By Dana Milbank, Published: September 9
Updated 3:15 p.m., Sept. 12

President Obama gave one of the most impassioned speeches of his presidency when he addressed a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. Too bad so many in the audience thought it was a big, fat joke.

“You should pass this jobs plan right away!” Obama exhorted. Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) chuckled.

“Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary — an outrage he has asked us to fix,” Obama went on. Widespread laughter broke out on the GOP side of the aisle.

“This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama said. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) guffawed.

“This isn’t class warfare,” Obama said. More hysterics on the right.

“We’ve identified over 500 [regulatory] reforms, which will save billions of dollars,” the president claimed. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) giggled.

It was, in a way, more insulting than Joe Wilson’s “you lie” eruption during a previous presidential address to Congress. The lawmakers weren’t particularly hostile toward the president — they just regarded the increasingly unpopular Obama as irrelevant. And the inclination not to take the 43-percent president seriously wasn’t entirely limited to the Republicans.

The nation is in an unemployment crisis, and Obama was finally, belatedly, unveiling his proposals, but Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) thought this joint session of Congress would be a good time to ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to autograph a copy of the children’s book “House Mouse, Senate Mouse.”

Former representative David Wu (D-Ore.), forced to resign this summer over accusations of sexual impropriety, nevertheless showed up for the speech (in a business suit rather than his tiger suit) and took a seat among the Democrats.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Vice President Biden set the tone at the start. Waiting for Obama to make his way down the center aisle, they stood before the House and had a talk — not about jobs, but about golf.

“Seven birdies, five bogeys,” Boehner reported to Biden.

“You’re kidding me!” the vice president said.

“I missed a four-foot, straight-on birdie on the last hole,” Boehner said of another round.

“Whoa!” the vice president said.

“So, the next day,” Boehner went on, “I shoot an 86! Ha, ha, ha!”

“That’s incredible,” the vice president said.

Boehner went on about other memorable golf moments before an aide let the men know that their microphones were live.

Obama rose to the occasion with a bold jobs proposal that delighted liberals but also had elements conservatives grudgingly endorsed. Yet long before the speech, both sides had concluded that it didn’t much matter: Obama has become too weak to enact anything big enough to do much good.

“I thought it was a great speech,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) But the odds of Obama getting his plan through Congress “are probably as good as the Nationals winning the league this year.”

Presidential addresses to Congress are often dramatic moments. This one felt like a sideshow. Usually, the press gallery is standing-room-only; this time, only 26 of 90 seats were claimed by the deadline. Usually, some members arrive in the chamber hours early to score a center-aisle seat; 90 minutes before Thursday’s speech, only one Democrat was so situated.

Republican leaders, having forced Obama to postpone the speech because of the GOP debate, decided they wouldn’t dignify the event by offering a formal, televised “response.” And the White House, well aware of Obama’s declining popularity, moved up the speech time to 7 p.m. so it didn’t conflict with the Packers-Saints NFL opener at 8:30.

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) had planned to skip the speech to host a football party, but the Senate majority leader thwarted his plan. “Typical Harry Reid,” Vitter tweeted. “He’s now schdld votes that should’ve been this morn 4 right b4 & right AFTER prez’s speech. Pens me in 2 have 2 stay.”

Almost all Republicans ignored the calls of some within their ranks to boycott the speech. In fact, the empty seats were on the Democratic side. Democrats lumbered to their feet to give the president several standing ovations, but they struggled at times to demonstrate enthusiasm. When Obama proposed payroll tax cuts for small businesses, three Democrats stood to applaud. Summer jobs for disadvantaged youth brought six Democrats to their feet, and a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed produced 11 standees.

Obama spoke quickly, urgently, even angrily. Rep. Jesse Jackson (D-Ill.) stared at the ceiling. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) scanned the gallery. Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) was seen reading a newspaper. And Republicans, when they weren’t giggling, were mostly silent.

Even a mention of Abraham Lincoln, “a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad,” brought no applause from the GOP side. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) yawned. One Republican backbencher, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, chose this moment to hold up a sign demanding “Drilling = Jobs.”

So now even Lincoln doesn’t merit Republican applause when Obama invokes his name? If it weren’t so disturbing, it would be kind of funny.

