The Obamanation

[Urbane Guerrilla]

At the end, Obama will have done one very good thing for the Republic that will keep its thinking more within the libertarian ambit: his programs will have shown a new generation of Americans that socialism doesn't and can't work, and he will have inoculated the United States against its blandishments. Apparently, the herd-sheeple will have to have their noses rubbed in it to appreciate the rottenness.

Those of us who appreciate liberty and small government, of course, already voted against Obama, owing to our clarity of vision, and will take the next opportunity to do so again. By then we can wake the echoes with the call, "Had Enough?"

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well? Have you?

[TheMercenary]

This country has a long way to go yet under the umbrella of an Obamanation.

But at least he has beaten Bush on his number of days golfing in the first 9 months! That has to be a record.

http://www.politico.com/click/storie...h_on_golf.html

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

At the end, Obama will have done one very good thing for the Republic that will keep its thinking more within the libertarian ambit: his programs will have shown a new generation of Americans that socialism doesn't and can't work, and he will have inoculated the United States against its blandishments. Apparently, the herd-sheeple will have to have their noses rubbed in it to appreciate the rottenness.

Those of us who appreciate liberty and small government, of course, already voted against Obama, owing to our clarity of vision, and will take the next opportunity to do so again. By then we can wake the echoes with the call, "Had Enough?"

UG...the extremist libertarian positions you espouse (as well as the ignorant "socialism" rheotric) have always been representative of a small minority of voters.

We'll not see a significant number of Libertarians in elective office any time soon.

The Republican party, however, has a bigger problem.

The party is commited to remaining ideologically pure....even if it is a death wish since the country is so ideologically diverse.

An upcoming NY election for an open seat in the House is only the most recent example...where the Democrat has a good chance of winning a seat that has been Republican for 100 years, because the Republican candidate is "not conservative enough" for the purists and a true ideologue entered the race and is now splitting the vote on the right.

But it goes back to the 06 and 08 elections when Democrats won 50+ House seats, mostly in historically republican distrcts, by recruiting and running moderates, while the Republican ideological test required that they run the most conservative. Most of those new 50+ "Blue Dog" Democrats are fiscal moderates, bordering on fiscal conservatives.

As a result, the Democratic party has become a big tent party, which presents opportunities as well as challenges....and it means those on the far left will have to chose to be either more accommodating and flexible or risk losing that majority status.

What the Democrats have in their favor is that as long as this is the face of the Republican party....

... Republicans will never attract the swing centrist voters. Limbaugh, Beck, Palin are great for the base, but a losing face for a party that wants to govern.

Unlike the riff on the right between social conservatives/fiscal conservatives/die hard libertairians, the Democrats keep expanding their tent... in 06, for example (after electing moderate Democratic Senators in AR, CO, NH, PA, VA, WY - most are either fiscal moderates and/or pro-gun or anti-choice - not your "typical" liberals) the Democratic caucus in the Senate chose a Majority Leader (Harry Reid) who is pro-gun and anti-choice. He would not have been my choice.. but there is that flexibility that is required.

I can't imagine a scenario where a pro-choice, pro gun control Senator could become a leader of the Republican party....Limbaugh, et al would not allow it.

With the country as divided as it is, I think the Democrats have maxed out or close to it. In 2010, I expect the Democrats will lose some of those House seats they won in 06 and 08 and one or two Senate seats......unless the Republican "ideological pure" death wish continues.

The Republican party has some major "rebranding" to do if they want to regain majority status anytime soon....and I dont see how they can do that without taking on the wingnuts in their midst.

[TheMercenary]

It's all fun and games, til we kick Reid out of office.

[TheMercenary]

Yes boys and girls, they are bullshitting you...

And we will be checking back in to see about those 3.5million jobs they promised to create...

Stimulus jobs overstated by thousands

Oct 29, 6:35 AM (ET)

By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON (AP) - An early progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government's first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

- A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.

- A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.

- A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

The White House says it is aware there are problems. In an interview, Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

"If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed," DeSeve said.

The White House released a statement early Thursday that it said laid out the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago. It said that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected "virtually all" the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes "does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday."

The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

continues:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091029/D9BKMVMG0.html

I agree that Obama over-promised on jobs....although the reports are still far from complete, much of the funds have yet to be committed and an 18 month+ time-span as envisioned in the legislation will provide more realistic measures.

But the economy is no longer on the brink as it was in Jan....the 3rd quarter GDP saw the greatest growth in 2 years.....by nearly every measure, the worst of the recession is behind us, with the exception of jobs...always the last indicator to recover.

