John Boehner's economic speech yesterday offered a golden opportunity for Democrats to ridicule, rebut, and remind everyone about who is really responsible for this shaky economy.

In what could possibly be one of the best speech edits ever, Ed Schultz lays out exactly what Boehner said: Nothing. Well, Boehner did tell everyone what he thought the President should do, and he said something about putting the adults in charge, too. My retort to that would be to suggest that he get out of the bars and the golf courses long enough to think straight, but that's just me.

The CBO had its own retort to this:

All this 'stimulus' spending has gotten us nowhere.

CBO says, "OhReally?"

Steve Benen:

First, as a real-world matter, economic growth was pretty slow in the second quarter (April to June), but the CBO report makes clear that without the stimulus, it wouldn't have grown at all. In other words, a stimulus helped lead to tepid growth -- the absence of a stimulus would have been significant economic contraction.

Second, this CBO data, like reports from the Council of Economic Advisors and the Office of Management and Budget, should effectively end the debate about whether the Recovery Act did what it set out to do. The stimulus effort was too small -- criticism from conservative Republicans is completely backwards -- but as designed, it was intended to give the economy a significant boost, and save and create millions of jobs. It did exactly that. Anyone who argues otherwise is either not paying attention or is being willfully dishonest.

What? TanMan dishonest? Say it isn't so!

Everyone sing along now:

The stimulus worked.
It really, really worked.
It could have worked better
If it was bigger,
But it still really
Worked.

Meanwhile, Boehner should be watching his back right now, because Eric Cantor hasn't made any secret out of his heart's desire to replace Nancy Pelosi, even while murmuring soft whispers of support for his orange counterpart. While Boehner may be today's minority leader, the Club for Growth is not all that happy with him (or Cantor, for that matter).

Of course, Club for Growth funds candidates like hand-picked Rove choice Tim Griffin, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio, so give their disapproval of Boehner and Cantor the full weight it deserves. Then consider helping Justin Coussoule send Boehner to the golf course for good?

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Immelt said angry political rhetoric is not helpful and headlines are too focused on finding negative indicators. He said business at GE, one of the world's largest companies, is improving.

Immelt was one of Obama's big business cheerleaders in 2008, but presumably fell into the disaffected CEO category earlier this year, as evidenced by his remarks in early July (which he walked back right away):

Mr Immelt also had harsh words for Barack Obama, US president, lamenting what he called a “terrible” national mood and expressing concern that over-regulation in response to the global financial crisis would damp a “tepid” US economic recovery. Business did not like the US president, and the president did not like business, he said, making a point of praising Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, for her defence of German industry.

Despite the denials and claims of being quoted out of context, Immelt's remarks were remarkably similar to off-the-record complaints by top CEOs about how "let down" they felt by Obama. And now, just two months later, we have Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffett waxing optimist, practically singing "Happy Days Are Here Again". Why?

Immelt's remarks in a letter to shareholders lock the puzzle pieces in place when placed against his remarks at the Baucus conference. Here is a little more of what he said:

Immelt said the country is going to need to adjust, though. The economy since the 1970s has been driven by consumer credit and a misguided notion in building a "lazy" service economy, he said, and manufacturing, with an aim to reduce the trade deficit, is the key.

"It was just wrong. It was stupid. It was insane," Immelt said of the push for a service-based economy. "The future of the economy has to be as an exporter."

Of course, in order to be an exporter, we have to be willing to trade on a global market. This is the point Immelt made in his shareholder letter:

General Electric's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, offered a clear-eyed appraisal of the stakes in a letter to shareholders this year: "When citizens distrust big business, governments will follow suit," he said. "We can find ourselves in a sort of 'dark cycle,' where the people who can make our economy better are considered its worst enemies. The rallying cry becomes, 'Why can't you clowns just create some jobs?'…I fear that if we don't improve the mood in our country, populism will turn to protectionism, to the great detriment of us all.''

He's right. This isn't an apologetic to big business, but facts are facts. We have to make things to pull the economy out of the ditch. When we make things, the service pieces of the economy will revive too, because people will spend for services they've cut back or foregone.

