Tag Archives: Howard Dean

January 26, 2013 · 11:12 AM

BIll Maher Obliterates the Republican Lie that Obama Hasn’t Created Any Jobs

PoliticusUSA

When Republican consultant David Avella tried to push the lie that Obama has not created any jobs, he was completely destroyed by Bill Maher and Howard Dean.

Here is the video:

David Avella of GOPAC tried to spread the Republican myth that Obama has not created any jobs, but Bill Maher called him out on it.

Maher said, “That’s not true. That’s just a lie. What are you talking about he hasn’t created any jobs?” Avella said that there are no net new jobs since he started his administration. Maher responded because he started from the hole, but Avella interrupted him and expressed the Republican point of view that it doesn’t matter how many jobs were lost before Obama took office. Maher said the Republican no net new jobs meme is categorically untrue.

Panelist Howard Dean jumped into the conversation and said, “This is like listening to Paul Ryan on the budget. It’s ridiculous. They were going like that. Finally, they leveled off. After what Bush did which was borrow us into oblivion. From the bottom of the recession, there’s about five or six million new jobs created under Barack Obama. Is it enough? No, we need to do more stuff. I think we ought to put the old campaign behind us and talk about the new one.” Maher built on Dean’s point, “Also this week, if Mitt Romney had been taking the oath this week, he would be taking credit now for the news we got this week. Housing starts are up. Stock market is way up. Unemployment claims are way down. He’s the worst socialist ever, this Obama.”

This idea that Obama hasn’t created any jobs is a favorite Republican lie. At the 2012 Democratic convention, former President Clinton took apart this falsehood, “The Recovery Act saved and created millions of jobs and cut taxes for 95% of the American people. In the last 29 months the economy has produced about 4.5 million private sector jobs. But last year, the Republicans blocked the President’s jobs plan costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another jobs score: President Obama plus 4.5 million, Congressional Republicans zero.”

As of last fall, even if you count all of the job losses that continue to pile up before the president could implement his own policies, Obama still had a net job creation record of +325,000. Republicans try to claim that Obama has not created any jobs by including 2009 and saddling Obama with Bush job losses from the first day that he took office. The stimulus wasn’t passed and signed into law until February 2009, but it just so happens that the job losses in January 2009 were the worst in 34 years. Before Obama has even had two full weeks in office, the economy lost 540,000 jobs. Those job losses belong to George W. Bush, but Republicans put them on Obama in order to make their dubious jobs math work.

A more accurate assessment of Obama’s jobs record should begin 2010, when his policies were implemented. By that standard Obama has created over 5 million jobs. The truth is that no matter how you slice the numbers, Republicans are still clinging to a flat out lie that Obama hasn’t created any jobs.

Voters didn’t buy the Republican funny math during the 2012 election. They aren’t going to buy it in 2014 or 2016 either. Bill Maher and Howard Dean were right on the money to call this out.

Republicans still haven’t figured out that they are only fooling themselves with their bogus statistics. You can fool some of the people all of the time, especially if those people watch Fox News and vote Republican.

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December 7, 2010 · 12:50 PM

Howard Dean: ‘The President Made A Huge Mistake’

Huffington Post – Sam Stein

Obama’s decision to craft a deal with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts may have been, as administration officials insist, the product of economic and political necessities. But it has created deep reservoirs of distrust with the president’s ability to handle high-stakes negotiations and has compelled even former staffers to level blunt criticisms about the White House’s politics.

“I think the president made a huge mistake in supporting any extension of tax cuts,” said Steve Hildebrand, the deputy national director of Obama’s presidential campaign and a strategist who has long grown sour on Washington. “We can’t afford it as a country, and we should recognize that. We need his leadership and bipartisan congressional leadership on it. And the whole idea of negotiating with Republicans who won’t negotiate in good faith, it is not the direction the president should be taking.”

Hildebrand — while hesitant to discuss politics over policy — was reacting to the deal reached Monday evening that would extend the Bush tax rates for two more years in exchange for a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and other tax cuts provisions the president has long favored. He wasn’t the only former Obama hand to speak critically about such an exchange, but the first since the administration announced the deal.

That none of the measures would be paid for was a major problem, Hildebrand and other Democrats stressed. Writing hundreds of billions in tax cuts was simply incompatible with supporting long-standing safety net programs, let alone protecting the country’s long-term fiscal security.

