Weekly remarks: Obama back on healthcare; GOP's Candice Miller on jobs, jobs, jobs

Weekly remarks by President Obama, as provided by the White House

When I took office eight months ago, our nation was in the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we’d seen in generations. While I was confident that our economy would recover, we know that employment is often the last thing to come back after a recession. Our task is to do everything we possibly can to accelerate that process. 

And we’ve certainly made progress on this front since the period last winter when we were losing an average of 700,000 jobs each month. But yesterday’s report on September job losses was a sobering reminder that progress comes in fits and starts, and that we will need to grind out this recovery step by step.

That’s why I’m working closely with my economic team to explore additional options to promote job creation.  And I won’t let up until those who seek jobs can find them; until businesses that seek capital and credit can thrive; and until all responsible homeowners can stay in their homes. 

It won’t be easy. It will require us to lay a new foundation for our economy – one that gives....

Michigan government shuts down, but does anyone notice?

Sleepy in Lansing …

The state of Michigan officially is having a 22-hour workday today, and lawmakers there are pretty exhausted after spending all night trying to overcome their budget standoff.

Admittedly, the budget gap they had to fill was a whopping $2.8 billion — hardly anything compared to California but still gulp-worthy. But after months of negotiations, weeks of hand wringing and days chugging back burned coffee, the Legislature — which had been wrestling with deficits for the majority of the 21st century — simply couldn’t stop snarling at one another long enough to meet the Oct. 1 deadline.

That meant the state technically shut down at midnight. For about two hours, nonessential services were closed.

Thankfully, it happened while most people in the state were asleep, rather that when work crews were laboring on road repairs or someone was trying to get a driver’s license renewed. By around 2:30 a.m., lawmakers did resolve most of their issues — which means deep cuts nearly everywhere, including Medicaid and funding heading to help cities — and gave themselves a 30-day extension to figure out the remaining issues.

Big sticking point: education funding. The budget fight’s still not over.

And consider this: Michigan residents saw their government shut down for four hours in 2007. It’d be interesting to see how fast lawmakers would act, if they didn’t get paid until a budget was passed.

 — P.J. Huffstutter

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Photo: Michigan lawmakers work into the night on a budget deal. Credit: Associated Press

Biden's Recovery.gov site gets overhauled

Remember the $18 million the government spent a couple of months ago on redesigning and maintaining Recovery.gov? Well, the new version of the Obama administration's website for tracking stimulus spending launched on Monday.

Smartronix Inc., the Maryland-based design contractor, delivered a solid revision to the interface and backend four months ahead of schedule. We were admittedly skeptical of the expenditure, but the new digs look good and pack a bunch of really cool features.

Is it "$9.5 million cool?" Well, you be the judge.

The home page is a dataholic's dream. It's stacked with spending summaries and slick maps that show where cash is being spent. You can pretty easily sort by category and drill down to see a map of spending in individual neighborhoods.

But it's still not perfect. The search function is practically worthless. If you're looking for a particular program, have fun wading through the mess.

However, the Recovery.gov project is certainly a big step toward organizing the piles of public information about government spending that has long floated elusively.

In the last year, Recovery.gov has had more site overhauls than Facebook, Digg or Twitter. And the government is slated to spend an additional $8.5 million on the site over the next five years.

-- Mark Milian

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Image courtesy of Recovery.gov

California GOP governor's race II -- Steve Poizner

As the nation's most populous state, California has even more voters than the new Obama White House has policy czars.

The state's politics and personalities have often been harbingers of trends, policies, tax revolts, etc. that eventually work their way across the country and draw international attention.

This past weekend, California's Republican Party held its state convention, a prime podium for its major gubernatorial hopefuls to address the party faithful and lay out their initial profile and policy declarations. This included former Rep. Tom Campbell, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and businesswoman Meg Whitman.

They've each been raising money and endorsements for months, of course, with varying degrees of success. But because this is the de facto public campaign start, The Ticket decided to run the unfiltered speech text given by each declared candidate so readers can get a feel for who's coming, how they choose to describe themselves at the outset and what to watch for.

We'll publish them here this morning about two hours apart in last-name alphabetical order and add links to each when all are posted. Campbell's speech text was published earlier today.

Poizner's campaign website is here.

As always, feel free to leave your civil comments at the bottom.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Remarks by Steve Poizner to the California Republican State Convention, Sept. 26:

Thank you. Good evening.

