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In Flint, Michigan, Vice President Joe Biden suggested that more rapes and murders could occur if President Barack Obama's jobs bill is not passed. "In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city," Biden said. "In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65 and rapes--just to pick two categories--climbed to 229. In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don't rectify it." The vice president also...

* On his jobs bill, which the Senate is set to vote on this evening, the president sent a warning message to Congress: “If they don’t pass the whole package, we’re going to break it up into constituent parts,” Obama said, insisting that action must be taken now.

The projection of 1.9 million new jobs, a 1 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate and a 2 percentage point increase in the gross domestic product under Obama's plan came from Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. "I assumed that it would be paid for," Zandi said. "I didn't know when I did that simulation how the president proposed to pay for it." Zandi said his job-creation figure only applies to 2012. "Beginning in 2013, and certainly into 2014, the plan is a drag on the economy because the stimulus starts fading away," he said. "So by 2015,...

You know all those rusting bridges that President Obama wants to spend billions more dollars repairing to allegedly stimulate the economy? He's headed out to one today which he's described as a "bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that's on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America." It is on a busy trucking route, spanning the Ohio River between Covington, Ky., and Cincinnati. It's the Brent Spence Bridge. It doesn't really need repairs. It's got decades of good life left in its steel spans. It's just overloaded. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and...

Pres. Barack Obama promised to have a plan to pay for his massive new stimulus bill by Monday. He broke that promise, as he has broken so many others, and remains in the “plan to have a plan” stage of his inscrutable meditations, having only made yet another unsubstantial speech, full of high sentiment and short on details. The president says he wants to ensure that the very wealthy do not pay lower effective tax rates than do the middle-class, and argues that families and businesses earning more than $250,000 in any given year should pay an additional $1,500,000,000,000.00 or...

He’s got a deficit-reduction package that can’t clear the House, thanks to massive new tax hikes that everyone knows are a deal-killer. He has a jobs package that can’t clear the Senate. What’s a President to do? Threaten a veto: President Obama warned he will veto any deficit plan brought to him by Congress that wasn’t ‘balanced’ between taxes and spending cuts.‘We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable,’ Obama said Monday morning, speaking from the Rose Garden.He rejected accusations that tax increases for the wealthy was ‘class warfare’.The president argued,...

Everybody remembers the urgency of President Obama's attitude toward the awful jobs situation. Back in early August, Obama said the jobs situation was so urgent that he was going to give another speech about it -- in a month or so, in September after his vacation on Martha's Vineyard. And then in September the president announced he would give his major jobs speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 7. But he neglected to check with congressional leaders first. And they suggested the 8th. So, since it was their House, the 8th it was. "Tonight," the president said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even as President Barack Obama prepares his opening bid on long-term deficit reduction, the White House wants to keep the focus on jobs and is determined to avoid getting sucked into another budget fight with lawmakers. Administration officials see the task of attending to deficits as necessary but not necessarily urgent, compared with the need to revive the economy and increase employment. The White House also sees this as the time to draw sharp contrasts with congressional Republicans, whose public approval ratings are lower than Obama's. As a result, when Obama announces at least $2 trillion in...

A top House Republican accused President Obama of appealing to Americans' "fear, envy and anxiety" by pushing a new tax rate on people making more than $1 million annually, saying the "class warfare path" will only hurt the economy. "Class warfare ... may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, told "Fox News Sunday." The president is planning on proposing the new and higher rate as part of a broader long-term deficit-reduction plan he's unveiling Monday. It will likely include a mix of entitlement reform and...

WASHINGTON, Sept 17 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Saturday that Americans need to be ready to "pay their fair share" to narrow the U.S. deficit, previewing his proposals to Congress that are expected to include more taxes on the rich. In his weekly radio and video address, the Democrat said his $447 billion jobs plan that features tax breaks for workers and small businesses, plus funds for public works projects and schools, "will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for." "On Monday, I'll lay out my plan for how we'll do that -- how we'll...

