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Where are the jobs?


© Jim Morin

Have the Republicans actually done anything at all to create jobs? Well, other than their very tired and utterly refuted refrain that cutting taxes will fix our economy and increase jobs?

After all, if cutting taxes leads to job creation, then the end of Dubya’s presidency should have seen employment increasing instead of cratering. And between 1945 and 1964 — when taxes on income over $200,000 was over 90% — should have been a great depression (in case you can’t remember, it wasn’t).

Can anyone name one other thing the Republicans are proposing to put people back to work? Will they end subsidies for sending jobs to other countries? All I hear them promise is to repeal health care reform, end abortion, and “protect marriage”. How is that going to create jobs?

In fact, reducing the deficit, which appears to be the highest priority now that we don’t have a Republican president, seems certain to result in higher unemployment.

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Late Night Political Humor

“The United States’ credit rating was downgraded to AA+. Am I the only one who thinks that doesn’t sound so bad?” – Jimmy Kimmel

“Standard & Poor’s has lowered our credit rating to AA+, which means no one will lend us money or go to 2nd base with us.” – Conan O’Brien

“S&P downgraded the United States from AAA to AA+, and it gets worse. Today, Italy, England, and Greece un-friended us on Facebook.” – Jay Leno

“S&P makes a $2 trillion mistake. Or as it’s known in financial circles, a ‘Trump’.” – Daily Show tweet

“By the way, the ratings agency is Standard & Poor’s. Who’s going to listen to a company whose name translates to Average & Below Average?” – Jon Stewart

“President Obama said that even though we’ve been downgraded, we’re still a AAA nation. Unfortunately, he meant in the minor league baseball sense.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“Standard and Poor’s has also warned there’s a 1 in 3 chance we could be downgraded again in the next three years. We could go from AA+ to F.U. That’s how bad it’s gotten.” – Jay Leno

“Man, America’s credit rating took a real hit this weekend. On Friday night, the U.S. actually lost its AAA status. Or as Joe Biden put it, ‘What happens if I get a flat tire?'” – Jimmy Fallon

“Standard & Poor’s has downgraded us from AAA to AA+. We have to take a note home and have our parents sign it. Don’t pull anything out of the stock market until 12:45 tomorrow. By then I should be over international waters.” – Stephen Colbert

“Wall Street got so hammered today Ronnie and The Situation tried to have sex with it.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“The good news is, the stock market is closed and it can’t hurt us again until tomorrow.” – Jay Leno

“We owe China more than a trillion dollars. Why don’t we just give them Florida?” – Jimmy Kimmel

“China has told us our days of squandering borrowed money are over. So maybe we shouldn’t tell them we just spent $76 million going to the Smurf movie.” – Conan O’Brien

“If the Lord can turn water into wine, surely he can turn debt into wine – which is good, because we’re gonna need a drink.” – Stephen Colbert

“The economy’s so bad Angelina Jolie is now adopting kids from America. My Facebook friends are now eating their Farmville animals. Piers Morgan can only afford to hack into the voicemail of Ringo.” – Conan O’Brien

“We’ve always been told our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay for our reckless spending. Now WE have to pay?!” – Jimmy Kimmel

“It turns out that Texas Gov. Rick Perry got a D in Principles of Economics. So he can’t be president, but he can get a job on President Obama’s economic team.” – Jay Leno

“Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced he’s not going to resign. He had suggested he might be leaving and getting a job in the private sector. But thanks to his economic policies there are no jobs in the private sector, so I guess he’s going to stay.” – Jay Leno

“I don’t know why Timothy Geithner would quit working at the Treasury. It must be an easy job now, especially since there’s no money in it.” – Jay Leno

“About 45,000 Verizon employees are on strike after failing to reach a new contract. Yeah, things are so bad, the S&P downgraded them from ‘Verizon’ to ‘AT&T.'” – Jimmy Fallon

“A new poll shows that disapproval of Congress is at an all-time high. Eighty-two percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing and the other 18 percent weren’t home when the question was asked.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“Only a couple of days until the big Republican Iowa Republican straw poll. Pollsters say it’s a dead heat between the guy you never heard of, the guy who used to be somebody, and the woman who has no chance of winning.” – Jay Leno

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Congressional Rating


© Ed Stein

Polls show that Congressional approval is now even lower than back before the last election, when Congressional approval was so low we kicked out a bunch of Congress and elected some newbie freshmen from the Tea Party. Ouch! Ever get the feeling that you’ve been had?

