From reading this board, who would have thought people would have liked a speech by a guy that was born to a muslim family in Indonesia, only to grow up to be a guy who pals around with terrorists. I'm miffed...

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Instant public surveys on Barack Obama's address before Congress showed, by and large, that the public was incredibly receptive to his speech, regardless of political party. But that did not hold true for every single study.

A CBS News poll of approximately 500 people saw approval of the president rise from 62 percent before the speech to 69 percent afterward.

Meanwhile, a poll on CNN showed that 68 percent of respondents -- who skewed a bit Democratic -- viewed the speech positively, 24 somewhat positively, and only eight percent not positively. Eighty-two percent supported the president's economic plan as outlined in the speech, while 17 percent opposed it.

Those results were buttressed by the findings of longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. In his own dial poll, which included 50 participants of mixed gender, education and politics, Greenberg found a large swath of bipartisan support for Obama's addres. That included a 14 percent jump, from 62 to 76 percent, in the favorability rating for the president
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That just can't be. It's a conspiracy!

50 people? Isn't that kind of a small sampling for drawing any worthwhile conclusions?

I'd pay more attention to the CNN poll of 500 people.

A sample size of 30 or more is pretty much all you need to start getting some statistically significant data, but that said yeah that is really low.

I think the Address was a good idea, especially with the initial budget outline he sent out yesterday. At least it is still a good 2-3 months until the actual/final budget gets sent...so hopefully some good work will come out of it.

Polls are a crazy animal. Congressional approval is at 32% overall...yet no one seems ready to throw their congressperson out on the street. It is always the other teams fault, never their own person.

OBAMA SPEECH GETS A BIG “F” FOR FOCUS GROUP AND FACT CHECK


OBAMA’S OVERUSE of the FOCUS GROUP CREATED POSSIBLY the BIGGEST FACT CHECK LAPSE by a PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH

Q. How can you tell when a politician speaks to the tune of focus groups?

A. The overall tone and meaning is at odds with their actions, facts and common sense.

Focus groups have one purpose: to find the exact set of words that please the most people. It’s the tool of choice for a masterful speech. However, the facts clearly disagree with Obama’s actions, statements—and at times—plain facts. Below are some of the most obvious contradictions in Obama’s speech, as looked through the lens of reality.

(Everyone is Fact Checking this speech. Check NPR too. We are still finding more, if you know of a FACT CHECK point, please leave a comment).

OBAMA: “We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy. Yet we import more oil today than ever before.”

THE FACTS: According to the Energy Information Administration, the official keeper of energy stats for the U.S. Department of Energy, oil imports to the U.S. fell through 2008 and demand is projected to continue to fall through 2009.

OBAMA: “Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.”

THE FACTS: That was the estimate for the size of the stimulus package President Obama asked for of more than $830 billion. But as the package was whittled down in Congress to $787 billion, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, and other outside analysts have lowered their projections to just more than 2 million jobs saved or created.

OBAMA: “You should also know that the money you’ve deposited in banks across the country is safe; your insurance is secure; and you can rely on the continued operation of our financial system.”

THE FACTS: If you have more than $250,000 in a bank, it is not necessarily covered by federal insurance. Further, insurance companies are struggling and state guarantee pools have only limited coverage.

OBAMA: “Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks.”

THE FACTS: Banks actually created pools of loans or bought loans for profit. Bad loans did not wander onto balance sheets by themselves.
OBAMA: ”Inherited this crisis.”

THE FACTS: History shows he was a member of the Democrat controlled senate for two years, and did nothing (i.e. missed more votes than 98 of the United States Senators).

Furthermore, Obama blocked the regulation of Fannie and Freddie via filibuster. At best he was a contributor to the crisis. At worst he could have prevented it.

OBAMA: “As for our auto industry, everyone recognizes that years of bad decision-making and a global recession have pushed our automakers to the brink. We should not, and will not, protect them from their own bad practices.”

THE FACTS: This is part of the story. The other part is trade barriers set up by foreign nations to limit the import of U.S. vehicles. South Korea, for instance, has until recently been a market largely closed to Detroit automakers, thanks to high tariffs, while Americans bought Hyundais and Kias by the thousands.

“And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

It’s doubtful that President Obama is referring here to Germany, home of Karl Friedrich Benz, inventor of the first true, four-wheel, gasoline-powered, internal-combustion-engine auto, or his contemporary, Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler, who did same. America — Henry Ford — invented mass production of the auto.

OBAMA: “A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway.”

THE FACTS: By pairing it with the Bush tax cuts and housing boom, Obama here casts financial deregulation as something that happened only this decade, under Bush. It is true that several key deregulatory moves occurred this decade, including a little-noticed 2004 SEC decision that allowed investment banks to greatly increase their debt levels, which helped drive their move into mortgage securities. But other key actions occurred during the 1990s, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which took down the wall between commercial and investment banks and was supported by many Democrats in Congress and by Robert Rubin, mentor to many Obama economic advisers. Rubin also fought attempts to regulate credit default swaps, which played a big role in the current crisis.

