Seriously, it takes a serious partisan avoidance of reality to take that much offense at someone saying to better your lot in life through self improvement.
“The key to understanding liberals is realizing that they are immune to argument. The concept underlying the idea of a debate is that facts and reasoning can lead one to change his previous conclusions. But liberals begin with their conclusions; facts and reasoning that may undermine the preexisting conclusion must be at least ignored, if not actively attacked. This is why you see liberals shouting about jailing global warming deniers as blizzards rage outside.
The problem liberals always face is that the world refuses to honor their preconceived notions. Sometimes we get lucky and the liberal wises up, at least a little. For instance, Jimmy Carter woke up to the fact that the Soviet Union was composed of genuine bastards when they invaded Afghanistan, and in fits and starts he took action. This shocking burst of foreign policy competence is almost single-handedly responsible for raising Carter’s ranking on the list of America’s greatest presidents all the way up to 39th. Zombie Millard Fillmore was totally bummed.
Now we are in the almost unimaginable position of looking back at Jimmy Carter as an example of comparatively sure, savvy leadership. The Russians invaded Afghanistan and Carter armed the rebels. The Russians invaded Crimea and Barack Obama went on Ellen to hear the hostess gush about how much America loves Obamacare.”
“Who is going to be the first to apologize to Mitt Romney? The President, the Vice President or Hillary Rodham Clinton?All three mocked the GOP presidential candidate in 2012 when he called Russia “our number one geopolitical foe.”
Obama said his opponent was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp.” Clinton, then Secretary of State, offered her two cents, saying, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”
“The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”
As we enter the sixth year of our Dear Leader’s “Occupy the White House Golf Tour”, let us review some numbers from the past five years.
In 2008, there were 145 million Americans in the work force, 79.4 million Americans not in the labor force, and the federal debt was $9.4 Trillion.
Today, in early 2014, we have 145 million Americans in the work force, 91.8 million Americans not in the labor force and a federal debt of $17.3 Trillion.
So in five years there has not added any new Americans to the labor force, but there are 12 million more Americans who could be in the labor force who are not, and the federal debt has increased by $7.9 trillion.
So new jobs created over the past five years is zero. As you have often heard every times the new unemployment numbers come out, the US economy needs to create 120,000 jobs a month just to cover new workers entering the work force. Over five years, that comes to 7.2 Million jobs. Given that the number of Americans in the work force has remained flat, the Obama Economy has not only failed to create any new jobs, it has actively removed jobs. This is an appalling performance, especially since the last recession ending in mid 2009, so for most of the last five years, American should have been in an economic recovery. A period were traditionaly there is not just job growth, but rapid and strong job growth. That has been the pattern in every recession/recovery for the past 100 years. This includes the recession of the late 1970s, which was the worst recession since the Great Drepression and the roaring recovery that occured in the early 1980s. Why is is the Obama non-recovery from the second worst recessionthe sole exception to economic history?
Recently, our Dear Leader claimed that there was “Not even a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS run by his political appointees.
Well, as we have learned, everything that BHO says has an expiration date. Sometimes that date is even before the words come out of his mouth. Remember that the left leaning Washington Post, among others, selected one of Barry’s Catch Phrases as the Lie of the Year.
So we should take his claim of no corruption with several large barges worth of salt.
Now let’s review what the Inspector General for the IRS had to say on the matter, “Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012.” There are a few more gems in his report to Congress:
In total, 30 percent of the organizations we identified with the words ‘progress’ or ‘progressive’ in their names were processed as potential political cases. In comparison, our audit found that 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriots,’ or ‘9/12’ in their names were processed as potential political cases during the timeframe of our audit.”
…
“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, emails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.”
Of the 296 organizations flagged with “political” keywords, only six were “progressive” groups. That is 2% of the 296 organizations selected by the IRS.
Clearly, there is more than just “smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS under the reign of our Dear Leader. This Culture of Corruption probably runs much farther and deeper in the Obama administration than just the IRS.
It’s been five years since our Dear Leader started his “Occupy the White House Golf Tour” and four and half years since the second worst recession since the great depression ended. Now history tells us that the deep the recession, the stronger the recovery.
The U3 unemployment rate fell to 6.7% from 7%, which normally would be a good thing. In this case, not so much. Let’s look at the numbers. The economy only added about 70,000 new jobs in December. If you have been paying attention over the past four and half years, you would know that the economy needs to add 120,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. The drop in the BLS U3 number is explained by the 520,000 people “leaving the workforce.” A better indicator of the health of the workforce is the BLS U6 rate. The average U6 rate during our Dear Leader‘s reign has been 13.1%. To compare, the average U6 rate during President George W. Bush’s two terms was 9.2%.
[…] Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.
[…] Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office.
The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s. The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007, before the Great Recession.
About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defined in 2012 as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.
President Obama’s anti-poverty efforts “are basically to give more people more free stuff,” said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,” Mr. Rector said. “Johnson’s goal was to make people prosperous and self-sufficient.”
So, as the nice man said, “Obama’s economic program of tax, spend, and regulate has been a dismal failure.”
Here is a graph from the Federalist, which points out that if ten million workers haven’t dropped out the workforce because the lack of economic growth, the U3 unemployment level would be almost 11%. This is Jimmy Carter recession level territory, in what should be a robust recovery.