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So, You Hate The Debt Ceiling Deal?

For those of you who still think Obama sold out by compromising with the Republicans (or worse, that he is a Republican), that the politics we are seeing in Washington is not the way our founding fathers intended for our country to function and marks the doom of our democracy. Well, you should read this excellent article written by Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station.

As Benjamin Franklin often said, democracy is hard, dirty, and sometimes very ugly.

Did you know that Patrick Henry stayed away from the constitutional convention because he was convinced that the other founders were conspiring to create a new monarchy? Or that Rhode Island wanted nothing to do with a new federal government, and so didn’t even bother to send any delegates to the convention? Most people know about the great tug-of-war over slavery, which ended with a great compromise that counted slaves as less than human.

The discussions over our constitution were fierce, involved lots of shouting, and occasionally fist fights broke out. In the end, almost one third of the delegates refused to sign the resulting constitution; they disliked it that much. Thirteen of the delegates even walked out rather than be there for the final ceremony because they considered it a failure. And afterwards, the founders had to patch up the constitution by adding 10 amendments to it (now known as the Bill of Rights) even before the original document was signed.

In the end, Franklin summed it up:

There are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution.

That’s right, it was compromise. Dirty stinking compromise. Love it or not, that’s how our government works. You think the Tea Party is crazy? Think about the fights over slavery, which ended up in bloody civil war. If we survived that, surely we can survive supply side economics.

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More Mystery Corporations

Earlier this week this blog reported on a mystery corporation that was created, donated a million dollars to help elect Mitt Romney, and then dissolved — all done to keep the donor’s identity secret. That story was somewhat defused when the actual donor decided to reveal himself.

But now we find that there are at least two other mystery companies that did the same thing. Two companies ostensibly located in Provo, Utah each donated a million dollars (coincidentally on the same day), yet neither corporation appears to do anything other than make political donations and their reported address is an accounting firm whose employees weren’t aware of either companies’ activities.

So how common is this practice? We now know that at least $3 million of the $12 million raised by Restore Our Future (the Super-PAC whose sole aim is to elect Romney) came from mystery corporations. I would not be surprised to find out that more than half the money that will be spent in the upcoming 2012 elections will come from secret donors. And there will be no way to know if foreigners are using this trick to influence US elections.

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Fox News Tells You Everything You Need to Know about Entitlements

More brilliance from Jon Stewart:

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Late Night Political Humor

“We finally got a debt deal. It’s a jobs killer. It’ll bring back the recession. It didn’t do anything to fix the entitlements. The only bright spot was that Gabrielle Giffords came back to Congress to vote. And she must have been thinking, ‘I got shot in the head for this?'” – Bill Maher

“In the movie ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes,’ not only do the apes take over, but they actually do a better job with the debt crisis than humans.” – Jay Leno

“John Boehner bragged that he got 98% of what he wanted from Obama in the deal. So contrary to popular belief, black does crack.” – Bill Maher

“There are consequences to voting for economic terrorists. There’s a rumor that Joe Biden called the Republicans terrorists this week. And they were furious about this. They were so upset about being called terrorists, they went out and took the FAA hostage.” – Bill Maher

“The only way they’re going to pull the debate back from the far right is for liberals to elect their own slate of 60 unstable, looney-toon, mad-as-a-hatter, crazy motherfuckers.” – Bill Maher

