From The Hill:

For the third time in four weeks, Senate Republicans on Thursday voted in unison to block a piece of President Obama’s jobs package.

The GOP senators were joined by one Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), and Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) in rejecting a procedural motion on legislation that would spend $60 billion on transportation infrastructure programs. The vote was 51-49.

The spending was offset with a new tax on income earned above $1 million that Republicans oppose.

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From the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama and his allies in the Senate promise to press ahead with separate votes on pieces of his failed $447 billion jobs measure despite unanimous opposition from Republicans. But there also are signs of slippage among Democrats and evidence the strategy isn’t working with voters.

Future votes on individual pieces of the measure, however, aren’t likely to fare better than a pared-back jobs measure designed to boost hiring of teachers and first responders that Republicans and a handful of Democrats scuttled on Thursday.

Obama’s revised plan failed on a 50-50 test vote that fell well short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Three Democrats abandoned Obama on the vote and two more who voted with the president said they couldn’t support the underlying Obama plan unless it’s changed.

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The Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, spoke to University of Pennsylvania students on October 18th. That’s usually not a huge deal. The VP gives speeches all over the place. What is a big deal is that during the speech, Biden said he wished that opponents of Obama’s “jobs bill” knew what it was like to be robbed and raped.

[Opponents of Obama's jobs bill say] this is just temporary. Well, let me tell you, it’s not temporary when that 911 call comes in and a woman’s being raped if cop shows up in time to prevent the rape–it’s not temporary to that woman. It’s not temporary to the guy whose store is being held up and has a gun pointed at his head, if a cop shows up and he’s not killed, that’s not temporary to that store owner… I wish they had some notion what it’s like to be on the other side of a gun or a 200-pound man standing over you telling you to submit.

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From the Associated Press:

United against Barack Obama, Senate Republicans voted Tuesday night to kill the jobs package the president had spent weeks campaigning for across the country, a stinging loss at the hands of lawmakers opposed to stimulus-style spending and a tax increase on the very wealthy.

Forty-six Republicans joined with two Democrats to filibuster the $447 billion plan. Fifty Democrats had voted for it, but the vote was not final. The roll call was kept open to allow Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. to vote. The likely 51-48 eventual tally would be far short of the 60 votes needed to keep the bill alive in the 100-member Senate.

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From The Hill:

Democratic leaders in the Senate are scrambling to avoid defections on President Obama’s jobs package, which appears headed for defeat on Tuesday.

A lack of Democratic unity on the president’s bill would be embarrassing for the White House, which has been scolding House Republicans for refusing to vote on the measure.

Obama has been touring the country, aiming to put pressure on the GOP to act. But Senate Democrats have indicated they are feeling some heat. Last week, Democratic leaders revised Obama’s bill, scrapping his proposed offsets. Instead of raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 annually, Senate Democrats lifted that figure to $1 million.

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The past week was very interesting in Presidential politics.  The darlings of the rank and file Republican Party, New Jersey governor Chris Christie and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, have concluded it is not time to run for President. Herman Cain (who was recently labeled a racist by a Democrat strategist on CNN) has become the sweetheart of the white-supremacist, right-wing Tea Party.

The popular press is lauding liberal Democrats for having finally found their own voice in the Occupy Wall Street protests. And Missouri’s Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, did not even show up for President Obama’s (who polls below 30% in MO) fundraiser in St. Louis. And a rumor is circulating that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has told Obama he cannot win passage of the jobs bill as proposed and will only take it in pieces to the Senate floor, thus distancing himself from the President.

Does anyone need to know anything else about the 2012 elections?

The problem for decades in Washington has been that lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, have spent their way to political success. Now that there is no more money, nobody knows what to do.  In fact, there is only one Congressman, Darrell Issa (R-CA) who has started (not inherited) a successful company that sold a product and wasn’t just in the service industry, law, accounting, insurance, medicine, banking, you get the idea.  The genesis of American capitalism is an agrarian society taking the risks necessary to make something from nothing and selling it.  He is likely the only one that has made the sacrifices necessary to build something from nothing, and make a profit.  The concept is that without actual profit you can’t spend money.  Everyone else, Democrat and Republican more resembles the Occupy Wall Street group who want to tell everyone where money should be spent, decisions based on personal interests and taxes, not capitalism.  The situation is exacerbated by the contempt and lack of cooperation between the congressional parties, as well as between members of Congress of both parties and the executive.

