strings attached. we're keeping them honest tonight. also, in a moment, we'll take you live to a town that's still under warde, and you'll hear from a man who has been stranded by hurricane irene and he says forgotten by fema. rising waters leaving him surrounded. roads are gone. nearby houses gone as well. power is out. supplies are still limited. he says he hasn't seen a government official or fema worker and only local sheriffs trying to deal with the problem. he joins us shortly by phone. breaking news tonight. late word that president obama will hit hard hit patterson new jersey over the weekend. flood warnings in effect for the area up and down the east coast in fact days after rain from hurricane irene first began falling. susan candiotti is in the middle of it in little falls, new jersey. susan, parts of little falls have been evacuated. what's the latest on the flooding there? >> reporter: just to give you a sense of where i am standing on the ledge of one of those vacuum cleaners at a car wash now dipping into the water so you can see how high the water is. putting this piece of paper in there to show you how fast the current is flowing. it's cold here. yeah. there are, like, 18,000 people in new jersey who have remained evacuated. 3,500 of them remain right here in this county. they are out of their homes and they don't like it. anderson, you know what? this is like the third time for some of these people they have been out of their homes this year. first time for a hurricane. two other times because of just bad storms. >> you went around the town in a boat today. what did you see? >> reporter: well, there's a street right down here that's a dead ender and someone who has a rowboat with a motor attached to it, we went down there. you know, the homes have water halfway up in many cases. there are some where you see garages where they left the doors open and it almost looks like the homes are on stilts because the water went all of the way in. we went back there with one man who lived here for about 15 years. he said he's never seen it this bad. i asked him what he saw about seeing his house for the first time, he said i don't have the words to describe it. it's just that bad. >> a lot of people there also have been refusing to evacuate. how are they handling it? >> reporter: yeah. i talked to a lot of those people, too. you know, they say we've been through this. i refuse to leave my house. we have flood insurance. a lot of them are simply worried about looting for both themselves and their neighbors. but there's a strong police presence out here. we've seen police turning people back if it looks like they don't belong. your heart goes out to everyone not leaving. >> any idea when the floodwaters might start to recede or fully go away? >> reporter: they hope it will be by this weekend when people might start to be able to come back in where the waters are the highest. some people already started the cleanup. they are going to have a rough go of it. >> susan, appreciate the reporting. thanks very much. i want to tell you about the situation in vermont now. they haven't seen things this bad since 1927. crews have been working hard reopening dozens of roads but people are still stranded from back on sunday including the man you're about to meet. todd trazaskosis stuck in a small town of gaysville. i spoke to him a short time ago. todd, you say there are a couple hundred people essentially stranded in your area. what's the situation now? >> essentially the same as it has been for the last several days since the water came through. a bunch of the major roads have been cut by the flow and local guys are slowly getting it together, at least around the bridges and culverts that had problems. there's a lot of activity from the local contractors. basically, any farmer way front loader is trying to clear roads. >> it's hard for people who are who aren't familiar with the region to be stuck in an area with roads being impassable. how is everyone holding up? >> caller: generally everyone has been pretty well. i know state troopers organized something where they were getting prescription medicine dropped in. not everyone has a generator. we do. so do the neighbors. that's why people have come up our way. we're housing someone's whose house the river went through and a couple people next door whose bridge went out and there's a landslide up to the house. we emptied the house out yesterday completely because it won't be safe. they're not staying there. it won't stay on the hillside. >> have you heard from fema or state, local officials? >> just local folks. i haven't seen anyone further up the chain than the local persons. i've been out busy doing things. there's a local meeting every day at the end of the bridge now where we get updates. people are calming on their own and trying to talk to insurance people. you know, it's going to be a slow process, because there's not a lot of good cell service in the valley. i'm up on this foot trail that we cut because it's got a good spot where i get a decent signal. we get something at the house but it isn't always reliable. >> you had to hike up a trail to get cell service to talk to us. a lot of the homes in the area were washed away in the flooding. does everyone have some kind of shelter at this point? >> caller: i think everyone at this point has been accounted for. that's the big job we did the first day making sure the neighbors we knew were where they were supposed to be. that they had gotten out safely. even yesterday i got to phone somebody who hadn't been able to talk to the outside. their relatives were, of course, worried, and we've been passing messages for folks. if anybody needs a shower when the generator's running we can get them into the mix. >> todd, i wish you the best. we'll check in with you and i hope the folks that need medication are getting it regularly. as you said, the state troopers were trying to make that happen. we'll check in with you again. thanks, todd. keeping them honest now -- hurricane and flooding damage could break the bank for fema. funding it is turning into a mess. leading congressional republicans say they want to pay for disaster relief by cutting money elsewhere in the budgets. offsets. today governor chris christie of new jersey had sharp words for those in washington with that idea and those who support it. >> nobody was asking about offsetting budget cuts in joplin. i don't want to hear the fact that offsetting budget cuts come first before new jersey citizens are taken care of. so you want to figure out budget cuts, that's fine. you want it to turn