(Fox News) In an effort to cut the unemployment rate among veterans, the Obama administration is calling for a new conservation program that would put veterans to work rebuilding trails, roads and levees on public lands.

Let’s give him some credit for wanting to reduce the unemployment rate among veterans, even if it is surely politically motivated, geared towards peeling off some veteran support from the GOP for Election 2012. But, let’s face it, it is pathetic that Obama thinks the best use of men and women who served in the most professional, educated, modern, and high-tech military ever seen is to get them jobs as menial workers. Granted, they would get paid well, being federal money and all. But, they are certainly more capable then being offered ditch digger jobs. Not to mention simply creating new government jobs, rather than private sector ones.

Of course, much like with his Stimulus, the jobs probably do not exist. Furthermore, the idea, like most of his ideas, isn’t particularly original

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Civilian Conservation Corps that operated during the 1930s could be viewed as a model for what the administration will try to accomplish through its “Veterans Jobs Corps.” He said that the administration will propose spending $1 billion that would be used to put an estimated 20,000 veterans to work restoring habitat and eradicating invasive species, among other activities.

So now the Obama admin. is looking towards Depression era make-work programs that failed to stimulate the economy, and helped keep the USA mired in depression for a decade.

Barack Obama’s avalanche of needless regulations on coal-fueled power plants are going into effect and the net result will be the closing of hundreds of power plants all across the country just when our need for power is increasing. This will absolutely necessitate the cost of our power to skyrocket. But, this is exactly what he wants. He wants to rape us for our power. He said so from the beginning.

Well, now that he’s had the opportunity to put into place just some of the new rules and regulations he wants — and he’s only pushed through a tiny bit of what he really wants, indeed — we are already seeing the results of his attack on us.

Look to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland where six coal-fueled power plants are being shut down by FirstEnergy because the retrofitting the power plants will have to undergo to satisfy Obama’s whims is just too expensive to justify.

Company spokesmen say there is no help for it.

“This decision is not in any way a reflection of the fine work done by the employees at the affected plants, but is related to the impact of new environmental rules,” said James H. Lash, president, FirstEnergy Generation and chief nuclear officer. “We recently completed a comprehensive review of our coal-fired generating plants and determined that additional investments to implement MATS and other environmental rules would make these older plants even less likely to be dispatched under market rules. As a result, it was necessary to retire the plants rather than continue operations.”

Obama is forcing these new regs on the whole industry. Many thousands of jobs will be lost — this particular shut down will cause the loss of over 500 jobs initially — and the loss of the generating capacity will force a larger load on other plants necessarily causing costs to go up for all of us.

This isn’t just affecting out-of-date plants owned by FirstEnergy, either.

Douglas Gotham, director of the State Utility Forecasting Group, for instance, says that rates hikes are on the way in Indiana, as well, and all because of Obama’s onerous new EPA regulations.

“Due to the federal regulatory focus on emissions from coal-fired generators, Indiana is expected to experience larger price increases than projected on a regional or national level.”

This is exactly what Obama wanted. Remember in 2007 when he sat down with the San Francisco Chronicle and told us all that he wanted to bankrupt the coal industry and that our rates would “necessarily skyrocket”?

Well, his plans are succeeding. Prices are indeed “skyrocketing.” Worse, jobs are being lost. As Sean Harkbarth of the US Chamber of Commerce notes,

Utility MACT is only part of the assault on coal power plants. Last September, I wrote about how EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution rule cost 500 jobs in Texas. The Chamber’s senior vice president of Environment, Technology, and Regulatory Affairs, Bill Kovacs told Congressmen last summer that the “cumulative impact of regulatory action can be overwhelming” and is causing power plants to be taken offline and putting people out of work.

Hackbarth points to testimony of EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus who admitted last April that jobs are not part of their determinations.

So, Obama’s plans really are well on the way to fruition. But it’s just beginning. He very much wants to do far more damage than he has thus far.

(H/T Thurber’s Thoughts)

Anyhow, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza called the speech a “confrontation wrapped in kumbaya”

At first listen, President Obama’s State of the Union address had all the hallmarks of the sort of bipartisan, let’s-do-the-right-thing-for-America tone that characterized his 2008 presidential campaign.

Probably because it was a campaign speech, in which Obama has proved further that he is only interested in being president of some Americans, and not others.

But, listen closer and a more hard-edged, challenging tone reveals itself— a preview of what the incumbent will likely sound like as he seeks a second term this November.

