Today President Obama hosted former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura at the White House for the official unveiling of Bush’s portrait. He couldn’t even take an hour off from bashing his predecessor. He just had to remind everyone, for the umpteenth time, how bad the economy was when he took office.

“The months before I took the oath of office were a chaotic time,” Obama said, after explaining that the president’s job is isolating, and that he and Bush have a connection since so few have held the job. “We knew our economy was in trouble, our fellow Americans were in pain, but we wouldn’t know until later just how breathtaking the financial crisis had been.”

Watch:

Rush Limbaugh translated the rest of Obama’s remarks for us.

Even Bush’s portrait was all about him. Greatest moment was passing power. Bush’s greatest moment, passing power to Obama. Bush’s second best moment was when Obama called him and told him Bin Laden was dead. And then, in a couple hundred years people will think about Bush passing power to Obama when they pass Bush’s portrait in the White House. He gave his stump speech. He gave his stump speech at a portrait unveiling.

President Bush, on the other hand, was quite funny and seemed to enjoy himself, despite the dig from Obama. Watch:

(The image above is also via Rush Limbaugh.)

This week the Obama campaign decided to take a new approach and attack Mitt Romney for his record as Governor of Massachusetts. It’s not going so well, seeing that the current governor, a Democrat, pointed out that unemployment was about 4% or so when Romney left office. You have to give them credit for gumption, though. Today we found out that another 383,000 Americans lost their jobs, and more have left the labor market. That’s some record President Obama’s got, and Mitt Romney isn’t afraid to point it out. Today he visited the bankrupt Solyndra plant, where hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars vanished.

Where Romney was speaking was another message from his campaign. Shortly after the Boston event, Romney launched a sneak attack of his own, holding a news conference at the headquarters of Solyndra, the bankrupt solar energy company that received $535 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration. According to reporters traveling with Romney, the campaign did not tell the press about the event until the bus was actually on its way to Solyndra.

“The reason for keeping it quiet is because we knew if word got out that Solyndra would do everything in their power and the Obama administration would do everything in their power to stop us from having this news conference,” a Romney aide told reporters, according to an ABC News account. “But taxpayers made a substantial investment in Solyndra, there are serious questions about what happened at Solyndra, why that investment was selected, what happened to that money.”

The bottom line is, Thursday marked a new escalation in the day-to-day fighting between the Obama and Romney campaigns. And Team Romney hopes it has sent a very clear message that it will punch, and counter-punch, as hard as is necessary.

Here’s video of Romney leaving the bankrupt solar plant.

“We’re at Solyndra. That was great fun. We had a great gathering, and looking at the Taj Mahal which is known as Solyndra. An enormous conflict of interest on the part of the President.”

MIKE BARNCLE: “Governor patrick, do you know what the unemployment rate in Massachusetts was when Mitt Romney left office?”

GOV. DEVAL PATRICK: “I think when he left office, it was in the 4s. I want to say 4.3, about what the national average was.”

JOE SCARBOROUGH: “That’s pretty good.”

Gee, I wonder Patrick if will be releasing a video later explaining how he really meant to go after Romney hard and just slipped up.

Here’s the Bain clip:

In related news, President Obama’s top campaign official went to Massachusetts to attack Romney’s record but was shouted down by Romney supporters. Heh! Bad day for Team O!

Of course, the economists found this news unexpected, and the numbers reported last week have been revised upward by a few thousand.

The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits last week rose to the highest level in more than a month, the government reported Thursday, in another sign the U.S. labor market is not improving as fast as it was earlier in the year.

Jobless claims rose by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 383,000 in the week ended May 26, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday. Claims from two weeks ago were revised up to 373,000 from an original reading of 370,000, based on more complete data collected at the state level.

Expect to hear shortly that the unemployment rate has gone down.

The number of people on unemployment benefit rolls dropped.

I also heard that private sector hiring slowed way down in the second quarter. But again, the government will tell us the unemployment rate is holding steady, or declined. That will be the headline, and buried somewhere will be the number of people who dropped our of the labor market.

I don’t know how President Obama manages to keep a straight face when he’s out there boasting about his economic record.

Update: Linked by Heritage Action – thanks!

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March. (Read More)

What would we do without big government? As if this will make everybody thin.

What will they think of next?

The first is a Cato report on how Canada has cut government and the cuts are paying off.

Two decades ago Canada suffered a deep recession and teetered on the brink of a debt crisis caused by rising government spending. The Wall Street Journal said that growing debt was making Canada an “honorary member of the third world” with the “northern peso” as its currency. But Canada reversed course and cut spending, balanced its budget, and enacted various pro-market reforms. The economy boomed, unemployment plunged, and the formerly weak Canadian dollar soared to reach parity with the U.S. dollar.

In some ways the United States is in even worse fiscal shape today than Canada was two decades ago. For one thing baby
boomers are now retiring in droves, which is pushing the federal government deeper into debt every year. America risks becoming a “first world” country like those in Europe, where huge deficit spending is wrecking economies and ruining opportunities for young people.