into a fiasco like that debt limit thing. where they're fighting with each other for eight or nine weeks and you expect the citizens of my state to wait? they're not going to wait and i'll make sure they don't. >> governor christie is taking aim at house republican leaders mainly majority leader eric cantor pushing for those offsets. >> the federal government does have a role in situations like this when there's a disaster there's an appropriate federal role. we'll find the moneys. we've had discussions about these things before. those moneys will be offset with appropriate savings or cost cutting elsewhere in order to meet the priority of the federal government's role in a situation like this. >> keeping them honest tonight. in other situations like this, congressman cantor has had a very different plan. just give us the money. that was his plan before. this is damage from tropical storm gaston which hit congressman cantor's district in richmond, virginia, back in 2004. the congressman sent out a press release back then after funding arrived with no offset budget cuts. it reads the magnitude of the damage suffered by the richmond area is beyond what the commonwealth can handle and that's is where i asked the president to make federal funds available for the citizens affected by gaston. the president then was george w. bush and the house was controlled by republicans. he wasn't talking about offsets then. a year later after hurricane katrina hit, a got colleague proposed an amendment that would tie relief cut to spending cuts doing precisely what congressman cantor now wants to do. back then, the congressman had a different view and he voted no on putting any strings on disaster relief. what's changed between then and now? between it being in his district and being in new jersey and vermont? well, the budget deficit is also larger and national debt is bigger but the political climate is also different. again, keeping them honest. this has never been much of a partisan political issue before. "the new york times" citing research by senate democrats showing that congress has approved 33 emergency appropriations for fema dating back to 1989, and none of them called for budget cuts elsewhere to pay for them. as for congressman cantor, his office declined our invitation to come on the program tonight and when we asked specifically what the congressman would cut to pay for emergency funding, his spokesman also declined to give an answer. he says any discussion of cuts would be in his words hypothetical. i spoke earlier with republican strategists and democrat strategists. is eric cantor being hypocritical here? back when the hurricane hit his district, he wasn't calling for offset for federal disaster money. >> of course he's being hypocritical. more than that, he's being political. he's a very smart guy. i can't say he's playing this because he's dumb. he must see political angle here. i frankly don't. it's an enormous risk here. not only did he support aid for his district which was necessary when tropical storm gaston hit a couple years ago, he also has voted for, my count, $50 billion of rebuilding aid for iraq and $56 billion of rebuilding aid for afghanistan with no offsets and he's voted for $40 billion over ten years in aid to oil companies. subsidies for oil companies. so i suppose the people who have been hit by the hurricane have two options. either hope that cheney and bush invade them, and then eric cantor will send them aid, or corporate oil companies, because eric cantor supports aid to oil companies as well but not american citizens hit by a hurricane. >> alex, what about that? using fema to push for spending cuts during the debt ceiling fight, this now just the agreed upon tactic of using one issue to fight another battle? is that going to be the way business is done now in washington? >> i'm not sure that it's just a political point or a politically useful issue. i think the president here is blaming the atm machine for not giving him any money when he drained the bank account. this is the president who spent $1 trillion on a similar law that didn't work and a health care bill that america doesn't want. now he keeps saying let's spend money we don't have. all republicans say this is important. great. let's take $6 billion we're throwing away on ethanol right now and use it for something more important. >> not all republicans are saying that. mcdonnell and chris christie attacking the candidates, saying now is not the time to start a big fight over spending cuts in terms of disaster assistance. >> in a trillion dollar budget, something in washington has to be less important than helping the people that we saw with homes flood and homes destroyed. i think that's what you can get support for in congress. if it's that important and it is it why did the president spend all the money? >> paul, what about that? what's wrong with an offset for federal spending? >> for emergency spending you don't have an offset because here's the tricky part, it's an emergency, alex. look, there's a regular order of these thing, and we should have budget debates through the normal budget process. should we subsidize oil companies the way that eric cantor wants to do? should we spend billions and billions rebuilding afghanistan and iraq with no offsets but no money rebuilding america. those are the kind of debates you can have in the regular order. when there's an emergency, what do you do? americans drop everything and go to help people who are in need. that's what cantor should be doing. >> paul and i are going to agree on this. you should have money saved away for a rainy day and the president should have thought of that and the democrat shos have thought of that when they spent a trillion on stimulus and a trillion on health care and we didn't have and now that rainy day has come and we don't have it. >> i got to say i helped the president balance the budget -- >> you can tell the atm it's an emergency and it still won't have the money. >> excuse me for talking while you're interrupting. but i helped the president balance the budget. i know what it takes. frankly the republicans don't. they are the ones who squaundrd excuse me. they squandered the clinton surplus. they did it, here's how. tax cuts for the rich which we could easily repeal if we need the money and i think we do. subsidies for oil companies and other corporations. a war against a country, iraq, that was no threat to america. we could -- we should revisit these republican parties. when a republican talks about deficits to me, it's like an arsonist complaining about the fire