First of all, Dennis, thank you very much for that fantastic introduction. I have to say a word or two about Sen. Hollingsworth. Now, I get to watch him closely in Sacramento. The fact is, Sen.Hollingsworth is a fantastic Republican leader and you know what? I've learned a lot by watching how tough he is.

The fact is, you don't have to compromise all the time. You don't have to give in all the time. Sen. Hollingsworth has shown that if you stand tall on Republican conservative principles, you can win.

So, this is my 10th California Republican Party convention in a row, and it's nice to see all my friends and all kinds of folks I've been working with over a long period of time. I have to....

California GOP governor's race I -- Tom Campbell

As the nation's most populous state, California has even more voters than the new Obama White House has policy czars.

The state's politics and personalities have often been harbingers of trends, policies, tax revolts, etc. that eventually work their way across the country and draw international attention.

This weekend, California's Republican Party held its state convention, a prime podium for its major gubernatorial hopefuls to address party faithful and lay out their initial profile and policy declarations. This included former Rep. Tom Campbell, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and businesswoman Meg Whitman.

They've each been raising money and endorsements for months, of course, with varying degrees of success. But since this is the de facto public campaign start, The Ticket decided to run the unfiltered speech text given by each declared candidate and provided by their staff so that readers can get a feel for who's coming, how they choose to describe themselves at the outset and what to watch for.

We'll publish them here this morning about two hours apart in last-name alphabetical order and add links to each when all are posted.

Campbell's campaign website is here.

As always, feel free to leave your civil Comments at the bottom.

-- Andrew Malcolm

But first, click here for Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item. Or follow us  @latimestot

Remarks by ex-Rep. Tom Campbell to the California Republican State Convention Sept. 25:

What we Republicans all share is a commitment to less government, more freedom and individual liberty. Those are the undying principles of our party and, I believe, the strong ties that unite us more strongly than any primary battle can divide us.

I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself, because there are many new members of our party present – some who weren’t even born when I attended my first....

Joe Biden update: A day of listening, speaking, posing

After an entire weekend off and a fundraiser in Delaware on Monday, Vice President Joe Biden faces a daunting day today.

In the morning while the president speaks at the United Nations and hosts meetings with several foreign leaders, Biden will sit through an entire briefing. Then he will meet with "senior staff." Not the junior bozos, mind you, just the senior ones. Those get-togethers are, just like dangerous Dick Cheney's, closed to the media.

At lunchtime Biden will travel all the way from Washington to Maryland where he's finally being allowed to join the months-long administration healthcare reform efforts with his maiden speech on the boss' latest expensive pet project. Biden will speak to the National Assn. of Insurance Commissioners.

The vice president's afternoon will be devoted to posing for photos with members of Congress.

Understandably, that event is strictly closed to any media coverage due to concerns of one kind or another, perhaps having something to do with several hundred taxpayer-funded elected representatives devoting so much time to posing for pictures with each other instead of doing what they were elected to do. You can imagine how many shots they need to take just to obtain one good one with all 536 people smiling, both eyes open and no one making a silly gesture like rabbit ears behind Nancy Pelosi's head.

Here's how the White House described the VP's afternoon:

In the afternoon, the Vice President will be at the United States Capitol to participate in the official photo for the 111th Congress. This event is closed to the press.

Btw, ABC's Karen Travers reports, at the Monday fundraiser Biden announced that if Republicans re-take 35 normally GOP House seats next year, it would mark a political "doomsday" for the administration and its ambitious agenda. If Republicans win 40 more districts in November 2010, the party would regain control of the House and Pelosi would lose her gavel.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Getty Images

Sunday shows: Obama, Obama, Obama, Medvedev

ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos: President Barack Obama and a round table with Democrat Donna Brazile, Republican Ed Gillespie, columnists George Will and Peggy Noonan and ex-Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

Bloomberg's Political Capital with Al Hunt: Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

CBS' Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Obama and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (see photo).

CNN's State of the Union with John King: Obama, Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and CNN contributors Mary Matalin and James Carville.

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace: ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), FedEx Chairman Fred Smith, CISCO Chairman John Chambers, Office Depot Chairman Steve Odland and a panel with Fox News contributors Brit Hume, Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal and NPR's Mara Liasson and Juan Williams.

