One way of thinking about the administration’s approach is that it reflects a passive-aggressive attitude. Congress obliges the president to make a decision, so he makes one, but he also makes clear that it isn’t really a decision and he doesn’t appreciate being rushed. The administration’s approach to the economy has been consistently passive-aggressive. First it was “we inherited this mess.” Then, as time passed and that claim became decreasingly plausible, the bad economy became the fault of the “do-nothing Congress.”

Obama’s supporters in the media likewise try to shift responsibility away from the president. And while they sometimes have a point–the president’s power over the economy is limited–the passive-aggressive approach is even used to explain away Obama’s policy decisions.

I wanted to make sure people saw this one… What a hypocrite.

Oh… and maybe Paul Krugman needs to pay attention.

thanks to our brave men and women in uniform, al Qaeda is weaker than it’s ever been, and Osama bin Laden will never again walk the face of this Earth.  That’s what change is.

So… evidently change is doing exactly what any sane president would have done?  Come again?

The problem with that narrative is that the number of bridges that are in bad shape has been falling steadily over time. The nation’s bridges appear to be in better condition than ever, as indicated by data from the Federal Highway Administration.

via Is Our Infrastructure Crumbling? – By Veronique de Rugy – The Corner – National Review Online.

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons–but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown.

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind Krugman’s Army, as the “Occupy Wall Street” protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

via The Left’s Nervous Breakdown – WSJ.com.

The highly interventionist liberal experiment of the last two and a half years has been a spectacular failure, with 14 million Americans out of work, sliding consumer confidence, collapsing house prices, and falling stock markets.

 

This is why Barack Obama could well end up being the last big government president of the United States, a nation that simply cannot afford the lavish excesses of an imperious presidency that drains the pay-checks of hard-working Americans with impunity and reckless abandon. The historic loss of faith in the federal government under Obama has combined with growing support across America for a return to the limited government ideals of the Founding Fathers. Nothing is ever certain in politics, but it is hard to see how a future president can shamelessly adopt the same borrow, bailout and spend approach zealously adopted by the current administration, without extremely damaging consequences for the United States.

It has become increasingly clear to any who originally doubted the predictions of many on the right that the trillions in dollars in stimulus spending… loans to ‘green energy’ companies… and wall street bailouts have NOT accomplished what they were purported to… and have added a crushing debt burden that will undoubtedly stifle future growth. Solyndra loans were given without due dilligence… spent to invest in technology the private sector wouldn’t (without wondering WHY the private sector decided not to in the first place)… and now we have a huge mess on our hands.

At what point should we hold Washington Democrats responsible for this failure of judgement?!  2012 cannot come soon enough.

via Why Barack Obama could be America’s last big government president – Telegraph Blogs.

…Obama’s most recent budget calls for adding $9.5 trillion in new debt over the next decade. If you got rid of the “accelerated depreciation” of corporate jets, Reuters economics columnist James Pethokoukis calculates, it would save a whopping .03 percent of that total.

…No one asked the president why he suddenly cares so much about getting rid of a tax break he himself was for before he was against it. Indeed, no one asked why, if it is such an affront to the liberal conscience, it was part of Obama’s stimulus bill, which was passed without any Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate (which means Nancy Pelosi voted for special tax breaks for corporate jets and the GOP didn’t).

When these are the facts… its kind of hard to take Obama seriously when he NOW comes out against the very thing he signed into law a few years ago.  And hypocrisy aside… Obama is simply being dishonest about the American people about what our choices and options are. His recent challenge to republicans to Republicans went something like this:  “You go talk to your constituents and ask them, ‘Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?’”

You see… in Obama’s world… the ONLY TWO CHOICES AVAILABLE TO US…. are making all kids completely safe (or at least giving willful dupes the impression this is even possible)… or giving some minor .03% tax cut to a business that is creating jobs (something he claims to want to do… something he claims a ‘lazer-like’ focus on…).  But this is simply not true.  No children are going to be ANY SAFER if a corporate depreciation tax schedule is kept in place or depreciated.  This is nothing more than partisan political posturing of the worst sort… the sort that insinuates that one’s political opponents want to harm women and children. Its as bad as the recent TV spot that insinuated that Paul Ryan wanted to push old ladies off of the edge of a cliff.  Where’s the civility Democrats are always begging for?

If anyone is incapable of having a debate… if anyone is incapable of having a rational conversation… if anyone is incapable of compromise… it is President Obama.  What compromise is there to be had with someone who is this out of touch with reality?

via Corporate Jets and Tax Breaks by Jonah Goldberg.

Now ask yourself this question:  can you imagine a media being as forgiving to Bush as they have been to Obama the past 27 months? Can you imagine the media giving Bush a pass on Abu Gharab #2?  Can you imagine them passing on the opportunity to paint the Lybian action as yet another wasteful failure of American power in the Middle East?  Can you imagine their condesention at Bush’s attempt to ‘brand’ the Lybian action as this rather Orwellian-sounding “kinetic military action“?  Can you imagine Bush being given a pass with unemployment still hovering around 10% over 27 months after he passed a trillion dollars in stimulus?  Can you imagine, given their reaction to how much the Iraq war cost, what their reaction would be to the biggest federal debt and deficits in history?  Can you imagine?

