Is anyone as sick of the communist on Capitol Hill as I am?

The President did lower taxes on everyone making $250,000 or less, and that HAS stimulated the economy. It's a historical fact that tax cuts for the richest Americans does not stimulate an economy and does not create jobs. Hoover, Reagan and Bush all proved that. The only problem with the stimulus was that it was a lot smaller than it should have been thanks to the Republicans. And the housing market was a time bomb waiting to go off ever since the Republican majority under Newt Gingrich in the late 1990s decided that it's ok for banks to make profits by selling houses to people who couldn't afford them. Carter was never the problem. It was Reagan who cut the tax rate for the richest Americans in half, stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, began to break America's unions and TRIPLED our national debt that created the problems we are still facing 30 years later. And it was the Republicans who put all those people on food stamps, not President Obama. Republicans have blocked legislation that would have created millions more jobs over and above the 4 and a half million jobs President Obama has already created. The unemployment rate has dropped two full points from the Bush highs, and would be a full point lower right now if the Republicans were not attacking public sector jobs.

Oh and you're not that far off on initial claims, but you fail to notice that last week's figures represented a ten percent drop from the same week a year ago.

"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 359,578 in the week ending June 16, a decrease of 17,032 from the previous week. There were 394,286 initial claims in the comparable week in 2011."