[Hoot Gibson]

Hoot, we certainly can tie employment statistics directly to economy, but what I am seeing directly is the increase in corporate investing. Business investment has increased for the 3rd consecutive quarter. Business investing is a sure sign that a level of confidence is beginning to show. If investing is increasing, directly tied to that is business increases. The history that I have followed is that hiring will follow, not immediately, but it will come.

This has been the slowest recovery of my lifetime. Obama wants us to believe that the recovery has been so slow because the recession was so deep - but in the past, deep recessions were always followed by fast, robust recoveries.

I don't doubt that the economy is slowly recovering because it has nowhere to go but up. What I do doubt is that the recovery would have been so weak under any other president, including the bumbling, incompetent Jimmy Carter. Not only that, by becoming the first American president to post $ trillion+ deficit for each of his four years in office, Obama is making the job of rehabilitating America's business climate much more difficult for his successors.