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Weekly Address: President Obama – Update on this Year of Action – UPDATED with WHCD Video

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The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

 

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, the President provided an update on the work his Administration has done to strengthen the economy and expand opportunity for hardworking Americans in this Year of Action. While Republicans in Congress are setting records in obstruction, the President is making progress for the American people and has taken more than 20 executive actions since January.

The President vowed to continue taking action on his own wherever possible, but underscored that much more progress could be made if Republicans in Congress were less interested in stacking the deck in favor of those at the top, and more interested in expanding opportunity for all.

Transcript: Weekly Address: The President’s Year of Action

Hi, everybody.  My number one priority as President is doing whatever I can to create more jobs and opportunity for hardworking families.  And yesterday, we learned that businesses added 273,000 jobs last month.  All told, our businesses have now created 9.2 million new jobs over 50 consecutive months of job growth.

But we need to keep going – to create more good jobs, and give middle-class families a sense of security.  And I want to work with Congress to do it.

But so far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked or voted down every serious idea to create jobs and strengthen the middle class.  They’ve said “no” to raising the minimum wage, “no” to equal pay for equal work, and “no” to restoring the unemployment insurance they let expire for more than two million Americans looking for a new job.

That’s not what we need right now.  Not when there are still too many folks out of work and too many families working harder than ever just to get by.

That’s why, in my State of the Union Address, I said that in this Year of Action, whenever I can act on my own to create jobs and expand opportunity for more Americans, I will.  And since January, I’ve taken more than 20 executive actions to do just that.

I acted to raise more workers’ wages by requiring that workers on new federal contracts earn a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour – and as long as Republicans in Congress refuse to act, I’ll keep working with cities, states, and businesses to give more Americans a raise.  I acted to encourage more pay transparency and strengthen enforcement of equal pay laws, so that more women have the tools they need to earn fair pay.  And I’m modernizing regulations to make sure that more Americans who work overtime get the pay that they’ve earned.  I’ve launched new hubs to help attract more high-tech manufacturing jobs to America – and ordered a reform of job training programs to make sure more Americans can earn the skills that employers need right now.  I’ve brought together business leaders to help us connect more classrooms to high-speed internet, and give more of the long-term unemployed a better shot at finding a job.

Each of these steps will make a difference.  You can check out the full list at whitehouse.gov.

But we could do a lot more if Republicans in Congress were less interested in stacking the deck in favor of those at the top, and more interested in growing the economy for everybody.  They’ve now voted more than 50 times to take apart the Affordable Care Act – imagine if they voted 50 times on serious jobs bills.

That’s why I’m going to take action on my own wherever I can.  To grow our economy from the middle-out, not the top down.  To give every American who works hard a chance to get ahead.

That’s what this Year of Action is all about, and that’s what I’m going to keep fighting for.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

~


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 19 Comments

19 comments

  1. JanF

    The First Lady’s Reach Higher Initiative


    While in Texas, the First Lady will join in the celebrations by wearing her college t-shirt to encourage young people to take charge of their futures and complete an education beyond high school. Join in and encourage others to show their support by taking a photo in your college t-shirt and share it with the hashtag #ReachHigher.

    College Signing Day highlights the work that the First Lady has been doing across the country to help inspire more young people to reach higher and to rally the country around the President’s “North Star” goal – that by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Today, she will be giving that effort a name and an aspiration: The First Lady’s Reach Higher Initiative.

  3. JanF

    Judge In Texas Sentenced A Rapist To Volunteer At A Rape Crisis Center

    A 20-year-old in Dallas recently pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl when he was 18, a crime that could have landed him in jail for two decades. Instead, State District Judge Jeanine Howard sentenced him to just 45 days in prison – and, once he gets out, 250 hours of community service volunteering at a rape crisis center. […]

    Young’s community service assignment didn’t sit well with the employees at the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center. “It’s just not an appropriate place for him to do his community supervision,” Bobbie Villareal, the executive director of the organization, told a local ABC News affiliate. “There’s just so many problems with that. First of all, we would worry about our client safety and well-being… Just having a criminal defendant in the office could be a triggering effect for many of our clients.”

    “That’s like saying a pedophile should do their community supervision helping at a pre-school,” she added.

    A triggering effect? Ya think?

  4. JanF

    Michigan Business Leaders Launch Push To Protect LGBT Employees

    A coalition of Michigan business leaders announced Thursday that it will mount a major campaign to get the state legislature to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s 1976 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA). Michigan is currently one of 29 states in which it is legal to fire someone for his or her sexual orientation – and one of 33 that allow employment discrimination based on gender identity.