SEC. 376. FEDERAL AND STATE IMMUNITY. (a) Abrogation of State Immunity- A State shall not be immune under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution from a suit brought in a Federal court of competent jurisdiction for a violation of this Act. (b) Waiver of State Immunity- (1) IN GENERAL- (A) WAIVER- A State's receipt or use of Federal financial assistance for any program or activity of a State shall constitute a waiver of sovereign immunity, under the 11th Amendment to the Constitution or otherwise, to a suit brought by an employee or applicant for employment of that program or activity...

President Obama signed a bill to help Americans get patents for inventions Friday morning, but in his speech at a science and tech school in northern Virginia, he quickly pivoted to talking about his jobs bill that has rankled both Republicans and Democrats. After acknowledging a handful of members of Congress in his audience at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Obama said he didn’t want to pass up the chance to make another pitch for his plan. “I’ve got another bill that I want to get passed to help the economy right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act,”...

Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) appeared on KDKA in Pittsburgh and said that Obama's 'jobs plan' will not work as presented. Casey believes the president's plan needs to be broken apart and multiple votes will be needed to get anything done. “I’m afraid if we tried to pass one big bill, I think there’s a lot of skepticism about big pieces of legislation with all kinds of different component parts. We should break this up", said Casey.

Few people are enthused about the the president’s jobs plan, as Obama’s low approval and climbing disapproval rates attest, but Republicans have said they’re willing to work with him on some of his proposals. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, for example, has said his vision and the president’s vision might overlap in the territory of corporate tax reform. That doesn’t mean, however, that House leadership concedes the importance of comprehensively passing the president’s bill with all the urgency Obama has sought to make seem imperative. In fact, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said today on CNBC that Republicans are...

ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law. Now that public polling shows Americans are realizing that economic stimulus programs don’t work, the Obama administration is calling the latest round of futile stimulus a “jobs bill.” In a sense it really is a jobs bill: a jobs bill for Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizers. The draft legislation, which had not yet been introduced in Congress at press time, makes ACORN, Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA), and a phalanx of leftist groups that...

US President Barack Obama said his jobs plan could boost growth by 2.0 percent and shave one percent off the unemployment rate, for the first time citing estimates of the bill's impact. The White House has been wary of making predictions for the American Jobs Act in the knowledge that its forecasts for Obama's 2009 stimulus plan turned out to be too rosy, handing his opponents a potent political weapon. But Obama gave more details at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Washington, as he steps up his campaign to force Congress to pass the $447 billion dollar bill, which is...

President Obama anticipated Republican resistance to his jobs program, but he is now meeting increasing pushback from his own party. Many Congressional Democrats, smarting from the fallout over the 2009 stimulus bill, say there is little chance they will be able to support the bill as a single entity, citing an array of elements they cannot abide. “I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said in an interview Wednesday, joining a growing chorus of Democrats who prefer an à la carte version of the bill despite White...

President Obama repeatedly asked members of Congress to pass the American Jobs Act last week. But when no Democrat filed Obama’s bill after he presented it to Congress, a conservative congressman swiped the name for his own legislation. The American Jobs Act introduced in the House of Representatives looks quite different from the version President Obama outlined in his speech to Congress. Instead of hiking taxes on working Americans to pay for another stimulus, Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) legislation offers a tax cut. UPDATE: Gohmert’s bill now has a number. It’s HR 2911. Text of the legislation is below.

Obama promoted his jobs bill in North Carolina on Wednesday, the third stop on what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney called a "campaign" for jobs. Not for the first time, Obama called back to an audience member's shouted, "I love you" with "I love you back." On Wednesday he added, "But if you love me you've got to help me pass this bill." The Obama administration isn't holding back in its full court campaign to pass the American Jobs Act. The WhiteHouse.gov website now includes a banner that links to the bill. Obama's speech at the North Carolina State...

President Barack Obama’s new jobs plan is hitting some unexpected turbulence in the halls of Congress: lawmakers from his own party. As he demands Congress quickly approve his ambitious proposal aimed at reviving the sagging economy, many Democrats on Capitol Hill appear far from sold that the president has the right antidote to spur major job growth and turn around their party’s political fortunes. “Terrible,” Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) told POLITICO when asked about the president’s ideas for how to pay for the $450 billion price tag. “We shouldn’t increase taxes on ordinary income. … There are other ways to...