Today’s Encouraging Job Figures

At a doctor’s office right now, but finding I have good wifi so can blog a bit while waiting. It’s great to get word of the upward revision to jobs #s for July & August, the #s for Sept. and the resulting drop in UE rate to 7.8%. Under PBO USA has created more jobs in 4 years than GWB did in 8! The upward revisions show that even though there’s still a long way to go, the national trajectory is definitely moving in the right direction. Meantime, Jack Welch is disgracing himself by pushing out a tweet that ‘Chicago’ has cooked the numbers to give the president and DEMs a boost, as if the Bureau of Labor Statistics were in on a fix. This guy was CEO of a major corporation-what an idiot.

Post-debate Day Wrap

This post-debate day was a busy one for blogging, so here’s a round-up of the five posts I’ve put up today.

1) A message for any worried DEMs and other Obama supporters, Don’t Panic*, Continue Doing What We’ve Been Doing

2) Mitt’s own senior advisor had to disown his boss over The Truth about Pre-Existing Conditions

3) The merry-go-round of mendacity has the brakes applied in Mitt’s Misinformation Parade Comes to a Sudden Stop 

4) In a video of a speech in Denver President Obama reminded us all that “If You Want to be President, You Owe the American People the Truth!”

5) A CBS post-debate snap poll answers the question Who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”?

 

 

Don’t Panic*, Continue Doing What We’ve Been Doing

Two key data points and a message for worried DEMs and other Obama supporters:

1) In today’s Gallup poll President Obama’s job approval rating is 54%, the highest he’s ever had in that poll.

2) Also, in CBS’s snap poll overnight, while it did show improved numbers for Romney on the question of who you think can most help the country (from 30% to 63%), for the president the same figure went from 53% to 69%, still a 6-point edge.

The president’s got most of the country with him. I believe he can keep the people with him. Even though he didn’t do as well in the debate as we hoped he would–I think he was befuddled, unfortunately caught off guard by Romney’s ambidextrous shape-shifting and unabashed dissembling, as TPM’s Brian Beutler’s written–but I would add the president has no small reservoir of goodwill, the truth, and a skillful campaign, all on his side. My message is don’t panic, keep doing what we’ve been doing, especially all the truthtelling and fact-checking that the campaign has done all day–with the blogger community, including this one, pushing out that information–and things will be okay. And we get another crack at Romney/Ryan next week. It’s still a race, but the president remains in a strong position.

*Thanks to the late Douglas Adams for his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its valuable nostrum, “Don’t Panic.”

The Truth about Pre-Existing Conditions

The Obama campaign assembled this brief video as a fact-check on Romney’s false claim in the Denver debate that under him people with pre-existing conditions would still have coverage. Fact is, only people who’ve had uninterrupted coverage would be able to evade problems over this. Today, Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom told TPM reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro, “With respect to pre-existing conditions, what Governor Romney has said is for those with continuous coverage, he would continue to make sure that they receive their coverage” but that others, lacking “continuous coverage,” would, according to McMorris-Santoro’s summary of Fehrnstrom’s comments, ‘need their states to implement their own laws’ to make sure that residents with pre-existing conditions would not lose coverage. Think about it: ill people, amid a healthcare ecosystem where many seniors would also be paying more for what medicare used to provide free, would now be at the mercy of their often underfunded home states to guarantee their medical care. It would be a disaster and more people would endure untreated illnesses and lingering conditions.

 

Mitt’s Misinformation Parade Comes to a Sudden Stop

Among the bogus claims made by Mitt Romney in last night’s debate was the howler that “half” the green energy firms the Obama administration invested “have gone out of business,” adding that “a number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.” Thing is, as quickly shown by journalists these claims are not remotely true, and now even the Romney campaign has admitted he was wrong.

ThinkProgress has the story via reporter Igor Volsky in a post headlined, “Romney Admits Pushing Misinformation in Debate“. He writes,

“[Michael] Grunwald [author of The New New Deal] estimates that less than 1 percent of green firms have gone bad in terms of dollar value.”

Volsky story includes a report of this Grunwald tweet: 

@MikeGrunwald
ICYMI: Romney camp told me (after my tweet-rants) Mitt didn’t mean to say half the #stimulus-funded green firms failed. Probably <1% so far.

Romney also singled out Tesla Motors, which designs and manufactures electric vehicles, and received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Last night, he quipped, “I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right?” But the company is not a loser. “Founder Elon Musk says it will accelerate its payment of the principal in the spring—and the Department of Energy isn’t complaining it’s not getting its money back.” Romney, unfortunately, has turned to rooting against an American company in his effort to unseat Obama.

“If You Want to be President, You Owe the American People the Truth!”

I was among the bloggers and journalists who participated in a conference call this morning with David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior advisor. About Mitt Romney’s debate performance he said it was “Well-delivered, but fraudulent…We’ll hold [him] accountable for the things he said… and make him justify those claims.” The president held a spirited rally before leaving Denver today. Here’s a 7-minute video of his talk and then a transcript of it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now, the reason I was in Denver obviously is to see all of you, and it’s always pretty, but we also had our first debate last night. And when I got on to the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that. The real Mitt Romney said we don’t need any more teachers in our classrooms, but -don’t boo, vote – but the fellow on stage last night, he loves teachers, can’t get enough of them. The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries, but the guy on stage last night, he said that he doesn’t even know that there are such laws that encourage outsourcing. He’s never heard of them. Never heard of them. Never heard of tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas. He said that if it’s true, he must need a new accountant. Now, we know for sure it was not the real Mitt Romney because he seems to be doing just fine with his current accountant. So you see, the man on stage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for their real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year and that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year. So Governor Romney may dance around his positions, but if you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth. So here’s the truth – Governor Romney cannot pay for his $5 trillion tax plan without blowing up the deficit or sticking it to the middle class. That’s the math. We can’t afford to go down that road again. We can’t afford another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy. We can’t afford to gut out investments in education or clean energy or research and technology. We can’t afford to roll back regulations on Wall Street or on big oil companies or insurance companies. We cannot afford to double down on the same top-down economic policies that got us into this mess. That is not a plan to create jobs, that is not a plan to grow the economy, that is not change, that is a relapse. We don’t want to go back there. We’ve tried it, it didn’t work and we are not going back, we are going forward.

