America wants President Obama to put jobs at the top of Washington's priority list (Jim Young/Reuters) ORC for CNN. 8/24-25. Adult Americans. MoE 3% (No trendlines) Which do you think should be more important for the Obama administration: reducing the deficit, even if unemployment might remain high or creating more jobs, even if it might mean less deficit reduction? ALL Reduce deficit: 30 Create jobs: 68 REPUBLICANS Reduce deficit: 44 Create jobs: 54 INDEPENDENTS Reduce deficit: 32 Create jobs: 66 DEMOCRATS Reduce deficit: 16 Create jobs: 83 You see those numbers? It's not just a majority of Americans. It's a majority of Republicans! Everybody wants Obama to put job creation first. Even the tea party is split right down the middle: TEA PARTY SUPPORTERS Reduce deficit: 50 Create jobs: 48 President Obama and his team need to read this poll and come to grips with its numbers. The last several months have been a disastrous distraction, a horrible mistake on both a political and human level. Republicans have taken control of the agenda and the results couldn't be worse. It's time for President Obama to point that out. I'm not saying he should wave a magic wand and convince Republicans that Keynesian economics works. He can't do that and it would be foolish to believe that he could; Republicans will never, ever agree to do anything constructive unless they have no other choice. But it would be equally foolish to believe that President Obama can keep on playing the same game he's been playing without destroying his presidency. He's been trying to seek common ground all year long, and now not only are his job approval ratings at a record low, but we just ended a string of ten straight months with job growth. It's time for President Obama to change direction and put all of his energy into making the case for policies that will actually increase demand, grow the economy, and create jobs. If by some miracle, he manages to get Republicans to agree, that's great. If not, at least we'll know what the 2012 election is about. But the one thing we cannot afford is to keep on doing the same stuff that we've been doing. It's just not working. 
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), responding to this morning's job numbers, insisted "excessive federal regulations" have "left small businesses unable to hire." He added, "Republicans are listening and focusing on removing barriers to job growth." Listening to whom exactly? They're certainly not listening to small business owners, who are saying the opposite of what Boehner arguing. Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation. [...] McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business. Their response was surprising. None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath. [emphasis added] A Miami-based small businessman working in the hospitality industry said, "Government regulations are not 'choking' our business.... In order to do business in today's environment, government regulations are necessary and we must deal with them. The health and safety of our guests depend on regulations. It is the government regulations that help keep things in order." So, what is standing in the way of hiring? According to the small-business owners surveyed, there were a variety of factors, including the high cost of insurance, but the common thread seemed to be a lack of customers. Republicans may not like the rules of supply and demand, but they have not yet been repealed. The private sector hires more workers when more folks are buying their goods and services. Fortunately, the government can play a role in boosting, as it did in 2009 when the recession technically ended. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans refuse to even consider boosting demand, and actually want to do the opposite: take money out of the economy, lay off more public-sector workers, and cut off stimulative benefits like unemployment insurance. "Republicans are listening"? If only that were true.
by Zack Beauchamp "Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote." - Matthew Vadum, American Thinker. 
Another sign that the GOP is willing to "flout all the usual conventions of fair play and, well, decency in order to get what they want":
Eric and Irene, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: “Have you left no sense of decency?” That’s the question Joseph Welch famously asked Joseph McCarthy, as the red-baiting demagogue tried to ruin yet another innocent citizen. And these days, it’s the question I find myself wanting to ask Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who has done more than anyone else to make policy blackmail — using innocent Americans as hostages — standard operating procedure for the G.O.P.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama. Now he’s doing it again ... by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he is threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage.
Mr. Cantor’s critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with good reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives. In particular, they did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting.
And it turns out that in 2004, when his home state of Virginia was struck by Tropical Storm Gaston, Mr. Cantor voted against a bill that would have required the same pay-as-you-go rule that he now advocates.
But, as I see it, hypocrisy is a secondary issue here. The primary issue should be the extraordinary ... willingness to flout all the usual conventions of fair play and, well, decency in order to get what they want.
Not long ago, a political party seeking to change U.S. policy would try to achieve that goal by building popular support for its ideas, then implementing those ideas through legislation. That, after all, is how our political system was designed to work.
But today’s G.O.P. has decided to bypass all that... Never mind getting enough votes to pass legislation; it gets what it wants by threatening to hurt America if its demands aren’t met. ...
Now, Mr. Cantor may end up backing down on this one, if only because several of the hard-hit states have Republican governors, who want and need aid soon, without strings attached. But that won’t put an end to the larger issue: What will happen to America now that people like Mr. Cantor are calling the shots for one of its two major political parties?
And, yes, I mean one of our parties. There are plenty of bad things to be said about the Democrats, who have their fair share of cynics and careerists. There may even be Democrats in Congress who would be as willing as Mr. Cantor to advance their goals through sabotage and blackmail (although I can’t think of any). But, if they exist, they aren’t in important leadership positions. Mr. Cantor is. And that should worry anyone who cares about our nation’s future.

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