Trouble on the Horizon?

The popularity of this President hinges on one thing – whether the stimulas plan starts stimulating jobs.
Spin your hearts out telling us all the wonderful benefits of this plan – but it is all about jobs.
At some point someone is going to stand up and say “the Emperor has no clothes.”

With the stimulus not doing anything for the unemployed and the private sector still notably absent – people are losing faith in what can be done for this economy.

The positive things about Obama? He’s not on continual vacation and he’s not stupid.
On the other hand, he hasn’t revoked Bush’s policies. Instead he’s continued and/or reinforced Bush’s policies. He’s given money away to the banks, Wall Street, etc. while treating blue collar industry like they were lepers. He’s flip flopped 180 degrees on almost all of his campaign positions/promises.
It seemed obvious to me that he was setting himself up to be a mediocre president but it appears that even that was more credit than he’s earned to date.

America is waking from it’s hopey changey slumber…it’s about time.

America is getting the kind of government it has earned.

Polls dropping are not a problem. Policy results are what matter. People tend to be stupid about how the economy works (note Bush Sr’s unjust dismissal in 1992). Obama has until 2012 for the economy to show recovery, and that is about the right time frame for the stimulus (well, the 65% of it that was spending – funny how Republicans now call all the tax cuts “spending”) to be deployed and yield benefit.
But yeah, health care is dead. The health care industry is a trillion dollar business and has bought too much of Congress – including some Democrats and almost all Republicans – to be brought to heel.
I wish someone would answer the question how we can afford to NOT have national health care and to continue forcing our businesses and citizens to spend two to three times what every other first world nation spends for similar results.

“Polls dropping are not a problem. Policy results are what matter. People tend to be stupid about how the economy works (note Bush Sr’s unjust dismissal in 1992). Obama has until 2012 for the economy to show recovery”
The policies are not as popular as the president. Obama has one more year on the economy or the Dems will get smoked in 2010.

MichiAnn1:”Remember that if the stimulus funds were disbursed according to job losses, that each job loss would lead to a state getting $800 in stimulus money.”
That would be an atrociously inefficient way to do it. You want to spend money where it will have the largest impact to create future jobs, not throw it on the grave of a typewriter factory.
And I bet that silly article also calls the $288 billion in tax cuts “spending.” (Although I’ll readily agree that $70 billion odd – almost 10% of the bill – insisted on by Republicans was stupid – NO ONE thinks cutting taxes on the upper middle class will have any stimulative effect.)

Time for a shirtless photo to accidently get published.
Something big, something shallow to distract from his dropping poll numbers.
Maybe go back on the campaign trail?

OBama is a disgrace:
Obama’s approach to Iran, including his assertion that the unrest there represents a debate among Iranians unrelated to the United States, is an acknowledgment that a U.S. president’s words have a limited ability to alter foreign events in real time and could do more harm than good. But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic’s Islamic authority in its 30-year history.
This is the most despicable, self-serving, and arrogant spin I’ve seen yet from this White House, and that’s saying something. Obama gave a speech, and suddenly the people of Iran discovered that they’re being ruled by tyrants? Never mind that two weeks passed between the speech and the uprising, and that the very obvious trigger for the unrest was the incompetent manner in which the mullahs rigged the election for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Never mind the fact that this President took a full week to even sound like a watered-down Nicolas Sarkozy, let alone the leader of the free world.

Concerned in OH:”So I guess during that week of silence from the WH ”
The Iranian election was on June 12th, results announced on June 13th. Protest began building immediately that point. Obama made the following statement TWO days later, on the 15th:
“I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent – all those are universal values that need to be respected… we believe the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.”
Based on REALITY, saying that Obama was silent for a week is not just a typical right wing exageration, it is an easily exposed lie.

WhereWasThePress:”I think artists, restaurant workers, the travel industry, what’s left of the car industry, local and national retail shops and stores and many others whose jobs depend on discretionary spending would heartily and earnestly disagree with you.”
I doubt that. The AMT revision has no immediate impact and won’t even be noticed until next April. There is no debate about its non-stimulative nature among economists on both sides of the issue.

A single, unsourced attribution from the Washington Post claims:
One senior administration official with experience in the Middle East said, “There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities,” adding that “I was struck in the aftermath of the president’s speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach.”
Yet somehow this now becomes “privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters.” The alleged comments of a single anonymous source get wildly exaggerated and the right wing two minute hate is off!
“This is the most despicable, self-serving, and arrogant spin I’ve seen yet from this White House, and that’s saying something. Obama gave a speech, and suddenly the people of Iran discovered that they’re being ruled by tyrants? Never mind that two weeks passed between the speech and the uprising, and that the very obvious trigger for the unrest was the incompetent manner in which the mullahs rigged the election for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

Hmmmmmm looks like ABC CBS and NBC cannot protect this loser any longer.. the Marxist regime is falling on its face… Obama will not say anything on Iran, because he, like the Iranian president believe protest is a form of low level terrorism…read the new Obama questionare from the pentagon that the aclu is suing over.. lets hear the kos kiddies cry now..

the Truth:”LIES.
Obama sat on his hands, and yea, he made the above extremely weak statement while Iranians died in the streets in the middle of last week. ”
What? You call it a lie and then acknowledge that it is truthful and accurate? Is this more right wing critical thinking?
“YOU CANT REWRITE HISTORY. ”
No, you can’t. I invite anyone interested who may be getting distracted by the right wing noise machine to do a quick bit of research themselves. Look up google news’ timeline feature. It makes following the evolution of stories like this quite simple.
Obama’s measured response is documented and closely follows the approach laid out by Reagan’s response to the Solidarity revolution (look up some of Reagan’s speeches during that event and it’s pretty clear Obama’s team has read them closely) in Poland or Bush Sr’s masterful handling of the ’89 fall of the USSR.