Now, I’ve got a different view about how we create jobs and prosperity. This country doesn’t succeed when we only see the rich getting richer. We succeed when the middle class gets bigger. We grow our economy not from the top down, but from the middle out. We don’t believe that anybody’s entitled to success in this country, but we do believe in something called opportunity. We believe in a country where hard work pays off and where responsibility is rewarded and everybody’s getting a fair shot and everybody’s doing their fair share and everybody plays by the same rules. That’s the country we believe in. That’s what I’m fighting for, that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States, and that’s why I want your vote.

AUDIENCE: Four more years!

PRESIDENT OBAMA: What I talked about last night was a new economic patriotism, a patriotism that’s rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong, thriving middle class. That means we export more jobs and we outsource – export more products and outsource fewer jobs. You know, over the last three years we came together to reinvent a dying auto industry that’s back on top of the world. We’ve created more than half a million new manufacturing jobs. And so now you’ve got a choice. We can keep giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, or we can start rewarding companies that are opening new plants and training new workers and creating jobs right here in the United States of America. That’s what we’re looking for. We can help big factories and small businesses double their exports and create a  million new manufacturing jobs over the next four years. You can make that happen. I want to control more of our own energy. You know, after 30 years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, your cars and trucks will be going twice as far on a gallon of gas. We’ve doubled the amount of renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. The United States of America today is less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last two decades. So now you’ve got a choice between a plant that reverses this progress or one that builds on it. You know, last night my opponent says he refuses to close the loophole that gives big oil companies $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies every year. Now, we’ve got a better plan where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal and the good jobs that come with them, where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and our trucks, where construction workers are retrofitting homes and factories so they waste less energy, and we can develop a hundred-year supply of natural gas that creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and, by the way, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020. That will be good for our economy, that will be good for our environment, that will be good for Colorado, that will be good for America, that’s what we’re fighting for, that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States.

Who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”?

While Romney evidently gained more from the first debate, this CBS poll shows President Obama still holds edge on the question of who “Cares About Your Needs and Problems”.

Sanctions on Iran are Working, Preventing War

Feeling bad for the Iranian people who are enduring hardship wrought by the West’s economic sanctions, but the majors demos in Tehran today–inveighing against the Ahmadinejad government and religious establishment–show the whole sanctions policy is working. President Obama has insisted they be given a chance to work, and he’s being proven correct. Mitt, Bibi, and other wingers all look silly, having insisted on imminent war. Even Bibi is now altering his stance to favor sanctions. The mullahs have a growing currency crisis on their hands, while the cost of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Instability is brewing. Sanctions that result in curtailment of their nuclear ambitions are a far better option than bombing. Painful though the sanctions are for Iranians, the people are taking their anger out on the regime, where it belongs for their autocratic rule.

Think my outlook is too rosy? Read what Tod Robberson, editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News published yesterday:

“Mitt Romney and his pal, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, face an increasingly uphill battle arguing that the tough sanctions regime put in place by the Obama administration isn’t working. The pressure on Iran’s government to cease its uranium-enrichment program and abide by its international treaty obligations has never been more severe than it is today.

The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, is in free fall. According to Reuters, the rial reached a record low value of 37,500 to the dollar on the free market. A week ago it traded at about 24,600. Between 2010 and 2011, the rial’s value remained relatively steady at between 10,300 and 10,800 to the dollar. According to one report, Iranians lost 660 trillion in rial-based assets because of the plummeting market. This marks an enormous financial crisis for the country.

Heck, things are so bad that, instead of sightseeing in New York last week, the Iranian delegation headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on a shopping trip to Costco to buy stuff like shampoo that they can’t get in their own country. One member of his delegation reportedly has defected.

What has happened since last year to make the currency plummet to less than half its 2011 value? Sanctions, that’s what. . . .

And now, there can be no argument that the sanctions are taking a steep toll on Iran’s government. This helps explain why Israel’s foreign ministry issued a report last week calling for the government to give sanctions more time — in spite of the constant drumbeat of war coming from Netanyahu and Romney.

Yes, Romney can ask for proof that Iran has curtailed its uranium enrichment program as a result, and that’s a fair question. The answer almost certainly is: There is no proof — yet. That’s what the sanctions are all about. At a certain point pretty soon, Iran’s isolation and economic strife are going to reach a breaking point, at which time Tehran will seriously enter negotiations on inspections and agree to international limits on its enrichment activities. Sure beats war.

Romney is going to have to come up with another argument heading into tomorrow’s debates. He can’t even rely on backing from Netanyahu, who appears to be backing away from the hard-line stance he had maintained barely three weeks ago. Read more on that at ForeignPolicy.com,” in a Joel Rubin story headlined Netanyahu Aligns with Obama on Iran.