President Obama’s traditional Super Bowl interview has come and gone, leaving barely two hours before the nation takes a forced respite from politics to watch the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in what is growing to be a rivalry of several chapters. The President sat down with Matt Lauer this year in the White House and chatted about the likelihood of a good game tonight, but also answered questions about tension between Israel and Iran and made a pitch for why he deserves a second term.

One argument for the GOP nomination Mitt Romney has over his rivals is that his time in the private sector gave him enough experience to effectively create jobs, and because unemployment figures are so dismal, the nation should put Romney in charge so he can fix it. But with the latest numbers showing unemployment is steadily dropping down to 8.3 percent, Chris Matthews wondered if Romney will be able to sustain that argument for much longer.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is tackling fact-checking site PolitiFact’s analysis of job creation statistics President Barack Obama shared during his State of the Union address this week. In the last 22 months, the President said, businesses have created more than three million jobs, last year creating the highest number of jobs since 2005. The folks at Maddow’s show looked into the numbers as well, finding a January 6th report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics saying that the private section has created 3.2 million jobs since February 2010. PolitiFact also checked off the statement as true. So far, so good.

One of the key strategies President Obama is utilizing in his reelection bid this year is to run against the “do-nothing Congress,” and on Fox News Sunday today, Chris Wallace asked House Speaker John Boehner to respond to that line of attack and the notion that Congress has been increasingly ineffective. Boehner argued that the focus of House Republicans over the past few months has been on job creation, and pointed to recent successes on the payroll tax cut and unemployment as evidence that Congress has been able to work with the president.

On his show today, Chris Matthews and panel discussed the very likely possibility of a Barack Obama-Mitt Romney showdown in the 2012 election, and amongst all the talk of class warfare and business experience, Matthews asked if American voters would embrace or resent Mitt Romney for his vast wealth and business ties given the anti-business climate in America encouraged by the Occupy Wall Street protests.

On This Week today, George Will claimed that if President Obama should be hoping that the Congressional supercommittee convened to come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget and deal with high unemployment will fail, because he can’t run against a do-nothing Congress in 2012 if the public sees Congress is actually doing something. Christiane Amanpour showed a new ABC/Washington Post poll that shows that President Obama and the Republican Congress are roughly given the same amount of trust, 40 percent, when it comes to the issue of job creation.

President Obama spoke this morning during an appearance at Georgetown Waterfront Park, bringing attention and support for his jobs plan known as the American Jobs Act. Most notably during his speech, the president mocked Congress for wasting precious time on resolutions about commemorative baseball coins and “reaffirming that ‘In God We Trust’ is our motto?’” making reference to last night’s House vote that passed with a vote of 369-9.

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sees it, Governor Rick Perry has a bit of a “campaign problem:” The man is bad at debates. Currently, a NYT/CBS News survey has him polling at 6 percent among the GOP candidates.

But, she says, he has a comeback plan.

In New Hamshire news being covered on The Rachel Maddow Show, the state is planning to hold a Republican primary in early December instead of in January or February as it usually does. This, announced Maddow, has the makings of Granite State / Rock feud (Rocky is an accepted nickname for people named Rachel, right? Sure it is.) because it means that Iowa will also have to have an earlier caucus, possibly as early as November and Americans will spend an entire year, pretty much, voting on its next president.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg made the news late last week when, during his weekly call-in radio appearance, he opined that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are attempting to “take the jobs away from people working in this city.” The Mayor then advised those participating in the protests to channel their collective frustration towards Washington instead of towards banks and corporations if they wanted to create some real, lasting changes.

And it would appear, judging from comments he made today during a press conference held at Bronx library, that the Mayor hasn’t changed his mind.

This morning during his weekly call-in radio appearance, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest unfolding in lower Manhattan (and, increasingly, in other U.S. cities), offering his take on the demonstrations. According to New York Times reporter Kate Taylor, Bloomberg summarized the protesters’ aims thusly: Later on in the [...]

In Miami town hall today, Mitt Romney told a town hall that he favors a tax policy that will help “those who have been hurt by the Obama economy,” and then suggested that he might be one of those suffering.

