(Indianapolis) — Governor Mitch Daniels commented on what he called Republicans’ pro-jobs, pro-growth policy during his response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night. Daniels gave the Republican response calling federal government “big and bossy” and stated that 2012 must be the year Americans prove doubters wrong and strike out to avert national bankruptcy and re-establish the country as a land of opportunity. Included in his address was a push for a dramatically simpler tax system with fewer loopholes and lower rates, and stressed the need to stop what he called the mindless piling-on of expensive new regulations. Daniels also lashed out at the Obama administration, calling it divisive and said Republicans in Congress had been unfairly painted as obstacles when they have acted to pass bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements and encourage new job creation.

Indiana unemployment figures released

(Indianapolis)  — Indiana’s December unemployment rate remained unchanged from November at 9% while Indiana led the nation in creating new jobs last month.  The Indiana Department of Workforce Development said there were 12-thouand private sector jobs added in the state in December and the workforce grew by 17-thousand-200, the biggest increase in the number of people working in more than 35 years. 

 Democrats block vote involving right to work legislation

 (Indianapolis) — After the Senate passed its version of the right to work bill Monday, Democrats again were no-shows at the Indiana House on Tuesday, blocking a vote on the legislation. Although Republicans hold a majority in the House, Democrats are still needed to move the legislation forward to become a bill. House Minority Leader B. Patrick Bauer said Democrats could return Wednesday. Meanwhile, murmurs are circulating that Democrats are trying to keep the bill from passing before the Feb. 5 Super Bowl. But Bauer is denying that strategy, saying, “No. Our goal is to have the people understand (the bill) and have (Republicans) do due deliberations.” Bauer is accusing  Republicans of attempting to rush the bill to get it passed and signed into law before the Super Bowl. Under right to work, companies and unions would no longer be able to negotiate a contract that requires all employees to pay fees for union representation, whether they join the union or not. Unions argue that would lead to “freeloaders” who get union benefits, free legal representation and lower wages for union members.  Supporters of right to work say the legislation lets employees decide whether they want to financially support  a union and bring  jobs to Indiana. An identical bill must pass both chambers and be signed by the governor before it becomes law which cannot happen unless Democrats return.

New grocery store coming to downtown

(Indianapolis)  — A new $85 million dollar development located in the Canal District will bring in an upscale Marsh supermarket.  Mayor Greg Ballard said the area of Michigan Street and Senate Avenue has been isolated by parking lots and the new development will serve the IUPUI campus, state government center and surrounding businesses. Marsh Supermarkets chairman and CEO Joe Kelley said their other downtown location will not close, and the new store will be convenient for people living and working north and west of Meridian Street.

Man arrested in fatal beating

(Indianapolis)  — One man is behind bars this morning in the beating death of his girlfriend. Officers called to a home in the 5200 block of W. Martha Street just before 10 a.m. Monday found the dead body of Sharmon Rodriguez, 42, unresponsive with cuts and bruises on her face. Rodriguez’s live-in boyfriend, Shaun Long, 37, was also at the home when officers arrived and had cuts on his head and face. He was taken into custody on murder charges. Police have not released a motive for the killing.  

Woman arrested after attack on boyfriend

(Indianapolis) — A woman was taken into custody for allegedly attacking her boyfriend. Erica Shields, 23, has been charged with battery, domestic battery and battery with injury. David Pennington, 39, said Shields punched and choked him and slashed his arm with a box cutter during an argument in their home in the 700 block of South Spencer Avenue around 7:30 p.m. Monday evening. Pennington was taken to a local hospital for treatment.  The pair’s 2-year-old son was home at the time of the incident. State child welfare workers are investigating.

Editor’s note: Gloria Borger is CNN’s chief political analyst, appearing regularly on shows such as “AC360,” “The Situation Room,” “John King USA” and “State of the Union.”

Washington (CNN) — What did you do over your summer vacation?

If you’re President Obama, you’ve had a bit of a transformation. That is, from the mild-mannered Clark Kent into, well, Superman.

Or something like that.

