How fortunate for Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh, big radio personality and leader of the instinctual far right, has yet to retire to a sunny island with his bottles of pills. At a moment when Republicans on Capitol Hill feel they must pretend to negotiate with the popular new president over spending to revive the economy, he blurted out what they really feel.
This is the Republicans' big contribution to our economic recovery: They want to make sure that undocumented immigrants who pay taxes using tax identification numbers don't get a cent of their tax money back in the refunds enacted by Congress. Oh, yes, and they want rich people to get tax refunds.
The 2008 election these days may seem long ago and far away. But it is worth remembering that while the Republicans had a bad time at the polls in November, they fared well in the array of contests that concluded the election cycle in December.
Public support for the economic recovery plan working its way through Congress is modest, but the proposal is likely to pass for a very simple reason: Voters want to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt.
Last night’s House vote on the Democratic stimulus package, where not a single Republican voted in favor, was another shot across the bow for this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a program that truly will not stimulate the economy.
Twenty-seven percent (27%) of American voters believe the nation is heading in the right direction. That’s up from 21% just before Barack Obama was inaugurated as President and up from 14% just before the election.
One thing for sure: Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on the future direction of the Republican Party.
Public support for the economic recovery plan crafted by President Obama and congressional Democrats has slipped a bit over the past week. At the same time, expectations that the plan will quickly become law have increased.
I envy Sports Man. He can rise above his own problems by focusing on the triumphs or setbacks of The Team.
Some political analysts have interpreted the 2008 presidential election as an ordinary retrospective election. With a very unpopular Republican incumbent presiding over unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a weak economy, 2008 appeared to be a Democratic year.
Over a third of the Senate voted against Tim Geithner's confirmation as treasury secretary, though he did pass the test by 60 to 34 early Monday evening.
Sixty-one percent (61%) of American workers say that if they leave their current job, it will be their choice, a significant drop in confidence from four years ago.
During the campaign, President Obama said he would stop federal raids of medical marijuana clubs in states (like California) that had passed medical marijuana laws.
The latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot shows no change this week. Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys found that 42% of voters said they would vote for their district’s Democratic candidate while 35% said they would choose the Republican.
The Pittsburgh Steelers are the heavy favorites to win Super Bowl XLIII, but slightly more Americans who plan to tune into the big game are hoping the Arizona Cardinals win instead.
Thirty-seven percent (37%) of Americans say it is better to work for the government than in the private sector in the current economic climate.
Paul Krugman, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and a regular columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote that you should “write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”
On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland and liberated the 7,000 prisoners who were still there, most of them sick and dying.
President Barack Obama is a beguiling but confounding figure. As he said of himself in "The Audacity of Hope," "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats have proposed an $825 billion economic recovery package, which would be used to create jobs, improve healthcare and expand renewable energy. From January 27-28, 2009, we are asking voters if they favor this proposal. We want you to predict what percentage of people will say that they will favor the economic recovery package proposed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats.