“We clearly have to deal with the deficit; it is probably the biggest problem facing the country,” said former DNC header Howard Dean. “But you can’t deal with the deficit from a political point of view if you say to Democrats, we are going to cut Social Security and Medicare and, by the way, give tax cuts to those who make a million dollars a year.”

Antipathy, however, was saved as much for the process of securing the final tax cut package as for the substance of the package itself. Suggesting that the deal could die in the House, Dean echoed a question other Democrats offered in the hours after Obama’s announcement: Was enough secured in return?

“I’m not so sure you can get the House to agree to this in conference committee,” he said. “And what about the president’s other priorities: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, START, DREAM Act? I mean, do we not get anything for the $700 billion?”

Continue reading here…

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December 1, 2010 · 3:21 AM

Glenn Beck: ‘Do you really believe that I could … just make things up and remain on the air?’ Well, duh.

Crooks & Liars

It’s hard to imagine a greater irony than Glenn Beck whining about his critics supposedly quoting him all out of context, since they only run small sound bites and leave out the context, blah blah blah. Because, you know, Beck has quite a track record when it comes to that practice himself. Indeed, Jon Stewart recently had some fun at Beck’s expense over his fondness for truncated video quotes.

Still, that was what Beck was doing yesterday. And it was all because Howard Dean said something mean about Fox News:

I would bring back the Fairness Doctrine so you couldn’t have a spectacle of a Fox Flooze, which just makes stuff up and is a propaganda outlet. You would actually have to have some sanctioned human beings talking to the other side. And MSNBC would have to do the same. They would have to have some conservatives on there too. I think that’s much better for the country. …Americans don’t know what’s going on and therefore the media can have their way with them intellectually.

To which Beck responded:

BECK: I would ask Mr. Dean to help me out. What is it that we make up?

I would ask you to just take a moment here. Do you really believe that I could or anybody here at Fox News could just make things up and remain on the air?

Ummmm …. YEAH!!!!! How about on a 24/7/365 basis?

And it isn’t just Beck, who of course has a nearly unbeatable track record when it comes to making crap up. Just this morning we got another fine example of Fox News making crap up:

Fox & Friends reported that a school in central Florida had banned the “traditional Christmas colors” red and green from classrooms. In a statement to Media Matters, the school’s district spokesperson, Regina Klares, has denied this, stating, “There is not a ban on the colors red and green at Heathrow Elementary.”

This is not the exception, it is the rule at Fox News. There are simply no standards for truthfulness there; otherwise Beck would be right — he wouldn’t have been able to go on air and lie day after day, week after week, unless it was his job to lie. Which tells you everything you need to know about Fox News.

See video here…

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September 17, 2010 · 7:20 AM

What Democrats want Barack Obama to say

I think that during the 2007/8 campaign season, Barack Obama and his supporters were rather idealistic and frankly, rather myopic to the muck and mire of Washington politics.

Obama talked a good game about cleaning up Washington and having an open and transparent government.  However, the reality of being the President of the United States hit him like a ton of bricks.  The reality of our national security issues prevented him from closing Gitmo as promised.  The reality of the wars in the Middle East caused Obama to increase troop level in Afghanistan, something he was opposed to during the campaign.

The stark reality of  partisan politics kept the “public option” out of the watered down Health Reform Bill passed in the beginning of the year.   Climate change and renewable energy plans (which would have created “green jobs”) were shelved for more important reasons, like a  10% unemployment for the last 18 months or so.) 

I don’t think the POTUS fully understood that there was no such thing as “post racial” America  after his election and that one-third of the country resented him to the point that they found multiple reasons to question his legitimacy to hold the office of the President of the United States of America.

Those opponents had been vocal even before Obama was elected and have grown in numbers and anger about the economy, jobs, too much government, as well as homophobic, xenophobic and cultural issues.

I believe the folks who said that Obama was too inexperienced in Washington politics, to become president, may have had a point after all…

Politico

After months of grappling with governance and a year’s worth of crises, President Barack Obama has leapt back into the political fray — to the relief of some Democrats and the indifference of others who want as little to do with him as possible.

But, try as some individual Democrats might to run away from Obama, the party’s collective fate is bound to his. As one Hill Democrat put it: “2010 and 2012 have now become the same year.”

