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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods fell unexpectedly in October, according to government data on Wednesday that reinforced views of a gradual economic recovery from recession. The Commerce Department said durable goods orders dropped 0.6 percent after rising by an upwardly revised 2.0 percent in September. New orders in September were previously reported to have increased 1.4 percent. Durable goods orders are a leading indicator of manufacturing activity, which in turn provides a good measure for overall business health.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's December jobs forum may be better at serving his political need to show the White House cares about sky-high U.S. unemployment, than discovering new ways to cheaply boost economic growth. There is a long history of presidents hosting "economic summits" to show their concern about the economy. But economists say that by appearing to rule out significant additional spending to lift the economy, Obama will limit what the forum can achieve, and he risks making it look like an exercise in public relations. "You need more demand for goods and services in order to...

Vice President Joe Biden did everything short of shaking a pair of pompoms yesterday as he cheered on an economic recovery while criticizing those he hears booing from the sidelines. "Ladies and gentlemen, things aren't good but they're getting a lot better," Biden told 500 people gathered at a fundraiser for the Committee of Seventy. "We're no longer debating whether we're going to slide into a great depression. We're debating what the shape of the recovery is. Is it robust enough from my perspective? No. Do we need to do more? Yes." "We may be wrong," Biden said. "But the...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15. This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama (see trends).

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy grew more slowly than initially thought in the third quarter, held back by strong imports and weak investment in nonresidential structures, according to data on Tuesday that hinted at a lackluster recovery. In its second reading of third-quarter gross domestic product, the Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 2.8 percent annual rate, rather than the 3.5 percent pace it estimated last month.

...The Government Accountability Office this week found "significant" errors on the recovery.gov Website, including claims that more than 58,000 jobs were "saved or created" by projects that had spent no government funds, and that no jobs were reported by some projects that had spent nearly $1 billion. That did not go down well with voters or with their representatives, who are beginning to show anger at the slow pace of the recovery. On Wednesday, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, D-Wis., himself a major architect of the stimulus bill, ripped the White House, saying, "The inaccuracies on...

Errors and poor estimates pepper the stimulus data that Oklahoma contractors recently submitted to the federal government. Big Five Community Services, a community action program in Durant, received $383,000 for its Head Start program. It used the money to fill three new positions and provide 39 Head Start staff members with professional training and a 1.84 percent pay increase for cost-of-living adjustments. Program representatives said the stimulus award created 42 jobs, data show. Carol Ammons, Big Five's executive director, said the pay increase would help prevent turnover and the training would help workers stay employed. "The sad thing about it...

Sitting here in Singapore as President Obama went through China and flew home from his 8-day trip to Asia, it is perhaps easier to see the true truth of his trip—it’s deep failure....

"I'm not scared of what (self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) would say at trial," Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee as he defended his decision to prosecute Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 planners in a federal criminal court. I'm not scared of what KSM has to say in court either. I'm scared of what a federal judge might say and do. Mohammed already has said, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z." By handing the 9/11 Five over to the federal court system, the Obama administration has opened the door for...

CARSON CITY — No sooner were the latest unemployment numbers released Friday morning than politicians offered their takes, illustrating that no fact will go un-spun this campaign season. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a statement declared the drop in statewide unemployment from 13.3 percent to 13 percent a “positive development and further evidence that Nevada is starting down the economic road to recovery.” Jeremy Aguero, principal of the financial firm Applied Analysis, said the “condition is effectively unchanged between September and October.” A muted response was appropriate, he said. “The unemployment drop isn’t because we’ve created jobs,” he said....

What was expected to be a boring congressional hearing erupted into high drama yesterday as an unnerved Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner sparred with frustrated lawmakers calling for his head over his handling of the economy. Clearly rattled by a fusillade of attacks from Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee, the usually reserved Geithner lashed out, laying blame for the current economic mess at the feet of the GOP and rejecting suggestions that he resign. Republicans "gave this president an economy falling off the cliff," Geithner fired back at Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), one of the Treasury secretary's harshest critics...

This will show how weak our president is ..COMPARE THE QUOTES

Original article from Thursday (19), links to the Japanese "Sankei Shimbun" website. FReepranslation is provided as a summary; the original Japanese version directly by the author governs and takes precedence over the unofficial English.Troubling developments.

The one highly visible success of the stimulus bill has been the cash-for-clunkers program. It induced a boom in vehicle sales this summer that clearly would not have happened otherwise. The rest of the stimulus bill has created a lot of jobs — 700,000 to 1.5 million, according to economists’ estimates. But it has done so in thousands of little ways: scattered construction projects, plugged-up school budgets and the like. Politically, these measures are not popular enough to create a groundswell for more of them. And the economy still needs help. So White House officials are now looking at creating...