The store, Cheryl Fudge, is a fave of Oprah and has praised first lady Michelle Obama's fashion flair. [Read Obama Gets Back to R&R.]

In fact according to their site, Cheryl Fudge is favored by many celebrities. Her site says, "In 2002, Cheryl Fudge left New York when she found a niche on Nantucket by transforming vintage Gucci and Chanel scarves into quirky-sexy halters favored by celebrities like Julia Roberts and Fergie."

Solar start-up Solyndra LLC, succumbing to pressure from lower-cost Chinese rivals, said it has suspended operations and plans to file for bankruptcy, 15 months after President Barack Obama visited a company factory that was to be expanded with the help of a federal loan guarantee.

The Chapter 11 filing, expected next week, will make Solyndra the third U.S. solar company to seek bankruptcy protection in the last month. Former Wall Street high flyer Evergreen Solar Inc filed for Chapter 11 two weeks ago, followed four days later by SpectraWatt Inc, a private company that was backed by Intel Corp.

Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, who will replace Austan Goolsbee as the White House’s chief economic advisor, “is likely to provide a voice inside the administration for more-aggressive government action to bring down unemployment and, particularly, to address long-term joblessness,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

But will Krueger’s recommendations jive with the president’s apparent economic and political agenda? Krueger co-authored a paper for the Handbook of Public Economics in 2002 that seems to undercut the economic argument for extending unemployment benefits. The paper found that those benefits tend to increase the length of unemployment by discouraging the search for a new job, and may actually encourage layoffs. Conversely, the paper also found that unemployed persons who are ineligible for benefits search harder for a job and are therefore unemployed for less time.

At some point anti-USA persons like Immelt should lose their US citizenship status and they should be forced to move to China if they pay no US taxes.

And Obama should be removed from office for what he has let GE get away with – these amount to acts of hostility to the US economy. And that is exactly how Obama and GE operate: they do whatever they want and whatever they can get away with.

In the last few years, economists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about bank runs. A bank run happens when depositors think a bank is weak and scramble to get their money out before it collapses. “Tight coupling” of financial institutions, like when banks are overly dependent on each other, can create a cascading series of problems for the system itself. We saw this with Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt. Its AAA-rated debt instruments lost value unexpectedly; that caused money market funds that held those presumably safe bonds to suddenly lose value. A shadow bank run was the result, as investors rushed to withdraw from the money market funds.

Worryingly, there’s been very little consideration of how systemic collapses can happen in another, perhaps more dangerous realm—the industrial supply system that keeps us in everything from medicine to food to cars to, yes, videotape. In 2004, for instance, England closed one single factory, which caused the United States to lose half of its flu vaccine supply.

The economy is still suffering from the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and widespread anger persists that financial institutions that caused it received bailouts of billions of taxpayer dollars and haven’t been held accountable for any wrongdoing. Yet the House Appropriations Committee has responded by starving the agency responsible for bringing financial wrongdoers to justice — while putting over $200 million that could otherwise have been spent on investigations and enforcement actions back into the pockets of Wall Street.

A few weeks ago, the Republican-controlled appropriations committee cut the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fiscal 2012 budget request by $222.5 million, to $1.19 billion (the same as this year’s), even though the S.E.C.’s responsibilities were vastly expanded under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Charged with protecting investors and policing markets, the S.E.C. is the nation’s front-line defense against financial fraud. The committee’s accompanying report referred to the agency’s “troubled past” and “lack of ability to manage funds,” and said the committee “remains concerned with the S.E.C.’s track record in dealing with Ponzi schemes.” The report stressed, “With the federal debt exceeding $14 trillion, the committee is committed to reducing the cost and size of government.”

But cutting the S.E.C.’s budget will have no effect on the budget deficit, won’t save taxpayers a dime and could cost the Treasury millions in lost fees and penalties. That’s because the S.E.C. isn’t financed by tax revenue, but rather by fees levied on those it regulates, which include all the big securities firms.

The Fair Labor Standards Act is the law that says you have to be paid minimum wage, and overtime if you're eligible for it.

Guess what law House Republicans held a hearing complaining about on Thursday?

The chairman of the Workforce Protections Subcommittee, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), said that the Fair Labor Standards Act’s protections “stand in the way of progress.”