When looked at as a whole, these remarks by CEOs are purely self-serving and not particularly political other than this: The campaign of fear and loathing waged on this country by teabaggers and stoked up by corporate media looking for the clicks and eyeballs not only affects our mood, it affects our economy in deep and scarring ways.

Strangely enough, the way out of this recession requires some optimism, which the Baucus group was certainly willing to provide. Unfortunately, their optimism may not be infectious if they continue to sit on big piles of cash while the unemployment rate stays high.

If I were to have a conversation with Jeff Immelt, I'd tell him that optimism is best served with a job offer or two. If he needs any evidence of that, he should consider what the Gallup polls have to say about big business these days:

The Gallup Poll last year found that 82% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military. For small business, it was 67%. For churches, 59%. For newspapers, 25%. For Congress, 17%. And for big business, 16%, lower than at any time since Gallup began posing the question in 1973.

When Americans' confidence level in big biz sinks below Congressional disapproval ratings, it's definitely in their best interests to start looking for some silver linings.

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The bobbleheads sure are doing their part in the Bush Magical Legacy Rehabilitation Tour. First we have the mysterious "Miss me yet?" billboard, then Tweety "Doesn't he look yummy in a flight suit?" Matthews asks if the nation will feel "nostalgia" for Bush with his memoir coming out, and every time you turn around there's a Bushie or a Cheney promoting the failed policies that saw Bush leave office with a record disapproval rating. Talk about a disconnect--or maybe it's just willful misinformation. There are no Americans wishing back for the days of the Bush presidency, for crissakes. We're still scarred from it, why would Americans want to open those wounds again?

Whichever way you want to categorize it, there is nothing more ludicrous and absent of facts than Kathleen Parker insisting that Bush has acted "nobly" since leaving office.

Is that right?

So is criticizing his successor not once, but twice--even after saying that the new Commander-in-Chief "deserved his silence", noble? Don't forget one was when he went to a foreign country--his speech in Calgary, Canada--and took thinly veiled swipes at Obama, saying that the two month old presidency harkened back to Hoover?

Is saying that Jimmy Carter "made his life miserable" noble?

Bush's post-presidency life has been fairly low-profile, especially in comparison to his ever-present and compulsively vocal vice president. He's made a few paid speeches, wrote his memoirs (which garnered him a comparatively small advance--perhaps a better indicator of how much Bush is expected to be missed by the American people) and worked on his fundraising for his library housed at SMU, whose primary purpose appears to be to rehab his legacy, much to the consternation of the staff there:

Their objections stem from the fear that the Bush center will act like a private think tank for neoconservative ideologues. “They get the cover of a university without having to play by its rules,” says Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history whose Bush Library Blog detailed the controversy at its height, between 2007 and 2008. The plans for the Bush institute sailed through S.M.U.’s administration, however, with the help of people like Ray Hunt, the oilman and longtime Bush supporter and friend, who is on the university’s board of trustees.

“We’re not going to have any of the usual controls over teaching and research hires and reviews,” complains Johnson. “My concerns have actually been heightened by the collapse of the Bush administration because it seems to me he and his circle are intent on rehabilitating him, and he is held in such disrepute by so many people across the country and the planet. I’m afraid this is going to be the main vehicle by which they try and rehabilitate their reputation.”

And by no measure, Kathleen Parker, can that be considered a noble effort.

If the president's speech seemed full of vague generalities and not the inspirational partisan battle cry you might have wanted, that's because the speech wasn't really aimed at us, but at independents. And in that light, it was a resounding success.

From Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling firm:

Democracy Corps conducted dial testing of the speech with 50 independent and weak partisan voters in Nevada, followed by focus group discussions with voters who shifted toward approval of Obama’s performance in office. This difficult audience for Obama was a heavily Republican-leaning group (46 percent Republican, 20 percent Democratic) that split their votes in 2008 (52 percent Obama, 46 percent McCain) but had moved away from him over the past year, with majorities expressing disapproval with his job performance and unfavorable views of him on a personal level.

