Tip off APE ORAL District 5A-15 C C boys basketball tourney begins DAILY BREEZE — SPORTS cape-coral-daily-breeze.com WEATHER: Partly Sunny • Tonight: Partly Cloudy • Thursday: Partly Sunny — 2A Vol. 48, No. 34 Wednesday, February 11, 2009 50 cents Stimulus plan focus of presidential visit By GRAY ROHRER
[email protected] An audience of 1,500 people greeted President Barack Obama with a sea of lofted cell phones and cameras Tuesday as he entered the Harborside Event Center in Fort Myers, clamoring President to capture a piece of local history. Barack Obama delivered a 20-minute Obama speech emphasizing the need for a speaks at the more than $800 billion economic town hall stimulus package and how it will affect Southwest Florida resi- meeting he dents, before taking questions held Tuesday from the audience. at the “We cannot afford to wait. I Harborside believe in hope, but I also believe Event Center in action,” Obama told the crowd. in Fort Myers. “We can’t afford to posture More photos and bicker and resort to the same are available failed ideas that got us into this online at: mess in the first place,” he added, cu.cape- prodding recalcitrant Republicans coral-daily- to support the stimulus package. Republican Gov. Charlie Crist breeze.com. embraced the bipartisan spirit advocated by Obama, and MICHAEL stressed how the stimulus could PISTELLA help Florida balance its budget and jump start infrastructure proj- ects. “We need to do this (pass the stimulus package) in a bipartisan way. Helping the country should be about helping the country, not partisan politics,” Crist said before introducing the president.