Warren E. Buffett does not put a title on his annual letter to shareholders. But if he did, this year's dispatch might be headlined "God Bless the U.S.A."

In the face of persistent worries about the American economy, the country's most famous — and closely followed — investor struck a patriotic tone in his annual report to shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, writing that "money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America."

Much speculation and debate has centered on who might run for the 2012 republican nomination, but yesterday that speculation was put to some rest. Announcements were made on 1-12-11 that Hermain Cain has officially formed his exploratory committee for the 2012 bid after many months of encouragement from around the country.

After having spent over a year now listening to his radio show I'm thoroughly convinced that he is the man who can lead this country back to greatness. For those who don't yet know of him he has a nightly radio show on WSB 750 AM out of Atlanta which is picked up across many states but is available nationwide on the internet at www.wsbradio.com from 7 to 9 pm eastern time. Tonight he will be doing questions and answers with callers to his show about his bid to now enter the presidential running.

I strongly urge all my friends on the vine and all others who are concerned about our countries direction to visit the radios website tonight and listen to his show. Then vist his website at www.hermancain.com to see his ideas, positions, and opinions on the troubles we currently face.

After just reading this little gem of an article http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2010/12/24/5709760-epa-moving-unilaterally-to-limit-greenhouse-gases I feel compelled to need to point out a few issues being overlooked by many.

First off there's a lot of fallacy in the reasoning of what caused the initial recession. Many today want to plan it on the economic policies of the Bush administration, but those who do forget that unemployment didn't even become an issue until late fall 2008 as the election approached. For 7 of those 8 years the country prospered as the stock market hit record highs, housing boomed and the overall economy thrived. While some of those policies lead to eventual long term problems they were not the main root cause of the recession.

The main cause of the recession was the sudden run up in fuel prices to the $4 a gallon mark that was brought on by speculators driving prices up. The huge rise in costs forced everyone to take money which would have been spent on clothes or a new TV or other consumer goods and put it instead into their gas tanks. Businesses absorbed similar hits as they were forced to put money which might have gone into new equipment, new employees, or other expansions into increased transportation costs. Since 70% of the US economy is consumer spending driven it was unavoidable that the economy would suffer as consumers had to use disposable ( and in many cases non disposable ) income for fuel costs instead of other consumer items. Then the big "credit crisis" compounded the issue as businesses and consumers saw credit lines slashed and lost the ability to finance purchases further reducing the amount of spending on non essential items across the board.

The rest we all know well. As people had less to spend the viscious cycle of layoffs at manufacturers and retailers due to loss of business created even more people with less spending money and then more layoffs, store and plant closings, etc. Following that as people were unable to make their mortgage payments the reposseions began and the housing market crashed leading to even less credit available and so on as the cycle continued.

Point is though that regardless of all the contributing factors afterwards the initial root cause of the recession was the tremendous and sudden spike in fuel costs to a nation that relies on petroleum for every aspect of daily life. Now the EPA is planning to circumvent the Congress to get a back door "cap and trade" policy by creating their own regulations to limit the so called CO2 pollutant. The rules they are proposing will not only drastically raise fuel prices again to an unsustainable level but will also cause major rate spikes in electricity prices. If high gasoline prices were able to spark off the greatest economic recession in a generation on their own then what do you think will happen when gas again rises well over $4 a gallon and electric rates increase at the same time during an already weakened economy?

Short article on Fed lending policy - does it coincide with Obama's signing the so-called Jobs bill?

Hello, Viners. I'm asking this question because I have taken the plunge, so to speak, and bought into a home-entertaining business. I have a full-time job which is pretty secure, but with the economy the way it is it seems everything is going up EXCEPT my paycheck. I looked for part-time work on evenings and weekends but had no luck, then I saw this ad for a home-entertainment business, and I went for it! So far I've only spent about $200 and expect my kit just any day now. So I would LOVE to connect with other people who have a side-business like that. Or maybe you've lost your job and decided, what the heck, I've always wanted to run my own business. Maybe we could even form a GROUP of our own, to share ideas on marketing, finance, taxes, etc. If nothing else, it would be a pleasant diversion from the typical lefty liberal/right wingnut slamming and sniping that masquerades as News on NewsVine, and we just might learn something valuable from each other! I hope to hear from lots of you, soon!