Your tax dollars hard at work.

Damn it all, I live in Georgia. Atlanta to be exact. There are a lot of potholes here. Perhaps if I see one of those signs I can take it down and use it to cover a pothole. Then not only will I have done something constructive with stimulus money, but I can give my fellow conservative Georgians a thrill from driving over that stupid logo. Yes, there are still a few conservatives living in Atlanta.

I wonder where one gets a wrench big enough to undo those sign bolts…

PS – LaHood is a moron.

So sayeth our POTUS.

In a little over one hundred days, this Recovery Act has worked as intended. It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession. It has delivered $43 billion in tax relief to American working families and businesses. Without the help the Recovery Act has provided to struggling states, its estimated that state deficits would be nearly twice as large as they are now, resulting in tens of thousands of additional layoffs – layoffs that would affect police officers, teachers, and firefighters.

The Recovery Act has allowed small businesses and clean energy companies to hire new workers or scrap their plans for eliminating current jobs. And it’s led to new jobs building roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects, thousands of which are only beginning now. In the months to come, thousands more projects will begin, leading to additional jobs.

And, of course, the strawman is trotted out to show just how awesome the stimulus is.

Now, I realize that when we passed this Recovery Act, there were those who felt that doing nothing was somehow an answer. Today, some of those same critics are already judging the effort a failure although they have yet to offer a plausible alternative. Others believed that the recovery plan should have been even larger, and are already calling for a second recovery plan.

But, as I made clear at the time it was passed, the Recovery Act was not designed to work in four months – it was designed to work over two years. We also knew that it would take some time for the money to get out the door, because we are committed to spending it in a way that is effective and transparent. Crucially, this is a plan that will also accelerate greatly throughout the summer and the fall. We must let it work the way it’s supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.

Yeah, that’s why at least three alternatives to Porkulus were proposed and locked out of being included in deliberations. The stimulus was also advertised as stopping the unemployment bleeding now and keeping unemployment to 8% max. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good story?

Maybe he thinks if he repeats the same crap enough times people will beleive it. That might have worked with Hopeandchange, but crappy unemployment numbers don’t lie.

You guys ready to hear the devious plot hatched by the CIA in secret? The CIA was planning…to kill top AQ figures. I know, you’re shocked right?

A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Gee, maybe the CIA declined to hold a meeting discussing the plan because they thought it was so gobstopping obvious that they really didn’t need to tell anyone that was the plan. Seeing as the plan never came to fruition just adds to the pointlessness of discussing it. And even if the CIA did go through with the plan as planned, did we really need to hold a meeting to declare the fact that the US would very much like to capture and kill AQ leaders? Really? I didn’t think that was a big secret.

Please, by all means, take this all the way. I would love for Cheney and W to have their day in court. I would love to see the spectacle of the Democrats getting all angry and indignant because nobody informed them that we would like to see bin Laden’s head on a stick. Political theater at its finest.

When is the departure of a unqualified czar not a good thing? When he’s replaced with a grossly unqualified czar.

Steven Rattner, head of the Obama administration’s auto task force, is leaving that post and will be replaced by former steelworkers official Ron Bloom.

The administration said Monday that Rattner decided to return to private life and his family in New York City.

Rattner won praise for the job he did managing the massive restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler. But his government service came under a cloud with an investigation of an influence peddling scandal back in New York.

Authorities have said that Rattner, an investment banker, was unlikely to face charges in the investigation which involved a giant state pension fund that provides retirement benefits for more than 1 million government employees.

The biggest issue with Rattner was that he knew sqat about the auto industry, but his replacement’s former job was as an officer in the steelworker’s union. So not only does the new car czar not know sqat about the auto industry, his last job was as a glorified union negotiator. Great.

By the way, the only mention of Rattner not facing charges back home came from the White House. Good stuff.

I’m in….I’ll take the feet if someone wants to take his arms.

Levi Johnston is the best advertisement for using protection during sex I’ve ever seen. Bristol should do a spot for Trojan warning women of the perils of accidentally fathering a child with a douchebag. If that doesn’t get women to buy condoms nothing will.

Side note; the Republican establishment thought Reagan was a dumb hick too.

*gasp*

Midway through his speech on urban and metropolitan policy in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building this afternoon, one of his two small glass prompters came crashing down, hitting the wood floor and crashing in many pieces. It made quite a ruckus.

“Oh, goodness,” a startled President Obama said. “Sorry about that, guys.”

He then proceeded on with his remarks, “To pull our economy back from the brink, including the largest and most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation’s history…”

For the rest of the speech the president relied on the one remaining teleprompter, to his right, and notes on his podium to finish his speech.

Shards of glass remained near the president’s feet for the duration of his speech.

