New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, in a radio interview on Friday, warned that high unemployment could lead to widespread rioting. That’s right. He actually said that. At a time when European cities have suffered massively from hooliganism, and at a time when U.S. towns like Philadelphia and Kansas City have suffered huge human and commercial tolls from so-called flash riots.

For Bloomberg to come out with this statement is irresponsible and incendiary. But you know what? He’s got a personal agenda. This is a desperate talking point to sell Obama’s jobs plan, which Bloomberg favors as a solution to high unemployment and zero growth.

There’s a whole history here of liberals threatening riots if they don’t get their way. WABC radio host Mark Simone reminded me that back in 1994, Matilda Cuomo warned there would be race riots in New York if her husband Mario weren’t reelected governor in his race against George Pataki.

So now the liberal Mike Bloomberg is trying to go to bat for his pal Obama. And he’s doing so in a very clumsy and inappropriate way.

In fact, Bloomberg is pitching for the whole Obama jobs package — the $450 billion stimulus plan and the $470 billion tax hike. The package is totally unpopular. A recent Bloomberg poll (how ironic) showed that voters disapprove of more Obama stimulus by 51 to 40 percent, and that 56 percent of independents oppose it. Other polls show that more than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy.

Memories are long. The $800 billion stimulus package nearly three years ago didn’t work. So why do it again?

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From The Hill:

Senior administration officials met with Senate Democrats for an hour and a half on Thursday to answer their complaints about President Obama’s jobs bill.

Democratic lawmakers voiced objections to several of the president’s proposals to pay for the $447 billion stimulus package, including an elimination of tax breaks for the oil-and-gas industry.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president, acknowledged after a marathon meeting in the Senate’s Mansfield Room that not all Democrats are sold on the plan.

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In 2008, candidate Obama famously dodged a serious question by telling America that the question was simply “above [his] pay grade.” Three years into his Presidency, voters around the country are clearly voicing their opinion that being held accountable for the failing economy is not above his pay grade.  Even in California, perhaps America’s last bastion of liberalism, voters are finally turning on Obama.

Around the country, the numbers all point to Obama losing in next year’s Presidential election.  Generic Republicans beat him in polling match ups.  Following Democrats’ loss of the House last year, Republicans just won a special election for a seat in New York that they haven’t held since 1923.  Perhaps the most telling number, unemployment is above 9% (with no real improvement in sight) and no President has won re-election with unemployment above 8%.

In California, however, a majority of voters have stood by Obama.  For most of this year, a strong majority of voters approved of Obama’s job performance.  Now suddenly, Obama’s ratings took a sharp turn for the worse and, for the first time, less than a majority of voters in California approve of his job performance – just 46% to be specific.

Given that the economy has not changed much over the last year, the question could be asked:  Why have California voters suddenly turned on Obama?

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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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Today, the Obama Administration sent legislation to Congress, detailing its latest plan to spur job creation. It relies on half-a-trillion dollars in new spending with an almost equivalent amount of tax increases. Very little of the proposed spending would actually spur new investment or hiring, while most of the tax hikes would work directly against them. The man is simply out of tricks. (Full text below.)

American Jobs Act — final

Michael Barone in The Examiner:

Barack Obama looked and sounded angry in his speech to the joint session of Congress. He bitterly assailed one straw man after another and made reference to a grab bag of proposals which would cost something on the order of $450 billion—assuring us on the one hand that they all had been supported by Republicans as well as Democrats in the past and suggesting that somehow they are going to turn the economy around. He called for further cuts in the payroll tax (which if continued indefinitely would undermine the case of Social Security as something people have earned rather than a form of welfare) and for a further extension of unemployment insurance (perhaps justifiable on humanitarian grounds, but sure to at least marginally raise the unemployment rate over what it would otherwise be).

He called for a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed (unfortunately, these things can be gamed). He gave a veiled plug for his pet project of high-speed rail (a real dud) and for infrastructure spending generally (but didn’t he learn that there aren’t really any shovel-ready projects?). He called for a school modernization program (will it result in more jobs than the Seattle weatherization program that cost $22 million and produced 14 jobs?) and for funding more teacher jobs (a political payoff to the teacher unions which together with other unions gave Democrats $400 million in the 2008 campaign cycle). “We’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it would do for the country.”

Yeah, sure. Like the screening process that produced that $535,000,000 loan guarantee to now-bankrupt Solyndra. And Congress should pass the free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea. Except that Congress can’t, because Obama hasn’t sent them up there yet in his 961 days as president.

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From the Associated Press:

First, do no harm. Economists say the most important part of the jobs plan President Barack Obama will unveil Thursday night is the renewal of two measures already in place—a cut in Social Security taxes and emergency aid for the unemployed.

His new proposals, like spending more for transportation projects and cutting taxes for companies that hire the unemployed, probably wouldn’t add many jobs, they say. Not soon, anyway.

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President Obama’s sit down with weighty media figure, radio talk show host Tom Joyner, resulted in an interesting prediction Tuesday:

“There is no doubt that we can take steps that would mean the economy was growing a percent or a percentage and a half faster. That could mean half a million to a million additional jobs,” said Obama.

After almost three years in office, 13.9 million unemployed, and more than 42 million on food stamps, is the President just blowing more hot election cycle air? Can DC handle yet another blundering blowhard? You decide.