    The Michigan Competitive Workforce Coalition will be co-chaired by AT&T Michigan president Jim Murray, ACLU of Michigan executive director Kary Moss, and Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker. The initial member list includes AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Consumers Energy, Dow Chemical Company, Google, Herman Miller, PADNOS, Steelcase, Strategic Staffing Solutions, Whirlpool Corporation. On the coalition website, co-chair Brian Walker argues that “Michigan’s continued economic growth relies on keeping and attracting talented, hard working, determined people.”

    Take note, Kentucky. Economic growth relies on keeping and attracting talented employees.  

  5. JanF

    Hawaii Raises The Minimum Wage For Those Who Need It Most

    On Tuesday, lawmakers in Hawaii voted to increase the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2018 and it was signed into law by Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) the next day. While the state is the third to raise its wage to that level this year, it’s unique in one aspect: its wage will apply to tipped and nontipped workers alike.

    That means Hawaii will become the eighth state to require businesses like restaurants, nail salons, bars, and barber shops to pay the employees who earn tips the same minimum wage as everyone else. Before Hawaii, Alaska, California, Montana, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington had already done the same. Those seven states have more than 1 million tipped workers that make the full minimum wage.

    The tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. So a restaurant worker is expected to make $5.12 an hour in tips just to keep up with the already miserly minimum wage of $7.25. Since the amount of the tip has a lot to do with things out of the worker’s control (the busyness of the restaurant, the quality of the food, the speed of the kitchen) this is grossly unfair.

    I am reminded of the candidate for Minnesota governor back in 2010 who was angry about tipped workers who he said “earned $100,000 a year”. In a close race, that guy lost. I hope there are a few close races for Republicans to lose this year.

  6. JanF

    No Humane Way to Die

    The question is not whether Lockett and Warner deserve to die; clearly they do, as far as I’m concerned. The question is whether our society, acting through the instrument of government, should kill them. I believe there is no way to impose capital punishment without betraying the moral standards that our justice system is theoretically designed to uphold. Put simply, when we murder we become murderers.

    Perhaps the most powerful argument against the death penalty is that it is irreversible. Sometimes, judges and juries make honest mistakes and innocent persons may be condemned to death. Some studies have shown an apparent racial bias in the way capital punishment is meted out, with blacks who kill whites more likely than other defendants to end up on death row.

    […]

    I would argue that there’s no reason to believe lethal injection is a more humane way to end a life than electrocution, poison gas, hanging, firing squad or even guillotine. Of course, we’ll never know. We can tell ourselves any story we want about how quickly and painlessly death arrived, and the one person who could prove us wrong will never speak again.

  7. JanF

    Amid Donald Sterling drama, a country not cured of racial hatred

    The truth is, the idiocy of these men doesn’t mean a whole lot, doesn’t impact much beyond their immediate lives. We hyperventilate about it, yet somehow manage not to be overly concerned as black boys are funneled into prison, brown ones are required to show their papers, voting rights are interdicted, Fourth Amendment rights are abrogated and some guy has his job application round-filed when the hiring woman sees that his name is Malik.

    We keep declaring our country cured of its birth defect of racial hatred. Indeed, that’s an article of faith on the political right.

    It is only possible to think that so long as you don’t look too closely, so long as you are willing to ignore dirty deeds done largely out of sight and back of mind by collective hands – everyone guilty, so no one is.

    Then some guys who didn’t get the memo speak a little too stupidly a little too loudly and people condemn them and feel good about themselves for doing so.

    It is there. It is there in every pronouncement of steeped-in-the-rhetoric-of-Ayn-Rand-and-Charles-Murray Rep. Paul Ryan. There is no pretty face to racism and when the mask falls off, the ugly that lives underneath should horrify no one.  

  8. JanF

    The GOP Base Isn’t Pining For Jeb

    Among self-described “very conservative” Republicans, Jeb Bush is a distant seventh, with just 7 percent. He does much better among “somewhat conservative” GOPers. Yet, he’s not exactly lapping the field. He takes 18 percent of the vote among this group – a five point lead over his closest competitor Sen. Rand Paul. […]

    It’s easy to understand why those within the GOP establishment like the idea of a Jeb Bush candidacy. At a time when many of those in the establishment feel under assault from the Tea Party wing of the party, Jeb Bush represents the political equivalent of a comfy old sweater. However, what the Acela-corridor money types want and what the GOP base wants are clearly quite different. It’s not to say that Jeb Bush can’t win a GOP primary. It will, however, be a long, hard slog.