the Truth:”LIES.
Obama sat on his hands, and yea, he made the above extremely weak statement while Iranians died in the streets in the middle of last week. ”
What? You call it a lie and then acknowledge that it is truthful and accurate? Is this more right wing critical thinking?
STOP LYING. IT DOES NOT WORK HERE. PEOPLE ARE INTELLIGENT ON THIS BOARD.
OBAMA DID NOT CALL ON THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT TO STOP KILLING ITS OWN PROTESTING CITIZENS UNTIL TWO DAYS AGO – SATURDAY AFTERNOON – AND THAT WAS ONLY AFTER CONGRESS FORCED HIS HAND WITH THE RESOLUTION ON FRIDAY.
STOP TRYING TO REWRITE HISTORY – PEOPLE ON HERE ARE NOT SHEEP, GO GET A NEW TALKING POINT FROM ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA/AXELROD.

It took a couple of years for Americans to realize that Jimmy Carter was a disaster, I suspect that Obama’s shelf life will be even shorter. He has blown trillions of dollars with little to show for it and has, thru his appointment of incompetents to CIA and Homeland Security, put our country in great danger.

The anti-Obama crowd is coming unglued.
Six months ago, they wanted to nuke Iran and waterboard the survivors…
Now they are weeping big salty tears for the Iranians and gnashing their teeth over Obama’s diabolical desire to be a good father to his daughters for an hour. Obama has been busier than any president I can remember. In fact, he seems to work TOO much.
What an irony, especially since the last president spent more time on vacation than any president in history.
You can’t entirely blame the Obama-haters, though. They are fed a steady stream of highly-tested, focus-group smear points. Meanwhile, the REAL focus of the GOP is not on helping Iranians….
It’s on KILLING our health insurance plans so they can with the 2012 election.

Not so, Jenn. That’s the hope, of course, that the GOP can infect independents with their smears. And you cannot blame them… I mean… the insurance industry is paying them big bucks to stop health care reform.
The polling numbers on the public option overwhelmingly favor Obama.
Their last chance is to attack Obama personally, and hope that this will undermine the public option.
It’s cynical. And it’s potentially disastrous. But the insurance companies stand to lose billions from Obama’s health care agenda. Right now, the average person is forced to shell out 10-20,000 dollars a year or suffer the consequences…. and once the public plan goes into effect…. that’s an end to the lucrative insurance racket.
They know this. And the GOP leadership believes that if they can “win” this one, they might have a shot in 2012.
Of course, it’s bad for the American people. But you have to understand that politicians are mere men, and the GOP, when faced with the prospect of permanent minority status is taking drastic action to prevent this possibility.
So to answer your claim. Independents aren’t defecting. The GOP is shoring up its base with increasingly hysterical antics… and hoping that the modest shift they create in the polls will be interpreted as a trend. Which might give them a little bit of traction in the coming days, when they try to get “equal” representation for what’s essentially an extremely marginal position: Protecting Health Insurance.
It’s textbook PR strategy.

Not to give out free advice… but I think the GOP got the pacing on the attacks wrong.
If the dip in support for Obama bottoms out before he gets to work on his health care plan… which there are strong indications that this is the case… the inevitable uptic will magnify what is apparently an immensely popular plan… helping both of them out, particularly as a corrective to any sway these attacks might have had on independents.
Before, I said that politicians are men, and the democrats are no different. They know that they stand to gain personally in power and influence by delivering the goods on health care reform.
The difference is that their ambitions are in better harmony with the public good in this regard. As I’ve said before, the GOP is taking a real gamble here. And maybe they will pull it off. If you asked me 10 years ago whether or not some maniacs with box cutters could bring down the WTC, I would have said it was a longshot. But still, the odds are against the GOP…. even if they do think they are on a holy mission to stop the man they have elevated to a devil.
And one likes to think that, if occasionally, the bad option wins out over the good option…. over the long haul, the good is gonna win out this time.

ABC is in danger of tanking with the public. As for Obama, today he said:
“Keep in mind the stimulus package was the first thing we did, and we did it a couple of weeks after Inauguration, and at that point nobody understood what the depths of this recession were going to look like,” Obama said. “If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report the economy tanked. It’s not surprising then that we missed the mark in terms of estimates of where unemployment would go.“
Duh…
1. Keynesian economics do not work, even if they have a ‘neo’ camouflage.
2. All of the other crap he has pulled and plans to pull has made the everyone nervous.
3. Nobody is going to invest (except at high interest rates) or hire (unless it’s a government job) or expand until they know the rules of the game.
4. I’ve never seen so much ineptness at understanding the concept of studying consequences when making policies. Sheesh.

“Losing some support?
The numbers actually show that 90% of Americans have at the minimum – some concern over the deficits.”
And yet the same poll asked people to rank issues of importance, 24% said the deficit, 35% said unemployment.
When asked what should be the top priority, job creation and economic growth was 1st, and spending/deficits tied with health care for a distant 2nd.
When asked who was most responsible for those deficits, 49% said the Bush admin, 21% said Dems in Congress, 7% said GOPers in Congress and 6% said the Obama admin.
When asked if people were confident in Obama’s set of policies and goals for the economy, 46% said quite confident or extremely confident. and additional 25$ stated they were somewhat confident.