 |
| Bill de Blasio (Photo credit: Kevdiaphoto) |
Voters in Colorado tonight got a glimpse of the Barack Obama of 2008, with his soaring, impassioned and relentless rhetoric that electrified a crowd in a way only rarely seen during the 2012 campaign...... On Friday he will spend the entire day at events in Ohio. ..... “I’m not going to allow this nation to be plunged into another battle over health care,” Obama insisted tonight. “I’m not going to allow politicians in Washington to make health care choices for women that they can make for themselves…” The crowd roared. ..... Obama said he is running to be a “champion” for the people who “need a champion in Washington.” ...... “We’ve come too far to grow faint-hearted! Now’s the time to keep pushing forward!” Obama exhorted the crowd which was on its feet with cheers and applause.Jobs growth quickens, giving Obama some relief
Employers added 171,000 people to their payrolls last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. The government also said 84,000 more jobs were created in August and September than previously estimated. ...... Polls show Obama and Republican Mitt Romney locked in a dead heat in a race in which the nation's feeble jobs market has been front and center. ....... While the rise in the jobless rate was expected, the increase in payrolls beat even the most optimistic forecast in a Reuters poll. ........ The jobless rate, which peaked during the recession at 10 percent, remains about 3 percentage points above its pre-recession level. ...... In October, the jobless rate rose because 578,000 people entered the workforce. That helped push the participation rate, a measure of the portion of the population in the labor force, up two tenths of a point to 63.8 percent. A gauge of the proportion of working age Americans who have a job hit a three-year high at 58.8 percent. ...... Still, 23 million Americans were underemployed ...... All of the gain in payrolls was in the private sector, which added 184,000 jobs in October, the biggest increase since February. The government shed 13,000 positions. ...... Private service-providing jobs were up 163,000, with retail trade adding 36,400 jobs. Temporary help services, often a harbinger of future full-time hiring, added 13,600 jobs ...... The construction sector saw a 17,000 increase in jobs, the largest rise since January, while factories added 13,000 workers, snapping two straight months of decline. ....... the U.S. economy faces a real threat of a renewed recession next year. ....... Without action by lawmakers, taxes will rise and government spending will fall to the tune of about $600 billion. That "fiscal cliff" could easily cause the economy to contract. .......... Europe's debt crisis, which has hit factories around the world, is also weighing on the U.S. recovery.NYC Mayor Bloomberg endorses Obama
The New York City mayor attributed the ferocity of this week's Hurricane Sandy to changes in the climate. ......... While running as a "consensus builder" four years ago, the president has "devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists, which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform, job creation and deficit reduction," Bloomberg wrote. "And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it." ...... t immigration reform is essential to an open and dynamic democracyObama close to 271 electoral votes
"Without Ohio's 18 electoral votes, Romney would need last-minute victories in nearly all the remaining up-for-grabs states and manage to pick off key states now leaning Obama's way, such as Iowa or Wisconsin" ...... "Romney seems on track for 206 from 23 states ...... "Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia, with a combined 61 votes at stake, could go either way."A Vote for a President to Lead on Climate Change by Mike Bloomberg
In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods -- something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable. ...... Here in New York, our comprehensive sustainability plan -- PlaNYC -- has helped allow us to cut our carbon footprint by 16 percent in just five years, which is the equivalent of eliminating the carbon footprint of a city twice the size of Seattle. Through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group -- a partnership among many of the world’s largest cities -- local governments are taking action where national governments are not. ...... America was built on the promise of equal opportunity, not equal results. ...... he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the health-care model he signed into law in Massachusetts. ....... like so many other independents, I have found the past four years to be, in a word, disappointing. ..... When I step into the voting booth, I think about the world I want to leave my two daughters, and the values that are required to guide us there. ...... One believes a woman’s right to choose should be protected for future generations; one does not. That difference, given the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies, weighs heavily on my decision. ..... One recognizes marriage equality as consistent with America’s march of freedom; one does not. I want our president to be on the right side of history. ...... One sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet; one does not. I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics. ..... in the end, what matters most isn’t the shape of any particular proposal; it’s the work that must be done to bring members of Congress together to achieve bipartisan solutions. ..... Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan both found success while their parties were out of power in Congress -- and President Obama can, too. If he listens to people on both sides of the aisle, and builds the trust of moderates, he can fulfill the hope he inspired four years agoAs election draws near, President Barack Obama expands lead in Michigan
Barack Obama heads into the final weekend of the campaign with a 6-percentage-point lead in Michigan over Republican rival Mitt Romney ..... "I think the auto issue ... has solidified things for Obama" ....... Michigan hasn't gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, and has mostly been considered safe territory for Obama...... officials with GM and Chrysler also took issue with any suggestion that they have not been fully committed to creating jobs in the U.S. ..... Ohio, second to Michigan in jobs linked to auto manufacturing, has had more visits from Obama and Romney and their close surrogates than any state in the last 30 days. .... The Obama campaign was soon expected to begin airing its first ad in Michigan in months ...... Half of those polled said the rescue of GM and Chrysler was a deciding factor in their support -- and of those, nearly two-thirds backed Obama. Among the slightly less than half who said it wasn't a deciding factor, Romney had a 56%-33% edge. ..... Three-quarters of Romney's supporters considered themselves enthusiastic -- about the same as the number for Obama. ...... Among independent voters, a key bloc, Obama held a 42%-31% edge -- though nearly 30% said they would vote for a third-party candidate or remained undecided. ..... Obama was effectively tied with Romney among male voters, but he more than made up for that with a 51%-41% lead among women.