In other words, his mojo is ultimately their mojo.

“He’s starting to get going, but I’d have him out there more, more, more — four days a week,” said former Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean, who has been heartened by recent red-meat Obama speeches in Milwaukee and Cleveland.

But is the real Barack really back?

Democrats aren’t so sure — and, as usual, they are never short of advice. So, here are five suggestions for Obama’s Recovery Fall, courtesy of 20 or so Democratic operatives, politicians and academics canvassed by POLITICO.

Stop saying the plan is working. Obama’s record of domestic achievement — passing health care reform, forcing through banking regulations, stopping economic freefall — and the public’s disdain for such “results” is the most distinctive feature of the Obama presidency. Nothing frustrates the West Wing more than the idea that the president cannot take credit for what they regard as a record of historic accomplishment and canny crisis management.’

But they have to let it go, Democrats say. Quit defending the economic policies, however sound, that have left the country with a 9.6 percent unemployment rate. Ditch the just-give-our-remedies-more-time-to-work stuff — emphasize the fight, not a statistical recovery many working-class voters aren’t experiencing.

“They believe that they have to say what they’re doing is working, but let me tell you, that’s annoying the hell out of people,” said James Carville, the former Bill Clinton adviser. “No one thinks it’s true. It irritates people who are out there struggling and just feeds this perception that they are out of touch.”

What they should do, Carville advises, is to say “Every day, we’re out there fighting for you — the middle class — and every day these Republicans are blocking us from helping you.”

Dean, who made the fight central to his 2004 Democratic campaign — sometimes to a fault — said that Obama’s been taking it to Republicans more often. One top Democratic operative even said the past two weeks have been “like someone flicked a switch on and Obama finally came back to life.”

Democrats who were heartened by Obama’s fiery speeches last week are hoping for more of the same in an upcoming series of Obama campaign rallies in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada.       Continue reading…

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September 9, 2010 · 7:39 AM

The Sooner Rahm Leaves, the Better for Obama

Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, form...

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Actually, I couldn’t agree with the columnist more.  From the onset, I was not happy with the POTUS’ choice for his Chief-of-Staff.  Mr. Emanuel seemed a bit far right of President Obama on most legislative issues.

The author of the following article, Ari Berman makes the case for Mr. Emanuel to make a graceful exit:

The Notion – Ari Berman

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s announcement that he will not seek a seventh term has prompted widespread speculation that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will run as Daley’s successor. “I’d be shocked if he doesn’t run,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post.

The sooner Rahm leaves Washington, the better for Barack Obama. His White House is desperately in need of a serious shakeup, especially with Democrats facing a tidal wave of losses in the midterms. Replacing Rahm is the best place to start.

I’ll never quite understand why a transformational candidate who ran under the banner of a new style of politics chose the ultimate old-school inside operator to control his administration. Rahm isn’t solely to blame for diluting Obama’s unique outsider brand, but he’s a major reason why. After all, in the Clinton White House and in Congress, Rahm was often at odds with the very grassroots activists who powered Obama’s presidential campaign. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ‘06, he famously clashed with party chair Howard Dean and recruited conservative Blue Dog candidates at the expense of legitimate progressive challengers. Rahm brought his corporate centrism to the White House, pushing for a smaller-than-needed stimulus bill, urging Obama not to pursue healthcare reform, watering down the bill when he did and calling progressive activists who wanted to pressure obstructionist Democrats “fucking retarded.” He later apologized to Sarah Palin but not to the Democratic activists he insulted.

Rahm’s alleged biggest asset—his ties to Capitol Hill and intricate knowledge of Beltway politics—paid few dividends for Obama. The president’s legislative agenda has hit a brick wall in the Senate and the dysfunction of the Democratic Congress, which Emanuel has done little to tame, helps explain why voters are set to punish the party in power this November. “If picking the leading practitioner of the dark arts of the capital was a Faustian bargain for Obama in the name of getting things done, why haven’t things got done?” asked Peter Baker of the New York Times in a profile titled “The Limits of Rahmism.” In other words, if you sell your soul, you better get something good for it in return. Instead, Obama is facing the prospect of a Republican Congress and an uphill re-election bid. No wonder Rahm is so eager to get out of town.  

Continue reading…

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