As Tea Party cranks up heat on Congress, poll shows public support waning
The Tea Party is coming to Washington to turn up the heat on the Congress — just as a new poll finds that public support for it has waned.
Members of the conservative Tea Party movement plan to hold a rally on Thursday outside the U.S. Capitol, urging Republicans to stand firm in their showdown with Democrats over proposed spending cuts.
While the Tea Party helped Republicans win power in last year’s elections, nearly half of all Americans now have an unfavorable view of it, according to CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released on Wednesday.
The Tea Party’s 47 percent unfavorablity rating is up four points since December, and represents an increase of 21 points since January 2010, the poll said.
That drops the Tea Party into the same disapproval range as the Democratic and Republican parties, whose unfavorable ratings are each 48 percent. The Tea Party’s favorable rating of 32 percent is down five points since December.
“This is the first time that a CNN poll has shown the Tea Party’s unfavorable ratings as high as those of the two major parties,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor, said voters have lost patience with Washington’s inability to reinvigorate the weak U.S. economy.
Who to blame for a U.S. government shutdown?
Never mind that it hasn’t happened yet. Lawmakers want to make sure everyone knows who is responsible if it does.
If the U.S. Congress deadlocks over spending for the rest of this fiscal year and forces a shutdown of government services when the money runs out on March 4, who will be to blame?
Democrats and Republicans may not agree on much, but they do agree on one thing – if the government shuts down it will be the other party’s fault.
The two sides have been going back and forth on the possibility of a government shut down for weeks. House Speaker John Boehner opened up a fresh round of the blame game on Thursday.
“We have some Democrats here on Capitol Hill threatening to shut down the government rather than to cut spending and to follow the will of the American people,” Boehner said at a news conference.
The government has been running on a series of short-term “continuing resolutions” that keep spending mostly at last year’s levels and Boehner said he would not agree to another short-term spending plan without spending cuts.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid quickly responded to Boehner’s comments and put the ball back in the Republican court.
The Republican’s budget is a joke. It isn’t about cutting spending, reducing the deficits or tackling the debt. It’s about gutting the social infrastructure of the country that helps lower and middle income Americans, about keeping them where they are at economically. Even if they are successful in pushing all these cuts through, they won’t amount to a single drop in terms of federal spending, yet will negatively affect millions of Americans. The Democrats will not be to blame, either.
The First Draft: From education to Bernanke to borders
Topic of the day for the White House: education.
President Barack Obama is unveiling his plans to reform the U.S. education system, which has one of the worst high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.
But while Obama’s education reform plans drew applause on the campaign trail, he might face tough competition for airtime as he is talking at 0945 EDT — roughly the same time as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke speaks about financial reform.
In his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, Bernanke said governments needed to take forceful and sometimes coordinated action to heal markets and said sustainable economic recovery was out of reach until the financial system is stabilized.
In a visit to Brussels on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden warned NATO allies of a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and appealed for help in tackling the problem. Biden said his visit to Europe was aimed at listening to U.S. allies, who sometimes bristled at calls by the former Bush administration to deploy more troops to Afghanistan.
On Capitol Hill, the Senate is due to vote on the stalled $410 billion spending bill that will keep government operations funded through the end of this fiscal year.
Lawmakers will also hold hearings related to border issues: one on the Secure Border Initiative and another on how the government is responding to violence on the border with Mexico.
they choose a failing school in guess were?chicago the suggestion was the reason that the school was below standard was lack of funding. as an experiment apparently to prove this point, they gave the equivalent of 9000 dollars funding to each child,which was then considered adequate.the result of the experiment?no improvement in grades,or the schools performance.throwing money at a problem is not the answer obama.
House Republicans see Obama as sincere, just misguided
WASHINGTON – Republicans in the House of Representatives say they appreciate Democratic President Barack Obama’s efforts to win their support for the economic stimulus bill, which is now approaching $900 billion. But they have made it clear that the partisan divide remains extremely hard to bridge.
“He’s sincere. I think he’s passionate,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said on Thursday at a retreat for House Republicans at the Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia.
“When he spoke to House Republicans, it was clear to me his sincerity and passion about the level of debt,” he said. “Clearly, we disagree on the economic stimulus effect of the government spending.”
Obama met with the House Republicans on Tuesday but failed to win a single vote from them on House passage of the stimulus plan the next day. With the fight over the legislation now focused on the Senate, Republicans have insisted on a greater emphasis on tax cuts and less on federal spending to reverse the deepening recession.
The House Republican plan includes cutting the lowest income tax rates, expanding tax breaks and incentives to small businesses and eliminating most of the spending House Democrats have put forward.
“It seems to me it’s more either ideological, or it’s just power politics in Congress and spending money on pent-up constituencies that haven’t had a ton of spending for a long time,” said Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican.
Ryan, who is the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, said that while a bipartisan deal on the stimulus package is probably elusive, Obama “did a good job of laying the groundwork for the future collaboration on other projects by coming to us.”
Danielle. Actually, many of the things you call a disaster were actually good policies/laws/appointments. Just naming off a list of what “you” think are disasters doesn’t really add to the discussion. Thank you for your list though.
BTW, when Bush was first in office, he did exactly what Obama is doing now. Bush did court the democrats and had several of them over to the White House just like Obama is having republicans over to the White House. In the end, it didn’t help Bush and in the end it won’t help Obama. The only real difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama speaks more smoothly (like a snake). He is trying to get the republicans to eat the apple.
In reality, Obama is not a “new kind of politician” like he said all through his campaign. So far he has shown he is just the same as every other politician who wins the White House. Bush and Obama are really cut from the same cloth, just on different sides of the isle.
Please tell me how we grew to be the greatest most prosperous and most giving nation on earth BEFORE welfare and BEFORE social security and BEFORE WIC programs, and BEFORE all the other government subsistence programs? If I make a man dependent on me, is that a good thing; is it either stated or implied in the US Constitution?