President Obama on Jay Leno Tonight Show

“Stunned is the word,”President Obama said last night in an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
Obama supporters camped out overnight outside the NBC Studios in Burbank hoping to score the hottest ticket in town.
The president is capping off his first presidential visit to the golden state with a stop on late night TV.

While he’s been on the tonight show as a candidate, this will be the first time a sitting president has ever appeared on the show.



“It’s almost like barack obama is using late night to give us all a little hug before we go to sleep at night,“ said Robert Thompson, Professor of TV and pop culture at Syracuse University.
President Obama began his 2-day visit to southern California in republican territory in Orange County.

More than a thousand people turned out to hear him speak at a town hall meeting.
The trip is part of a continuing campaign style approach by the president to take his message and agenda to the public.

Obama for the fourth consecutive day addressed the furor over $165 million in bonuses paid by AIG after it received a total of $173 billion in federal bailout funds. He learned of the payments March 12, according to an administration timeline.

Obama said that while it was necessary to rescue the troubled insurance giant, “the question is, who in their right mind, when your company is going bust, decides we’re going to be paying a whole bunch of bonuses to people.” He vowed to try to get the money returned for taxpayers.

He again expressed confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has come under fire from some lawmakers in Congress for not blocking AIG from paying the bonuses.

Geithner, Obama said, is doing his job “with grace and good humor and he understands that he’s on the hot seat. But I actually think that he’s taking the right steps and we’re going to have the economy back on the move.”

Frustration in Congress

A vote last night in the U.S. House to impose a 90 percent tax on employee bonuses at the New York-based insurer and other companies that received taxpayer bailouts shows the “frustrations” of lawmakers and the public, he said.
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