Obama and Clones ‘Recovery’ Destroyed Millions of Jobs + More

Posted on Wed 09/08/2010 by PA Pundits - International

The Patriot Post Chronicle

The Foundation

“I will venture to assert that no combination of designing men under heaven will be capable of making a government unpopular which is in its principles a wise and good one.” –Alexander Hamilton

Editorial Exegesis

Recovery Summer! Woo hoo!

“It’s not as bad as it could’ve been. That, as the Labor Day weekend began, was the cold comfort that many in the media took from the still-dismal August jobs report. Can’t we expect something a little better? True enough, 68,000 new private-sector jobs were created last month, showing that private businesses, though gasping for breath, aren’t dead yet. But overall, 54,000 jobs disappeared, raising the toll during the ‘Recovery Summer’ Vice President Joe Biden ridiculously hailed two months ago to 238,000. Nor was the uptick in the unemployment rate to 9.6% from 9.5% what you expect in a ‘recovery.’ This is not ‘better than expected’; it’s worse than expected. This can be gauged not by market expectations for modest job creation, but by long-term experience watching how jobs are created in a normal recovery. By that gauge, we’re in the worst jobs slump since World War II. … If it wasn’t clear to everyone by now, it should be: All the actions this government has taken — the $700 billion TARP program, the $862 billion ‘stimulus,’ the health care takeover, financial reform — haven’t ‘saved or created’ 3.8 million jobs, as claimed. Instead, they’ve destroyed millions of jobs — and with them, the hopes and dreams of those who’ve lost the jobs. But the administration remains clueless, hinting that it may seek another ‘stimulus’ costing billions. This bunch is either willfully doing damage to the U.S. economy, or completely incompetent. On Friday, the president actually patted himself on the back, saying the employment report was ‘positive news’ that ‘reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession.’ If there’s one thing that marks this administration as different from others, it’s the steadfast refusal to remove its ideological blinders and learn from its mistakes.” —Investor’s Business Daily

Upright

“President Obama calls his latest attempt to revive the economy a ‘Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.’ I’m calling it ‘The Mother of all Big Dig Boondoggles.’ Like the infamous ‘Big Dig’ highway spending project in Boston, this latest White House infrastructure spending binge guarantees only two results: Taxpayers lose; unions win.” –columnist Michelle Malkin

“What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.” –economist Thomas Sowell

“Once you take it as a given that the government has an important say in what you do with your property or put in your body, a whole universe of appalling actions and apologia becomes possible. … We can and will talk about what rights need to be reasserted, what programs need to be cut, what sectors of this American life need to be left … alone. But until we make a dent in the widespread notion that there always has to be some type of government structure or some taxpayer-financed watchdog to police every imaginable peaceable transaction, any contemplated fix to the mess we’re in will be temporary at best.” –Reason editor Matt Welch

“Politically divided, committed to two wars, in a deep recession, insolvent and still stunned by the financial meltdown of 2008, our government seems paralyzed. As European socialism implodes, for some reason a new statist U.S. government wants to copy failure by taking over ever more of the economy and borrowing trillions more dollars to provide additional entitlements. As panicky old allies look for American protection, we talk of slashing our defense budget. In apologetic fashion, we spend more time appeasing confident enemies than buttressing worried friends.” –historian Victor Davis Hanson

“Other presidents have been wrong. Other presidents have been misguided. Other presidents have been weak and pusillanimous and pathetic. Only one truly disdains America. His name is Barack Obama. … Obama has no soft spot for America. The unpresidential condescension he feels for our country and its religion- and gun-clinging citizens oozes from his pores and spills out of them in unguarded moments. And that disrespect — the kind that comes only from those who are clueless about leadership — gives both aid and comfort to our enemies and leaves those who wish to share in the bounty of our freedom and liberty in the dark.” –columnist Carol Taber

Insight

“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.” –Italian statesman and political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

“The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.” –Russian writer Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1828-1910)

“Coolidge is the first president to discover that what the American people want is to be left alone.” –American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Dezinformatsia

More cowbell: “As we’re standing here looking at it right now … was the stimulus big enough? … There are plenty of economists out there … who say what’s needed is is a second stimulus. … What about a more significant stimulus … another, say, couple hundred billion dollars?” –CBS’s Harry Smith

Cheer up; it could be worse: “Turning to the U.S. economy and the latest reading on the job market for August. Employers cut 54,000 workers from their payrolls, less than what analysts had predicted. The unemployment rate ticked up a notch: 9.6 percent now as discouraged workers restarted their job search. It’s a mixed picture here, but it’s giving some encouragement to those who are out there looking, some who are hanging onto their jobs and their businesses by a thread.” –NBC’s Brian Williams

