Tuesday, January 10, 2012
‘Obama’ is how you spell relief
By Wesley Pruden
Conservatives are fractured, split and mad at each other, brawling like Democrats. There’s only one man who can unify the movement. Fortunately for the Grumpy Old Party, Barack Obama is available, ready and eager.
By mid-March, we’ll have muddled through most of the primaries and caucuses (cauci?), and by then the Republicans will know who their nominee will be, even if he won’t be crowned until the party meets in convention assembled in Tampa in late August.
Soon the cannibalism will abate, and the fun begins. The venom will be aimed at the president, who will fire back with toxins of his own. The camps of the candidates, each heavily armed, will be evenly matched.
The weight of President Obama’s fantasies keeps the economy mired in a mud of low expectations.
“It’s the economy, stupid,” but even Stupid can see the economy against a backdrop of presidential incompetence at home and timidity abroad. Over the weekend, Newt Gingrich continued to pound Mitt Romney, to “slow him down” so he could “expose” him (though not necessarily by stealing his pants). Ken Starr, the Watergate prosecutor, scolded anyone who won’t vote for a Mormon just because he’s a Mormon, and pointedly said he wasn’t endorsing Mr. Romney. He must have been talking about Jon Huntsman, who scolded his fellow Mormon for injecting “partisanship” into the campaign. Horrors! Partisanship in an election campaign? Who would have thought it? Ron Paul was chased out of Moe Joe’s Diner in New Hampshire by scrambling reporters intent on doing harm. Dan Rather (remember him?) says Barack Obama would lose the election if it were held today. The silly season is hard upon us, and it’s only January.
But soon we’ll have to take ourselves seriously, and the economy will still be job one. The government’s numbers continue the dreary downward trend Mr. Obama introduced soon after his inauguration three years ago, and the weight of his fantasies keeps the economy mired in a mud of low expectations.
The latest numbers revealed 200,000 new jobs for Americans last month, and the jobless rate, which was bumping 10 percent only a few months ago, dropped for the second month in a row. Any good news is better than bad news, but the news hidden in the government’s numbers for December was bad indeed. The unemployment number is the least reliable indicator of the health of the economy.
Over the past 30 months, the number of available workers has declined by more than 840,000—dropping by 170,000 in just the past two months. The number of Americans employed or looking for work—what the economists call “the labor force participation rate”—has fallen to 64 percent of the population. Adjusted for this unusually unhappy rate, the unemployment figure is more than 11 percent. No good news here.
There’s even worse news in the small print, which is why the remorseless stock-market indicators declined when the numbers came out on Friday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates a “real unemployment rate,” which includes workers with part-time often ragtag jobs, and the workers who have simply given up the job search, at 15.2 percent. This is not bad news, but catastrophic news, not just for the discouraged and underemployed but lethal for an incumbent president organizing his re-election campaign.
The skeptical Wall Street reaction to the news recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous definition of a struggling economy: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” Update that and you can see the rock and the hard place squeezing Barack Obama.
This is the killer issue the Republicans must exploit to win when they finally find their man. There’s no sign of a happy warrior in sight, among either the Republicans or the Democrats, but soon, when primary and caucus have produced a nominee by relentlessly eliminating the chaff from the wheat, it will be game on, and a very different game than the one we’ve seen.
Alan Krueger, the president’s top economic adviser, spins the new government figures as providing “further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal,” that only the failed Obama economic policies can help the country “dig our way out of the deep hole.” Alas, the only thing anyone can accomplish by digging to get out of a hole is a deeper hole.
In fact, the only way Mr. Obama can make mediocre economic news look good, observes Investors Business Daily, is to set expectations “so low that even a tiny step forward seems like a giant leap.” That’s not much of a strategy.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Monday, January 9, 2012
This will make your Blood Boil..............
Click on link near the bottom to verify.
Michelle Obama Listed Daughters As “Senior Staffers” on African "vacation"
Can you believe this?
Now, if a Republican would do something like this, the press would be all over it and yapping about it for weeks.