OBAMA: “Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”

THE FACTS: That’s going to be a tough one. President Obama wants to halve the national deficit over the next four years, largely by cutting spending in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and raising taxes. But Dave Walker, the former Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, warns that tax hikes and slashing war spending will barely make a dent in the deficit and debt without serious reform to government entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Without these reforms, Walker argues the debt will grow to 2.5 times the gross domestic product over the next 30 years, as the Baby Boomers enter the entitlement system.

OBAMA: “In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them.”

THE FACTS: We won’t know the details backing up this claim until the budget is released. But it is doubtful that Obama will be able to save very much in cutting education programs, given that the bulk of the federal education budget goes into supplementary programs such as Title I, for schools with high levels of low-income students, and IDEA, for students with special needs. In fact, his stimulus plan increased funding in both of those areas.

Secondly, Obama’s promise to attack subsidies for big agribusiness is undermined by the fact that he voted for the $290 billion farm bill in 2008, which, as critics like John McCain noted, continued big corporate subsidies.

A look at some of his assertions:

OBAMA: ”We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It’s a plan that won’t help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values.”

THE FACTS: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money does not go to home buyers who used bad judgment, it hasn’t announced it.

Defending the program Tuesday at a Senate hearing, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it’s important to save some of those people for the greater good. He likened it to calling the fire department to put out a blaze caused by someone smoking in bed.

“I think the smart way to deal with a situation like that is to put out the fire, save him from his own consequences of his own action but then, going forward, enact penalties and set tougher rules about smoking in bed.”

Similarly, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. suggested this month it’s not likely aid will be denied to all homeowners who overstated their income or assets to get a mortgage they couldn’t afford.

“I think it’s just simply impractical to try to do a forensic analysis of each and every one of these delinquent loans,” Sheila Bair told National Public Radio.

OBAMA: ”We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”

THE FACTS: Although 10-year projections are common in government, they don’t mean much. And at times, they are a way for a president to pass on the most painful steps to his successor, by putting off big tax increases or spending cuts until someone else is in the White House.

Obama only has a real say on spending during the four years of his term. He may not be president after that and he certainly won’t be 10 years from now.

OBAMA: ”Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”

THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.

OBAMA: ”In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”

THE FACTS: First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps. That’s all a president can do, because control over spending rests with Congress. Obama’s proposals here are a wish list and some items, including corporate tax increases and cuts in agricultural aid, will be a tough sale in Congress.

Second, waste, fraud and abuse are routinely targeted by presidents who later find that the savings realized seldom amount to significant sums. Programs that a president might consider wasteful have staunch defenders in Congress who have fought off similar efforts in the past.

OBAMA: ”In the last eight years, (health insurance) premiums have grown four times faster than wages. And in each of these years, 1 million more Americans have lost their health insurance”

THE FACTS: The number of uninsured grew by 7 million from 2000 to 2007, the latest year for which Census figures are available, meaning Obama’s claim would be true if had been talking about averages. But it’s not true that the number of uninsured rose each year by 1 million. In 2007, the ranks of the uninsured dropped by 1.3 million from the year before, to 45.7 million.

OBAMA: ”Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.”

THE FACTS: While the president’s stimulus package includes billions in aids for renewable energy and conservation, his goal is unlikely to be achieved through the recovery plan alone.

In 2007, the U.S. produced 8.4 percent of its electricity from renewable sources including hydroelectric dams, solar panels and windmills. Under the status quo, the Energy Department says, it will take more than two decades to boost that figure to 12.5 percent.

If Obama is to achieve his much more ambitious goal, Congress would need to mandate it. That is the thrust of an energy bill that is expected to be introduced in coming weeks.

OBAMA: ”Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.”

THE FACTS: This is a recurrent Obama formulation. But job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.

The president’s own economists, in a report prepared last month, stated, “It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error.”

Beyond that, it’s unlikely the nation will ever know how many jobs are saved as a result of the stimulus. While it’s clear when jobs are abolished, there’s no economic gauge that tracks job preservation. The estimates are based on economic assumptions of how many jobs would be lost without the stimulus.

OBAMA: ”And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

THE FACTS: According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was probably Germany’s Karl Benz, who created the first auto powered by an internal combustion gasoline, in 1885 or 1886. Nobody disputes that Henry Ford created the first assembly line that made cars affordable.



President Obama addresses a Joint Session of Congress, February 24, 2009. (The Washington Post)

OBAMA: ”And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

THE FACTS: According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was probably Germany’s Karl Benz, who created the first auto powered by an internal combustion gasoline, in 1885 or 1886. Nobody disputes that Henry Ford created the first assembly line that made cars affordable.

This part is incredibly damning....Especially when the facts portion contains the ever powerful "probably"

__________________
Dr. Spaceman: Now Jenna, medically speaking for your height your weight puts you what we call the "disgusting" range. Fortunately there are solutions. For example, crystal meth has been shown to be very effective. How important is tooth retention to you?

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Obama Declares War on Investors, Entrepreneurs, Businesses, And More - Money and Politics Blog - CNBC.com

^^^Larry Kudlow anchor


...enough said.