Elitist disdain: “According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they’re ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans — for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn’t an ‘electoral wave,’ it’s a temper tantrum.” –Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson

Puff pieces: “First lady Michelle Obama returned to the White House last week after spending her summer vacation walking the fine fashion line between comfortably casual and utterly camera-ready. Her travel attire served as a wake-up call to all those American tourists who have blighted the national landscape with their ill-fitting shorts, sad-sack T-shirts and aggressively revealing tank tops: You can do better.” –The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan chastising the unwashed masses of America for not living up to the celebrity standards of the White House’s Socialist Bourgeoisie

More sycophancy: “Hard-working Hillary, suddenly transforms once again into international political celebrity. … And her hair is even back in the headlines. She’s getting rave reviews on her longer, cool, new do.” –ABC’s Claire Shipman on Hillary

Newspulper Headlines:

Psychologists Attempt to Explain the Obama Agenda: “Irrational Decisions Might Actually Make Sense” –PsychCentral.com

The Definition of Insanity: “Romer Admits Stimulus Failed” –New York Post website ++ “Romer’s Final Washington Dispatch: More Stimulus” –New York Times website

Out on a Limb: “Dems in Power Could Be in Peril, Poll Says” –USA Today

Breaking News From 1978, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007: “Leaders Call for Peace as Mideast Talks Begin” –The New York Times

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “If the World Is Going to Hell, Why Are Humans Doing So Well?” –Scientific American website

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control: “Barack the Neocon” –New York Post

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Labor Secretary Defends Obama on Economy” –FoxNews.com

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

The Demo-gogues

Class warfare: “[A]nyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up — they just haven’t studied our history. We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting special interests run wild.” –Barack Obama telling his special-interest union supporters in Milwaukee just what they want to hear on Labor Day

Just strange: “[We’ve been] taking on some powerful interests … who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time. And they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. (That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.)” –Barack Obama

Be very afraid: “It will change the way Washington spends your tax dollars, reforming the haphazard and patchwork way we fund and maintain our infrastructure to focus less on wasteful earmarks and outdated formulas, and more on competition and innovation that gives us the best bang for the buck.” –BHO on the proposed government-run “infrastructure” bank

Blame Bush: “I had nothing to do with the massive foreclosures here. … I don’t have any hand in what took place during the Bush administration. I tried to rein that in.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.)

The fundamental problem: “[The Constitution] really doesn’t prohibit the government from doing virtually anything — the federal government. … I am not sure there is anything under current interpretation of the Commerce Clause that the government couldn’t do.” –Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY)

Village Idiots

Fun with made-up numbers: “[T]here’s widespread consensus despite what you may hear from some that the Recovery Act has saved or created somewhere between two and three million jobs already and is on track for what we said, which was three and a half million.” –former White House economic adviser Christina Romer

Except for the measures that count: “By virtually any measure, our economy is in a better place than it was two years ago.” –White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

Except for the many who do: “Nobody denies that the stimulus worked.” –Anita Dunn, former White House communications director

That’s extreme! “Right now — and this is a problem for [Republicans] — I do think Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, they are the leaders of the party. There is an intolerance in that party and an extremism that I think is where the real energy is, and so I think you’ll see in ’11 and ’12 with that presidential primary, those are going to be the people who come out to vote. … That’s going to be a problem.” –Obama adviser David Plouffe trotting out that tired formulation that merely disagreeing with Obama’s Leftist policies is proof of “intolerance” and “extremism”

Short Cuts

“Ed Schultz apparently has some serious audience envy, because he’s now puffing his chest and saying he could also draw half a million people to the mall in DC. Perhaps Ed should try getting that many people to turn on the TV in their homes, on their couch — before he attempts to make them get up off the couch and hear him speak about how people can’t make it without government help.” –TV and radio talk-show host Glenn Beck

“The only people I’ve ever heard of who got to wear their bathrobes to work were Hugh Hefner and America’s judges, and however you may feel about the man from Playboy, I’d venture that judges have created far more havoc for society.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

“The prince has turned out to be the usual frog, a politician trying to spin his shortcomings as successes. A lot of people idolize a prince, but President Obama is learning that a frog is just something to step on.” –Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

“Hillary Clinton hosted the leaders of Israel and the Palestinians Thursday for Middle East peace talks in Washington. A genie once gave Hillary her choice of two chances to make history. He told her she could try to achieve peace in the Middle East or she could try to reform Bill, and she immediately told the genie to hand her the map.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“The only evidence for Obama’s Christianity is that he faithfully attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ for 20 years. Yes, the guy bellowing ‘G0d damn America!’ is the one vouching for Obama’s Christianity. That’s like saying you got sober with the help of your A.A. sponsor Lindsay Lohan.” –columnist Ann Coulter

*****

(Please pray for our Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families — especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)

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