I believe your post 110%....I do get it.....I've been there. In early 2009 right after I lost my job I ran into an aquaintance that used to make a good living selling real estate and he was working in the grocery store deli. And I am not just pointing at the elephants.....but it sure seems like the elephants never acknowledge a damn thing about their own repsonsibilities for this mess. Until we all get together this will be an insurmountable challenge.
And just when did the donkeys "acknowledge a damn thing about their own repsonsibilities"? Just answer that one question Dave.
The donkeys in the Senate can't even pass a budget. All they can do is vote to spend money we don't have. Dodd and Barney Frank are not running for reelection. That's because they could never convince enough dunderheads that they had nothing to do with the bank crisis and it was all the fault of the elephants.
Until we have leadership that has the faintest idea how the free enterprise system works and how true job creation is achieved this will be an insurmountable challenge.... This leadership has gone through an entire term in office without so much as providing one budget to its citizens....not one. This leadership has spent more time blaming the role of their predecessors on the problem than on seeking policy actions to solve them....until this leadership realizes that their actions to date have made the problem worse and created even greater impediments to growth this will be an insurmountable challenge...... Simply put, until these incompetents are shown the door this will be an insurmountable challenge....another four years is one of the greatest threats we have faced as a society in generations.....
Grim Milestone: As Americans Suffer, President Poised to Surpass 100 Rounds of Golf This Weekend Home - by Cardigan - June 4, 2012 - 15:00 America/New_York - 4 Comments Flopping Aces Other than retirees, who has time for 100 rounds of golf over the course of three-and-a-half years? Apparently our beloved president does, since there are no pressing matters of national concern, least of all the economy and endemic joblessness. According to Keith Koffler, last week the President completed his 98th (documented) round of golf. White House watchers anticipate that by the end of this weekend, the president may well have completed his 100th round of golf since becoming president.
Grim Milestone: As Americans Suffer, President Poised to Surpass 100 Rounds of Golf This Weekend Home - by Cardigan - June 4, 2012 - 15:00 America/New_York - 4 Comments Flopping Aces Other than retirees, who has time for 100 rounds of golf over the course of three-and-a-half years? Apparently our beloved president does, since there are no pressing matters of national concern, least of all the economy and endemic joblessness. According to Keith Koffler, last week the President completed his 98th (documented) round of golf. White House watchers anticipate that by the end of this weekend, the president may well have completed his 100th round of golf since becoming president.
When he's not on the course he's on the road attending fund raisers. He spent all weekend in Chicago raising money and interrupting ground and air traffic. When he's in the White House it's for important things like meeting with the NCAA champion Alabama football team. IF he's meeting with congressional leaders or department heads, I missed it.
I read the other day that he has met with the director of the DEA exactly one time since he was sworn in. I guess we don't have a drug problem in the United States.
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Obama: “The Economy Needs To Be Strengthened, That’s Why I Had a Press Conference”… Oh boy. Via ABC News: With Republicans seizing upon remarks he made earlier in the day that “the private sector is doing fine” – arguing that they show a president out of touch with an ailing economy — President Obama sought to clarify his remarks Friday afternoon. [...] Decrying the “political games” that in his view necessitated the further elucidation, the president said “if you look at what I said this morning” what he was specifically addressed was that “we’ve actually seen some good momentum in the private sector. That has not been the biggest drag on the economy.” “So let me be as clear as I can be: the economy needs to be strengthened,” the president said, “that’s why I had a press conference. I believe that there are a lot of Americans who are hurting right now, which is what I’ve been saying for the last year, two years, three years. What I’ve been saying since I came into office. And the question then is what are we going to do about it?”
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Please Excuse My President Home - by Cardigan - June 12, 2012 - 15:00 America/New_York - 2 Comments Commentary Few things are more difficult in politics than confronting failure and learning from it. It is especially difficult when a leader you have championed, and in whom you have placed your highest hopes, turns out to be less than he seemed. Such is the dilemma facing liberals in the age of Obama. Barack Obama entered the presidency with his sights and standards very high, and many liberals believed he could be the transformative figure they had been awaiting for generations. But by now it is clear that, by any reasonable measure (including those set out by Obama himself at the beginning of his term), his presidency has been a failure. Consider the economy. President Obama has overseen the weakest recovery on record. He is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The standard of living for Americans has fallen more dramatically during his presidency than during any since the government began recording it five decades ago. As of this writing, unemployment has been above 8 percent for 38 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago. A record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty. The economist Michael Boskin has listed some of the post–World War II records set during the Obama years: among them, federal spending as a percentage of GDP at 25 percent, the federal debt as a percentage of GDP at 67 percent, and the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP at 10 percent. The United States has amassed more than $5 trillion in debt since January 2009, with the president having submitted four budgets with trillion-dollar-plus deficits. (Prior to Obama, no president had submitted even a single budget with deficits in excess of a trillion dollars.) In addition, government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history. Add to this the fact that the president’s signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is among the most unpopular major domestic policies passed in the last century; and that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, widely known as Obama’s stimulus package, is so unpopular that his aides have virtually expelled the word stimulus from their lexicon. The president’s critics are eager to offer their explanations of his shortcomings, but what can his supporters say? Three new books, each by authors favorably disposed to Obama, attempt to explain the declining arc of his presidency. Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages) and David Corn’s Showdown (William Morrow, 432 pages) offer a behind-the-scenes look at the Obama White House. Scheiber focuses exclusively on the president’s economic team, and Corn covers everything from debt-ceiling negotiations to the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the third book, Overreach (Princeton University Press, 248 pages), presidential scholar George C. Edwards III provides a more academic and detached analysis of Obama’s failures and tries to put them in perspective.