With Congressional Democrats in near-panic amid forecasts that unemployment will remain high through next November’s midterm elections, a party leader said on Thursday that the House will pass a new “jobs bill” before Dec. 18. With more than half of last winter’s $787 billion package of tax cuts and stimulus spending still in the pipeline, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader from Maryland, said the new measure should not be called another stimulus bill. He indicated that the legislation might include money for public jobs, which many liberals have advocated; tax credits to employers for new hires, an...

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday expressed regret over US President Barack Obama’s remarks that “the US respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China.” “[The remarks] did not clarify the fact that Taiwan does not belong to China and disregarded the fact that the 23 million Taiwanese are under threat from the 1,400-odd missiles [deployed] by China. The result is regrettable,” Tsai said in a statement. Tsai’s remarks came after the US and China issued a joint statement in which Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) underscored the importance of the Taiwan issue in US-China...

The United States and China, the world's first and third largest economies, have pledged to rebalance each other's economy and move in tandem on forward-looking monetary polices for a strong and durable global economic recovery, according to a China-US joint statement released in Beijing on Tuesday. The statement, issued after talks between Chinese President Hu Jintao and his US counterpart Barack Obama, has climaxed the latter's first China trip since he took office in January. "China will continue to implement the policies to adjust economic structure, raise household incomes, expand domestic demand to increase contribution of consumption to GDP growth...

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.” While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues. “I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms....

US President Barack Obama came to office promising hope and change. But on climate change, he has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush. Now, should the climate summit in Copenhagen fail, the blame will lie squarely with Obama.

Barack Hoover Obama, The Audacity of Failure Politics / US Politics Nov 15, 2009 - 10:58 AM By: Mike_Whitney Barack Obama is on his way to becoming a one-term president. According to Politico: "President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning. The president’s plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and...

Who is failure? If you trust Google's top search result to point you to the right answer, it's President Obama. The culprit is not a politically charged search engine but rather a Google Bomb. Such tricks have plagued the White House for some time. Nefarious bloggers exploit the way Google's algorithm surfaces relevant information by linking a word or group of words -- in this case, "who is failure" -- to a central Web page -- Barack Obama's White House profile page. During President Bush's term, George W. Bush's profile frequently showed up on searches including "failure," "miserable failure" and...

I’d thought the googlebombs relating to “miserable failure” and “failure” had finally been defused earlier this year. Guess not. Ranking tops in Google right now, the official White House page for US President Barack Obama: I’ve not heard of any active campaign to linkbomb Obama to the top for these words, so I’m guessing this is fallout from the long-standing “miserable failure” googlebomb that was impacting his predecessor, President George W. Bush. Below, some key background from our archives: Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs from January 2007 provides detailed background on what googlebombing or linkbombing...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. consumer sentiment fell in early November to the weakest in three months amid grim expectations for job and income prospects, a survey showed on Friday. "Confidence tumbled in early November due to the grim financial realities faced by consumers as well as weaker economic prospects for the year ahead -- importantly, the decline in confidence was already in place before the announced increase in the unemployment rate to 10.2 percent on November 6," the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers statement said.

As the most gifted orator of his generation, President Obama finds speechmaking perhaps his most potent political tool. It propelled him to national prominence in 2004 and to the White House in 2008. And whenever he needs to calm economic fears or revive stalled health care legislation, he takes to the lectern. It may be too soon to reach such conclusions. The Democrats who lost last week, after all, had fatal flaws all their own. But the results do suggest that Mr. Obama’s addresses these days may not resonate quite the way they did. Speeches that once set pulses racing...

The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges. But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored, the officials said. Instead, they said, the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it...

The Treasury recently reported that the federal government recorded a total budget deficit of $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2009, about $960 billion more than the deficit incurred in 2008. CBO notes, in its latest Monthly Budget Review, that the federal deficit rose as a share of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) from 3.1 percent in 2008 to 9.9 percent in 2009—the highest deficit as a share of GDP since 1945.As shown in the figure below, federal spending and receipts diverged dramatically in 2009, reflecting the weakening economy and the federal response. The increase in the deficit of...

The White House will today issue a Statement of Administration Policy today endorsing the health care reform legislation from House Democrats. It will not be a signal that the president favors the House bill over the one from Senate Democrats, officials say. The president will go to Capitol Hill to speak to House Democrats, likely on Saturday, to rally support for the bill.

For all that's transpired since his election as president, public opinion has not moved on the big issue, the current economy. The question a year later is how long Obama's got until it goes up, or he goes down – possibly with his party in tow. Health care reform draws a divided public response as well, with support for a variety of initiatives coupled with significant concern that they could do more harm than good. Some of Obama's best ratings lately have been in handling international affairs, contrary to questions during the 2008 campaign about his readiness for the global...