Michelle Obama Listed Daughters As “Senior Staffers” To Justify Expensive African Vacation And Safari • October 5, 2011 The most accountable administration evah:
Judicial Watch said the U.S. Air Force provided a C-32 – a Boeing 757 modified by the military for the purpose of flying big-wigs around the world – to fly the First Lady and her entourage to and from Africa , at a cost of $424,142. Another $928.44 was listed as the cost of providing 192 meals for the 21 people who made the trip The Obama daughters were listed on the manifest as “senior staff.” “This trip was as much an opportunity for the Obama family to go on a safari as it was a trip to conduct government business,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This junket wasted tax dollars and the resources of our overextended military. No wonder we had to sue to pry loose this information.” I missed this story yesterday, but it’s worthy of our attention. The nation is suffering with the economy sputtering, the national debt soaring and Obama’s economic rescue policies not only failing but actively making things worse.
Meanwhile, the First Lady justifies an expensive trip to Africa to take a vacation and safari with her daughters by saying it’s “official business” and even going so far as to list her children as “staffers.” The level of arrogance and dishonesty on display here is nothing short of shocking. But, er, “hope for change” and “yes we can..
It’s a true story... See link:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/10/michelle-obama-listed-daughters-malia-and-sasha-as-senior-staffers-for-432142-african-trip/
AFTER TWO YEARS OF OBAMA....HERE'S YOUR CHANGE
January 2009
TODAY
% chg
Source
Avg.. Retail price/gallon gas in U.S.
$1.83
$3.44
84%
1
Crude oil, European Brent (barrel)
$43..48
$99..02
127.7%
2
Crude oil, West TX Inter. (barrel)
$38..74
$91..38
135.9%
2
Gold: London (per troy oz.)
$853.25
$1,369.50
60.5%
2
Corn, No.2 yellow, Central IL
$3.56
$6.33
78.1%
2
Soybeans, No. 1 yellow, IL
$9.66
$13..75
42.3%
2
Sugar, cane, raw, world, lb. Fob
$13..37
$35..39
164.7%
2
Unemployment rate, non-farm, overall
7.6%
9.4%
23.7%
3
Unemployment rate, blacks
12.6%
15.8%
25.4%
3
Number of unemployed
11,616,000
14,485,000
24.7%
3
Number of fed. Employees
2,779,000
2,840,000
2.2%
3
Real median household income
$50,112
$49,777
-0.7%
4
Number of food stamp recipients
31,983,716
43,200,878
35.1%
5
Number of unemployment benefit recipients
7,526,598
9,193,838
22.2%
6
Number of long-term unemployed
2,600,000
6,400,000
146.2%
3
Poverty rate, individuals
13.2%
14.3%
8.3%
4
People in poverty in U.S.
39,800,000
43,600,000
9.5%
4
U.S.. Rank in Economic Freedom World Rankings
5
9
n/a
10
Present Situation Index
29.9
23.5
-21.4%
11
Failed banks
140
164
17.1%
12
U.S.. Dollar versus Japanese yen exchange rate
89.76
82.03
-8.6%
2
U.S.. Money supply, M1, in billions
1,575.1
1,865.7
18.4%
13
U.S.. Money supply, M2, in billions
8,310.9
8,852.3
6.5%
13
National debt, in trillions
$10..627
$14..052
32.2%
14
Sources: (1) U.S. Energy Information Administration; (2) Wall Street Journal; (3) Bureau of Labor Statistics; (4) Census Bureau; (5) USDA; (6) U.S. Dept. Of Labor;
(7) FHFA; (8) Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller; (9) RealtyTrac; (10) Heritage Foundation and WSJ; (11) The Conference Board; (12) FDIC;
(13) Federal Reserve; (14) U.S. Treasury
Here’s my 20 +. Mostly agree with all this, but let’s put it in the form of an amendment to the Constitution, otherwise they’ll just sneak in changes again in the future.
Subj: Congressional perk fixes
Winds of Change....
Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise.
In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.
_*Congressional Reform Act of 2011*_
1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.
If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Don't you think it's time?
THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!
If you agree with the above, pass it on
Sunday, January 8, 2012
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