Video: Obama Brags About America’s Unemployment Rate Being Above 8%… Aren’t we lucky? <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OeqPHGN2-0s?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Majority of Independents Believe Obama’s Policies Have Made it Harder for Americans to Gain Employment Fundamental transformation, just as he promised. (Reuters) — With President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney delivering dueling visions for the U.S. economy in speeches on Thursday, a majority of independents said that Obama’s policies have made it harder for Americans to gain employment, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday. Fifty-two percent of independents said they agreed with the idea that the president has not helped create more jobs in America, an argument central to Romney’s campaign. Obama appears to have trouble convincing some members of his own party that his administration has been good for jobs: 29 percent of Democrats said they agreed with the claim that he has not been a job creator. With the unemployment rate at 8.1 percent, the Obama campaign maintains that 4.2 million private-sector jobs have been created since he entered office in January 2009, although roughly as many have been lost. “I think the thing that Obama’s team is going to be worried about is the number of independents who agree that the policies the president has put in place make it harder to create jobs,” said Ipsos pollster Chris Jackson. “The key conversation is convincing them that the things he has done have helped the economy or not certainly made things worse.” Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, argues that the Obama administration’s healthcare reform has been bad for the economy, a view that now resonates with a majority of people. Among registered voters, 57 percent said that they believe the healthcare overhaul has damaged the economy while 43 percent said the 2010 legislation has been good for the economy. At the same time, Obama’s call for an economy that gives everyone a “fair shot,” a message he delivered in an address in Ohio on Thursday, received wide support. Among Democrats, 84 percent agreed with the pledge and 66 percent of Republicans supported it as well. “The language Obama is using is much more unifying, something that more people agree with,” Jackson said. “Americans on both side on the aisle think that fairness is something important.”
Counter Revolution Home - by Cardigan - June 18, 2012 - 11:15 America/New_York - 5 Comments Doug Ross These are the miners waiting for their last paycheck after new EPA regulations went into effect, forcing thousands of layoffs. The agency’s rules are forcing “utilities across America to abandon coal as a fuel for power generation” according to Pennsylvania State Senator Tim Solobay, a Democrat. These are some of the 2,500 Sallie Mae employees who were laid off in 2010 after the federal government took over the student loan industry. Tens of thousands of additional private sector employees also lost their jobs after the industry was nationalized. These are the doctors who quit their profession after Obamacare prohibited them from building clinics, MRI imaging centers or hospitals. The nationalized health care bill controls one-sixth of the American economy; even if it is struck down by the Supreme Court this month, much of its damage will have already been done
Congressional Report: Obama Admin Spent $10 Billion To Create 355 “Green” Jobs Per Year… <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ig4jbcU9db0?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0"></iframe> Via WFB: The Obama administration spent $10 billion to create 355 renewable energy jobs per year, according to testimony offered Tuesday before Congress by a Congressional Research Services expert. Asked by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) “how many jobs were created” in 2009 and 2010 under the 1603 renewable energy grant program authorized by the Obama administration, a CRS specialist in public finance admitted that $10 billion was spent to create 3,666 construction jobs over a two-year period — and only 355 jobs per year going forward. Dr. Molly Sherlock, the CRS specialist, first said the jobs total would depend on the type of job — and differentiated between “induced,” “direct,” and “indirect” jobs — before Gardner asked for a straight number. “I just want to know how many jobs were created,” Gardner said during the hearing. “If you’re looking at the direct jobs, this one estimate has direct jobs created at 3,666 in the construction phase, and direct jobs created at 355,” Sherlock said. “Direct jobs would just be the construction jobs and the ongoing operations and maintenance jobs. But if you wanted to look at the supporting jobs in other industries then you’d want to look at the other figures.”
Obama Admin Desperately Tries To Spin Dismal Jobs Report: Hey, At Least The Economy Is Still Growing… The unemployment rate is still 8.2% with the second quarter marking the weakest three-month period in two years. Case closed. Via Politico 44: The White House took an optimistic view of the June jobs report on Friday, saying that overall unemployment is down nearly one percentage point over the past year. “The economy has now added private sector jobs for 28 straight months, for a total of 4.4 million payroll jobs during that period,” Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a statement. “Employment is growing but it is not growing fast enough given the jobs deficit caused by the deep recession.” The jobs report showed the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 8.2 percent in June, while the economy added 80,000 jobs, roughly the same as in May.