If this had any hope of of working, Obama could just stand on TV and say "Look, guys, just stop being dumbasses" and the country would be fixed. Or, could have said it years ago and we wouldn't be in this fix in the first place.

Personally, I have no faith in Obama. When someone on the new station I was watching said something along the lines of "The momentum of the president's victory has worn off and Obama has earned his popularity level" I actually laughed out loud.

Gotta hand it to the guy though, he sure sounds smart for someone who doesn't know what he's doing.

That is exactly my problem. He didn't tell people to go the government website where the bill was written, he told them to go to recovery.gov

Just wait till the republicans use this tactic and the media does nothing but lament the new age of propaganda.

Oh man, a classic episode. Now I have to watch it

You mean recovery.gov which states on the "about the bill" page "To view the full bill, click here." and takes you directly to where you can view a pdf of the full bill? Which is conveniently located on the whitehouse webpage, complete with a "leave a comment" section? Admittedly, I find the non-pdf version on the congressional website easier to read, but that's a personal preference and I don't think that the whitehouse website or the recovery.org site are particularly "un-transparent"... I think they're probably trying to show things in as good a light as possible, but we as Americans have a responsibility to look at the freely given information and strip away those natural biases and look for ourselves at the un-dumbed-down versions, just as we recognize the bullet-point summaries as the useful tools that they are.

Republicans have always been better at PR. Republicans made a bill called the "US PATRIOT Act." Democrats would have called it the "Emergency Domestic Surveillance Authorization." Republicans made a bill called "No Child Left Behind." Democrats would have called it the "Private School Voucher and Education Funding Reallocation Program of 2005 (PSVP)." How else could you get two groups with completely opposing interests and needs to consistently vote for the same person because its the "right" thing to do?

You do remember that when clinton left office in 2K we had a national surplus, right?

But we still had expensive health care and many people weren't covered at all. What does the budget surplus have to do with anything?

Also, if you read his state of the union adresses, having a budget surplus was not one of his explicit goals until the year it actually happened. (Instead he focused on education, and health care reform) Furthering my point that what the president says in these big speaches, is rarely ever the largest change that actually happens. But it's normally something that is only hinted to instead.

Something tells me that you are using selective memory here. but I don't really have the time to look it up. I am pretty certain that Democrats use spinned act titles as much as anybody else does.

I got home from work this morning and that exact episode was on, irony!

As I will it so mote it be.