“So please liberals start trolling Whole Foods parking lots, nude beaches, erotic cake stores, the MSNBC commissary. Anywhere where you might find angry left-wing lunatics to create a party within a party, as the Tea Party is a party within the Republicans, and to show that we will not back down in a crazy-off against anybody. The party within a party will be called the Donner Party.” – Bill Maher

“That’s right, we will literally eat each other before we give an inch, and this is our leader, Face Ripper Monkey… And don’t tell me that there already is such an entity on the left, that it’s the ACLU, Greenpeace and MoveOn.org. Oh please, those are educated people lawyers and scientists. We need loudmouths and bad dressers who can match the tea people maniac for maniac, and say to them you think you can be pea brained, single minded, and purple with rage?” – Bill Maher

“Well, the Donner Party is a dog that can bark at a pine cone for nine days and not get tired. You say no new taxes on the rich. We say tax the rich at 100%. You call for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. We call for a federally funded partial birth abortions at the drive-thru at McDonalds. You want Reagan on the fifty dollar bill. We insist on Jeanine Garofalo, because apparently crazy is the new sensible and will not lose the war of bad ideas.” – Bill Maher

“The Dow went down 500 points. Standard & Poor’s downgraded us. Moody’s turned us from AAA to WTF.” – Bill Maher

“I have some bad news for the Chinese; that money we were going to pay you back with, turns out we had it in the stock market. Tough break.” – Jay Leno

“I don’t want to say the economy is worrisome, but I turned on CNN and MSNBC and the blond anchor lady was just sitting there eating a pint of ice cream.” – Bill Maher

“Some good news; after one of the worst weeks in 30 years the market slightly recovered today. Up 60 points! Sixty points! In fact, economists say if we can do that every day for the next 200 years we’ll be back to where we were last week. So that’s fantastic.” – Jay Leno

“Man, it’s been a tough time for the economy, but this week, President Obama declared that quote ‘things will get better.’ Yep, and then he opened his eyes, and blew out the candles on his birthday cake.” – Jimmy Fallon

“Yesterday Barack Obama had a birthday. Or as Republicans call it, Kwanzaa. I don’t know how much you know about Barack Obama, but he was briefly president of the United States, and yesterday he turned 50, although if Republicans insist, he is willing to be 52.” – Bill Maher

“Later this month President Obama will embark on a bus tour through the Midwest that will focus on jobs. Mainly him trying to keep his.” – Jay Leno

“Think how far Obama has come. Not long ago, a lot of people in this country thought he was a secret Kenyan, or a secret Muslim. Now we know he’s a secret Republican.” – Bill Maher

“A new study found that presidents age two times faster than normal people while they’re in office. Or as John McCain put it, ‘Whew — good thing I lost!'” – Jimmy Fallon

“Congress has the lowest approval rating ever. 82 percent of the American people say Congress sucks. But to be fair, these are the same idiots who voted these people in, so they can go suck it as far as I’m concerned.” – Bill Maher

“On this day in 1861, the federal income tax went into effect. Actually, what happened was, back in those days there were lots of armed robbers and thieves, so the government rounded them all up – thus forming I.R.S. as we know it today.” – Jay Leno

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Stock Market – Child’s Play?

This should be the new ad for E-Trade, after the last few days of the stock market:

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Perry Lunges; Colbert Parries

Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC’s first ad:

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Debtpocalypse, the Sequel?


© Tom Tomorrow

I guess the big question is, do you think Obama compromised too easily? Or did he do what he needed to do to save the country from defaulting? Although I have some sympathy for the former position, which is fairly popular with pundits (including Tom Tomorrow), I have to ask them, what would you have had Obama do differently, and what would have been the outcome? Is the answer they are proposing total stalemate and chaos?

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Republicans for Obama

The Onion has a hilarious and brilliant piece of satire “New GOP Strategy Involves Reelecting Obama, Making His Life Even More Miserable“. A few snippets:

According to GOP sources, the decision to cede the 2012 election to Obama came after rank-and-file Republicans agreed that grinding the president down to nothing and pushing him to the brink of insanity was far more in line with the Republican Party’s core principles than actually controlling the White House, making laws, or governing the country.