If you’ve got a decent imagination, very quickly you would see that there is an incredible double-standard at work, not only in the mainstream media, but in what Liberals find objectionable on any given day.  And what concerns me the most is their utter lack of interest in the economic hardships the American people are facing… and the lack of interest Obama has in doing anything to fix this problem more than a year after it became apparent that his original plans to simulate had failed.

I don’t know about you, but when I read headlines like “Gallup Finds U.S. Unemployment Rate at 10.0% in March“… I swallow rather hard… because it is quite apparent that we are still in the midst of an economic cricis.  And make no mistake, 2 years of stagnant growth and 10 percent unemployement is a cricis… regardless of how many times the mainstream media tells you were ‘in a recovery’.  If you look at the details, its shocking how bad a position we are in.  Even the unemployment figures don’t tell the whole story:

The percentage of the overall population that is employed in March 2010 was 58.6 percent. One year later, the total percentage of overall population  employed is… 58.5 percent.  Conclusion: In a growing population we have produced fewer jobs than the number that the population grew. (For the record, the number of Civilian non-institutionalized population was 237.2 million in March 2010, and is 239.00 million in March 2011.)

The number of people who were “not in the labor force” In March 2010 was 83,264,000 (seasonally adjusted). In March 2011, it was 85,594,000 (seasonally adjusted). If you want to know how unemployment dropped a point, look no further than this statistic.

Bottom line… overall REAL unemployment hasn’t changed one bit… regardless of what statistics the Office of Labor releases.  The only thing that has been keeping the unemployement figures as low as they have been… has been due to some rather arbitrary accounting — magically rounding the overall workforce number down to make the same number of unemployed seem like a lower percentage.

Furthermore, we find ourselves in this position even after spending trillions of dollars of debt-spending on ‘stimulus’.  I don’t know about you, but for a trillion dollars… I expected the streets to be paved with gold…. not barely paved.

What has become clear to me is that Obama has no clue what causes economic growth… and has doubled down on  a failed Keynesian ideology despite the overwhelming evidence of its ineffectiveness.

And to make matters worse, as the recent ballooning budget crisis hit state governments, we have slowly begun to realize that all that money that was promised to simulate ‘main street’ mom-and-pop stores… actually was spent protecting union members and federal workers from the pain of economic downturn.  Look at the breakdown on the Business Insider website:

• $36.9 billion for Aid to People Affected by Economic Downturn (YAY!)
• $48.4 billion for Education (Think teachers unions)
• $324 million for Accountability (Think federal employees)
• $58.4 billion for Aid to State and Local Governments (Think public sector state unions)
• $41.4 billion for Energy
• $13.1 billion for Science and Technology including $2.5 billion to National Science Foundation research and $4.7 billion to National Telecommunications and Information Administration… 400 million to NASA (think federal employees)
• $18.8 billion for Health Care (almost half of which went to federal agencies)
• $870 million for Business ($646 of which went to Small business loans)
• $98.3 billion for Transportation and Infrastructure (think Union jobs)
• $48.3 billion for Infrastructure (Jobs for Main Street Act, the purpose of which was “To poach previously allocated TARP funding and funnel the money into creating jobs in targeted sectors of the US economy [including] mass transit, schools, public housing, and clean water initiatives while adding jobs in these fields.
• $26.7 billion for Public Service Jobs (ironically titled “Jobs for Main Street Act”)
• $79 billion for Emergency Relief for Families (good, but hardly ‘stimulus’)
• $34 billion for the Extension of Unemployment Benefits

Just look at the mysterious lack of anything beneficial for the 80% of the country that is a) not unionized or b) not a federal worker!  Oh, and any ‘stimulus’ that DID go to the the non-unionized private sector was in the form of government LOANS… all of which are to be paid back… basically creating a wash in dollar terms.

I mean seriously, did anyone really expect any of this to work??!!  Can we all agree that whatever this was… it was NOTHING a true stimulus should have been?!  What DID go to the private sector in ‘free’ money was only to help people WITHOUT jobs manage… not help the businesses they work at CREATE NEW ONES. To all my friends on the left: do you not see the sad reality here… the lack of any real solution for most of the middle class in this country… despite Obama’s “laser-like-focus” on jobs!!!??? Doesn’t anyone notice this?  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

And then I read this article by Stephen Moore explaining that its worse:

Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million).

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

And while some of this discrepancy has happened because of real productivity gains in manufacturing…  the government sector has grown by multiples… and has shown decreasing productivity:

Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

We are spending twice as much on education… and getting worse results.   GREAT.

This is a real disaster we are experiencing…  lets hope the next president can fix things before its too late.

Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.

We’re not going to win any favors stabbing our allies in the back.

via WikiLeaks cables: US agrees to tell Russia Britain’s nuclear secrets – Telegraph.

STATEMENT: “We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.

HEALTH-CARE NEGOTIATIONS ON C-SPAN

STATEMENT: “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.

EXPIRATION DATE: Throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 2009 and 2010; when John McCain asked about it during the health-care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”

RAISING TAXES

STATEMENT: “No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.” (multiple times on the campaign trail)

EXPIRATION DATE: Broken multiple times, including the raised taxes on tobacco, a new tax on indoor tanning salons, but most prominently on February 11, 2010: “President Barack Obama said he is ‘agnostic’ about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”

RECESS APPOINTMENTS

STATEMENT: Then-senator Obama declared that a recess appointment is “damaged goods” and has “less credibility” than a normal appointment. August 25, 2005.

EXPIRATION DATE: March 27, 2010: “If, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.”

It goes on for another 10 pages like this…