When we last left this story, President Obama was trying to be the measured adult in the room, compromising over the debt ceiling to get a deal. In the end, it wasn’t the “grand bargain” that Obama wanted. Liberals argued that it was awful, too — chastising the president for negotiating with himself. And Republicans complained that they needed more spending cuts. And, oh, by the way, they still wanted to repeal health care reform.

In other words, an unsatisfactory experience for all.

So when Obama came back to D.C. this fall, the feeling inside the White House was that something had to change. The bad news: Mr. Adult (aka Mr. Compromise) had sunk to new lows in the ratings. The good news: Congress had sunk even lower. Way lower. Then House Speaker John Boehner gave a speech outlining his demands for the deficit reduction “supercommittee.” Top of the list: no new taxes.

Shocking, I know.

That about did it. The White House figured it had no partner for peace. The man who had almost signed on to the grand bargain — with some tax increases and entitlement cuts — wasn’t about to come back to the table anytime soon.

The next step: play the game.

The president outlined his demand for the debt reduction supercommittee: no spending cuts for the middle class without commensurate tax increases on the wealthy. No proposals for long-term entitlement reform. But there was a catchy bumper sticker: the Buffett Rule. Billionaires should not pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

It’s not intellectually satisfying. Nor does it improve the chances for a deal out of the supercommittee that can get anywhere in Congress. It’s politics, plain and simple.

In fact, the strategy does one big thing: It reunites the president with the base of the Democratic Party, which finally had something to cheer. When Barack Obama came out swinging this week, threatening to veto any deficit reduction measure without a balance of new taxes and spending cuts, there was joy among liberals. Obama had finally come home.

For the rest of us, well, it was a dismal peek at reality. Who can really fault the White House for playing politics with Republicans who have refused to cut the big deals? After all, the GOP presidential candidates, by and large, are still complaining that Congress agreed to raise the debt ceiling. After Boehner lay down his laws, Obama had to do the same. He could no longer negotiate with himself.

So he joined the game. Maybe it’s the opening salvo, and maybe something will come of this kabuki. But there is a final calculation here: if nothing comes out of the supercommittee, the president would be less damaged than the Congress.

As for the rest of us, we’re still Waiting for Superman. The real one.

The forum, titled “Open for Questions with Interactive One,” featured various administration officials discussing how the administration’s polices have affected and will affect the Black community, taking questions from  the Interactive One network sites,  TheGrio.com, and   BlackPlanet.com.

Make sure to visit the site and watch the discussion here: We Must Pump It Up To Pass Jobs

President Obama charged all in attendance to get the truth out about the state of employment and what is happening across the nation.

Though it’s difficult to be optimistic about the bleak job market when unemployment is stuck at around 9.1%, but a survey just released by employment services firm ManpowerGroup offers hope for job seekers in many places around the country.

The survey reveals that the metropolitan area with the most optimistic forecast of all for hiring this fall is San Antonio, Texas, and there’s also the good news that employers in 45 states expect the bleak employment picture to perk up. In fact, hiring managers in dozens of metropolitan areas anticipate considerable increases in hiring, while others present a darker forecast.

In fact, Baltimore-Towson employers are expressing similar sentiments. Twenty percent of that metro area’s hiring managers anticipate a bright fourth quarter. Meanwhile, 7% expect to decrease their payrolls, 71% anticipate no change and 2% are uncertain. This yields a net employment outlook of 13% and positions the Maryland metropolis as the third best place for finding a job this fall. Greensboro-High Point, N.C., St. Louis and Tulsa enjoy the same rank.

Part of the fact is that America at large feels  that lawmakers are acting like spoiled brats. Here is a recent poll taken during the debt ceiling discussion:

Tell us what you think.  We want to hear from you.

Four days after President Obama laid out the American Jobs Act for Congress, he took his message to a public forum attended by over 100 African Americans at the White House and live-streamed over the Internet, imploring them to help get the bill passed.

“We are at a critical juncture in our country and this Jobs Act can deliver,” said Obama. “I need people to get out there and support this. If Congress doesn’t get it done, we know exactly who is holding this up.”