“If we are going to make the president a haggard shell of a human being by the time he leaves the White House, we need four more years of never compromising, four more years of miring every piece of legislation in unnecessary procedural muck, four more years of pretending we want to work with the president and then walking away from the table at the last second,” McConnell added. “Four more years! Four more years! Obama 2012!”

“Making Barack Obama’s life a waking nightmare is what we do best. It’s also just smart politics. After all, getting the man reelected and watching him whither away to nothing before our very eyes will fire up the base more than any of the current Republican presidential candidates will.”

Bullseye Rooster takes the satire in the opposite direction, with Obama announcing that he will not run for reelection. Instead:

A lot of my actions over the next eighteen months will be motivated by the desire to piss off Republicans. That is the easiest way for me to measure whether my policies are good for the people.

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Late Night Political Humor

“Happy birthday to President Obama, who turned 50 years old. Whether you like him or not, it’s a tremendous success story. This guy was born in a hut in Kenya and grew up to be president of the United States.” – David Letterman

“It’s President Obama’s birthday. I can’t believe it’s been 50 years since his mother forged his birth certificate.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“It is complete inappropriate for the president to turn a year older when the nation is in crisis.” – Stephen Colbert

“Happy birthday to President Obama. It’s hard to believe that just a year ago, Obama was in his 40s and his approval rating was in the 50s. Now it’s the other way around.” – Jay Leno

‎”I say we live our lives the way our founding fathers intended: four-feet tall, crippled with rickets until we die of old age at 28.” – Stephen Colbert

“Obama got some lovely presents. China gave him an extension on his rent.” – David Letterman

“There was a big 50th birthday party for President Obama in Chicago. It was kind of ironic at the party; the richest 1% of the guests took 42% of the cake. That was kind of interesting.” – Jay Leno

“Today Michelle Obama urged her husband’s supporters to sign an e-card for his 50th birthday. Which explains why Joe Biden has magic marker all over his computer screen.” – Jimmy Fallon

“Because it’s the big 5-0, the White House released his vital numbers: they say his cholesterol is 209, blood pressure’s 105 over 62, but the number that is really going to kill him? Unemployment at 9.4%. That’s the bad one.” – Jay Leno

“A new poll shows that President Obama is losing support among voters in Florida, which explains why this morning he sent SEAL Team 6 out to get Casey Anthony.” – Conan O’Brien

“Political analysts say that Oprah Winfrey can help deliver to Obama the white, middle-class female vote. They also say Dr. Phil could deliver the fake doctor vote.” – Conan O’Brien

“Obama told his supporters that we’ve got Al Qaeda on the run. Apparently, Al Qaeda was in the stock market too.” – Jay Leno

“The stock market had its biggest one-day drop since 2008. Remember how the experts said we had to raise the debt ceiling or the market would crash? Well, they were half right.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“They say because of our national debt every child born in this country owes $50,000. China had a message for those kids: ‘We’re hiring! Come on down! Make sneakers.'” – Jay Leno

“Fox News will host the next Republican primary debate on Aug. 11 in Iowa. Yeah, Fox News will ask some tough questions, like ‘How much better are you than Obama,’ ‘Why is Obama such a bad president,’ and ‘Man, can you believe we elected that guy?” – Jimmy Fallon

“I was watching Fox News today. I lost a bet.” – David Letterman

“Several Fox News hosts criticized ‘Spongebob Squarepants’ for pushing a global warming agenda. Then things got really ugly when they demanded to see ‘Dora the Explorer’s’ immigration papers.” – Conan O’Brien

“A year ago the Chilean miners were rescued. The year before the feel-good story was the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson. So what’s the feel-good story of 2011? Anthony Weiner.” – David Letterman

“It’s being rumored that former Congressman Anthony Weiner, ‘the peter Tweeter,’ is being considered as a contestant on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ The producers haven’t told him one way or the other whether he’s going to get the job. Anthony Weiner is not the kind of guy you want to leave dangling.” – Jay Leno

“The whole 4th season of ‘Jersey Shore’ takes place in Italy. I had no idea the Pope even had a hot tub.” – Conan O’Brien

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Follow the Money

Is anyone at all surprised to find out that the Chairman, President, and CEO of the company that owns and operates Standard & Poor’s is a frequent and big money contributor to the Republican Party and to their candidates, causes, and PACs? This includes money to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney. But no money to Obama or the Democrats.

