of america in his acceptance speech, and i read that this morning. you haven t perhaps got a chance to do that, but if you did, perhaps like me, you found it extraordinarily disappointing. surprisingly disappointing, because his speech four years ago, he laid out a whole series of lofty goals and unfortunately, he was unable to meet them. as a matter of fact, i can think of very few of the promises he made four years ago that he s kept. he said he would raise incomes for people. in fact, they ve gone down by $5,000 a family. he said he would create more new businesses, people who wanted to start a business would be encouraged to do so but in fact, we re a 30-year low in new business startups. he was going to get people back to work. you remember with his stimulus plan, the stimulus said that if we let him borrow $787 billion, he would hold unemployment below 8%. it s been 43 straight months
gretchen: 44 machines after the top of the hour. cost of the federal stimulus package is continuing to climb. $833 billion, i toweled it was climbing. the recovery act signed by president obama was originally projected to cost $787 billion. casey anthony is a free woman. probation ended at midnight. this is a year after acquitted of killing her daughter caylee. steve: sticker shock and outrage over a new pair of nike. the national urban league wants nike to pull because they target kids who can t afford school supplies. the question is are expensive
and say they a lot of the same things from this pew report, a lot of the same struggles and also a lot of the same lack of blame for the obama administration. feeling that he inherited a real economic crisis. jon: all right. so, angela, is it, is it the fault of the congress that the middle class appears, according to these numbers, to be shrinking? well, look, it s no question that we have a dysfunctional congress, and the approval rating of congress is very, very low, but you also have to look at the failed obama policies. if you look at the stimulus packages and, jon, again, it s all in the messaging. with this presidential election, whoever gets out the best message dealing with what margie just said, dealing with the fact that these walmart moms still blame the bush administration. so it seems to me that the negative campaigning is working, so romney and ryan have to get out there and do advocacy and get the truth out there. but to get back to obama s failed policies, you ve had
[ .] uma: new next hour, investigators in maryland checking twitter posts, photos and maintenance records looking for the cause of the horrific train derailment that claimed the lives of two young women. we have breaking details. bombshell testimony in the drew peterson murder trial. a colleague claims that peterson offered him $25,000 to find someone to kill his third wife. our legal panel will weigh in on the case. the drought taking a huge toll on run customers and farmers in the midwest. what it means for your future. we have a live report coming your way. jon: the $787 billion program that one that was supposed to create jobs in this country? there are shocking new allegations that the labor
voted for a $715 billion stimulus that was very similar to obama s. it was never entirely clear how obama s $787 billion stimulus was socialism but $715 billion was good public policy. they realized their ticket back to power was no. it s a big government mess. they ve been very relentless with it. did you look at paul ryan and how he s bashing the stimulus plan since even before he was the running mate, look at this. we learned that much of this stimulus, which was neither targeted timely or temporary, in fact, it was just a down payment on government programs. all this temporary booster shot stimulus didn t work in the stimulus package, so we don t want to go with ideas that have proven to fail but ideas that prove to success. the failed stimulus is typical of washington s destructive economic agenda. it failed to create the jobs promised. but you in the book actually have charts showing what happened with the stimulus, and is there any merit to what ryan