I'm glad you read it and as for me I'd rather fight like hell to make sure that plan A works.

Otherwise I'm reminded of a time a few decades ago when the Mormon Church was predicting Nuclear War and had started a program they called "Preparedness." The idea was to get all their members to have some kind of shelter and have it stocked with at least five years worth of provisions.

A very gutsy reporter I knew at the time who reported in a heavily Mormon community did a series of stories on the program. Afterward she did a sort of person on the street thing where she asked just random people about Preparedness.

Most of them of course were all for it and some even admitted being part of the program. But then she asked this one guy and he said: "I don't think its really going to happen. But I guess if it does all I really need is my gun and the name of a good Mormon."

I've got a gun but I like Plan A a lot better.

 

Obama's speech was excellent, the topics were ripe for a positive spin and he delivered on that. It has been said that the engine needed to drive the economy back to prosperity is fueled by several factors, public investment in needed areas, private investment in other areas, collective efforts to weed out those factors dragging the economy down and the fourth, far more important fuel, attitude of the people. IMO, this speech was aimed precisely there, public attitude.

He spend a year on the campaign trail telling how disastrous things were in the economy, now he needed to tell how bright the future was and he did.

It was a political speech that was timed beautifully.

Now we need to see how it gets done, I'm afraid the $1.75 trillion budget outline he gave congress yesterday might blunt a little of the optimism from the day before. But that deserves an entirely different thread.

 

Obviously, he was right about the state of the U.S. economy in 2008, unlike John McCain and George Bush, who kept telling us that the fundamentals of the economy were strong.

But I think you're right that a strong dose of optimism is required, tempered with some straight talk about the situation in which we find ourselves.

 

Do you know what they found when they chipped all the make up of Tammy Fay's face?












Jimmy Hoffa!:rose:

 

She reminds me of Michelle...

 

That is a very strange connection to me

 

Ok, I'm joking maybe

 

Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks for no one but himself. I believe Michael Steele was chosen to speak for the Republicans. He was a good pick but we can all see why he was elected. He has some strong core values that the right must get back 2 if they are ever going to turn this tide.

 

rhetorically solid - very good timing - staying consistent with the expectations he laid out in his campaign - still not a single word about monetary policy :-|

From what I've read, for all of this to work leaving the same monetary policies in place, the economy will have to turn around and be growing at an annualized rate of 4%+ by 2012 - even in a scenario where the entire stimulus plan nails objectives 100%, I believe that is simply fantasyland . . . I'm hopeful that he's got the charisma to convince people everything is A-OK and that they will just act that way - but the tipping point of economic collapse using the old rules has already come and gone.

You can argue politics, philosophy, morals, etc., etc. - but you can't argue mathematics.

 

Larry, Curley & Mo

Don't matter if we like them or not they will be the downfall of this country. Its already started with the bailout. So my vote they SUCK!!!

 

It started long before that.

 

"The Fatherland"

Better yet, check out a recent movie called "The Fatherland" 1994. Its set in 1964 and Hitler won the war. It Stars Rutger Hauer, Miranda Richardson.
I rate it ****

Who's seen this flick?

 

Obama couldn't inspire a fire if he were wading in a pool of gasoline waving lit flares about wildly.

The man knows absolutely nothing useful, has NEVER accomplished a single thing in his life. He does NOT know how anything is done, how to do anything, nor how anyone else does anything useful. He is utterly ignorant about economics, business, normal life, and has displayed utter contempt for things like wisdom, judgement, and thought.

Nothing he wants to do is good, everything he wants to do is bad, poorly thought out, or just plain mindlessly stupid. I have no idea why anyone would ever have voted for him in the first place, much less actually think anything he says is worth wasting the time to hear. One would be far better benefitted by taking a nap, eating junk food, or crawling on broken glass than to pay attention to that useless and know-nothing narcissist.

 

No...it can't be...

Is that you Rush?

 

What the bloody hell? You people actually think Obama's going to accomplish something? What has he done in his lifetime? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!!!

The people who make jobs are not the politicians. They are the people who have money and invest it to create services or goods that benefit others. And Obama does NOT know this. He actually thinks that blowing trillions of dollars building useless bridges and roads will somehow magically inspire others to invest, risk, and expand both the creation of wealth and the consumption of things.

My God, he's a fricking idiot.