“We’ve come too far to turn back now,” said Obama at one point. “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”

First, those policies were primarily Democrat ones, and who was in charge of Congress when the economy went south? Yup, Democrats. Second, if we do not turn back now, we’ll end up going over the falls like Greece, Italy, and other European countries.

Later, he offered an even more blunt challenge: “With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow.” He also repeatedly urged Congress to “send me a bill”, making clear that the ball, legislatively and politically, was in their court.

Well, gee wiz, Barry, the House GOP has passed over 30 economic bills which are languishing in the Democrat controlled Senate. Perhaps you should have a talk with Harry Reid, ya think? But, I guess it is easier for Obama to mimic Hugo Chavez then Bill Clinton, who mostly played well with others and realized that the game is about leadership and compromise, rather than abusing one’s political opponents and becoming a tin pot dictator.

Obama even had the temerity to whine at the Republicans for not immediately passing the payroll extension for a whopping two months, and he wants a long term extension, which is what Republicans wanted in the first place.

Anyhow, over at Speaker Boehner’s website, we find a few things Obama didn’t say during his 7,000 word campaign speech

“My policies are hurting families and small businesses, and making the economy worse.” Since President Obama took office, 1.7 million fewer Americans have jobs, gas prices have doubled, and families have endured nearly three years of an 8 percent or higher jobless rate.

“I’m to blame for the failure of my policies to create jobs and strengthen our economy.” President Obama has resorted to the politics of division, blaming everything and everyone from Congress to his predecessors to the American people to ATMs for his poor economic record.

“I have listened to the American people and will approve the Keystone XL energy pipeline.” The Keystone project, which would create at least 20,000 new jobs in manufacturing and construction, is supported by lawmakers in both parties, labor unions, governors, and editorial boards across the country. And US News reports most Americans want the pipeline built too.

“My own hand-picked jobs council has urged me to embrace the Republican approach to job creation – and I’m going to take their advice.” Not only does the president’s jobs council report align with the Republican approach to creating new private-sector jobs, it reflects legislation already passed by the House and awaiting action in the Democratic-controlled Senate. See here.

Along with a few more. Oh, and apparently Obama didn’t take the time discuss his signature legislation, Obamacare. He ignored it. I wonder why?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Fox News) As President Obama prepares to rev up his re-election drive with his third State of the Union address Tuesday night, he and his aides have already begun framing the fall contest as a “choice” election, not a simple up-or-down referendum on his own job performance in the Oval Office.

In so doing, the president borrows a page from an unlikely playbook: that of the man he has spent the last five years disparaging, George W. Bush.

It was President Bush, in his 2004 matchup against John Kerry, who perfected the “choice” strategy. Buffeted by mounting opposition to the Iraq war, the incumbent argued that the alternative to a second Bush term – that being the Democratic senator from Massachusetts – was so dangerous that voters should put aside any misgivings they might have about the president.

Well, it is very interesting that Obama would reach back and attempt to run in this manner, but, digging deep, President Bush actually had a record to run on, besides painting Kerry as dangerous. Bush dealt with a lingering economic downturn when he first came in to office, then a big downturn post-9/11, and turned both around. He lowered taxes for all (unfortunately, his tax plans removed a large amount of workers from paying federal taxes.) He saw historic lows in the unemployment rate. He reached across the aisle to get Ted Kennedy’s “No Child Left Behind” passed. He responded to 9/11 by taking out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, freeing tens of millions from an oppressive Muslim fundamentalist regime. He took out Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime, freeing tens of millions of people. He provided enormous relief for AIDS patients domestically and around the world. Expanded Health Savings Accounts (which Obamacare now restricts). He pushed his “Healthy Forests Initiative”. No attacks on American soil post 9/11. Got Libya to renounce their terroristic ways and give up their WMD programs. And the list goes on and on. Not all of it good, but, a solid list of accomplishments.

What does Obama have to stand on? An unpopular ObamaCare bill which is raising costs, high unemployment, historic deficits, $5 trillion in new debt, low consumer confidence, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline (of which Canada is not waiting to see who wins in 2012 before turning to China to sell the oil), giving billions to Brazil so they can develop deepwater oil fields, of which Brazil is now going to sell to China, people giving up on the workforce, and wasting almost a trillion dollars on his Stimulus. His idiotic policies have unfortunately turned people away from investing in alternative energy sources due to his malfeasance, and the way he has pushed electric vehicles has made them a joke, setting them back by decades. His EPA is on the wrong track and failing to protect and engage on real environmental issues. He has failed to reign in the TSA under his watch. He has pissed off our allies around the world, and pandered to our enemies (and failed there, too).