On Fox News Sunday this past weekend, Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan (R) was invited on to offer his early response to President Barack Obama’s revamped deficit reduction plan. It is set to include, among other provisions, $4 trillion in savings, $340 billion in Medicare / Medicaid reform, and $800 billion in revenue increases, which includes a new plan to ensure those in the highest tax bracket pay at least the same percentage of earnings as those in the middle class. Ryan said he’s trying to keep an open mind where this plan is concerned, but doesn’t know if “any good will come” out of a Democratic President attempting to “take on” entitlement programs like Medicare.

“From what he hear originally,” shared Ryan, “it looks like it’s just more price controls and reimbursement cuts to doctors and other health care providers, which simply leads to restricted access and denied care to seniors.” Ryan was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, wary of the President’s likely tax increase for the wealthy.

With the economic crisis– particularly the dire jobs situation– paramount in the headlines of what is wrong with the nation today, last night Bill O’Reilly dedicated a segment of his program to debating the faults of our infrastructure and the likelihood of President Obama doing anything about it. O’Reilly faced off with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on the amount of spending necessary, the former concluding that “pouring more money” into problems was simply not the solution.

Senator Jim DeMint paid a visit to On The Record last night, and had some pretty strong words for President Barack Obama. In fact, he told host Greta Van Susteren that the President is practicing “venture socialism,” and offered to work with him on some alternatives for creating jobs and pumping energy into the economy.

GOP leadership appears to have started something of a coordinated effort to present their alternative to President Obama‘s America Jobs Act presented last week during an address to a joint session of Congress. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today and didn’t just deride the White House jobs bill — though he was critical on what he deemed “class warfare” political rhetoric. Rather, Ryan presented his own plan and focused on some similarities to the White House plan. Could this be the beginning of a compromise?

Last week President Barack Obama presented a new plan to reinvigorate a stagnant economy and provide jobs for record unemployed with bill set to inject nearly $500 million into stalled engine that is the U.S. economy. This morning, he intends to give the “American Jobs Act” a proper political and media send-off by discussing this plan during a speech in the White House Rose Garden. Via the advances in streaming video technology, you can watch this live on your computer. I know…Amazing!

Not shockingly, Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West was not too thrilled with President Obama’s job creating proposal he put forth to Congress last Thursday. Speaking last night to Judge Andrew Napolitano, Rep. West noted that he agreed with some of the President’s ideas, but that the way he encouraged support was “absolutely offensive” to him.

Following tonight’s presidential address to a joint session of Congress, there were reports of encouraging signs that Republicans might actually consider working with President Obama on his American Jobs Act. That hope lasted about as long as a Kajagoogoo retrospective, as Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va) appeared on Fox’s Hannity show to provide a reading between the lines of Speaker John Boehner‘s tepid written statement: Republicans will take the tax cuts, and block the rest.

It’s finally here! President Obama’s much-anticipated, much wrangled-over speech before a joint session of Congress, in which he will deliver a plan to create jobs (a plan that was demanded by some of the same people who are skipping the speech) and jump-start the economy, kicks off tonight at 7:15pm EDT. Here is the President’s speech as prepared for delivery.

The stagnant U.S. economy (along with high unemployment rate) have become an enormous political football of in the last year. There’s no question that there are too many people who are out of work and hurting, but both the GOP and Democrats have seemed to made more effort to lay the responsibility for a bad economy on their opposition than actually pass legislation to help. Tonight, President Barack Obama is addressing a somewhat historic joint session of Congress to reveal his plan to spur the economy.

Ahead of President Obama‘s address to a joint session of Congress, the White House has released excerpts of the speech: (via email from The White House)

Excerpts of the President’s Speech on the American Jobs Act

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll released today reveals that more than half of Americans surveyed now disapprove of the job performance by President Obama. Roughly six out of ten have a negative view on the White House efforts to help the economy and create jobs. The only possible solace that the administration can take from this poll is that those polled still blame the GOP more than the president.

President Barack Obama used today’s Labor Day address to preview Thursday’s jobs speech and to ask the Republicans in Congress to put country before party. He did not, to the dismay of many, address Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa Jr.‘s remarks from earlier in the day wherein he rallied union workers to war with the Tea Party.

On Meet the Press today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters called for President Obama to take a more forceful approach to a jobs program, and likely made Republicans drop their jaws with the amount of money she argued the United States should invest in such a plan.