Here’s video if you can stand to watch the tragic death. Truly a sad day for America and the world.

Yes, because we must always have a Cheney around to make Democrats uncomfortable.

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that running for political office is on her horizon.

“It’s something I very well may do,” said Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, a lawyer and State Department appointee who has worked on two Republican presidential campaigns.

Ms. Cheney, 44, has emerged as one of the strongest defenders of the effectiveness and legality of Bush-Cheney policies on enhanced interrogation methods. More recently, she and her father have become two of the most outspoken critics of President Obama’s position on terrorism and other national security issues, which has led Republicans to consider her a strong candidate for national political office.

I’m thinking Senate. I was denied Jeb’s Senate run, and I want compensation. What do you guys think of a Senator Cheney?

This highlight two things; a) Newsweek is really trying to help Obama with those falling approval numbers and b) how much of a joke Catholicism has become in America.

In truth, though, Obama’s pragmatic approach to divisive policy (his notion that we should acknowledge the good faith underlying opposing viewpoints) and his social-justice agenda reflect the views of American Catholic laity much more closely than those vocal bishops and pro-life activists. When Obama meets the pope tomorrow, they’ll politely disagree about reproductive freedoms and homosexuality, but Catholics back home won’t care, because they know Obama’s on their side. In fact, Obama’s agenda is closer to their views than even the pope’s.

…

Notre Dame awarded the president an honorary degree because it saw the need to highlight the best of Catholic teaching as applied to politics: the ability to open the eyes of those who would prefer to keep them closed, and to open the hearts of those who would prefer not to know the pain that their actions cause. The pope has a lot to learn about Catholic politics in America. Barack Obama can teach him.

Yeah, we should make Obama the next Pope because he’ll listen to the congregations and change stuff.

PS – Only in America could someone say with a straight face that a man who supports abortion and embryonic stem cell research is a better Catholic than the Pope.

Um, wow. Just wow.

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

That’s pretty damn shocking. Ginsberg, a noted feminist lawyer back in the day, didn’t realize that Roe v. Wade was about abortion rights but instead thought it was designed to be a backdoor way for the government to keep the “undesirables” from breeding. And she thought this until a SCOTUS case involving government-funded abortions ruled against it.

Whiskey tango foxtrot?

Reid had made noises to this effect, but now it’s official; the Senate will not take up cap and trade until September at the earliest. Guess those House Blue Dogs aren’t the only ones checking the polls.

President Barack Obama’s push for quick action by Congress on climate change legislation suffered a setback on Thursday when the U.S. Senate committee leading the drive delayed work on the bill until September.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer said her self-imposed deadline of early August for finishing writing a bill to combat global warming has been put off until after Congress returns from a recess that ends in early September.

“We’ll do it as soon as we get back” from that break, Boxer told reporters. Asked if this delay jeopardizes chances the Senate will pass a bill this year, Boxer said, “Not a bit … we’ll be in (session) until Christmas, so I’m not worried about it.”

But Boxer did not guarantee Congress will be able to finish a bill and deliver it to Obama by December, when he plans to attend an international summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

Yeah, that supermajority is working out real well for the Dems isn’t it? But really, putting this off only delays the inevitable for the Dems, and pushing this back to the fall/winter season does nothing but give more time for RNC to come up with a spate of “imagine Grandma freezing to death because of cap and trade” commercials. Really, the Dems don’t want to have this debate during the start of the cold weather season do they?

Damn, he likely didn’t know that telling people to, um, not document things was an option.

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs “to put nothing in writing, ever” regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner’s conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner “intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards.”

Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in a policy negotation concerning a major federal policy change could be viewed as a criminal act.

Hopeandchange, transparency, and all that crap.

I know at this point nobody will be shocked at any MSM spin on the most dismal unemployment numbers since, well, we started keeping track of such things but this on is special. The headline: “Initial claims fall more than expected.” Good times right? Not so much actually.

The number of Americans filing initial unemployment claims fell sharply last week, while those filing ongoing claims rose to another all-time high, according to government data released Thursday.

There were 565,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 4, down 52,000 from a revised 617,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

It was the lowest number since January and was below the consensus estimate of 603,000 from economists surveyed by Briefing.com.

Analysts said last week’s drop was distorted by a change in the pattern of seasonal layoffs in the automotive industry.

…

Meanwhile, the number of people requesting continued jobless benefits rose to a record high, indicating that the labor market remains weak.

The government said continuing claims rose to 6,883,000 in the week ended June 27, the most recent data available.

That’s an increase of 159,000 from the previous week’s revised total of 6,724,000 and was the highest reading since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1967.

The 4-week moving average of continuing claims rose 12,000 to 6,769,000.