And let’s not forget the historic and unprecedented number of golf days, vacation days, and campaign events.

But, let’s give him his due: he did authorize the mission that took out Osama Bin Laden, which I still maintain was a gutsy call. He has ramped up military actions against Islamists, and expanded them into other countries. He did ramp up deportations for awhile, and go after the companies that hire them. And, um, well, ah, …… well, he keeps burger shops near the White House in business!

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

First, if you’re quoting Andrew Sullivan as an actual conservative, get out the chest high hip waders. Second, Obama was always good at talking the talk, but, could never walk the walk, because he himself was intensely partisan to the far end of the progressive spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that, people have their own set of beliefs. It’s when one acts on beliefs, forcing them on people, that the problems start. And James Pethokoukis at The American Enterprise finds 11 stunning revelations from a confidential Larry Summers memo to Obama in December 2008 that was a key source for the New Yorker article. Here are a few of them (the bold is James’ writing, the italic is Larry Summers own writing

The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda. The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them). Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.

The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault. A significant cause of the current crisis lies in the failure of regulators to exercise vigorously the authority they already have.

The first one is the most significant, which highlights what we all inherently know, that the point of the stimulus was to give payback to campaign contributors and elected Democrats, as well as pushing Obama’s far left progressive agenda without regard for realities. Solyndra is the perfect example.

Oh, and then we see the “death panels” crop up even back then

IPAB was there at the very beginning. There are two possibilities for making tough decisions on the long-run budget, which could be done either separately or together: creating an executive-branch “health board” (which focuses on one part of the issue) and a Congressionally chartered commission (which could focus more broadly).

From the beginning, Team Obama wanted to implement the panel of 15 unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats to make decisions on our personal health care.

Doug Ross writes “The revelations in this document alone should be enough to bring down the Obama administration. The level of dishonesty laced throughout the Obama White House is both shocking and repellent.” Let’s add some fuel to that fire, looking at the very first paragraph in the Larry Summers memo

In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011.

That is Summers saying what would happen without the Stimulus, which is mostly what happened with the Stimulus. Except, with the Stimulus, jobs loss was greater, and the unemployment rate didn’t start to fall until late in 2011, partly due to people dropping out of the job market, essentially giving up.

Summers also concluded that a core package more than $300 billion was not “feasible to design sensible proposals along these
lines that go much beyond this total size.” And then they go on to propose hundreds of billions more.

There are all sorts of interesting tidbits in both Pethokoukis’ article along with the Summers meme, which provided a blueprint for spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money for political payback and pushing Obama’s extremist political agenda, which wasn’t even in the same landmass as his supposed “post-partisan” coming together speeches. Read them both.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

While the Old Media has been ecstatic over recent job numbers, claiming that some 200,000 jobs have been added to the economy, we should note that while Obama giveth Obama also taketh away. The media may be trying to claim the President has “created or saved” jobs (the latest weasel word is he’s created job opportunity) but his policies have also cost jobs. In particular his policies are costing jobs in the medical field.

Last week, layoffs were announced in Mississippi at the University of Mississippi Medical Center due in part to the 80 million dollars that it will cost to implement a new computer system named EPIC Systems, Obama’s newly mandated electronic medical records system.

Naturally, the system Obama is forcing on an entire nation of medical professionals and hospitals is the same system owned and operated by Judith Faulkner, one of his own big donors. Faulkner is also a big donor to the Democrat Party. Not surprisingly, besides affording her the lucrative, crony capitalist business deal, Obama also put Faulkner in a key role on the Health Information Technology Policy Committee, the committee responsible for implementing the President’s e-records policy. She has become known as Obama’s medical records czar.

As hospitals and doctors are forced to launch their own EPIC Systems portals, the costs are forcing hard choices for administrators. All to implement what many call a flawed system.

Representative Tom Price (R, GA), a medical doctor, scoffs at Obama’s EPIC Systems e-record program. Price is not amused by the government-speak bestowed on this e-records systems, those “meaningful use” standards that he calls “anything but useful or meaningful.”

Rep. Price revealed to an audience at a recent Heritage Foundation event that Obama’s new electronic medical records system is filled with “nonsense.”