(Watch this C-SPAN video for a preview of what Lewis is likely to say.)

NBC's Meet the Press with David Gregory: Obama, Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Politico's Roger Simon.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Jim Young / Reuters (Medvedev and Obama in July).

Video courtesy of C-SPAN

Weekly remarks: Sue Myrick on healthcare costs, options; Obama on financial reforms

Weekly remarks by President Obama, as provided by the White House

Leaders of the world’s largest economies will gather next week in Pittsburgh for the second time this year.  The first meeting of the G-20 nations in April came at the height of the global financial crisis – a crisis that required unprecedented international cooperation to jumpstart the world’s economies and help break the downward spiral that enveloped all our nations.

At next week’s summit, we’ll have, in effect, a five-month checkup to review the steps each nation has taken – separately and together – to break the back of this economic crisis. And the good news is that we’ve made real progress since last time we met – here at home and around the world.

In February, we enacted a Recovery Act, providing relief to Americans who need it, preventing layoffs, and putting Americans back to work. We’ve worked to unlock frozen credit markets, spurring lending to Americans looking to buy homes or cars, take out student loans, or finance small businesses. And we’ve challenged other nations to join us not only to spur global demand, but to address the underlying problems that caused such a deep global recession in the first place.

Because of the steps taken by our nation and all nations, we can now say that we have stopped our economic freefall. But we also know that stopping the bleeding isn’t....

New poll finds Americans not buying Obama's light-at-the-end-of-the-recession talk (Updated)

In recent days both Democrat Vice President Joe Biden and the other fellow have begun to make the argument in public that from the point of view of the secure White House, they can somehow see the current dumpster economy smelling better, light at the end of the tunnel, the dawn of a new economic era just over the horizon.

This is based largely on scattered economic stats indicating that things are not so much really getting better; they're just not getting bad as much as before. Back in those awful winter days when new blood and Aretha Franklin's hat arrived with such promise and the new team inherited a terrible situation from you-know-who and his evil partner, you-know-him.

Also Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, who also still has a fulltime job and newly-renewed contract, sees the recession as virtually over.

(UPDATE: Friday, 1 p.m. Newly-released figures indicate California's August unemployment rate jumped to 12.2%, the highest in modern record-keeping.)

But a new poll indicates it's gonna take a whole lot more than repeated rhetoric to....

House chastises Rep. Joe Wilson over remark [Updated]

[Updated at 3:14: After spirited debate, the House of Representatives voted 240-179 to admonish Rep. Joe Wilson for his behavior during President Obama's recent address to Congress. Follow this link for a report from the House floor.]

Rep. Joe Wilson, who accused President Obama of being a liar during last week’s televised address to Congress on health policy, returns to the national spotlight today when the Democratic House considers whether the Republican's conduct merits a resolution of disapproval.

Wilson, who told the White House he was sorry for shouting “You lie!” at Obama, has refused to apologize a second time to the House for what most on both sides of the aisle consider at least a breach of manners and what liberals consider much worse. Obama quickly accepted Wilson’s apology last week, noting that everyone makes mistakes and that the South Carolina Republican’s interruption has taken the focus away from the issue of healthcare.

Despite the first apology, the issue won’t go away and why is an interesting example of what politics has become. Conservatives have seized on Wilson as the latest symbol of resistance to administration plans to reform health insurance after a summer of complaints about Obama.

Conservatives, some carrying guns, attended town halls across the nation, complaining of Obama’s healthcare proposals, the growth of government and even such inaccuracies as that Democrats plan to expand healthcare to illegal immigrants and to create death panels.

This morning, Wilson took to the floor and in a short speech noted the town hall meetings were full of “honest patriots” who “want us to work together for health insurance reform but not a government takeover.”

But for liberals and for African American lawmakers, the issue goes much further than rudeness and into the area of race relations. For liberals, Wilson represents the latest face of those who will never be comfortable with Obama, in part because he is the first African American president.

For Majority Whip James Clyburn, an African American and fellow South Carolinian who is pushing the House to act, Wilson’s outburst requires a resolution because of the extraordinary disrespect it showed to Obama. For many Democrats and especially African American leaders, not passing a resolution against Wilson would set a bad precedent.

If the resolution comes to a vote, expect essentially a party-line vote, though it will be intriguing which Democrats decide to back Wilson.

– Michael Muskal

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