For some time, the question of when that animosity began has gone unanswered. Certainly there have always been hard-fought ideological battles in the halls of government. But there have also been famous relationships between party leaders, relationships that helped bring these leaders and the country together. When did our modern politics deteriorate so much? Recently a longtime friend and Washington insider suggested that it began with the defeat of the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, the highly respected and superbly qualified candidate, for the Supreme Court. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama on Saturday urged the US Senate to pass his jobs bill this week, boosted by a non-partisan group’s report that the plan could cut the deficit and grow much-needed employment figures.

“It is time for those who oppose the jobs act to explain why they are fighting against something that we know will improve the American economy,” Obama said in his weekly Internet and radio address.

The bill, he said, “will provide our economy with the jolt that it really needs right now.”

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The White House has denied pressuring Ford to pull its ad that criticizes competitors that took and have yet to repay taxpayer dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. However, the Obama administration can’t deny a new gift it showers on General Motors and Chrysler in its package of tax hikes to pay for its so-called American Jobs Act.

For all the talk about fairness and equity with the so-called Buffett Rule, there is one sneaky loophole in the Obama revenue proposal that has largely escaped notice. In doublespeak that would make even George Orwell do a doubletake, President Obama’s “financial crisis responsibility fee” would tax banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses that have paid back their bailout money — and even some firms that never took a bailout — to pay the tab of irresponsible firms, namely the auto companies that still owe the government billions.

“We also ask the largest financial firms — companies saved by tax dollars during the financial crisis — to repay the American people for every dime that we spent,” President Obama proclaimed in the Rose Garden two weeks ago. But the details of this “responsibility fee” in the 80-page plan the president submitted to the Joint Committee on Taxation makes it clear that this fee will only be on firms that have already repaid the TARP funds and likely on some firms who never took a dime of taxpayer money.

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From The Hill:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) on Tuesday further distanced his Democratic Conference from President Obama by nixing a major component of the White House’s jobs plan.

Reid said he would revise parts of the proposal that some Senate Democrats have found unpalatable. The Nevada Democrat announced his new strategy on the same day he blocked a Republican effort to force a vote on Obama’s jobs bill.

The GOP-led maneuver, and Reid’s counterattack, shows that Republicans are more united against Obama’s plan than Democrats are for it.

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The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, is rolling out its new $350,000 television ad campaign to generate support for President Obama’s American Jobs Act. Thirty billion of Obama’s $450 billion jobs bill has been designated to supposedly save 285,000 teaching jobs.

According to our estimates, the bill would generate $35.4 million in dues revenue for the NEA. In other words, the teachers union is spending $350,000 in hopes of getting over $35 million in “saved” dues payments – a return 100 times greater than the initial investment. These union geniuses belong on Wall Street.

Our estimates also show that the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, would see $13 million in “saved” dues payments.

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Richard Epstein in Hoover’s Defining Ideas:

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes “Buy American” restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. “[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods” used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a “manufactured good” for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff.

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An oft-repeated talking point and applause line has crept into President Obama’s repertoire of class-envy and demonizing rhetoric these days.

“At a time when countries like China are building high-speed rail lines and gleaming new airports, we’ve got over a million unemployed construction workers — many of them Latino — who could be doing the same thing right here in the United States. That’s not right. It’s time for us to fix it.”

Setting aside the ethnic pandering inserted especially for the Hispanic Caucus audience, the blatant coveting of China’s shiny new toys is  shameful.

There is something unseemly about the President of the United States publicly drooling in envy over the Potemkin Village that has been propped up in Communist China.  Yes, they have fast trains and cool airports, but they were put together with little regard for safety and by the equivalent of slave labor.  The central government of China has made a choice.  They have chosen to erect these symbols of modern technological wonder for the sole purpose of impressing foreign rubes like Barack Obama at the expense of the hundreds of millions of people who still live in squalor.

