This “facebook” of which you speak?..
I think the misinformation may be a cynical ploy by the Obama administration to create a bigger splash with the announcement, then get the facts straight, then cite the (real) confusion after the event to explain the discrepancies.
Considering Obama earns about $1 million in political capital for killing Usama, and this move is the equivalent of buying a double cheeseburger for lunch in this context, I think it doesn’t matter.
Whoa, there! Don’t take your guns to town, son.
If Jesus Christ Himself ran on the Independent ticket, I would probably vote I. Bump in the polls when Jesus decriminalizes pot- face it, there is enough suffering in this world without pot prohibition laws, He would do it. Most other scenarios, I vote Obama.
Well selling points aside, it completely rebuts the Repub assertion that Obama is a weak leader. No one but the fanatics are gonna buy that line. It means Obama CAN concentrate on jobs. Don’t know if he will have the sense to do so … he seems curiously uininterested in doing so. Sure, he saved the economy as a whole, but almost ten percent official unemployment is VERY bad news for him. I hope he has staffers running around with their heads on fire trying to solve it, but I see him more taking the “long view” that it will turn around someday on its own, which of late is like saying “you will have pie in the sky when you die.”
I have no idea what he should be doing to “save” your economy, there is no way he would get a massive spending stimulus through the American congress, so what pray tell are you reproaching the man for? Not having a magic wand to make things turn around? Elected leadership have only the most indirect influence on the economy as such, and for a big one like the US, I fail to see what the man can do if he has no hope of passing a massive spending stimulus (or perhaps dubious end efficacity given debt fears, pity your prior government - like so many - did not use the boom years to pay down debt as they should have).
Name even one. :rolleyes:
Most people understand that Obama inherited an economy in collapse. They can see that he is trying to fix it but the Repubs ,voting as a group ,are trying to stop him. The Repubs want the presidency and will sabotage any attempts that Obama makes to mend the economy.
The control of the Supreme Court is huge. Corporate personhood, unfettered corporate contributions and so many other pro corporate positions have been instituted by the court. They were not passed by the House and Senate. No vote was needed. The people do not speak.
What the fuck does corporate personhood have to do with your modern politics? It’s an old common law tradition (and damned useful one). I just looked it up, and your Supreme Court decided on that as far back as 1816…
What any of this rot has to do with OBL escapes though.
The idea that a corporation could be treated as a person for the purpose of owning property or entering into a contract has long been established. But recently, corporate personhood has been greatly expanded and corporations have been granted civil rights.
The biggest controversy has been the right of corporations to make political donations. The precedents are clear - there’s literally a hundred years worth of decisions that state this is, at best, a limited right. But all of this was overturned in 2010 by the Supreme Court, which held that corporations have an unlimited right to make political donations.
Well this doesn’t have anything to do with OBL to say the least.
Maybe that’s the point. OBL’s death improves Obama’s poll numbers but there are a lot of other issues that will affect the election too.
I agree with the poster whose answer to the OP is that it doesn’t matter because Obama would win regardless. He’s doing well and his opponents look terrible. I think this is independent of the validity of conservative/liberal points of view- the GOP just really stinks.
IMHO people who say a big financial collapse might change people’s opinions also have a point.
Oh, come on, you know that out there in the Internet somewhere some crackpot blogger who calls himself a Dem is in a furor over Osama’s death. Just as there’s probably a crackpot blogger who calls himself a Repub who is probably in a furor over Osama’s death. Doesn’t mean a damn thing, of course, unless either one has following of more than a dozen, becase crackpottery will always outweigh political affiliations. It is in fact a very stupid and obnoxious attack to make, however.
Well this is off topic, but since you asked:
Things Obama could have done/could do to improve jobs situation for Americans
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Institute tax incentives for corporations that ACTUALLY HIRE PEOPLE. That is, reward corporations for HIRING, don’t give them tax breaks for “business expansion” or anything like that. Give larger breaks to corporations that provide decent paying jobs rather than McJobs.
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Set up major infrastructure improvement/maintenance programs similar to the WPA and hire lots of people to do it. Do not allow big business to capture the program, they’ll just use the most automated stuff they can to pocket as much profit as they can. Our infrastructure is in bad shape, here’s a chance to kill two birds with one stone. And infrastructure is an investment that tends to pay off.
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Use tariffs to discourage companies from moving jobs overseas. Yeah, I know, tariffs bad, unemployment good. I beg to differ.
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Set up a government pure science research program, in areas related to medicine, biology and physics. Not as much of that going on as before. No oversight as to the nature of the project, let the scientists pick their studies. Discoveries made by the pure science guys can be used by ANY US corporation, big or small, to develop new inventions. I know that academia is SUPPOSED to function this way, but to an increasing degree, academia has been captured by business via research grant funding, which tends to lead to small gains, not breakthroughs. Think about all the advances we have made thanks to NASA, all the industries that have sprung up, the products. No reason the biological sciences can’t be similarly productive. The only catch for the program is, YOU CAN’T EXPORT THE INDUSTRIES OVERSEAS!!! As occurred with VCRs, for example. The corporations that use these discoveries have to manufacture and so forth in the US, and hire US citizens to do the work.
I’m sure I could come up with more if I thought about it harder. But that’s the stuff that comes to mind offhand.
I’ll grant you that. As I posted above, issues like corporate law are not button issues with most voters.
He should have taken over one of the banks and started lending to small businesses. Corporations are the people who lay off workers and offshore jobs. That is not where job creation growth will come. In the 60s, 30 percent of our tax base was provided by corporations. It is now under 6.
There is a program on History of a guy who travels the country inspecting our infrastructure.It is called “Inspector America”. Bridges are built to last 50 years. The average age of our bridges is 43.
Sewers are underground ,so we don’t fix them until they break. That is bad policy. They cause damage when they go down. There is a lot of legitimate work that needs to be done.
I will not continue the hijack, but it seems to me the two extreme left posters are engaging in fantasy, as I rather believe every action they cite would require congressional action, and are not things the executive can execute by fiat (for which rational persons should be happy to be sure). So, as I have understood even the modest measures your president passed were a massive uphill struggle, I find it … interesting that there is a belief that sweeping measures redolent of the failures of 70s economic policy would have been achievable.
I wrote a response to your post, realized it was massively off topic, so moved it to the Elections forum and broadened the scope to include progressive strategies generally for the 2012 election.
You can find it here.
Of course. I was just curious where our friend *found *this person he uses to personify “the left”.
You’re getting two things mixed up. Academia is a venue for research to be done, not a source of funding for research. Most research is done in the universities, with the money coming from elsewhere (some private industry, and mostly government). Even government agencies like NASA mostly just function as funders and facilitators for research done at universities, and most NASA research centers are co-operated by various schools.