Obama urges passage of stimulus

From NBC's Athena Jones At an event today to announce the members of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, President Obama highlighted the latest jobs numbers and kept up his campaign-style rhetoric Friday, urging quick passage of the stimulus bill. Echoing a statement his team put out this morning after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported some 598,000 jobs were lost in January and unemployment rose to 7.6%, Obama said that the data demonstrated the urgency of the situation, and that it was inexcusable and irresponsible for Congress to get bogged down in distraction, delay, or politics as usual at this time. "The American people did not choose more of the same," he said. "They did not send us to Washington to get stuck in partisan posturing, to try to score political points or to turn back to the same tried and failed approaches that were rejected because we saw the results. They sent us here to make change and the expectation that we would act." He said that while the bill before ... (link)