President Obama was asked about the whole Cory Booker situation today and below is his response. I sense a little hint of someone who is fired up and ready to go… with a little annoyance mixed in. A great combination.Can you tell?
Day: May 21, 2012
So on Sunday’s Meet The Press, Cory Booker made some news. He criticized the Obama administration for running ads questioning Mitt Romney’s connection to Bain and Romney’s claims of being a job creator. Booker called the ads “nauseating.”
Needless to say Booker – a Democratic Mayor from Newark New Jersey – received a huge amount of backlash from the social media and other prominent Democrats, causing him to later release a web video praising President Obama and expressing his everlasting love and support of the President.
But it was too late, the damage was already done.
And now we’re starting to see why this very popular Democratic Mayor spoke up against the Obama administration and in defense to the Romney campaign. Thanks to some investigative work by Think Progress, it seems that Romney’s Bain was a huge donor to the Booker 2002 campaign.
A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.
Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage.
He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the “Booker Team for Newark” joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector — including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million — again making this a sizable chunk.
My wife has given me permission to gloat a bit after I said this about Facebook, and Wal-Mart, by-the-by, yesterday on this very same blog. The reason? Wall Street had a nice day today, but the ‘book fell on its Face, dropping to $34.03, almost $4 from its opening last week. Meanwhile, a real company that makes real products that are really, really popular and, by-the-by, expensive relative to their competition, Apple, climbed 5.8% (%!) to $561.28.
This spells short-term trouble for Facebook and other social networking sites considering going public. Perhaps it’s just the leftover blahs from the past few weeks. Perhaps it’s the lingering blah form the remnants of Recession George. Perhaps this is a blip and the stock will rise commensurate with the hype as the economy improves.
Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
Facebook will never be like Apple or Google until they actually have something to sell that doesn’t involve people checking the box on a privacy policy that prints out at Moby Dick-like length and, by-the-by doesn’t really protect your privacy. They have loads of information, but now have to find a way to sell it in a responsible, green, diversity-friendly way.
I wish them every good luck with that.
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Appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Show today, Mitt Romney’s senior campaign adviser said that Mitt Romney created more jobs during his time as Massachusetts Governor, than President Obama created nationwide. Said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s adviser;
“With respect to Mitt Romney’s period of time as the governor of Massachusetts — in that four years as governor he created between 30k and 40k jobs. That is more than President Obama has created for the entire nation. And at Bain Capital, of course the mission was to create value, that’s how the free enterprise system works, but when you create value, when you add value as they did in trying to improve companies, you also add employment, and a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate of how many jobs they created is well in excess of 100,000.”
The Hill is reporting that “Romney made a similar claim early in the Republican primary season, but seemed to walk the number down after it was challenged by his GOP presidential rivals. At later points during the cycle, Romney has said he created “tens of thousands” or “thousands” of jobs.
The Romney campaign has not detailed the method it’s using to come to these estimates, but critics say Romney is taking credit for jobs created after his tenure, not subtracting out jobs that were eliminated after his tenure, or taking credit for business deals that he had little to do with.”
But here are some figures everyone can understand, everyone that is, except Mitt Romney and his coons. CNN took a look at just one of President Obama’s policy initiative – the original Stimulus. The report found that:
The stimulus bill passed by Democrats in 2009 with almost universal Republican criticism was split into three parts: Just over $200 billion in tax cuts, about $300 billion in direct spending on projects and other aid to states, and just under $300 billion in social safety-net spending through items such as extended unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the parts of the program that got the most criticism — actual spending on projects and aid packages — was the most effective in creating jobs.
Tax cuts for middle income workers were less effective while tax cuts for the wealthy were deemed the least effective.
Still, the CBO estimates that at least 1.4 million jobs were created and saved by the direct spending alone, and that as many as 3.6 million jobs were produced while stimulus funds were being spent.
And that’s just on the Stimulus. Not being counted in this 3.6 million figure are the jobs created or saved from the auto bailout, or the jobs gained from the 17 different tax cuts the president signed for small businesses. Compare 3.6 million jobs created by the Obama Administration to the “30 to 40 thousand” created by Romney. Anyone with common sense and the most basic knowledge of Math knows which figure is higher. Romney and his surrogates however, are content in preaching to their base.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday said House Speaker John Boehner was right to focus attention on a possible hike in the nation’s debt ceiling, saying it was a “perfect time” to address the nation’s fiscal health, but placing the burden for moving forward with President Obama.
“At some point here, this president needs to become the adult, because the Speaker and I have been the adults in the room, arguing that we need to do something about the nation’s most serious long-term problem,” said McConnell on CBS’s Face the Nation.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) restarted the debate over a possible debt-ceiling hike last week when he called for dollar-for-dollar cuts in exchange for any raise in the limit. Boehner said he feared that without early negotiations on a long-term fiscal plan, lawmakers post-election would only have a few weeks to avoid what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called a “fiscal cliff” with looming cuts to spending and expiring Bush-era tax rates.
[The Hill]