One of the things about the system Price told the audience was that the system requires a pathologist to fill in a field of information on what a patient is allergic to in every case the docs deal with. If they do not fill in this field the system will “ding” the doctor on his reimbursement funds. That may not seem so absurd, but Price also noted that the pathologist has to fill out these same fields even if he is just consulting on a case by looking at a slide in a microscope and won’t actually see the patient in person.

It gets worse. Price went on to recount that this system is so dysfunctional that it requires the same fields to be filled out for a corpse at an autopsy.

“This is no lie,” Price says. “The federal government wants the pathologist to determine whether or not a corpse has any allergies. …This is nonsense.”

Price told the Heritage audience that a bureaucrat simply cannot tell a doctor what to do. He felt that there wasn’t anything wrong with government mandating a main “highway” for electronic medical records to “ride” on but felt that bureaucrats in Washington simply haven’t the knowledge to make a single system that is all things to all doctors for all patients.

“[Washington should] not dictate what the docs are doing on a day-to-day basis for a given patient because it doesn’t make any sense, it’s a waste of time.” Price insisted. “They can never, ever put in place the right standards …for a bureaucrat to determine whether or not the doctor is doing the right thing.”

(About 20 minutes into the following video)

The fact is, while this month’s jobs record might seem good, Obama is still destroying jobs in other areas due to his constant stream of regulations. And maybe these numbers aren’t so good at that. This rosy 8.5 percent unemployment figure that the White House is touting is “terribly misleading,” according to James Pethokoukis. The AEI columnist notes that if the White House was still using the size of the U.S. labor force from 2009, the unemployment rate would be at 10.9 percent today.

Lastly, we should note that the full implementation of Obamacare is still several years off. When that bell tolls, job loss with be monumental. But even though we have yet to get to full implementation of Obamacare, it is still costing jobs even today.

(209.97.50.225*) Headline: Vice President: This is what a real opportunity society looks like

An 8.6% unemployment rate, with a real unemployment rate of somewhere between 11% and 20%, depending on who you read, is what an “opportunity society” looks like? Government spending oodles of money on people who consider the administration of taxpayer money to decide what gravel to use when repaving a road? $15 trillion in debt? A huge deficit? Mortgaging our future to increase the purchasing power of Chinese peasants?

Mitt Romney recently laid out his plan for America. Reading about it, I thought of my dad. My dad was a hard worker. He took pride in what he did. And, like millions of Americans, that pride was put to the test when he found himself struggling to make ends meet.

Ah, so he’s attacking Mitt. Funny that Joe should talk about his own dad working hard, since Joe himself has barely worked a day in the private sector since graduating with his law degree. He’s pretty much always been in government since.

Today millions of Americans are meeting their responsibilities every day, yet falling behind. They are not looking for handouts or bailouts, but rather an economy in which their hard work is rewarded and the prospects for their children will be brighter than their own.

Did anyone else immediately think “Joe’s pushing a government backed economy”?

This is the basic compact that has made America great. These are the basic values that have helped make our workers the most productive, our entrepreneurs the most innovative and our economy the envy of the world. These are the principles on which our vision for the future must be built.

Said vision is to stifle all innovation and worker spirit by regulating everything, involving government in everything. Quick, name the last world changing breakthrough in medicine……..can’t eh? Yet, the American spirit used to bring about world changing medicines on a constant basis. That was before the federal government decided to be involved with everything. Remember, these children, looking for a brighter future, cannot even hold a school bake sale without Los Federales being involved. Kids are hassled for selling lemonade on the corner. The biggest products to be developed over the last 30 years started in people’s garages, such as Apple products. And now have to be built in China and imported.

Romney appears satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind. His proposal would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class.

What’s a little class warfare between political rivals? Anyhow, Joe goes on a bit more, droning on and on, mentioning that the same old policies that brought us to this economic mess that Team Obama made worse, you know, those policies passed by Democrats who controlled Congress a good chunk of the time over the last 100 years. And we get to

The president and I firmly believe, like my father, that every man and woman is entitled to basic dignity. And we believe deeply in opportunity — that if you work hard and play by the rules, no opportunity should be out of reach. That is a fundamentally different vision than what the other side has proposed.

