Middle East: Jordan…

   …got a little taste of protest on Friday as a few hundred Jordanians took to the streets in the capital city of Amman to demand political and economic reforms and to also show support for the anti-Mubarak government movement in Egypt.

Protesters from leftist groups and the Muslim Brotherhood marched from the prime minister's office to the Egyptian embassy on Friday, calling for change in their country.

Activists on Friday chanted "Down with the government" as they rallied outside the prime minister's office.

Protesters also expressed their support for Egyptians, calling on Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president, to step down and accused him of being a CIA agent.

"No to Arab regimes that have ties to the US and the West," they chanted outside the embassy in Cairo, and "no to Arab regimes that serve Israel's interests".

Activists also called prayed for all the Egyptians who had lost their lives during the protests against Mubarak.

Technorati Tags: King Abdullah,Jordan,Egypt,Middle East,Current Events,Protests

Flashback: GOP claimed credit for today's jobs report

DailyKos

by Jed Lewison

Fri Feb 04, 2011 at 10:00:04 AM PST

Remember this?

19 days in, GOP leadership takes credit for job growth

It took less than three weeks for the new Republican Congressional leadership to claim credit for an apparent economic upturn.

Well, in light of today's jobs report, Republicans are doing their best to make you forget.

The drop in the unemployment rate last month wasn't enough, Republicans said Friday in reaction to the latest jobless numbers.

The GOP used the report showing that the unemployment rate had dropped to nine percent as a pretext for calling for new spending cuts, and attack President Obama's stimulus policies.

"Instead of more ‘stimulus’ spending and more debt, as the president proposed in his State of the Union address, we need less spending, more freedom, and more certainty for those in America who create jobs," House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

That's a load of crap. Not only have Republicans have done absolutely nothing to boost job creation since taking control of Congress, the only economic ideas they've proposed are making things worse.

The beginning and end of every Republican discussion about the economy is that we need to immediately reduce spending. Actually, the opposite is true. Since last February, there's been 1.3 million new private sector jobs. However during the same period there's been a loss of 255,000 government jobs at the local, state, and federal levels. (That doesn't include the Census hiring bubble -- since then, there's been a lost of 761,000 government jobs.)

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that cutting government employment in the middle of an economic recovery is a bad idea. If you're trying to put people to work, putting them out of work is idiotic. But that's the Republican agenda, and as long as they get their way, economic recovery is going to take far longer than it should.

Website: http://www.jedreport.com
Email: jedreport@gmail.com
Daily Kos Contributing Editor and Editor of Daily Kos TV. Las Vegas resident and former communications director for Sen. Maria Cantwell. @jedlewison on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Politics,Jobs Report,GOP,Unemployment report,Current Events