America needs to get its fiscal house in order, and Canada has shown how to do it. Our northern neighbor still has a large welfare state, but there is a lot we can learn from its efforts to restrain the government and adopt market-oriented reforms to spur strong economic growth. (Read More)

Then there’s this piece in The Wall Street Journal about health care reforms in the state of Maine that are actually working. Yeah, they walked back some statist policies that drove up prices.

Then the 2010 electoral wave carried in Republican Governor Paul LePage and a GOP legislature, and they took modest steps to deregulate the insurance market. Insurers are now allowed to sell policies for premiums that range from 3 to 1 on the basis of age, rather than the prior 1.5 to 1, and to offer incentives or discounts for consumers to choose high-value providers.

The state also created a reinsurance fund that taxes all health plans by $4 a month. If someone ends up requiring extremely expensive care, the fund picks up some of the costs, which means insurers can better manage their future liabilities and pass the savings on to individuals.

The returns are now rolling in for the new coverage that can be offered starting on July 1, and premiums are falling by as much as 69% for Maine’s dominant insurer, Anthem.

According to the Maine Bureau of Insurance, a married couple age 40 to 44 with one child will pay $1,919 a month for a policy with a $2,250 deductible in 2013 if they choose to re-up their current policy. If the same family switches to the new health plan, or buys the plan for the first time, their premium will fall to $920, a 52% decrease. A couple over 60 could buy the same policy for $1,290, down from $2,466 under the old system. Or a young adult 25 to 29 could buy a high $10,000 deductible plan for catastrophic expenses for $232, previously $665. (Read More)

Neither of these items will get much attention from the MSM because they don’t fit the “we need as much big government as we can get” narrative that the Democrats are trying to sell us. But they’re still noteworthy.

Oh, and if you’re new here, President Obama is against any policies that will reduce the cost of health insurance or grow the economy. Vote accordingly.

“Obama … stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it,” Haaretz reports. ”[He] wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel [sic] about their support to Israel.”

Similarly, he said to the group, “I [am] not going to tell you again how I even feel about Israel, but why [are] we still talking about it?”

He then suggested that he should not be questioned about his commitment to the Jewish state because “all his friends in Chicago were Jewish - and at the beginning of his political career he was accused of  being a puppet of the Israel lobby,” Haaretz reports.

But the only reason he’s not getting credit for being the first Jewish president is that Republicans are all bigots.

Okay, so he may not be the first Jewish president, but his shameless pandering certainly takes the cake.

Anyway, this quote at The Conservatory jumped out at me.

Best AP editorial spin in this piece?

A Marquette University Law School released Wednesday poll showed Walker with a narrow 7-point lead over Barrett, 52 percent to 45 percent.

It’s The New Narrow . . .

Way to spin it, AP!

In related news, Barrett was unable to name a single school hurt by Walker’s collective bargaining reforms.

Now this is the sort of story that makes blogging fun!

Conn Carroll had an excellent piece at the Washington Examiner yesterday titled “Obama’s Lame Duck Plan To Pass Cap And Trade.”  Carroll makes the case that Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) may use the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) as a back door to implement cap and trade regulations on United States citizens.

…

Carroll opines that the treaty may not be necessary.  It may prove to be a back door means by which supporters of Global Warming regulations can have a United Nations sanctioned body impose binding regulations on the United States.

Read the whole thing. The fact that these Democrats even consider having the UN impose binding regulations on us should be all any voter needs to know. But today’s Democrats aren’t just considering it, they’re pushing for it. Unfortunately, most voters are in the dark.

Rep. [John] Campbell, a Republican, sits on the House Financial Services Committe. The committee’s jurisdiction extends to “all issues pertaining to the economy” and includes “efforts to combat terrorist financing.” And the committee oversees the Treasury Department, the cabinet-level agency which includes the Internal Revenue Service within its organizational authority.

I spoke briefly with District Director Lou Penrose. I delivered to him a number of documents.

These included:

* Brett Kimberlin’s 2010 tax return for Justice Through Music, which provides information to the IRS on tax-exempt criteria and qualifications.

* David Hogberg’s first-hand report from Aaron Worthing’s “peace order” hearing, “IBD at Kimberlin Hearing: Walker Handcuffed, 1st Amendment Muzzled.”

* Glenn Beck’s report from his May 25th broadcast, “Glenn talks to bloggers about Brett Kimberlin Terrorism.”

* Hans Bader’s essay at Open Markets, “Injunction Imposed Over Blog Posts That Criticized Convicted Terrorist-Turned-Left-Wing Activist.”

* Matthew Vadum’s report at Capital Research, “Nonprofit of terrorist bomber received Tides Foundation funding.”

* Vadum’s article at FrontPage Magazine, “Brett Kimberlin and the Hall of Fame of Leftist Terrorists.”

Read the whole thing, follow the links, print it all out, and go see your own representative if you believe in free speech. If enough of us do this, maybe we can make a difference.

Via That Mr. G. Guy, Lee Stranahan is calling on lawyers to come up with a strategy for dealing with Kimberlin and his ilk. What he did to Aaron Walker is disturbing. Even more disturbing is the number of progressives who are celebrating a blow to free speech. Geez, none of this even includes the disturbing tactic of SWATting people’s homes, or journalists who have gone into hiding.