With Black unemployment at a 27-year-high of 16.7 percent, the President laid out specifics of his plan and how it would help to get the African-American community back to work.

The plan would provide summer jobs for youth (45 percent unemployment for Black youth) and boost the paychecks of 20 million Black workers through an extension and expansion of the payroll tax. It would also extend unemployment insurance for nearly 1.4 million African Americans who have been unemployed six months or longer.

The forum, titled “Open for Questions with InteractiveOne,” featured various administration officials discussing how the administration’s polices have affected and will affect the Black community, taking questions from NewsOne.com and its sister sites in the InteractiveOne network, TheGrio.com, TheUrbanDaily.com, HelloBeautiful.com, and BlackPlanet.com.

The featured speakers included Director of Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes, US Secretary for Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, Deputy Administrator of the US Small Business Administration Marie Johns, Ambassador and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

For over two hours, panelists and audience members peppered administration officials such as Valerie Jarrett with comments and questions from Twitter and social networking site, BlackPlanet.com.

The president urged the panelists and audience members to knock on doors to help educate the American public about the benefits of this bill.

“We must pump it up to pass this Jobs Act,” said Obama.

Below is a video of the event:

Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina (CNN) — Communities from the Carolinas to New England prepared Friday for what President Barack Obama wagered would be a “hurricane of historic proportions.”

As residents streamed from coastal North Carolina, where the storm was expected to strike first, the city of New York issued what Mayor Michael Bloomberg said was the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order, covering low-lying areas of all five of the city’s boroughs.

Authorities warned of widespread and prolonged power outages, flash flooding and storm surges that could flood low-lying communities and possibly inundate subway systems. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority will shut down its system at noon Saturday.

New Jersey Transit also will shut down a noon, and the transit system in Philadelphia will halt service at 12:30 a.m. Authorities urged residents who need to leave to do so immediately.

“The sun is shining, but don’t be misled,” Bloomberg said. “There is a very dangerous storm headed in our direction.”

Even guests in Atlantic City’s iconic casinos were being asked to leave immediately.

“All indications point to this being a historic hurricane,” President Barack Obama said in remarks from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, shortly before cutting short his vacation to return to Washington. The president was not in danger from the storm, his office said.

Irene was about 300 miles to south-southwest of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, at 2 p.m.. ET Friday, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm had weakened slightly, with top sustained winds down to 100 mph from 110 mph earlier in the day.

Still, Irene was expected to bring an ocean surge of up to 11 feet to coastal North Carolina, tearing away beaches and probably damaging homes, businesses and other structures before sliding up the East Coast all the way to New England, Hurricane Center Director Bill Read said.

Storm surges of 4 feet to 8 feet are possible in the Virginia Tidewater region, with 3- to 6-foot surges further north, Read said.

While the first rain bands hit the coastal areas of South and North Carolina on Friday afternoon, it will be either late Friday night or early Saturday before hurricane-force winds hit the area, he said.

North Carolina authorities reported evacuations were going smoothly. But not everyone was choosing to leave.

Charles Carawan said he planned to stay, along with his wife, son and $500,000 worth of crab stored at his seafood packaging business.

“I have nowhere else to go,” Carawan said.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said anyone who doesn’t leave is making a mistake.

“Anybody that thinks that this is a normal hurricane and that they can just stick it out is being both selfish, stupid and also diverting essential public safety assets away from the task at hand, which is safeguarding lives and getting people out of the way,” O’Malley said. “It is the height of selfishness for people not to evacuate. One weekend of inconvenience staying with friends or family on higher ground is a small price to pay to protect life.”

Exactly where the storm will strike remained uncertain, but with hurricane-force winds extending 90 miles from the storm’s center and tropical storm-force winds as far out as 290 miles, the impacts will be widely felt, forecasters warned.

As of Friday morning, it appeared the storm’s center would make landfall between Cape Lookout and Hatteras in North Carolina, Read said.

“The timing is such that tonight into Saturday will be the worst for North Carolina and the Virginia Tidewater, Saturday into Sunday for the Delmarva (peninsula) and the eastern part of New Jersey, and then all day Sunday for New England,” Read said.