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Texas Representative Louie Gohmert is a genius. He’s absconded with the name of Obama’s jobs bill — the American Jobs Act of 2011 –and used it for his own tax-cutting bill.

Is it a Republican dirty trick? How can Gohmert do this? Because Obama is either incompetent or cynical.

Here is the thing, either Obama was never serious about this so-called jobs bill in the first place and never intended to submit it, or he is one of the most inept politicians in presidential history.

If Obama were an effective president Rep. Gohmert would never have been able to appropriate Obama’s bill name for his own. If Obama was effective he’d have crafted his jobs bill, delivered his speech that night, and lined up at least one Democrat, if not the whole Democrat Party, to introduce his bill the very next morning after the speech.

But Obama did no such thing. Not only was there no bill when he delivered the speech, even this many days after the speech the bill has never been introduced in the House of Representatives where such bills might begin the legislative process.

That means that there was no bill called the “American Jobs Act of 2011″ in the House, so Rep. Gohmert was under no compulsion not to use it as a name for his own bill.

Of course, it is also possible that President Obama never intended to submit any bill named the “American Jobs Act of 2011″ in the first place. It is possible he never wanted such a bill debated for real because all he was doing was using it as a political ploy for his reelection campaign.

As for Gohmert, his new “American Jobs Act of 2011” (H.R. 2911) among other things the bill would repeal the alternative minimum tax and would make corporate tax rates zero percent.

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From National Journal:

While speaking in North Carolina on Wednesday, President Obama said, “I love you back” to an audience member who shouted “I love you.” He added, “But if you love me you’ve got to help me pass this bill.”

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Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not take up the Senate’s “doc fix” bill, which passed through the Senate on Friday.  A letter from Pelosi reaffirms her position and scolds Republicans for blocking the jobs portion of the bill:

“What is it that Republicans in the Senate and House don’t understand about the need for jobs in America? I see no reason to pass this inadequate bill until we see jobs legislation coming out of the Senate. House Democrats are saying to Republicans in the Senate: Show us the jobs!”

It’s humorous to hear Pelosi whine on this–if my memory is correct the Democrats control both Chambers and passed the $787 billion stimulus bill to create ” jobs, jobs, jobs.”  More than one year later, we now know that the “stimulus failed,” and a second $17 billion stimlus/jobs bill was passed–which somehow still is not enough.

So, we have more than $800 billion in stimulus spending “designed” to create jobs and now Pelosi has the audacity to blame the GOP after the two previous massive, generational-theft stimulus bills failed.  Are you kidding, Nan?

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Recently, my colleagues in the U.S House of Representatives passed a bill that will undoubtedly further harm our already weakened economy by discouraging investment in businesses and real estate. With national unemployment at 9.5% and no sign of relief in sight for the real estate market, now is no time to be discouraging this type of investment and the jobs that it creates.

The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act (HR 4213) that passed the House by a narrow margin included an extraordinary tax increase on carried interest returns from successful investments by real estate, venture capital, and private equity partnerships. This revenue is currently taxed at the 15% capital gains rate, which is already scheduled to increase to 20% next year. Carried interest provides incentive for investment partners to take the risky investments that are needed to create jobs and boost the economy.

The U.S. Senate expects to vote on the bill in the coming weeks. Senator Max Baucus introduced a compromise amendment that would tax a smaller portion of the carried interest revenue at the new higher rates, but the impact of any tax increase on carried interest will still be harmful and widespread. I will not vote for any bill that includes a tax increase on carried interest, and I will urge my colleagues to join me in opposition.

What’s most alarming about this tax rate increase is that it is deeply punitive on the very businesses we need to help stabilize our economy. The increase would overturn decades of partnership tax law, and these partnerships would be the only businesses in the country whose enterprise value would be taxed at the income tax rate rather than the capital gains tax rate. These partnerships would be unfairly punished for the mistakes of a few Wall Street managers, despite the fact that these partnerships are in the best position in our economy to continue to create and grow businesses and jobs.