Obama saw a substantial, but not overwhelming, spike in his overall numbers with his personal favorability rating and job approval both increasing by 16 points. But his speech drove much bigger shifts among these initially skeptical swing voters on several key issues.

Most important, Obama managed to decisively reverse the view that he was too close to Wall Street. In a Democracy Corps survey from just before the Massachusetts election, we found that a 49 to 41 percent plurality said Obama and Democrats were more concerned with bailouts for Wall Street than creating jobs for regular Americans. Entering the evening, swing voters in this group agreed with a 48 to 16 percent plurality saying Obama “puts Wall Street ahead of the middle class.” But after the speech, the number disagreeing with that statement jumped a remarkable 50 points, to 66 percent. Moreover, Obama saw a 38-point increase in support for his banking reform plan and a 40-point increase in the percent saying that he “stands up to special interests.” Obama’s strong words for the banks clearly resonated and generated some of the strongest scores on our dials of the night from Democrats, Republicans and independents.

[...] For these voters whose attitudes shifted from disapproval to approval of Obama’s performance as president, one consistent question remained: can he deliver? Unlike most attributes that shifted during the speech, “promises things that sound good but won’t be able get them done” remained very high (78 percent pre-speech to 74 percent post-speech). The “shifters” in these post-speech focus groups are waiting for results, and they pointed specifically to passing health care reform and job creation initiatives as critical reforms that must be delivered. While they see the Republicans as obstructing every Obama initiative, they nonetheless expect Democrats to pass major legislation with their large majorities.

Among their findings:

* While everyone had a strong negative response to the banking bailout, the Democrats hated it even more.

* The strongest positive response was a 99 from both Democrats and independent on the idea of removing tax breaks for businesses who outsource jobs.

* There was an 80% positive response on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.

From the department of You Can't Make This Sh*t Up:

Republican Rep. Tom Price, of Georgia, has introduced a House resolution that would, if passed, express the legislative body's "gratitude and appreciation" to Tea Party members who marched on Washington on Sept. 12 to "show their love of liberty and their grievance with recent government actions."

The proposed resolution is co-signed by more than 70 members of the House.

The proposed resolution would single for praise the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots, who refuse to sit idly by as the Federal Government advances skyrocketing deficits, taxpayer-funded bailouts, pork-barrel projects, burdensome taxes, unaccountable policy czars, command-and-control energy policy, and a government takeover of health care, came to Washington, D.C, to show their disapproval ..."

So let me get this straight...Price wants to pass a resolution that would praise anti-government, right wing extremists who want to overthrow their president? Really? If one single Democrat votes for this garbage, you can be sure we will call them out and ridicule them mercilessly.

Just to be clear, there weren't hundreds of thousands of people at that joke of a march on September 12th. And this was not an anti-tax march, this was a well funded hate-fest that was organized by Fox News and Glenn Beck.

You can read Price's entire resolution here. For added entertainment, click through to the original article and check out some of the comments. Didn't they learn anything from our Jon Perr's 10 Lessons for Teabaggers?

As the House prepares to take up a resolution of disapproval over Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during last week’s appearance by President Obama to a joint session of Congress, the wingnuts have found what they claim to be “hypocrisy” on the Democrats part.

This video is from 2007 when Rep. Pete Stark was saying how Bush lied:

Now let’s go back to the current event. The Democrats asked Joe Wilson to apologize on the House floor for his outburst and he flat out refused. It was that refusal that led to this motion.

What happened with Pete Stark? Well something the wingnuts aren’t willing to admit, yet I found out on HotAir – a rightwing blog:

Boehner introduced a censure resolution this morning knowing that the Democrats would have to kill it and symbolically line up on Stark’s side, which they did. That was enough for Pelosi, evidently: after he initially refused to apologize, after the fight-fight-fightin’ nutroots very predictably made it a point of pride that he not apologize, the good congressman has duly considered the Speaker’s rebuke from Friday and … apologized.