You don't "jolt" the economy into making jobs. All that federal spending does is remove money from those who MIGHT create jobs, and divert it into political pork. It costs the federal government about a third of a million dollars to creat a single "make work" job that produces no wealth. The private sector puts people to work producing stuff THAT MAKES WEALTH for less than half that.

All that Obama's done, and is promising to do, is going to collapse our currency, so that the middle east and Asia will no longer accept the dollar as currency, and we'll have to buy our oil in THEIR currency, because we'll have undermined our own by going trillions and trillions in debt and then be unable to pay it back.

The stimulus package was "only" 800 or so billion in spending and ALL of it was new debt, none of it paid for, and included in that spending was new programs that will create nearly 4 TRILLION DOLLARS OF NEW DEBT over the next 8 years.

We desperately need to put Americans to work producing stuff for AMERICANS right now. We need to be drilling for oil, farming, mining, inventing, building, producing, servicing, and every other form of productive activity. Instead, we've strangled ALL of it with idiotic legislators promising to kill off what may survive of our domestic auto industry, we backed off and put massive oil reserves out of reach. Did any of you know that Utah, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota combined have new found oil fields nearly equivalent that of the middle east? And that the morons have removed it from being developed?

So we instead, destroy our country with even more dependency?

Did you know that if Obama succeeds at his stated goal of federal takeover of health care, that it will raise the federal budget by 80%, and that no nation has successfully been able to tax it's economy that much. EVER? It would mean that federal spending would increase to a LARGER share of our economy than was spent fighting WWII????

No nation has been able to confiscate that much wealth from it's people. When it tries, whatever and whoever is taxed that much changes behavior, and the revenues fall short. FAR SHORT.

Nobody, ever, has been able to sustain more than about 27% of GDP, and Obama's planning on nearly 40% of EVERY DOLLAR YOU EARN being taken from you and spent for you, on indulgences almost none of us can afford, much less the "all of us" he's promising.

Yet, here you are, spouting "he makes me feel hopeful". No, the man and his party is planning to completely and utterly destroy our economy and business sector, which will TAKE THE WORLD DOWN WITH IT. That's not hope, that's abject idiocy.

If EVER anyone should EVER protest, we should mob DC and demand Obama and every Democrat that voted with him be impeached and jailed for criminal malfeasance. If anyone EVER tried to run a public company this way, that would be removed and likely prosecuted criminally.

And you people call this "hope"?

My GAWD WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON? Has this country fallen into complete and utter ignorance, so nobody has even the slightest understanding of economics, business, or entrepreneurship? So that the miserably idiotic tripe that falls from that guys mouth is considered anything but an insult to the intelligence of even a child? I can't listen to him. It's like hearing some child who knows nothing about a car proceed to lecture the mechanic about how to fix it. Every word that he speaks is a gross insult. To think that I"m stupid enough to actually fall for it?

Man, I'm only in my mid fourties, but I learned long ago that there ARE some things that you can't just fake. And judgement, sense, and wisdom cannot be. And this man has absolutely NONE of those. Not even a smidgeon. His only skill is that of manipulating the ignorant for his own wishes.

 

Well I am not much into politics but anybody can get a crowd going and to support them, its an actual profession its called motivational speaker, not President of the United States. But so far the guy is doing a better job then i pegged him to do, but time will tell if he is gonna be a good president.

 

Sure judgment, sense and wisdom can be faked. You just did it.

 

View attachment This is my opinion on his speech

 

Here's something that really does just make me shake my head and laugh. Its all the people who would bitch about problems before Obama got elected, but now that he is the president can only bitch about him actually taking steps to solve those problems.

I'm willing to bet almost everyone here would bitch about special interests and the influence they have on our government. Well now Obama has taken them head on and about half of you will probably bitch about that.

Last week Obama delivered his address to the joint session of Congress and the next day the vested special interests that stand to lose their favored status geared up public relations and lobbying efforts to fight it.

Then Obama submitted his budget to congress and those same special interests and more are clamoring to Washington to try and protect their greed and influence.

And knowing that in advance Obama is ready for them as he clearly demonstrates in this interview.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/28/obama-to-lobbyists-bring_n_170724.html

I don't think anyone here would have said things don't need to change a few months ago. So it seems senseless to me that they would claim the opposite now just because their guy or their party didn't win.