We have no idea what would have happened w/o the stimulus program, the TARP program, etc.

IMO, it would have been bad public policy to take that risk and I certainly did not see any better alternative, including doing nothing.

[TheMercenary]

Well if I owned a business, and I fired a bunch of people and my bottom line improved, my numbers would reflect that. Still there were 500,000 new jobless claims last month. Tell those 500,000 people who just lost more jobs the economy is improving. One months growth is no measure of the overall health of the economy. It is smoke and mirrors by the Obama Administration that things are on the mend. Nothing more, nothing less. And given the minor investigation by the AP into their numbers, they have a lot to explain.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well if I owned a business, and I fired a bunch of people and my bottom line improved, my numbers would reflect that. Still there were 500,000 new jobless claims last month. Tell those 500,000 people who just lost more jobs the economy is improving. One months growth is no measure of the overall health of the economy. It is smoke and mirrors by the Obama Administration that things are on the mend. Nothing more, nothing less. And given the minor investigation by the AP into their numbers, they have a lot to explain.

Unemployment claims are at a 9 month low. Every economic indicator shows improvement since January with most improvements coming after the stimulus was enacted... except jobs...always the last to turn around.

So what would you have done differently in terms of public policy?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

We have no idea what would have happened w/o the stimulus program, the TARP program, etc.

IMO, it would have been bad public policy to take that risk and I certainly did not see any better alternative, including doing nothing.

I am not in complete disagreement. What needs to asked is did we get what we paid for and has this opened a period of unbridled spending by the party in power to "fix" things that are broken?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Unemployment claims are at a 9 month low.

So what would you have done differently in terms of public policy?

I would have considered letting more of the businesses fail. Take a look at GMAC, they are back at the trough asking for more.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I would have considered letting more of the businesses fail. Take a look at GMAC, they are back at the trough asking for more.

Creating a ripple down effect of even more unemployment from all the affected ancillary industries?

And yet, that was not the biggest piece of the stimulus program.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

Creating a ripple down effect of even more unemployment from all the affected ancillary industries?

And yet, that was not the biggest piece of the stimulus program.

Well that is the point. We had the unemployment anyway. Who's to say it might not have been more profound up front but then end up with a healthier system in the long run. Instead we have created a welfare system for big corps. Now the "to big to fail" continues to feed the monster combined with more government involvement in how business is being conducted in private industry.

[classicman]

I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
- Edward Gibbon

Wish I had listened to this one a loooooong time ago.

"There are a lot of lies going around.... and half of them are true."
- Winston Churchill

[classicman]

WASHINGTON – Many communities hit hardest by job losses, those built around dying factories and mills, have been slowest to see relief from President Obama's stimulus plan.

The manufacturing industry has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs during the recession as plants have closed or scaled back. Places such as the southwest Missouri city of Lamar, tucked amid endless fields of winter wheat and soybeans, have seen the cornerstones of their economies disappear, leaving a gap that even billions in roadwork and government aid cannot fill.

Lamar began feeling the recession ahead of the rest of the country, when the furniture-maker O'Sullivan Industries closed its doors in mid-2007, immediately leaving 700 workers unemployed and turning its factory into a million-square-foot vacancy.

That began what city manager Lynn Calton calls "a slow death." Stores folded. A 50-year-old car dealership went under. One in 10 jobs disappeared last year. Everyone suffered, from the downtown florist to the dentist who cleaned the factory workers' teeth.

Even Mayor Keith Divine filed for unemployment when his furniture store went out of business. He now sells carpet and mattresses and says he hasn't seen evidence of the 640,000 jobs saved or created nationwide thanks to the $787 billion stimulus.

For the Obama administration, Lamar is as much a problem of expectations as it is of policy. For all the items contained in the stimulus, from tax cuts to road work to new schools, nothing could quickly replace what factory towns like Lamar had lost.

That's why the White House says it's unfair to judge the stimulus by the unemployment rate because no amount of stimulus was going to keep Lamar's unemployment rate from approaching 12 percent.

Nationwide, only 2,500 of the 640,000 stimulus jobs announced Friday were in the manufacturing industry, and many of those appear to be mislabeled. Teachers were the biggest winners because states used federal aid to fill budget gaps, then credited the money with avoiding layoffs —even if no such layoffs were planned.

"We haven't seen any improvements in our town," said Gary Macklem, the mayor of Croswell, Mich., a small city in a county built on farming and factories, where unemployment has hovered just below 20 percent all year. "We lost two factories and the other factories are hanging by a shoe string."

Link

There is no way that paint & rumblestrips can help these places. A far more comprehensive plan was needed to stimulate these industries.