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The Associated Press has a story this morning called “Unemployment challenges Obama’s economic narrative.” No kidding.

I never get tired reminding stimulus advocates that before the stimulus bill was passed, the president scared the bejesus out of many people by claiming that if the Stimulus bill wasn’t passed, unemployment would reach 8.8 percent. Also, his team promoted the idea that the stimulus would create 3.3 million jobs (not just saved). They even had numbers and a model to prove it.

So the president got his cash, $789 billion which grew to $862 billion, and unemployment kept going up. It even passed 10 percent at one point and is now stagnating at 9.7 percent–where it’s scheduled to stay for a while.

And it’s not the only “job bill” that was passed. There was one in March 2020 ($18 billion) and another one in April 2010.

By the president’s own logic, the stimulus failed. That’s why he  has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more jobs. How you go about proving that this is not true is impossible and this is why it’s not powerful. It doesn’t make it right.

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From The Hill:

Democrats are set to unveil a new jobs initiative Wednesday that will provide grants to local governments to save or create jobs.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) will join other lawmakers and mayors to announce a $100 billion program to support jobs initiatives in local governments and municipalities.

“Our goal is to retain or create a million jobs,” Miller said during an appearance on CNBC Wednesday morning. “There’s some very serious concern that the small, good news we’re getting right now on the unemployment figures could be wiped out by what’s going to happen in local governments, if they don’t get some assistance.”
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Two weeks ago the U.S. Senate passed new rules that would require new spending to be offset somewhere else in the budget, the so-called paygo rule. They did this because Democrats and Obama got tired of being called big spending socialists and wanted the veneer of fiscal responsibility with which to cloak themselves. It lasted two weeks before the Senate broke its own new Obama-sponsored rule and went headlong for just another big spending program with its supposed jobs bill.

On February 13 President Obama celebrated the paygo rule as a “common sense” rule that would “rein in spending.” Obama then said that the new rule would assure that Congress would be forced to “pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.”

It all sounds so grand. But it wasn’t to last. Maybe that’s why the Senate couldn’t abide by the rule, it was too much “common sense” for them to put up with?

Two weeks ago the Senate Republicans stood against the President’s “common sense” saying that the paygo rule didn’t do a thing to dampen spending but only gave Congress the dispensation to raise more taxes in order to fund the spending levels desired. All 40 Republican Senators voted against the paygo rule two weeks ago, though this week six voted to suspend the paygo rule for the jobs bill, newly seated Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts being one of them.

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Senator Evan Bayh’s decision not to seek re-election this November makes him just the latest among numerous Democrats who announced they are quitting. They have looked at the Obamacare debacle, the crippling debt, the millions of lost jobs, and the looming national security disaster heralded by the increase in jihad terror attacks on American soil, and they’re getting out. They know that Americans are waking up to how the big government policies of the Democrats are continuing to hurt our economy, and are ruinous for America.

Swindling Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) will not seek re-election; the drug-addled Congressman Patrick Kennedy will not be seeking re-election in Rhode Island; Arkansas Congressman Marion Berry and Senator Byron Dorgan are leaving. Then there’s Michigan Democratic Lt. Governor John Cherry’s decision to end his floundering bid for governor. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter is also retiring. Not to mention the stunning late December party switch by freshman Alabama Representative Parker Griffith — just to mention a few.

And in Bayh’s whiny withdrawal speech, he made sure to take parting shots at the Republicans under the guise of the well-worn canard of their “lack of bipartisanship.” As if the Democrats worked with Bush.

The Party of No? Hardly. It’s the Save-America party, it’s the Say No to Communism party. Bayh didn’t speak of the irreparable damage the Democrats are doing to this country. He whimpered that only the Republicans said no to a jobs bill (although the government doesn’t create jobs, the private sector does) and that the Republicans wouldn’t sign off on another bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive commission to investigate bloated, useless, cost-prohibitive government spending. Funny how even a Democrat who is thought of as honorable and measured showed no honor in his parting remarks. He went out like an ankle-biting Democrat, pathetic and small.

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