the zipper club is, if you have had open heart surgery they had to zip it up. i thought that everyone in the world but apparently. bill, looked confused. i m sure that you did. ryan do you have any question for the president? i m glad clarified that. well, lizz, what do you think of that one? what were they talking about. clearly open-heart surgery. i mean, larry king does not disappoint. every thyme he s on he was the gift that keeps on giving. i m so sad that he s going away. i just he always just knows how to say something and poor bill clinton was just sitting there like, yeah, the zipper club. and the thought of larry king being in any kind of zipper club makes me never want to have sex again, quite frankly. i can t i don t want to no. no, no, no. all right, as a country now, are we going to be a lot safer now that congresswoman michele bachmann is going to be on the house intelligence committee?
sign is a substantial victory for middle-class families across the country. they re the ones hit hardest by the recession that we ve endured. they re the ones who need relief right now. and that s what s at the heart of this bill. you got to hand it to the president, he worked it hard. he managed to get an extremely controversial tax bill through a fractured congress in less than three weeks. speaker nancy pelosi said the republicans forced the democrats to, quote, pay a king s ransom in order to help the middle class. liberals might not be too happy with the outcome of this tax debate but no one can argue that president obama has he s done absolutely everything he possibly can to jump-start this economy after eight years of bush destruction. congressman elijah cummings didn t vote for the bill, but he says he understands why the president cut this deal. cummings says he believes he s got to do something to create
it didn t. this tax bill, if we had started earlier, particularly during the 20 but i m talking about senator yeah. i understand that. i m talking about i mean, there s people out there who are off the bandwagon. yeah i understand that. and what do you say to those people? i don t know. i mean i know that people were disappointed that there wasn t a public option, we still got a good health care bill. there were people disappointed that the brown coughlin amendment didn t pass so that those six banks couldn t dominate the banking industry the way they do that ted coughlin and i worked on but we still have a decent bill, wall street reforge. i reform. the word compromise is not particularly a favorite word for a lot of my fellow progressives, but i think this, again, i was not happy with in. i voted against cloture. i voted for the bill because i thought if we didn t in the end it would be worse. but i think the president now is his popularity is picking up again
and get this coming moving again. will it work? yeah, what is the measure of success of this bill? lowering the unemployment rate by maybe two percentage points when ben bernanke has been out there in the last couple of weeks saying that we ll have high unemployment 9%, 10%. yeah some estimates by the end of next year. this bill could bring the unemployment rate down to a little over 8% and that the trend might then continue. if that happens i think obama s going to be in strong shape. but one thing i will tell you for sure, if there had been deadlock and if nothing here had passed, not only will middle-class families had been hit hard, not only would you have seen the unemployed in terrible trouble but we know for sure that unemployment would have gone up. probably by 0.6 of a percentage point to 1 percentage point. okay so the political insight on this, i guess the political
create jobs? and that is the key. we must get people back on payrolls in this country. how do you know this is going to work? yeah i voted for this bill because i don t think that you look in theive an unemployed worker, shelby ohio, or norwalk ohio, saying that i m voting tax cuts for the rich. it s my principle, sorry about your benefits and in the end that s why so many progressives i think supported this. this bill, i don t quote john boehner very often but he said it you know he talked about certainty and predictability. in bill helps do that. this bill partners with the business community pretty well. i think this bill is this new law and the president s leadership and the president s reaching out to ceos is really does send a signal that the cash reserves they re sitting on which in some cases and in some big manufacturing companies whose ceos i ve spoken to in the last two, three months they re sitting on reserves two or three times the normal cash reserves they sit on.