The Summer of Our Discontent

You two should be blissfully happy, right?

After all, Obama been so incredibly successful in transforming the country into the Socialist Utopia that you and the rest of Obama's supporters all dream about. Unfortunately for him, his supporters have been dwindling in numbers. But not before the damage to the economy has been kept up for almost 2 years now, including the campaign, which did it's damage simply because employers could see the writing on the wall.

And now with the pending tax increases, Obama plays golf and smiles away, knowing he will be keeping people down, and dependent on government, which is his goal. Hey, they passed another $26 Billion dollar stimulus just last night, and ALL of that money goes to the already overpaid government workers of the States, their unions and their benefits and pensions, not the the real workers in the private sector who have to get by on less and less every day.

Hope you are happy. No matter who caused all this mess, Obama is certainly making it worse.

---------

The "summer of recovery" should be renamed "the summer of our discontent" because it seems like almost nobody is happy. As hard as the Obama team has tried to convince everyone that everything is going swimmingly, the sad reality keeps rearing its ugly head:

You know you're in the summer of recovery when both the Wall Street Journal runs editorials titled "It isn't working" and "Why I'm not hiring" and the New York Time's front page story is "U.S. Lost 131,000 Jobs as Governments Cut Back".  Listening to the White House and then analyzing economic data is like participating in an episode of the Twilight Zone. In the Time's article we also learn;

"The Labor Department greatly revised its headline number for June, widening the job loss figure for that month to 221,000 jobs, from 125,000. Private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000, was lowered to 31,000″

The people that are supposed to keep track of the number of jobs created from month to month got the number of private sector jobs wrong by 168 percent last month.  So the "it's getting better" number that was reported in June was actually much worse.   With exampleafter example of this type of incompetence, is it any wonder that polls show that American's don't trust their government?

***

At a time when expect our government to be encouraging companies to hire, President Obama's policies do the opposite.  From the coming tax increases to President Obama's recently signed health care legislation, each policy increases the already high costs associated with adding a new employee.  It costs a NJ company $74,000 to put $44,000 in an employee's pocket, and so companies in that position aren't going to hire.  What happens when taxes go up significantly next year?  More companies will be doing more with less because they have to and President Obama's policies have ensured that.  How's that summer of recovery working out for you?  For more and more people it isn't, and a majority of Americans are placing the blame squarely in President Obama's lap.

What does our President have to say about all of this? The world according President Obama proclaims that it is all George W. Bush's fault.  This continual demagoguery might rev up the base, but it's losing independents in droves. It's also backfiring.

No wonder the President is getting so bored with it all…According to The Washington Prowler:

….there is a mounting whispering campaign in Washington about the current President's disenchantment with the job he currently holds. "You hear it a lot from White House staff," says a Democrat lobbyist in the financial services sector, who worked on the Obama transition team. "The President is tired of dealing or bored with all the B.S., or that things haven't broken the way he wanted and it's not shaping up to be the job that he thought it was going to be. The way some of them talk they make the President sound like a recent college graduate unhappy with his first job stuck in the mailroom."

Apparently the entire White House is seriously displeased with events as they have unfolded:

[Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama's top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it.

"There's a relentlessness to this that's unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis," says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. "We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person can create an event so quickly from one computer terminal."

Larry Summers, who served as Clinton's Treasury secretary for the last 18 months of his term, says, "It used to be there was a kind of rhythm to the day" with the tempo picking up after the markets closed and as newspaper deadlines approached, between four and seven P.M. "That's gone." And, according to Rahm Emanuel, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta thinks "it's a huge problem" that Washington runs at such "a highly caffeinated speed."

Emanuel calls it "F***nutsville," and Valerie Jarrett says she looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion: "Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people believed the media," she says.

etc…

Peter Wehner is having none of it, (nor am I):

Life in the White House is challenging; anyone who has worked there can testify to that. And Washington, D.C., is certainly an imperfect city, as all are. But the impression Team Obama is trying to create — that no group has ever faced more challenges, more difficulties, or more hardships — is silly and somewhat pathetic. Politics is the worthiest ambition, wrote John Buchan (the author of JFK's favorite book, Pilgrim's Way); it is the greatest and most honorable adventure.

If Obama and his aides don't see that or anything like that — if they view politics and governing only through a lens tinted by bitterness, frustration, and resentment — then it is time for them to step aside. If not, then they should man up. Self-pity is a terribly unattractive quality.

Of course, their discontent is nothing compared to the rest of our's, as Tony Blankley aptly notes:

A foul and dangerous brew is heating up that is composed of: (1) The economic collapse that started in 2008; (2) the radical, "fundamentally transforming" left-wing agenda of the government; and, (3) the thwarting of the public will – with glee – by the entrenched, non-elected powers (in the courts, media, colleges and government bureaucracies) as they get into the face and under the skin of the cultural and political majority.

It is insufferable (and will not long be suffered) to be lectured to and imposed upon by a ruling class that loathes our nation's history, values and accomplishments; by those who are not, in fact, our genuine betters. They are neither better educated nor more profoundly morally versed.

In fact, they are our intellectual and moral inferiors – not superiors. Constantly grinning Supreme CourtJustice Elena Kagan didn't think the Declaration of Independence's proclamation that human beings "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" should in any way affect her understanding of our constitutional rights – presumably, if any.

Obama's base should be happy, right? After all, he's been so incredibly successful in transforming the country into the Socialist Utopia they all dream about. But no. As poor Robert Gibbs bitterly snarks, "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president":

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was President".

Jeez, I understand the Bush-bashing, but why drag poor Dennis Kucinich into this?

RELATED:

The predictable result of all this discontent in/with Washington:

Big Government: The Rats Begin Leaving Obama's Sinking Ship

Neither Orszag nor Romer is a fool. They were party to a con, and they surely knew it.

They presumed that the economy would bounce back as it usually does after a recession, and they went along with Rahm Emanuel's strategy of exploiting the crisis lest it "go to waste." In the process, they did what they were told and said what they had to. They endorsed and defended policies that, as economists, they knew were unsustainable; and they have left us holding the bag. The recovery has stalled; unemployment is at least 35% higher than Romer predicted it would be at this stage; and the deficits stemming from the so-called "stimulus bill" that these two piously praised as necessary for the recovery now threaten its continuance.

I doubt that Barack Obama cares one whit. His aim was the transformation of a country that he sincerely hates, and Orszag and Romer have loyally served his purpose – as Geithner and Summers still do. There will, I suspect, be a political reckoning for all of this profligacy, and its first harbinger will present itself on the first Tuesday in November. You can fool Americans for a time – but not for long.

Ace Of Spades HQ: Income Falls In Almost All Cities, Except For Three — Including Washington DC

Washington DC's in the business of government, and business is good, baby.

The other two cities only grew in income due to government salaries, too:

Among the 52 MSAs with a population of one million or more, only three had an increase in both net earnings and personal income in 2009 (Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia). The biggest gains in compensation in these three MSAs were in the federal government (civilian and military combined). Private sector compensation declined in these three MSAs.

Link this to Christienomics and you're cooking with gas.

Is anyone noticing this? I mean, I know you are; I mean other people.

Yes,  people are noticing.

The Blog Professor: Dems gone wild: Kansas City mayor pro tem Bill Skaggs assaults videographer

Yet another Dem Pol loses his cool.

http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/the-summer-of-our-discontent/