Was the press conference staged? I saw one conservative blog comment that said it was obviously staged because he had a carefully prepared speech in response to each question -- meaning, I assume, that it would have been better had he been unprepared? Another conservative site proclaimed that Fox News had been prevented from asking a question for the fifth time in a row at Obama press conferences. Presumably they know something about Major Garrett (The Fox News correspondent who asked a question about a biden comment) that the rest of us don't know.Quote:
Originally Posted by K G
With respect to the "inherited" financial collapse, I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Is it that you believe it is not a problem or is it that you believe that the collapse was caused by the Obama administration?
I also liked the Elkhart woman's question about how funds woud get to them. I thought his answer was pretty straight and not necessarily exactly what she would have liked him to say.
The impression I get in reading these threads is that none of the complaints is real. If Obama said that 2 + 2 = 4, there would be a thread saying that Obama was once again trying to manipulate numbers to support a fantasy. If he didn't say it there would be a thread complaining that he was avoiding the numbers.
I can understand if someone does not believe any stimulus program is needed, even though I disagree. I can understand if someone wants the stimulus program to be based primarily or solely on tax cuts, although I disagree and believe the data do not support that approach. I can understand the belief that we should do nothing to grow the deficit further, but do not understand if the same person wants the tax cuts to be made permanent despite the fact that they would add trillions to the deficit. Amazingly, those are the same people who call California "La La Land."
There is little to discuss when issues are raised solely to make noise. There are a lot of real issues and they are pretty serious for most of us. I don't think that our current economic problems are going to be resolved in a manner that will please anyone from an ideological perspective.
Obviously, a big part of the equation is whether or not there actually is a major problem at all. Do we actually believe that banks will collapse without support? Do we believe that enough banks will survive collapse to allow our financial system to continue to operate? Do we believe that the snowball effects of rising unemployment, collapsing consumer credit, collapsing business credit, massive business losses, and more layoffs will continue until unemployment hits Depression era levels? Do we believe that, if such problems are actually in our future, that they are the inevitable product of some long term business cycle and we should simply starve our way back to prosperity?
Are any of these fair questions, or are they simply scare tactics to encourage the masses to vote their way into an atheistic, socialistic, communist dictatorship that will probably be run by homosexuals who will require all pregnancies to be terminated by abortion?
With the exception of the last, I think these are fair questions. I may have thoughts about them, but I do not have answers and I doubt that the administration does either. Unfortunately, our options are to do nothing, with unknown consequences, or do something that may or may not work. Neither is a good option.
Whatever happens, I suspect that most on this forum will complain in advance about whatever the administration does. Whatever happens, most on this forum will blame the administration if the economy gets worse and, if the economy gets better, most on this forum will say that it's proof of the strength of our system that it recovered despite whatever the administration did or, alternatively, that it recovered because of something done by GWB or the Republicans in Congress. Personally, I don't really care who gets the credit. I would like to see things get better than they are now. My suspicion is that things will get a lot worse first.
