Obama May Not Have Called Conservative Activists "Tea Bags"

By Justin Duckham - Talk Radio News Service

President Barack Obama has caught flak for reportedly calling the conservative activists that descended on Capitol Hill twice in the past week “tea bag, anti-government people.”

The description comes from a New York Times blog written by Jackie Calmes featuring a quote provided by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) detailing Obama’s talks with Congress in the hours leading to the House vote.

“According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Right wing blog redstate.com posted an article Tuesday morning chiding the left for its use of “tea bag” or “tea bagger” as in insult aimed at conservative activists, using the New York Times blog to charge that even the President uses the insulting term to describe the demonstrators.

However, it seems that Obama might not have uttered those words and that Blumenauer was in fact paraphrasing.

Talk Radio News Service was present during Blumenauer’s discussion with Calmes and captured sound from the exchange. While the audio shows that Blumeanuer did make the statement in question, the Oregon Democrat appears to revise his words several seconds later to instead suggest that the president only said “extreme people.”

Click on the audio icon below to listen to the exchange.

Unemployment high in March, Officials say

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico – Talk Radio News Service

A day after President Barack Obama's budget was passed by a Congress boiling with partisanship, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing unemployment at its highest since 1983. There are now 13.2 million Americans out of work.

The pouring rain in Washington mirrored the sobered mood in the room, as the Joint Economic Committee heard the testimony of Keith Hall, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

March was one of the worst Months on record for unemployment, and when asked outright, Hall told the committee that there were no "bright spots" in the report.

National unemployment climbed to 8.5 percent in March, rising from the level of 8.1 percent in February and 7.6 percent in January.

Hall said that two-thirds of the job loss has happened in the past 5 months. Every state is in recession for the first time in 30 years, according to Carolyn Maloney (D-NY).

Official unemployment numbers do not encompass underemployed Americans or those who have officially left the workforce. It is reported that 16 percent of the country is out of work or underemployed. One in four of those unemployed have been out of work for more than six months, and of those, half have been looking for work for over a year, Hall said.

Maloney highlighted that last month, 8,000 jobs were lost in the news publishing industry. Those losses total 70,000 job cuts since Dec. 2007, Hall said, adding that most job losses have been see in the manufacturing, construction, and temporary services industries. The only area to see any growth in March was the Healthcare industry, Hall said.

Ranking Committee member Senator Sam Brownback (R-KA) noted that the impact of the ongoing recession was not severe for almost a year after it began in December 2007. Brownback attributed recent dramatic jumps in job losses over the past five months to the lockup in the credit markets and the government bailouts that followed.

The Federal Reserve believes that unemployment will peak at 8.8 percent this year, but Ranking House Committee Member Kevin Brady (R-TX) said that the unemployment rate is already higher than what the administration anticipated for 2009. Brady said that the Obama Administration's "optimistic assumptions" would not get the country out of its current mess.

President Obama’s Economic Stimulus package was passed by Congress earlier this year, and saw an unprecedented amount of money placed into public works meant to put people back to work. Obama has pledged the legislation will save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years.

Read the report here: Bureau of Labor Statistics Report

McCain campaign on bailout: 'Trust me' is not good enough

Campaign advisers said that Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is in consultation with senate colleagues and the ongoing developments on Capitol Hill as the Congress negotiates with the administration on Wall Street bailout legislation. Campaign manager Rick Davis said that McCain is going to participate in this legislation and plans to vote on it, if and when it reaches the floor.

McCain has express some concerns with a plan that would allow the U.S. Treasury to purchase illiquid assets from major financial companies in order to inject liquidity into the financial system. The campaign said that McCain has called for "unprecedented transparency" for unprecedented power and also feels that there is potential for too much power to be concentrated on a single authority. McCain has called for sufficient oversight to accompany the legislation. "Simply trust me is not good enough," said Davis.

With 43 days to go until Election Day, McCain senior advisor, Steve Schmidt made his feelings about the media clear in a call...with the media. In the call, intended to roll out a new campaign commercial highlighting some of Barack Obama's associations in Chicago politics, Schmidt said that the ad was necessary because the media is under reporting some of Obama's controversial friendships. He zeroed his scope on the New York Times.

"Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard, a journalistic organization It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Senator McCain, attacks Gov. Pain and excuses Senator Obama...Everything that is read in the New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated from that perspective," he said.