The Camp of the Saints has a pretty good run-down of what’s been written about this in the past day or so.

Anyway, even if you don’t have time to go to your representative’s office, you can still call, email or write a letter.

The Romney campaign released a new video today, World Multiple Sclerosis Day, that shouldn’t hurt with the women – “Soul Mate.” The Romney children and Ann Romney talked about Mitt’s support when Ann was diagnosed with MS, it’s nice. Even nicer is that at the end, rather than request a campaign donation, there is a link to donate to the National MS Society.

Update: In case you missed it, Planned Parenthood endorsed President Obama today. I know, what a shock. The group is spending over a million dollars on anti-Romney ads in swing states. I’m thinking the ads could help him as much as hurt him. I wonder how many pro-life Democrats and Independents are out there who will be reminded that he’s the pro-life candidate.

When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion.

By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the end of March 2012. CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. …

On that basis CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the first quarter of calendar year 2012 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

– They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.1 percent and 1.0 percent,

– They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points,

– They increased the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 1.5 million,

– They increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.3 million to 1.9 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

James Pethokoukis crunched the numbers for us:

OK, so without the stimulus, there would be anywhere from 200,000 to 1.5 million fewer people employed right now? That means the current cost-per-job created is somewhere between $4.1 million and $540,000.

Even half a million per job is too much. Plus, who is to say how many jobs weren’t created because of the stimulus spending? How many employers looked at the massive spending by the federal government, saw the tax hikes coming down the pike, and decided to put off hiring?

Speaking of wasteful spending on jobs, be sure to read about how the government is spending $1.4 million on summer jobs where kids will watch birds and count fish. Heck, at least this time they say they’ll employ about 500 kids. Maybe they should have just done that with the stimulus and we could have saved a few billion bucks or so.

In his recent speeches on the campaign trail and at official functions, President Obama typically touts the fact that over the past two years, the economy has created more than 4 million new jobs, with more than 1 million in the past six months alone.

At a fundraiser last month, he called this “extraordinary progress.”

But the economic recovery that Obama has presided over has been far from extraordinary. It hasn’t even been ordinary.

In fact, it’s come in well below average on several key indicators compared with the previous 10 economic recoveries, dating back to 1949, according to an IBD analysis of various economic data.

Read the whole thing, and check out the damning charts on the “Recovery that Wasn’t.” What a disaster. No wonder consumer confidence is so low.

Artur Davis is a former Congressman from Alabama who was an early supporter of President Obama.  He defected in a blog post.

But parties change. As I told a reporter last week, this is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party (and he knows that even if he can’t say it).  If you have read this blog, and taken the time to look for a theme in the thousands of words (or free opposition research) contained in it, you see the imperfect musings of a voter who describes growth as a deeper problem than exaggerated inequality; who wants to radically reform the way we educate our children; who despises identity politics and the practice of speaking for groups and not one national interest; who knows that our current course on entitlements will eventually break our solvency and cause us to break promises to our most vulnerable—that is, if we don’t start the hard work of fixing it.

On the specifics, I have regularly criticized an agenda that would punish businesses and job creators with more taxes just as they are trying to thrive again. I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured: frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country. You have also seen me write that faith institutions should not be compelled to violate their teachings because faith is a freedom, too. You’ve read that in my view, the law can’t continue to favor one race over another in offering hard-earned slots in colleges: America has changed, and we are now diverse enough that we don’t need to accommodate a racial spoils system. And you know from these pages that I still think the way we have gone about mending the flaws in our healthcare system is the wrong way—it goes further than we need and costs more than we can bear.

Taken together, these are hardly the enthusiasms of a Democrat circa 2012, and they wouldn’t be defensible in a Democratic primary. But they are the thoughts and values of ten years of learning, and seeing things I once thought were true fall into disarray. So, if I were to leave the sidelines, it would be as a member of the Republican Party that is fighting the drift in this country in a way that comes closest to my way of thinking: wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities. (Read More)

The other is Jo Ann Nardelli, a Pennsylvania state committewoman and founder of the Blair County Federation of Democratic Women. The Daily Caller has her story:

During a press conference last week, Nardelli cited President Obama’s recent announcement in support of gay marriage as a central reason for her defection, endorsed Mitt Romney for president and changed her party registration to Republican, The Altoona Mirror reported.

“As the Democratic Party has taken the stand for same-sex marriage, then I must make a stand on my faith that marriage is between a man and a woman. God’s principles for life never change. His guidelines, given in Scripture, produce fruitful lives when you follow them,” Nardelli, a pro-life Democrat for more than 40 years, said at the Blair County Courthouse. ….

In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Nardelli claimed to not know any Republicans. She asserted, like the party-switching Ronald Reagan in 1962, that the Democratic Party had strayed from values with which she could agree.

“I thought I could make a difference to change our party. It didn’t work,” she said. “I noticed that it’s been going more and more to the left. This is not my father’s party. I did not leave the party; the party left me.” (Read More)

It’s nice to see people waking up to what’s become of the Democrat Party.