Of course, from now on he’ll probably use a shell company so we can’t figure things like this out.

UPDATE: Today (Aug 11) is “Money is not speech” day. To see what you can do to help, see http://storyofstuff.org/dollarsordemocracy/.

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Bachmann Campaign Ad

Yes, this is actual audio from Michele Bachmann’s latest presidential campaign ad, with added animation by Scott Bateman.

Unfortunately, with the animation you don’t get to see the look in her eyes, but here’s the cover of the latest Newsweek magazine to help with that:

UPDATE: The Daily Beast (owned by Newsweek) releases outtakes from the photo shoot. This was not the only photo of Bachmann that makes her look crazy. Plus Daniel Kurtzman has other (mostly humorous) reactions from the media, like The Indecider’s twitter feed, which says “Newsweek called Michele Bachmann ‘The Queen of Rage,’ much to the dismay of her husband, who thinks of himself as the queen of the family.” and “Is that the Michele Bachmann Newsweek cover or a painting that follows Scooby Doo with it’s eyes?” and also “The most shocking thing about Michele Bachmann’s Newsweek cover is that Newsweek is still a magazine.” Oh, and did anyone notice the word “eek” behind her head?

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Late Night Political Humor

“A man jumped the White House fence, but after a brief chase, the Secret Service was able to talk President Obama into coming back and finishing his term.” – Conan O’Brien

“Happy birthday to President Obama, who is turning 50, although Republicans in Congress are demanding he cut his age to 40.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“President Obama celebrated his 50th birthday in Chicago. Obama cut the cake, then Republicans cut everything else.” – Jimmy Fallon

“President Obama celebrated his 50th birthday in his hometown of Chicago. Oprah jumped out of the cake. Then she jumped back in. She loves cake.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“While eating at a burger place, President Obama gave a free milkshake to an 11-year-old boy. Not to be nice, he just wanted to get rid of it because he saw Michelle coming.” – Jimmy Fallon

“President Obama signed the new debt bill into law. But it doesn’t really solve the problem. Economists say in 10 years, the deficit will be $27 trillion. But you know what? In 10 years, that’ll be President Bieber’s problem.” – Jay Leno

“Our prayers are answered! America’s own ‘Legion of Doofs.'” – Jon Stewart (on the new congressional Super Committee)

“According to a new poll, voters described the way Congress behaved during the debt debate as ‘disgusting, stupid, and ridiculous.’ They would have also accepted ‘gutless and cowardly.'” – David Letterman

“I see Congress more as a bunch of monkeys. High-fiving each other in celebration, having forgotten that mere moments ago they were throwing their own feces.” – (Daily Show correspondent) Jason Jones

“It’s interesting to see the Tea Party go from a small group of people that everyone thinks is crazy to a large group of people that everyone thinks is crazy.” – Jimmy Kimmel

“Just 10 days until the big Iowa Republican presidential straw poll. How many think Mitt Romney will win the straw poll? How many think Michele Bachmann will win? How many would rather vote for the straw?” – Jay Leno

‎”I don’t believe in birth control. If you want to control your fertility, do it the way God intended: with a cold, loveless marriage.” – Stephen Colbert

“The Louvre has more bare breasts than any other institution in the world, with the possible exception of the Clinton Library.” – Craig Ferguson

“A lot of people want to know what Osama bin Laden’s last words were. In a new article, they tell you: ‘Come in.'” – David Letterman

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