward doing that ends in in some politician's pocket. Cut all that shit out ... just like they did.

[S2M]

The $1.2 trillion bill covers every Cabinet agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, imposing severe spending cuts aimed at domestic programs and foreign aid, including aid for schools, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsidies for the poor.

Not really sure about the rest, but the part above is great news. That was just wasted money. Domestic programs and foreign aid packages are severely abused, aid for schools is not needed as it's time for the PARENTS of underperforming schools to step up, nutrition programs are nothing more than common sense and don't need funding, poor people are, by and large, already catered to far too much, and while I love keeping the environment clean and functioning, I would bet that the money allocated toward doing that ends in in some politician's pocket. Cut all that shit out ... just like they did.

It's all great news, just like the Union busting going on in Wisconsin and next in Ohio, but we must be vigilant, these are not really cuts, they are minor reductions to The Wons big spending increases. This is for the remainder of 2011 spending, the real cuts will come with the 2012 budget and they had better be more than just a few hundred billion from current levels.

And when the economy still hasn't rebounded, and people are still unemployed - or underemployed, and you rethugs cut their benefits - you abetter be satisfied with your LONE term....cause there are a hell of a lot more poor people in this country than rich. Good luck with that.....

[S2M]

Sorry, FF....you know how that's going to play to the american people: The Republican's are forcing my hand. BTW, nice sleight of hand. I was talking about post- Jan 2013....when your party exacerbates this whole thing....

[S2M]

Here's a good one....

You know, FF, if I didn't know your gender - I would think you were a female. Seriously, because you mess up issues. Women think abortion is about choice, when it's really about the ending of a life. You think the Healthcare bill is breaking some constitutional law, when it is really about making sure everyone has the benefits of healthcare.

Sometimes things have to seem like unconstitutional things to ensure the safety of this country....I'm sure those body checks at the airports are in some way unconstitutional, but they ensure the safety of air travel - so they stay. Please don't get the issues messed up - or someone may confuse you with an XX......

[Angel]

Women think abortion is about choice, when it's really about the ending of a life.

Not all women think that way, asswipe!

[S2M]

Women think abortion is about choice, when it's really about the ending of a life.

Not all women think that way, asswipe!

Enough of them that aborton remains legal, Team Mattress Back.....

[Seven Wishes2]

"A good one".

You neo-cons always omit the last sentence from the commerce clause.

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

It happens every time some GOP politician is reading off his Republican Cliff Notes. Every time. But the last sentence of the clause clearly shows Congress DOES have the authority it does pertaining to the health care bill.

AND BESIDES, THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE WAS A REPUBLICAN IDEA FOR 40 YEARS AND NOT ONE MEMBER OF THE GOP ONCE QUESTIONED ITS CONSTITUTIONAL LEGITIMACY.

Name ONE thing Obama has done that "violates" the Constitution. One. I can name a DOZEN Dubbya did.

[Saint John]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi_c6D8SPcE

[S2M]

Sorry, FF....you know how that's going to play to the american people: The Republican's are forcing my hand. BTW, nice sleight of hand. I was talking about post- Jan 2013....when your party exacerbates this whole thing....

Yeah, we'll see. Do you and the welfare crowd know or even care that The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $4.13 billion per day since September 28, 2007? So these so called "cuts" are about 15 days worth of spending off the budget. Like draining the swimming pool by sipping with a straw. When we're broke who's gonna pay the fucking benefits anyway? Who are they gonna vote for then?

When all is said and done, and the smoke has cleared....sure, there are a few issues worth giving a damn about. But the number one issue people care about is MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS...if Obama turns the economy around before the next election he's getting a 2nd term. Unfortunately, people don't really care about tomorrow. It's a nice and warm/fuzzy concept and all...but people won't be here when everything collapses, so why care? I'm not saying *I* believe that.....but I bet dollars to donuts that people aren't really worried about deficits. What's in my paycheck TODAY!

[S2M]

"A good one".

You neo-cons always omit the last sentence from the commerce clause.

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

It happens every time some GOP politician is reading off his Republican Cliff Notes. Every time. But the last sentence of the clause clearly shows Congress DOES have the authority it does pertaining to the health care bill.

AND BESIDES, THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE [b]WAS A REPUBLICAN IDEA FOR 40 YEARS AND NOT ONE MEMBER OF THE GOP ONCE QUESTIONED ITS CONSTITUTIONAL LEGITIMACY.[/b]

Name ONE thing Obama has done that "violates" the Constitution. One. I can name a DOZEN Dubbya did.

I got news for ya 7, those Republicans who may have supported the mandate are long gone from Congress, there's a new team in town with new ideas. It's called "Change", Hope you can deal with it.

WOW...a republican calling for CHANGE.....but hold on to that right to bear arms. Don't [/]change[/i] that. Let's pick and choose what to change. What will benefit ME. Fuck the American People.

[S2M]

I'm not saying that, FF. What I'm saying is people just want a DECENT wage for a decent day's work. Washington keeps nickling and diming the american people to death. You're a smart XY, I think... Please, as a staunch card-carrying member of the republican party - why won't washington go to the Fair/Flat Tax? Explain to me how taxing consumption is the wrong way to go. You'll end up getting those illegal's money at the register. Educate a stupid independent.....