Syndicated from Alan Caruba

Ever since polls have been taken there have been presidents who encountered disapproval during their terms in office. Usually history exonerates them to some degree. This is not likely to happen with Barack Obama.

As this is written, a Politico.com polls puts Obama’s job disapproval rating at 46.4% and Congress has a disapproval rate of 72%, a figure matched by Rasmussen Reports. Obama’s disapproval rate according to Rasmussen was 44%.

Polls, we are always told, are “snapshots” of public opinion at a given time, but the polls consistently tell us that the vast majority of Americans disapprove of the President and Congress, and believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, wrote “I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s judgment and instincts.”

Suffice it to say that, if elections were being held next Tuesday, voters would replace most of those in Congress and, if Obama’s ratings continue to fall—-and I think they will—-there would be an angry mob surrounding the White House carrying torches and pitchforks demanding his resignation.

In that fanciful scenario Obama would head home to Chicago to work on another ghost-written autobiography or memoir of his brief stay in the White House and America would be stuck with Joe Biden. If Nancy Pelosi is reelected, she would be next in line!

Since January 2009 the Obama administration has created an economic and financial house of cards. No part of it is sustainable.

Turning around Congress and the nation’s future can be likened to turning a super tanker. It takes five miles of ocean just to slow the ship. In America’s case, the ship has been outward bound on a sea of progressive programs that everyone knows are not working and which have begun to spring giant leaks in the hull.

There is plenty of blame to go around for our present troubles. Both parties studiously ignored the ticking time bomb of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that have put taxpayers on the hook for $1.6 trillion. The “toxic assets” they created brought down banks and investment houses.

The people in charge of maintaining the value of the U.S. dollar, primarily Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, began to reduce the amount of interest banks had to pay to borrow. By the time that amount reached zero percent and banks became reluctant to loan even among each other, one might conclude our money had become valueless.

When the market crashed in September 2008, the U.S. government bailed out some banks and investment firms, buying their “toxic assets.” Banks stopped lending, Lehman Brothers went out of business, and the slide toward economic collapse began in earnest. With all that TARP money and subsequent “stimulus” billions, the one element of the economy that didn’t get any help were our small and medium size businesses, the ones that create eight out of every ten new jobs.

Meanwhile Social Security is broke and Medicare soon will be. The former is insolvent and the latter has been expanded in ways that will require rationing medical care European-style. There may not be “death panels”, but the effect will be the same. There will be little incentive for anyone to go into the medical profession.

Thanks to the Obama administration’s close association with SIEU, the mammoth government service workers union, Americans are discovering that it and other comparable unions have been operating on a “public be damned” philosophy. In America, the biggest employer is state and federal governments. Union members are no longer affordable.

When a teacher recently complained she wasn’t being paid enough, New Jersey’s Governor, Chris Christie, told her to get another job.

Around the 1970s the American economy began to move away from one that actually made things to one in which “financial services” replaced this essential requirement for a viable economy.

Now conjure with this. The national debt is $13 TRILLION. The Gross Domestic Product is around $12.9 trillion. According to Reuters, the United States posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, “nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall registered in April 2009 and the largest on record for that month.”

Moody’s Investor Services keeps repeating that our “AAA” rating is going to go bye-bye any day now. It will cost more for the U.S. to borrow money and we are already paying billions in interest on what has been borrowed. If this sounds like Greece, it is.

One reason Congress is so unpopular is that they are repeating and exacerbating all the failed policies of the Depression years; not getting out of the way so that the private sector of the economy can recover. More and more of the economy is being nationalized.

There are two outstanding reasons President Obama is unpopular. He lies all the time and he is spectacularly incompetent. He is the living example of the Peter Principle in which a person is finally promoted to a job for which he has no qualifications.

Post Syndicated from Alan Caruba

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.” — John Adams (1835-1826)

There is no question in my mind that I have lived long enough to see everything the nation once stood for in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world begin to disintegrate and fail.

John Adams, for those who slept through history class, was America’s second president, and one of the Founders who participated in the writing of our Constitution. If you worry about deals made behind closed doors, you are herewith reminded that the Constitution was written behind closed doors. Though the room in Philadelphia had its share of lawyers, the man who presided over the process was a soldier and farmer called George Washington. Others included farmers, physicians, and even clergymen.