That last bit was, of course, at the bottom of the article. Hey, you gotta put a positive spin on the skyrocketing unemployment rate somehow.

Oh my.

Obama retains extremely strong support from Democrats, and earlier this year lost much of the Republican support that followed a giddy Inauguration. It is the independents who appear to be currently on the move: Obama dropped 6 percentage points last week from the week before in Gallup’s tracking poll, and Quinnipiac University found a 5-percentage-point drop in approval from independents between early June and early July. Recent state polling shows drops over longer periods.

A Quinnipiac University poll of voters in economically troubled Ohio, released Tuesday, showed Obama’s approval rating slipping 8 points, to below 50 percent, from a poll two months earlier, with a plurality of 48 percent of independent voters disapproving of his job performance. A Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia found Obama’s approval and disapproval numbers effectively tied, with independents disapproving of the president’s job performance, 52 percent to 38 percent.

“That is fairly consistent with all our polling around the country — Obama tends to be really well-liked personally, but he’s starting to lose a majority of the independents,” said Public Policy’s Dean Debnam. Democrats have “had long enough in some voters’ minds that they’re getting blame for nothing happening, and Republicans are scaring them around health care and tax increases.”

Obama is now down to a -8 in Rasusssen polling. The last Democrat POTUS we had whould have taken this as a sign. Let’s see if this one will.

UPDATE – Obama might not be looking at the poll numbers yet, but the Blue Dogs sure are…

Insanity at work.

Five months after Congress approved a massive package of spending and tax cuts aimed at reviving an ailing economy, the jobless rate is still climbing and the White House is scrambling to reassure an anxious public that President Obama’s prescription for economic recovery is on the right track.

Yesterday, Obama took time out of his first presidential trip to Moscow to defend the $787 billion stimulus package, arguing that the measure was the right medicine at the right time. “There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he told ABC News.

Back in Washington, senior Democrats on Capitol Hill were nervously contemplating whether additional government stimulus spending may be needed to pull the nation out of the worst recession since the 1930s. Senior administration officials acknowledged that the effects of the stimulus package have been overshadowed by an unexpectedly sharp drop-off in employment since the measure passed in February. But they reported that only about $100 billion has so far been spent and that as increasingly large sums flow out of Washington, the program is on pace to save or create 600,000 jobs over the next 100 days.

“It is clear from the data that there needs to be more fiscal stimulus in the second half of the year than there was in the first half of the year,” White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers said. “Fortunately, the stimulus program designed by the president and passed by Congress provides exactly that.”

The problem is that the stimulus was sold to America with the promise of stopping the unemployment gusher now, not a year from now. I say a year from now because what Summers says isn’t exactly the truth, the bulk of the stimulus spending isn’t due out until next year. A fact that was pointed out repeatedly by Republicans and roundly ignored.

To make matters worse, nobody in the governemnt learned their lession from TARP; lax oversight as to where the money is going is ensuring that the money is not going where it’s supposed to.

Overall, states reported using Recovery Act funds to stabilize state budgets and to cope with fiscal stresses. The funds helped them maintain staffing for existing programs and minimize or avoid tax increases as well as reductions in services.

States have implemented various internal control programs; however, federal Single Audit guidance and reporting does not fully address Recovery Act risk. The Single Audit reporting deadline is too late to provide audit results in time for the audited entity to take action on deficiencies noted in Recovery Act programs. Moreover, current guidance does not achieve the level of accountability needed to effectively respond to Recovery Act risks. Finally, state auditors need additional flexibility and funding to undertake the added Single Audit responsibilities under the Recovery Act.

Much like TARP funds are being hoarded by banks to boost their bottom lines, stimulus funds are being hoarded to boost states’ bottom lines and keep government employees employed. Lovely, except that’s not what the funds were intended for. The stimulus was created specifically to provide funds for new projects that would create jobs, not to fill anemic state coffers. So now the stimulus suffers from the same problem as TARP; since the money is not being spent in the way it was intended the projected effects are not materializing. The solution to both problems would have been oversight to make sure the funds given were spent, but it’s a bit late for that now.

So now the current solution du jour is to triple down on stimulus spending and hope it goes better than the first two times we tried it. Somehow I don’t think the third time’s gonna be the charm.

Apparently we’ve gone completely from the “dissent is patriotic” meme to the “L’etat, c’est moi” meme.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who has had an eventful couple of weeks to say the least, believes House Republican opposition to climate change legislation and the stimulus indicates they’re cheering against the good ol’ US of A.

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman told WAMU radio host Diane Rehm on Tuesday morning, promoting his new book, “The Waxman Report.”

There you have it folks; Barack Obama is the state. To dissent from Obama is to dissent from the USA.

And you guys thought Inauguration Day wasn’t the same as Coronation Day.