department. it's not the fault of the people who are hit by a hurricane. come on. >> please, no. it's not fair to say that republicans are saying it's anybody's fault. we're just saying the bank account is drained. let's find the money somewhere. if democrats are going into the next election saying there's nowhere in the federal government that we can find a few dollars to help people in need, that there's nothing that's less important than that, and republicans are going into the next election saying, hey, let's try to act like we're broke because we are, then i think that's the advantage that will go to the republicans. so knock yourself out. >> alex, should eric cantor proposing these offsets, should it be part of his responsibility to least list his priorities for what he would cut in order to do these offsets? >> i think republicans have demonstrated a lot of willingness to do that. anderson, i think that's a good point. >> can we ask cantor's office? they haven't listed specifics. >> but during the debt ceiling debate for example, republicans were more than willing to prioritize spending. i think that would be a great place to get democrats and republicans together on the hill and say, let's prioritize this stuff, because we've run out of money. >> paul, republicans are saying, look, we send democrat controlled senate a fema funding bill and they left town for the month. >> fine. whatever. these people are hurting. we need to help them. i'm serious. no. like, come on. they left on their vacation. seriously, whatever. when a storm hits, people need help. they need help right away. they don't need help because they're democrats. they don't need help because they're republicans. they're american citizens who are suffering damage through no fault of their own. what is really going on i suspect is an insidious thing where the republicans are trying to discredit government. when they ran fema they discredited it and it is run by competent people. by the way, the guy who runs it was an appointee of george bush's brother, jeb bush, and now fema is doing a good job, and they want to defund it. i think really what they want to show is that the government cannot help you when in fact it can when there's an emergency and we need to help our neighbors. >> if i can offer a slightly different point of view. i don't think republicans are trying to discredit government. it's done a good job of that by itself. republicans aren't saying don't help people. they're saying, where's the money? there has to be priorities. it's time for washington to start acting like grown-ups. i'm isha sesay with break breaking news -- president obama wants to unvairl his new jobs program but house speaker boehner nixed his request to speak wednesday night. we'll have details on the speech showdown next. breaking news when the president can have his speech. next thursday instead of wednesday, his first choice. after a war of words over the speech request. it started this afternoon when the house speaker snubbed the president of the united states perhaps for the first time in history. this week a spokesman accused the white house of ignoring decades if not centuries of protocol and what republicans call an effort to one-up the gop. in case you wondered what all the gainsmanship and game playing and petty politics is about, jobs. not politics. jobs. new numbers tonight show the private sector created fewer than 100,000 jobs this month. president obama requested time to speak to congress wednesday night to lay out his new jobs plan, but the day he asked for would preempt a gop debate. so speaker boehner's office made a counteroffer for the following night, opening night for the nfl. the white house says speaker boehner was informed about the address. boehner spokesman said he wasn't consulted. now president obama agreed to just move the speech to thursday. joining us with more, chief white house correspondent jessica yellin and on the phone, democratic strategist paul ra gall la and eric ericsson, and jessica, if i can start with you, we heard from white house press secretary jay carney saying wednesday was the day. it was the right day, the right time. now the white house is backing down. what are your sources telling you tonight? >> reporter: first of all, if they're going to address a joint session of congress, there are only two days next week to do it. wednesday or thursday. the only two dates both house, in session. so the white house says they picked the first date. clearly, there is a disadvantage to going thursday, as you point out, the nfl is there, playing then. one white house official says this whole flap was silly. that's what they told me. and they would have been happy to go thursday, had the speaker's office said originally that's what they would have preferred. the bottom line is, this is clearly a case of bad communication, of ugly, bad -- bad communication between them, but also bad feelings between the two offices right now, and not a sign of good things to come as they try to actually work out a jobs plan which as you point out is the main theme here going forward. >> indeed. paul, i've got to ask you. this does it make the president look weak, though? >> reporter: well, yes. but until the speech comes. if the speech is strong the president will look strong. this little tit for tat today, jessica yellin has it right, she's a terrific reporter. it's classic sort of miscommunication. it is the sort of thing that has never happened in my memory. i used to work for the house majority leader who was a democrat when we had a republican president and i worked for a democratic president with a republican speaker. you work these things out. the fact that the speaker right away kind of went to the airwaves and the fact that apparently the president's staff didn't carefully vet the date with the speaker, it really is a shame. it's going to be a great football game, but hopefully the president can get his jobs speech in before kickoff. >> eric erickson, to jessica's point that it doesn't bode well ahead of this jobs plan, isn't this exactly what american people are sick of, this bickering and the lack of bipartisanship in washington? >> yeah, they are sick of it. i think they're sick of politicians in washington flat out giving speeches now regardless of party. i think people are kind of tired of the speeches. yeah, i completely agree with jessica and paul both on this, that it is dined kind of a sill affair. there have been these incidents in the past. the last one i could find was actually woodrow wilson back in the 19-teens, who had given an address to congr