 |
| English: New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Harry Hopkins had nowhere near the rules and regulations we have now. (In 1933, Hopkins’s Civil Works Administration put 4 million to work in a month.) ...... President Obama came in with a really good energy policy, including an idea to provide both a tax credit for new green jobs and for startup companies, to allow the conversion of the tax credit into its cash equivalent for every employee hired. ....... the obvious candidate for that role today is changing the way we produce and use energy ...... Before the financial meltdown, the four countries that will meet their Kyoto greenhouse-gas emission targets were outperforming America with lower unemployment, more new business formation, and less income inequality. ...... We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America. ...... You get 7,000 jobs for every billion dollars in retrofitting. Let’s start with the schools and colleges and hospitals, and state, county, and local government buildings. That would keep the construction industry busy for a couple of years, creating a million jobs that would ripple through the whole economy, spurring even more growth. ....... One of the reasons Harry Reid won in Nevada is that, right before the election, two big Chinese companies announced they were moving factories there to make LED lightbulbs and turbines for the big wind farms down in Texas. ........ They said, “We’re coming here because Nevada has the best state incentives to go with the federal incentives.” They were very clinical. They said labor costs in China are still cheaper, but these turbines are big and heavy, and higher transportation costs to the U.S. market would offset the labor gains—and there was a tax credit from the federal government for green-energy manufacturing, and extra credits in Nevada. ........ Banks still have more than $2 trillion in cash uncommitted to loans. ....... I suggested that the federal government set aside—not spend—$15 billion of the TARP money and create a loan-guarantee program that would work exactly the way the Small Business Administration does. Basically, the bank lends money to a business after the federal government guarantees 75 percent of it. Let’s say that the SBA fund has about a 20-to-1 loan-to-capital ratio, and it’s never come anywhere near bankruptcy. If we capitalized this more conservatively at 10-to-1, we could guarantee $150 billion in loans and create more than a million jobs. ........ Look at the tar roofs covering millions of American buildings. They absorb huge amounts of heat when it’s hot. And they require more air conditioning to cool the rooms. Mayor Bloomberg started a program to hire and train young people to paint New York’s roofs white. ........ In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week. ...... Every analysis shows that TARP and the stimulus saved us from a second Great Depression. After the GM and Chrysler bailouts, we have something like 75,000 more jobs in the industry. Closure of the factories and the suppliers with them would have cost a million jobs. The stimulus should have been more vigorously defended in the last election. It did work, but it didn’t “fix the economy” because it was an $800 billion stimulus trying to fix a $3 trillion hole. ........ If we cut a lot of government spending while our economy still has so little private investment, we risk weakening the economy even more and increasing the deficit because tax revenues can fall more than spending is cut. ...... When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton said, “Because that’s where the money is.” We have to unlock that money and take steps to get U.S. corporations to invest some of the $2 trillion they have accumulated. ....... The real thing that has killed us in the last 10 years is that too much of our dealmaking creativity has been devoted to expanding the financial sector in ways that don’t create new businesses and more jobs and to persuading people to take on excessive debt loads to make up for the fact that their incomes are stagnant. ...... In the seven years and eight months that preceded the meltdown, our economy produced a meager 4 million new jobs, far too few to cope with millions coming into the workforce, and virtually all those jobs were created in housing, finance, and consumer spending. ........ the former labor commissioner in Georgia, Michael Thurmond. After job vacancies go unfilled for a certain period of time, the state offers businesses the money to train potential employees themselves. During the training period, the companies don’t become employers, so they don’t have to start paying Social Security taxes or employer benefits. They train people their way, then hire those who succeed as regular employees, reducing the time lag between when a job is advertised and when it is filled. With unemployment at 9 percent and the real rate of those without full-time work higher, there are 3 million posted job vacancies. Filling them faster could make a big difference. ........ Lower the rates to be competitive, but reduce the loopholes that cause unfair disparities. We all need to contribute something to help meet our shared challenges and responsibilities, including solving the debt problem. ...... we abandoned the path of balanced budgets 10 years ago, choosing instead large tax cuts especially for higher-income people like me, along with two wars and the senior citizens’ drug benefit. In the history of our republic, it’s the first time we ever cut taxes while going to war. ...... There must be opportunities to be tapped, given all the cash in banks and corporate treasuries. ........ There’s been a remarkable lack of attention to “microeconomics,” the untapped growth potential of American corporations, entrepreneurs, and workers.Now we know, the banks are sitting on two trillion dollars of cash, and the corporations are sitting on two trillion dollars of cash. There is no shortage of cash. There is no shortage of people with skills. There are huge unmet demands. So what's amiss?
Image via Wikipedia
Obama may sit out New York City mayor's race between Bloomberg and Thompson President Obama is refusing to get involved in the city mayor's race unless Bill Thompson can somehow close the gap with Mayor Bloomberg.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsJz6voJpy_lOoX2AA5M8Wyj-MJ-FtCDRfqWA29bvFMC7Ti2BOWCwqegDX1AvEtOhQPpPPG0i2ktXmu6Zg_DIu8qSDqmHqECtHAi0Xaj0VtMDTqfswMuU1hV8_NWesWVPSzhoHzPog9uG7f8sCtVNb=s0-d)
Wikipedia: Kirsten Gillibrand On May 15, 2008, Gillibrand gave birth to her second child, Henry Nelson Gillibrand, making her the sixth woman to have a child while serving as a member of Congress. Her House colleagues gave her a standing ovation for working until the day she gave birth.This country has a long way to go in terms of making the workplace gender friendly.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uAFIY8AcjQ8KdaJaE3anTSHbEdtmxMWLQ7XTLNKFpz-vpkZFDsbWVEDRExnPLSQDx77nkBOF6HOm4VVTKcBKtliwRImRp6SVdyXnFZM_eNtM_qTLseRvRxkkWE_BTJcjstYKb_syKW-O9LbnYoKXg=s0-d)
