Labor Secretary celebrates jobless rate increase by … trick-or-treating?
....Note that in both cases, we have failed to even get back to the levels at the start of the recovery in June 2009. We’re bouncing along generational bottoms in employment as related to population size, and we’re not moving in a direction that suggests in any way, shape, or form that our economy and job markets are “healing.”
Bottom line: Anemic economic growth of around 2% not only puts the U.S. economy at heightened risk of recession, but is also too slow to a) generate enough jobs to quickly close the jobs gap, and b) boost take-home pay. Anyone satisfied with or hyping this report does a great disservice to the America worker.
'VIRTUAL STANDSTILL':
171K New Jobs, 170K New Jobless
The final monthly jobs report before Election Day offered a mixed bag of economic evidence that would surely become political putty for the presidential candidates, with the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.9 percent but the economy adding a better-than-expected 171,000 jobs. At the same time, the number of unemployed grew by 170,000, roughly the same amount -- to 12.3 million.
The October numbers allow President Obama to argue the economy is technically growing under his watch. But they also allow Mitt Romney to argue that the new jobs are not making much of a dent in the unemployment problem. Both campaigns quickly set to work putting their spin on data that, if nothing else, underscores the slow pace of the recovery.
"Today's increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill," Romney said in a statement. "The jobless rate is higher than it was when President Obama took office, and there are still 23 million Americans struggling for work. ... When I'm president, I'm going to make real changes that lead to a real recovery, so that the next four years are better than the last."
Former Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Keith Hall told Fox Business Network that at this rate, "we're still talking nine or 10 years" before the economy gets back to normal.
Nevada's Largest Daily Newspaper: Obama "Narcissistic Amateur"
...The official explanation for why Obama administration officials watched the attack unfold for seven hours, refusing repeated requests to send the air support and relief forces that sat less than two hours away in Italy? Silence.
An open discussion of these issues, of course, would lead to difficult questions about the wisdom of underwriting and celebrating the so-called Arab Spring revolts in the first place. While the removal of tyrants can be laudable, the results show a disturbing pattern of merely installing new tyrannies - theocracies of medieval mullahs who immediately start savaging the rights of women (including the basic right to education) and who are openly hostile to American interests.
When Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney promptly criticized the security failures in Benghazi, the White House and its lapdog media jumped all over him for another "gaffe," for speaking out too promptly and too strongly. Prompt and strong action from the White House on Sept. 11 might have saved American lives, as well as America's reputation as a nation not to be messed with. Weakness and dithering and flying to Las Vegas the next day for celebrity fund-raising parties are somehow better?
This administration is an embarrassment on foreign policy and incompetent at best on the economy - though a more careful analysis shows what can only be a perverse and willful attempt to destroy our prosperity. Back in January 2008, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them." He added, "Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." It was also in 2008 that Mr. Obama's future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, famously said it would be necessary to "figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" - $9 a gallon.
Yet the president now claims he's in favor of oil development and pipelines, taking credit for increased oil production on private lands where he's powerless to block it, after he halted the Keystone XL Pipeline and oversaw a 50 percent reduction in oil leases on public lands.
These behaviors go far beyond "spin." They amount to a pack of lies. To return to office a narcissistic amateur who seeks to ride this nation's economy and international esteem to oblivion, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie "Dr. Strangelove," would be disastrous.
Candidate Obama said if he couldn't fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.
Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it's time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/11/02/nevadas_largest_daily_newspaper_obama_unfit_to_serve
How Far Obama Has Fallen
By Peggy Noonan
The winning politicians of the future will not be all about I. People don't like it. They don't want to have to wade past the ego to the info.
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Which gets us to Tuesday. No one knows what will happen. Maybe that means it will be close, and maybe it doesn't. Maybe a surprise is in store. But the fact that Barack Obama is fighting for his political life is still one of the great political stories of the modern era.
Look at where he started, placing his hand on the Bible Abe Lincoln was sworn in on in 1861. It was Jan. 20, 2009. The new president was 47 and in the kind of position politicians can only dream of—a historic figure walking in, the first African-American president, broadly backed by the American people. He won by 9.5 million votes. Two days after his inauguration, Gallup had him at 68% approval, only 12% disapproval. He had a Democratic Senate, and for a time a cloture-proof 60 members. He had a Democratic House (256-178) with a colorful, energetic speaker. The mainstream media were excited about him, supportive of him.
His political foes were demoralized, their party fractured.
He faced big problems—an economic crash,two wars—but those crises gave him broad latitude. All of his stars were perfectly aligned. He could do anything.
And then it all changed. At a certain point he lost the room.
Books will be written about what happened, but early on the president made two terrible legislative decisions. The stimulus bill was a political disaster, and it wasn't the cost, it was the content. We were in crisis, losing jobs. People would have accepted high spending if it looked promising. But the stimulus was the same old same old, pure pork aimed at reliable constituencies. It would course through the economy with little effect. And it would not receive a single Republican vote in the House (three in the Senate), which was bad for Washington, bad for our politics. It was a catastrophic victory. It did say there was a new boss in town. But it also said the new boss was out of his league.
Then health care, a mistake beginning to end. The president's 14-month-long preoccupation with ObamaCare signaled that he did not share the urgency of people's most immediate concerns—jobs, the economy, all the coming fiscal cliffs. The famous 2,000-page bill added to their misery by adding to their fear.
Voters would have had to trust the president a lot to believe his program wouldn't raise their premiums, wouldn't limit their autonomy, wouldn't make a shaky system worse.
But they didn't trust him that much, because they'd just met him. They didn't really know him.