    The article suggests that the GOP needs Jeb Bush to “bridge the demographic chasm between the growing minority population and the GOP brand”. I think it will take more than a guy who can speak Spanish to bridge that chasm. Actions speak louder than words and right now the inaction of Republican members of Congress who are anti-immigration and anti-living wage are on display. If it is “the economy, stupid” in 2016, lip service (even en Español) will not be enough.

  9. JanF

    What working people will vote for this November

    We are approaching a midterm election in which the real issue is not the Affordable Care Act’s Web site. The real issue is whether we continue down the road toward more radical inequality or move, instead, toward reinventing a nation whose economy is consistent with our national values of democracy and opportunity.

    … we are going to turn out to support candidates who offer a better future: candidates who squarely acknowledge that our society faces a choice between plutocracy and a future of shared prosperity – and who choose shared prosperity. That means candidates who stand for investing in the United States to create jobs and make our country more competitive, not giving tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas or signing trade agreements that benefit corporations and not people. Those who stand for raising wages for the 90 percent, not cutting taxes for the 1 percent; those who support comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship and oppose mass deportations of families from our communities; those who have the courage to say that mass incarceration is a blight on our country; and those who know that unequal pay for women is an injustice. […]

    Candidates might succeed in November if they make it worthwhile for working people to vote for them. They surely will succeed if they go on offense and expand the president’s opportunity agenda to a full range of measures designed to lift the wages of most Americans.

  11. JanF

    Condoleezza Rice Backs Out Of Rutgers Commencement

    The school’s board of governors had voted to pay $35,000 to the former secretary of state under President George W. Bush and national security adviser for her appearance at the May 18 ceremony. Rutgers was also planning to bestow Rice with an honorary doctorate.

    But some students and faculty at New Jersey’s flagship university had protested, staging sit-ins and saying Rice bore some responsibility for the Iraq War as a member of the Bush administration. [Rutgers President Robert] Barchi and other school leaders had resisted the calls to disinvite Rice, saying the university welcomes open discourse on controversial topics.

    Open discourse is fine. But honoring one of the architects of a war of choice in which thousands lost their lives and which drained our treasury is NOT okay. Especially since she continues to defend the Bush Administration’s policies.

  12. JanF

    Why There Is No Cure for the GOP’s Benghazi Fever

    The White House certainly has bungled part of its Benghazi reaction. It did not release the emails soon enough-and it has had a hard time explaining why the Rhodes email, as not-so-relevant as it is, was not part of the batch made public a year ago. The Obama White House not been able to pull off a release-the-birth-certificate moment to smother the Benghazi conspiracy theories.[…]

    For Obama’s political foes, the Benghazi narrative-that is, their reality-challenged version of it-offers too much benefit to be abandoned. It serves three fundamental desires of the right. The get-Obama crusaders have long wanted to show that the president is just another weak-on-defense Democrat, to demonstrate that he is not a real American worthy of being president, and to uncover an explosive scandal that eviscerates Obama’s presidency and provides cause for impeachment. Benghazi, in their feverish minds, has had the potential to do all of this. It is a candy store for many conservatives-no matter that the bins are empty.

  13. JanF

    Actuially, the only thing “breaking” about this news is heartbreak from realizing that it came up for a vote.

    I took exception to their claim to be the Party of Lincoln which led to their “rejection” of secession.

    The Party of Lincoln? Er, no.

    Sorry, modern Republican Party, you cannot call yourselves the Party of Lincoln. That party died in 1980 when the GOP convention nominated Ronald Reagan, a man who ran as the states rights candidate. The Ronald Reagan who spoke these words in Philadelphia Mississippi:

       I believe in states’ rights and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.

    […]

    The Party of Reagan was born that day and it was built over the next 30+ years by tapping into the rich vein of racial animus and into the unresolved anger over a war lost a hundred years earlier. This fact was not missed by those who watched what later unfolded. William Raspberry writing in the Washington Post:


       It was bitter symbolism for black Americans (though surely not just for black Americans). Countless observers have noted that Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys. The essence of that transformation, we shouldn’t forget, is the party’s successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan’s Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.

    […]

    Your party is the Party of Reagan. And your party did not end slavery … your party did not want to preserve the union … your party does not even believe in the Constitution of the United States.

    Yes, the Wisconsin GOP voted down the amendment to the party platform. But:


    … you are left with the thing created by Reagan and nurtured by the extremists you have embraced. Like this guy:

       Don Hilbig, a delegate from Rock County, spoke in support of the measure. “There is no more burning question than our sovereign rights as a state,” he said. “Secession is a critical part of that.”

    Try getting that off your shoe.

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