That’s not the entrepreneurial spirit, that’s Big Daddy State Government. Because Joe believes that government should control health insurance and health care, owning the auto makers, regulating banks, credit cards, mortgages, pay day lenders, and having a federal consumer watchdog department. Nothing inherently wrong in having some basic regulations, but, he isn’t talking about just a few common sense ones, he’s talking about people sitting in Washington, D.C., many unelected, administering everything that happens in a country of 300 million plus people.

Quite simply, the president and I believe this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. That is how we define opportunity. It’s an America where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talents and drive will take them, and where the middle class is growing, not shrinking.

A fair shot as defined by Government. That’s their vision. And it is what’s leading the US down the road to destruction. People cannot do things, because there is a regulation for everything. Want to be a barber? Get a government approved license, then apply for a government license to open a barber shop, which must be approved by other barbers who do not want the competition, and, if allowed, you then have to build the shop to government approved specifications with government approved instruments that conform to a wide variety of laws, including how your sign can look and what type of flooring is safe.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Politico) Watch out incumbents: Only 17 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States in 2011, the second lowest annual average ever, a new Gallup poll Thursday shows.

Since Gallup began asking the question gauging satisfaction in the country in 1979, the annual average was lower only in 2008 at 15 percent.

And which Party controlled the purse strings in 2008? Democrats.

Twenty-six percent named the economy in general, 25 percent mentioned and issue of unemployment and jobs, 16 percent chose dissatisfaction with the government and politicians while 12 percent said the biggest problem was the federal budget deficit.

Now, why are people so darned negative? It couldn’t possibly be the record deficits, record (and rising) debt, high and stagnant unemployment, large amounts of citizens who have given up on the job market, rising real prices, high fuel costs, a government that wastes taxpayers money and mortgages the future of our descendents to China (which also pays for the expansion of China’s military), debt payments that will soon be larger than our military budget, low consumer confidence, a president that is unable to lead, and spends most of his time campaigning, vacationing, or playing golf, and a government that is incapable of addressing the serious problems facing this country. Those are the ones right off the top of my head.

And who is the President now? Hey, Bush would have been blamed for all of this. The buck stops at the Resolute Desk Presidential Golf Cart.

But, to be fair, it was 11% back in September. So, Obama’s US satisfaction rate has rebounded from “Holy Sh*t, that’s terrible!” to “What the hell is this chump doing?”

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Washington Examiner) President Obama said that he will delay his vacation and keep Congress in session until the passage of his desired payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extension — two proposals that Obama said would create more jobs than the Keystone XL pipeline that his administration recently delayed.

As Obama called for passage of those bills, he also responded to a recent Republican push to require him to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. “However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline,” he said, “they’re going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance.”

The Lonely Conservative asks “Is he insane?” Quite possibly, though I’m not sure that has bearing on this foolish pronouncement, which seems to be standard Democrat idiocy. Remember Pelosi stating that “unemployment benefits create jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name”? I have to wonder, if unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut are super wonderful awesome, why have so few jobs been created? Why, four years since (Democrats took over Congress and) the economy started melting down and the job market going south, has the unemployment rate been in the high eights or higher consistently with those measures in place?

Scared Monkeys posits “English might have been George W. Bush’s second language; however, it has become obvious the economics is not even in Obama’s top 10 disciplines.” Also, SM wonders exactly how the unemployment benefits and payroll tax cut increase hiring. I wonder if someone in the media could ask Obama that question, asking him to explain in detail how it works. Perhaps the MSM doesn’t want to get Obama off teleprompter, because they know they will be treated to a headache inducing amount of babbling and ah’s, er’s, um’s, and other filler grunts.

I just have to wonder, is there not one person working in the Obama administration who understands how the economy works? But, then, even Liberals with Nobel Prizes in economics live in a Liberal fantasy world, without a clue. If you want the best propaganda hysteria, and scaremongering, listen to a Democrat. If you want someone who understands how business works, listen to a Republican.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Real Clear Politics) “Layoffs too often became permanent, not part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the internet,” President Obama said at a campaign event in Kansas.

Jobs have always been replaced as technology moved forward. The milk man had to learn a new job. So did the guys who drove the horse drawn coal delivery carts. So did that nasally lady who answered your phone call and transferred it to SYcamore-4-3319, rather than it being automatically done as it is nowadays. You can find numerous examples of this happening over time. And all as part of the “business cycle”, showing that Obama has absolutely no clue as to how business works.

The whole speech itself was one huge class warfare speech, given by a guy who is himself a 1%er, and refuses to pay more in taxes and do his “fair share”.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.