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned. The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency ...

GUANGZHOU, China, Nov 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's half-brother made a rare appearance on Wednesday in southern China, his home for seven years, to launch a novel he says draws on his painful childhood under an abusive father. Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo -- who had the same, late, father as the U.S. President -- has kept a low public profile since reports surfaced last year that he was living and working in the southern Chinese capitalist and manufacturing haven of Shenzhen, around an hour's train ride from Hong Kong. After repeatedly shunning media attention, Ndesandjo's first major public...

The pace of layoffs eased in October, but progress in the labor markets remains painfully slow. Private-sector jobs in the U.S. fell 203,000 last month, according to a national employment report published Wednesday by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers. The ADP loss is right on par with the drop projected by economists in a Dow Jones Newswires survey. The estimated change of employment from August to September was revised by 27,000 from a decline of 254,000 to a decline of 227,000. The ADP survey tallies only private-sector jobs, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics' nonfarm...

WASHINGTON: European nations are unlikely to contribute more troops to Afghanistan, the head of the European Commission said on Tuesday, as President Barack Obama weighs boosting US forces there. Opinion polls in many European countries show clear majorities in favor of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. There are some 67,000 US troops and 42,000 from allied nations there. "Honestly in Europe there is not great enthusiasm for sending more troops to Afghanistan. That is the public opinion situation in Europe," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in Washington.

NEWARK — In the final hours of this intensely fought campaign, supporters of Gov. Jon S. Corzine are knocking on doors here with a message for people who voted for Barack Obama: Your president needs you. In an effort they are calling “Yes We Can 2.0,” Corzine campaign officials are devoting millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers to try to bring back to the polls those 442,000 New Jersey residents who had never voted before Mr. Obama’s election last November. They are flooding them with phone calls, mail and text messages, hoping to contact each of them at least...

Long lines at public flu clinics -- initially intended to primarily serve the uninsured -- are now commonplace nationwide as doses of the vaccine remain scarce. Many clinics report seeing large numbers of people who have insurance but have been unable to get H1N1 vaccines from private doctors, who say they have either already run out or have yet to get any. The line at the Glendale clinic, the first to be held in that city since Los Angeles County received doses late last month, was the longest yet, county Department of Public Health officials said. And the stakes were...

The House health-care reform plan unveiled last week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) would do more than regulate insurance companies – it would even regulate vending machines. The bill, which is posted online, would require that vending machine operators either create new machines that allow the customer to view nutrition facts or post nutritional information for each product near “each article of food or the selection button.” The regulation could wind up costing vendors millions of dollars to make the changes, according to industry estimates. Section 2572 of the bill (H.R. 3962) says, “In the case of an article...

Divisions in the majority party in the House and Senate could delay legislation into the new year. Abortion funding in particular shows a chasm between party liberals and moderates. Reporting from Washington - House Democratic leaders, while insisting that the finish line is in sight on their overhaul of the nation's healthcare system, have hit a last-minute snag over the abortion issue. Senate Democratic leaders, meanwhile, are continuing to have problems winning over moderates in their own party -- raising the possibility that the climactic votes on healthcare might be pushed into next year. The delays in both houses reflect...

By seizing gubernatorial seats in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans on Tuesday dispelled any notion of President Obama's electoral invincibility, giving the GOP a lift and offering warning signs to Democrats ahead of the 2010 midterm elections. With Obama slipping in polls and many voters unhappy with the Democratic-run Congress, "it's been increasingly clear over the last few months that Democrats were likely to have a tough midterm next year," said Charlie Cook, who handicaps races nationwide for his nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "What we've seen tonight doesn't dispute that assumption." Tuesday's gubernatorial results certainly won't help Democrats. Perceptions are...

Washington (CNN) -- Victories in New Jersey and Virginia Tuesday provided a major shot in the arm for the Republican Party heading into the 2010 elections, but the Democratic losses of these two governorships should not be interpreted as a significant blow to President Obama. While the economy and jobs were the chief concern for voters in both states, 26 percent of New Jersey residents said property taxes was also a major issue, while another 20 percent mentioned corruption, according to CNN exit polling. In a similar CNN survey taken in Virginia, health care was the most important issue for...

You can tell that the White House isn't expecting such a great election day -- Democrats are down in recent polls in the governor's races in both Virginia and New Jersey -- both by how much officials are insisting the outcomes have no relevance to the President and how much they're trying to change focus to the conservative in-fighting in the special election for an upstate New York congressional seat. The White House is setting the stage for a bad day tomorrow, pre-spinning any losses as irrelevant. On Friday White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, “Whatever the results are,...