You have to build the kind of trust it takes to do something so all-encompassing.
And so began the resistance, the Tea Party movement and the town-hall protests, full of alarmed independents and older Democrats. Both revived Republicans and, temporarily at least, reunited conservatives.
Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect?
Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had "a gift," as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn't really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And—oddly—he didn't seem to notice.
It is one thing to think you're Lebron. Its another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you're Lebron.
And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren't America-sized. They didn't get the country so well.
It is a mystery why the president didn't second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working.
He doesn't do chastened. He didn't do what Bill Clinton learned to do, after he took a drubbing in 1994: change course and prosper.
Mr. Obama may yet emerge victorious. There are, obviously, many factors in every race. Maybe, as one for instance, the seriousness of the storm has sharpened people's anxieties—there are no local crises anymore, a local disaster is a national disaster—so that anxiety will leave some people leaning toward the status quo, toward the known.
Or maybe, conversely, they'll think he failed to slow the oceans' rise.
We'll know soon.
Whatever happens, Mr. Obama will not own the room again as once he did. If he wins, we will see a different presidency—even more stasis, and political struggle—but not a different president.
I'm Even More Confident That Mitt Will Win
By David Limbaugh
I want to give you an updated list of reasons I believe that Mitt Romney will win the election Tuesday. So much information, so much confusion, so much uncertainty. But I don't think it's so complex as it seems.
In 2008, a perfect storm developed for Barack Obama: an economic crisis, which was effectively, though unfairly, blamed on Republicans; war fatigue, which had been stoked by six years of Democratic anti-Bush propaganda; a messianic illusion personified in Obama, who was promising incomprehensibly wonderful yet undefined change and utopian-level bipartisanship; and a Republican opponent who all but forfeited the election to Obama (with the glorious exception of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate).
Despite all those factors benefiting Obama, he won less than 53 percent of the popular vote. That's impressive, but that's the very uppermost result he could ever expect with all signs coalescing in his favor. And things have changed radically since then. Consider:
--For all practical purposes, Obama was a blank slate in 2008. The liberal media did their best to conceal his liberal record and ideology. He enjoys no such luxury today, having established a disastrous economic record: the longest period of high unemployment and the worst recovery in 50 years and crushing national debt.
--Obama has shown no interest in tackling spending, restructuring entitlements or reducing our deficits and debt. He has wasted unconscionable sums on failed green projects, expanded government, entitlements and government dependency, and devastated the private sector. In his arrogance, he hasn't even produced a second-term agenda beyond promising more cliches -- greater education spending as a panacea -- and more "stimulus" spending.
--Obama is not only not promising us a brighter future but assuring us perpetual malaise.
--Since 2008, President "You Didn't Build That" has proved himself to be an extreme leftist ideologue, which is very troubling to most Americans, twice as many of whom self-identify as conservative than liberal.
--Obama has systematically engaged in divisive politics, shattering his cultivated image as a post-racial, post-partisan statesman. He has undermined his class and economic warfare strategy through policies that have hit minorities and the middle class the hardest.
--Though he presented himself as a transcendent figure in 2008, since then -- and especially during this presidential campaign -- he has shown himself to be the direct opposite: a petty partisan figure appealing to people's worst fears and to the demons, not the better angels of our nature. Having no record to run on, his campaign has been childish and small, from Big Bird to "Romnesia" to the vulgar videos from his supporters.
--Obama has shattered the myth of his own likability through his conduct in office and, particularly, his behavior in the debates. He now has a palpable air of desperation about him. He has dispirited his base, particularly young people, who will not go to the polls in numbers anything like the way they did in 2008.
--He has gratuitously offended Christians by disrespecting their views and trampling their liberties, and evangelicals and Catholics are eager to vote him out. And in an effort to incite his leftist base, he has alienated many women through his manufactured war on women.
--He has infuriated many Americans by apologizing to the world for the nation they love and for his abominable actions and cover-up on Libya.
--Obama wasted hundreds of millions trying to demonize Romney, only to be foiled by Romney's unfiltered display of his consummately gentlemanly nature during the widely viewed presidential debates, in which he also showed himself to be enormously likable, competent and informed.
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-In contrast with Obama, Romney has exuded confidence and a presidential demeanor. He has been refreshingly bullish on America and entrepreneurship and has arrived on the national stage at a time when America is hungriest for someone with business acumen and experience. He and Paul Ryan have offered a promising agenda with specific plans to turn around the economy and the nation's financial crisis. When they say "we can do this," most people believe that they mean it and that they can actually do it.
--According to Gallup and Pew, Republicans are winning by 7 points in the early voting. In the crucial swing state of Ohio, Karl Rove and others say that Republicans are 256,000 votes ahead of where they were in early voting in 2008, and Obama only won the state in 2008 by 260,000 votes. Also, polls are tightening in Ohio, and regardless, Republicans traditionally do better in Ohio than pollsters predict. Moreover, the conventional wisdom that Democrats outperform Republicans in the "ground game" is being obliterated.
--Romney is recognized to be competitive in states that he was believed not to have had a remote chance to capture. There are no such anticipated swings in Obama's direction.
--Romney is killing it with independents and has narrowed the so-called gender gap.
--Republicans have never been more energized, as evidenced by the election of Scott Brown, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, by the 2010 congressional races, by the universal outrage over Obamacare, by the robust tea party movement and by the spontaneous outpouring of support for Chick-fil-A. If this election is to be decided by turnout as everyone says, it's already over.
--Paul Ryan is an all-American phenom.
There is a Romney-Ryan spirit in the air.
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