GOP: The Goddam Obstructionist Pissants
The Obama campaign has a powerful new television ad out titled “Jobs” that calls out Republican obstructionists in Congress who refuse to act on the President’s jobs plan:
From the Obama campaign:
Obama for America today released a new television advertisement called “Jobs” that asks Americans to join the President in calling on Congress to pass his commonsense bipartisan plan to create jobs now as we continue to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and rebuild an economy that’s meant to last.Nearly nine months ago, President Obama gave a speech before Congress where he laid out the American Jobs Act, with ideas to cut taxes to help small businesses hire and grow, rebuild American infrastructure, create pathways back to work for Americans looking for jobs, and cut taxes for every American worker and their families – all paid for within the President’s long-term deficit reduction plan. The plan would create 1.9 million jobs, according to an independent economist.
After pressure from the American people, Republican leaders in Congress agreed to end their obstruction and cut payroll taxes, extended unemployment insurance, and created a new tax credit for businesses that hire unemployed veterans. But it left most of the ideas –and over 1 million jobs –on the table. And it has not yet acted on any of the five common-sense ideas in President Obama’s to-do list: cutting taxes for small businesses that hire or raise wages and for companies that bring jobs home, expanding refinancing for responsible homeowners, creating a veterans jobs corps, and investing in clean energy manufacturing.
The President is calling on Congress to put country ahead of politics and take steps to create a million jobs now. America’s businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months but our economy is still recovering from its greatest crisis since the Great Depression and there’s still more work to do.
“Jobs” is airing in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It will also be airing on national cable starting next week.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney just keeps the Lies Train rolling down the track. Jonathan Chait at the New York Times isn’t having it. In his piece this week titled “Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now”, he has this to say:
A couple weeks ago, Mitt Romney quoted Noam Scheiber’s book about the Obama administration’s economic rescue, The Escape Artists, in a highly misleading way. Yesterday he did it again, only this time Romney altered his description so that whatever shred of truth that once existed in his telling is gone, and nothing remains but a pack of lies. […]The lies. Let us tote them up. […]
It’s fair to say that the administration miscalculated lots of things about the economy. Like private-sector forecasters, it underestimated the severity of the 2008 crash. And it foolishly guessed that the size of the stimulus it submitted to Congress would grow rather than shrink. But did the miscalculations matter? That seems highly unlikely. The reason Congress trimmed down the stimulus was that Congress regarded it (and it was almost universally described) as enormous to begin with. It’s possible that if Obama had first submitted a larger stimulus, Congress would have trimmed it down from a higher starting point, but it’s also possible Congress would have killed the entire thing. There was no force to support more stimulus in 2009 or 2010, and after that, of course, the House was captured by fanatically anti-stimulus Republicans. What Noam calls “Obama’s original sin” was actually Ben Nelson’s original sin.
In any case, Noam’s counterfactual belief that Obama could have passed more stimulus is at least non-false by virtue of being hypothetical. Romney’s increasingly dishonest citation of it is simply more evidence of his disregard for truth.
One of the things that I have been asking of the Obama campaign is that they take the awesome Stephanie Cutter online videos where she calls the lies “BS” and distill them down into 30-second ads suitable for television. The time has come for Democrats to quit avoiding the words “lies” and “liar” when Republicans are actually lying. It’s time to call them out for their deceit and to do so in a public and straightforward way. I don’t know if they will ever do that but, in the meantime, those of us who are in the trenches are going to do so every chance we get.
[Blogged live from the Netroots Nation conference in Providence, Rhode Island.]