More than 1.4 million Californians were working part-time in September, not out of choice but because their hours had been cut or it was the only job they could find and they needed the money, reports the state Employment Development Department. That's a nearly 72% increase from a year ago when 840,000 Californians settled for part-time work. The biggest jump has been in workers who have settled for part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work. Their numbers have soared 83.3% since September 2008.

Trying to appeal to voters in New Jersey’s urban centers, President Obama made his second campaign stop of the day for Democratic Governor Jon Corzine at Newark’s Prudential Center. The President began by describing the economic challenges facing American families, but he took pains to remind the audience that the worst recession since the Great Depression “didn’t start on Jon’s watch…didn’t start on my watch…[there’s] a little amnesia about how we got into this mess.” He then went into a drawn-out mopping metaphor that drew laughs: “I’m more than happy to go ahead and do the work required to get...

A year ago I argued that to repair America's ripped social fabric, Barack Obama had to move forward on healthcare, a higher minimum wage, imaginative ways to keep families in homes that were being foreclosed and investments in public works on a vast scale to stem the tide of unemployment that would inevitably follow a financial collapse. And that he had to juggle many of these reforms simultaneously. Such transformations couldn't occur overnight, but the impetus for them had to come in the first months of the new administration – when Obama's popularity was high, when the calamitous malfunctioning in...

In October, for the third straight month, 39% Strongly Disapproved of the president’s performance. The number who Strongly Approved fell two percentage points to 29%, the president’s lowest full-month total to date. That leads to a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10, also a new low for Obama. Also in October, the president’s total approval slipped a point to 48%. His total disapproval remained stable at 51%. During October, 55% of Democrats Strongly Approved of the president’s performance while 64% of Republicans Strongly Disapproved. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 21% offered Strong Approval while 44% Strongly Disapproved....

WASHINGTON – Fifty-seven people in northeast Indiana got a job – or were spared a pink slip – so far this year because of the government’s stimulus program, the government reported Friday. It was the smallest job gain or employment preservation reported in the state’s nine congressional districts. Vice President Biden said the program created or saved an additional 400,000 jobs – the harder-to-count jobs created as a result of extra economic activity – putting the total more than 1 million. The government does not distinguish between jobs that were created because of the program and the jobs people didn’t...

The White House said Friday that the $787-billion stimulus package had created or saved about 1 million jobs so far -- a number that is hard to verify because of the guesswork involved in determining whether businesses had retained workers due to the stimulus who otherwise would have been laid off. Peter Morici, an economist and professor at the University of Maryland, said that claims of jobs saved were "not verifiable. It's only verifiable in the loosest sense." Morici added: "The impact of the stimulus is less than the president is claiming and more than the Republicans will admit. It...

It's now Obama's war, his jobless rate, his debt, etc. Valerie Jarrett announced the other day that "we're going to speak truth to power." Who's Valerie Jarrett? She's "Senior Adviser" to the president of the United States – i.e., the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to "speak truth to power" to. But I suppose if you're as eager to do so as his Senior Adviser, there's always somebody out there: The...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says Congress’ federal stimulus program has saved or created 8,356 jobs in the University of California system, a claim that comes as a surprise at UC Irvine, Orange County’s largest employer. “We can’t figure out where the governor’s office got the data to support saying 34,000 jobs have been saved in the CSU and UC systems. No such data has been forwarded by our campus to the state,” said Cathy Lawhon, director of media relations at UCI. “Basically, the state cut to the UC system was $815 million. The stimulus money totaled about $700 million, which didn’t...

With Democrats poised to lose the governor's race in Virginia, and to possibly lose the governor's race in New Jersey and a special election for a House seat in New York, the White House has started insisting any pending losses will not have any significance. "Whatever the results are I don't think they portend a lot in dealing with the future," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters on Friday, pointing to the fact that Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races in 2001 despite a very popular President Bush, with Republicans picking up seats in Congress...

Forget our babble. Here's the data. Won't you please give to UNICEF the FDIC fund this Halloween? Failed Bank City State Deposits (in millions) Assets (in millions) Branches Bank USA, National Assoc. Phoenix AZ $212.8 $117.1 2 California National Bank Los Angeles CA $7,792.2 $6,160.4 68 San Diego National Bank San Diego CA $3,608.1 $2,892.4 29 Pacific National Bank San Francisco CA $2,335.3 $1,762.8 18 Park National Bank Chicago IL $4,706.1 $3,730.9 30 Community Bank of Lemont Lemont IL $81.8 $81.2 1 North Houston Bank Houston TX $326.2 $308.0 2 Madisonville State Bank Madisonville TX $256.7 $225.2 1 Citizens National...

"Today, I again seek to act for the good of our community," "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. I am and have always been a proud Republican. It is my hope that with my actions today, my party will emerge stronger and our district and our nation can take an important step towards restoring the enduring strength and economic prosperity that has defined us for...