Governments and private agencies launched an immense effort to prepare for the storm.

The federal government began moving tons of supplies to military bases and other staging areas.

for more of this story:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/26/tropical.weather/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Walter Bagdasarian was convicted in 2009 of two felony counts of threatening a major presidential candidate. Bagdasarian posted several messages to a Yahoo Finance message board, including one that called Obama a racial epithet and another that said “he will have a 50 cal in the head soon”–a reference to a .50 caliber gun.

Your Black World Reports:

A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that violent and racist creeds against Obama were “repugnant” but not criminal. The court also said it was obvious the San Diego man wasn’t planning to attack the candidate and that the postings were protected by Bagdasarian’s free speech rights.

Read More At YourBlackWorld.com

RELATED:

Fox News Twitter Hacked, Says “The President Is Dead”

This is Mr. Obama’s sixth straight quarter below the 50 percent mark, however it is virtually unchanged from his 9th quarter rating of 46.7.

Obama joins a cluster of former presidents who experienced sub-50 percent, and later won re-election–Bill Clinton (49.3), Richard Nixon (49.2) and Ronald Reagan (44.4). Former President George W. Bush’s 10th quarter approval rating was an exceptional 73.6 percent.

According to Gallup, it is too early forecast what these numbers will mean for Obama during the 2012 president election, considering there’s no consistent pattern in the quarterly approval averages of previous presidents to say whether 46.8 percent pinpoints a re-election or defeat.

SOURCE

RELATED:

Obama’s Approval Rating On Economy Fall Further

But based on the congressional gridlock surrounding the country’s deficit, it’s clear Republicans and Democrats are oblivious to what the American people really want, or need for that matter.

Republicans and Tea Party members say “The American people want spending cuts” and “The American people don’t want tax hikes.”

Democrats and President Obama say “The American people want the rich to be taxed,” “The American people don’t want Social Security and Medicare to be cut.”

“The American people want jobs,” “The American people want a balanced budget,” and so on.

Annoying, huh?

The hackneyed catchphrase is nothing more than an exploitative ploy to sway political debate, and undermine the American people.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said on MSNBC, “Why in the world is there not a balanced budget amendment in the U.S. Senate? That’s the question the American people should be asking…I think the American people would like to see us do that.”

View Sen. Coburn’s comments below:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Coburn and nearly all politicians do more harm than good when they invoke their personal views onto the American people. Policy, especially those that pertain to the nation’s economy, should literally come from the people — if you’re going to put words in their mouth, that is.

Rather than speculating what the American people want, politicians should flat out say what it is they personally believe congress should do. A congressman, or senator expressing his or her personal views does not imply that he or she is somehow disingenuous — it implies quite the opposite. What is disingenuous, however, is implicating “the American people” for the sake of political squabble, or persuasion as opposed to actually carrying out the will of the people — which is very skewed at best.

President Obama, too, succumbed to “the American people” mantra. During a press conference, Mr. Obama told reporters that the American people were “sold” on a balanced approach to reaching a debt deal.

Video of President’s statement below:

The difference between Obama and Coburn, and other Republicans, is that Obama (although he exaggerated the numbers) was somewhat accurate in his statements. A majority of the people are sold.

Polls from Gallup and the Washington Post revealed that a majority of Americans do support a mixed approach of spending cuts and tax increases. However, the slippery slope of polls is that a percentage of the people (the minority and undecided) are always ignored, forlornly pushed aside for the accommodation of the “majority.”

Politicians need to be honest with the public, and most importantly honest with themselves. It is understood that congress is elected by the people to serve the people, which implicitly gives them the authority to use their discretion, opinions, etc.

The truth of the matter is that no politician can go before a camera and declare what the American people want, because the American people, and politicians for that matter, will never stand on one solid platform. There is no one, monolithic way of dealing with the economy, nor will there ever be one general opinion from the American public.

So please politicians, I beg you, kill it with the speeches, and get down to compromising for the ones you claim to serve: the people.

RELATED:

Time To Shut Down Ideological Purists In Debt Ceiling Fight