So the minority party introduced a resolution of censure, which was killed. But that didn’t put an end to it, Stark ended up doing the right thing and apologizing to the House and President. Wilson is refusing to apologize to the House.

Of course even Hot Air is now jumping on the “hypocrisy” bandwagon. (Note to Captain Ed – check out your own archives first!)

If there is any hypocrisy here, it is on the part of Republicans. They wanted to censure Pete Stark, but couldn’t do it since they were in the minority (remember – elections have consequences). But when it comes to Joe Wilson, they are circling the wagons. They haven’t pushed him to apologize on the House floor, but the Democrats did and he refused.

Also let’s remember what the motions are. The Republicans wanted to censure Pete Stark. That’s the second highest level of punishment in the House, with expulsion topping it. For Joe Wilson, the Democrats are wanting a resolution of “disapproval”, which is the most minor disciplinary action in the House – essentially a slap on the wrist.

So thanks wingnuts for proving that the House’s reaction to Wilson is proper. Hell they are actually letting him off easy. It’s Wilson who is refusing to play by the rules.

It was inevitable Obama's numbers would drop, and although Ohio is typically a bellwether state, it remains to be seen whether this is a trend. (Download complete poll here.)

The fact that the most high-profile administration efforts went to save banks instead of homeowners probably didn't help. People all over the country are barely hanging on, and it will take something like a successful health care plan - or another stimulus package - to win back their confidence:

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- A new poll found that President Barack Obama’s approval rating has dropped by 13 percentage points from two months ago in Ohio, traditionally a critical swing state in presidential elections.

The survey by Quinnipiac University released today showed 49 percent of Ohio voters approved of Obama’s job performance, down from 62 percent in a May 6 poll. The disapproval figure for Obama in the new poll was 44 percent, up from 31 percent in the May survey.

The pollsters termed Obama’s ratings “lackluster” in a release, and said the numbers were his lowest marks “in any national or statewide Quinnipiac University poll since he was inaugurated.”

The White House announced late today that Vice President Joe Biden will travel to Cincinnati on July 9, where he will tout progress being made by the $787 billion economic stimulus Measure passed in February.

“The economy in Ohio is as bad as anywhere in America,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. The poll numbers “indicate that for the first time voters have decided that President Barack Obama bears some responsibility for their problems.”

Maybe this is why Obama economic adviser Laura Tyson said this yesterday:

"We should be planning on a contingency basis for a second round of stimulus. ... The stimulus is performing close to expectations but not in timing." Reuters: "Addressing a seminar in Singapore, Tyson said she felt the first round of stimulus aimed to prop up the economy had been slightly smaller than she would have liked and that a possible second round should be directed at infrastructure investment."

Also, Biden will head to Ohio Thursday to talk up the stimulus plan.

The blowback against the Democrats' failure to stand up to President Bush on Iraq is starting to show in the polls. According to this Washington Post/ABC News poll (which Steve pointed out yesterday) Americans were not impressed.

Disapproval of Bush's performance in office remains high, but the poll highlighted growing disapproval of the new Democratic majority in Congress. Just 39 percent said they approve of the job Congress is doing, down from 44 percent in April, when the new Congress was about 100 days into its term. More significant, approval of congressional Democrats dropped 10 percentage points over that same period, from 54 percent to 44 percent. Read more...

George Lakoff: The framers got it right: Congress is the Decider.

Remember this?

President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week's midterm elections.

USA TODAY:

President Bush's job approval ratings have slumped in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup poll, with the president's rating hovering near the lowest of his tenure.

In the poll, taken Thursday through Sunday, 33% of Americans approve of Bush's job performance and 62% disapprove. That compares to 38% approval and 56% disapproval in a USA TODAY/Gallup poll taken Nov. 2-5, just before the Nov. 7 midterm elections.

Keep calling Americans terrorist supporters. That will definitely help your numbers.

31 %

President Bush's approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in the November elections. The survey of 1,013 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, shows Bush's standing down by 3 percentage points in a single week. His disapproval rating also reached a record: 65%. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points...read on"

Why are there so many whack-jobs?