Along with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the sharpest mind among them was that of John Adams. After the ratification of the Constitution, he warned that “a Constitution of government once changed from freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

Freedom Lost

The healthcare bill is freedom lost forever. I hope I am wrong, but I now doubt it will be repealed, nullified by the states, or reversed by the Supreme Court. While it is true that most constitutional scholars believe it is unconstitutional, taking and twisting the Commerce clause beyond recognition, I believe the damage has been done.

I freely admit that, before the vote, I remained hopeful that, even if enacted and signed, it could be overturned, but I am now less confident of that. In retrospect, the entitlement society that began in the depths of 1930s Great Depression and has been expanded ever since has proven to be the slow poison that will undo our constitutional system of government.

Conservatives have long warned against the excesses and delusions of liberals, but we have also seen self-identified conservatives like former President George W. Bush preside over the expansion of Medicare with a prescription program that defied any manner of funding at a time when Medicare and Social Security was known to be going broke.

In 2005, Bush did try to mend the system for the vast redistribution of wealth by campaigning to allow workers to divert some of their Social Security into private accounts as a hedge against old age and illness. When Nancy Pelosi said this was a plan to unravel public pensions, the voters decided they didn’t like that idea.

The Speaker, Running Amuck

I confess I have tried in my mind to dismiss the Speaker of the House as just some lunatic, fringe advocate for liberalism run amuck, but like a lot of Republicans today, it is clear that she was underestimated (along with the Senate’s Harry Reid) for her political skills.

She engineered a political victory that has not only restored President Obama’s reputation as a leader on the domestic front, but has set in motion the destruction of America’s frail financial foundations.

Few believe that the U.S. can continue to borrow the billions necessary to maintain Social Security and Medicare. The alternative, of course, is to tax all Americans to such an extent that it destroys the middle class and drives more corporations offshore.

Speaker Pelosi eat, drank, and breathed Democrat politics from birth. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro was a congressman and mayor of Baltimore. Her brother was also a mayor of Baltimore. She made her first public speech at age seven at her father’s swearing in ceremony.

I opened with a quote by John Adams and will close with one by Thomas Jefferson:
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

Abandoning the Principles of the Constitution

Americans, however, have long since abandoned the principles of the Constitution, a small and limited central government, for a behemoth that now controls our very lives through a bill that vastly expands the federal government and gives it the power to intervene between our physicians and ourselves.

We have been betrayed by an insurance industry that will be happy to rid itself the high risk and costly need to provide health insurance while continuing to prosper from life, property, and other forms. We have been betrayed by the pharmaceutical companies now salivating at the prospect of future profits funded by the taxpayers. The American Medical Association supported healthcare reform; a betrayal.

Even the States, many of which now want to protect themselves from even greater unfunded mandates, have long since abandoned their sovereignty by allowing the federal government to control education, highways, environment, and a myriad of other local responsibilities.

None of the institutions of government, not the executive, not the Congress, and probably not the courts will uphold a Constitution now distorted beyond recognition. Despite the usual talk of a new revolution, of midterm elections to return power to the Republican Party, the People are essentially defenseless.

Tell me I am wrong. Then tell me why.

The latest measurement of success for job creation is the notion of “jobs saved” versus “jobs created” another insult to the common sense intelligence of Americans.

First of all, government cannot create jobs, except those brought about by massive spending on the expansion of the bureaucracy. In fact, the number one job creating entity in America today is the Federal Governement.

Although government cannot and should not create jobs, it has the power to kill jobs by over taxing citizens, stiffling lending to small business by creating confusion and reluctance and by taking more and more decision-making away from people.

A second problem with job creation being placed in the hands of career politicians and bureaucrats is that they simply, in most cases, don’t have a clue about what makes small buisnesses work. Most of the intelligencia in D.C. has never built a business or taken an idea to market. They have never pondered over leases, hiring, training, equipment, payroll, health insurance, employee reviews, etc. It’s all foreign to them.

Washington’s idea of job creation is akin to tapping into the moon for additional water. Or, studying why pigs like mud and how lady bugs breed.

Finally, and perhaps the worst aspect of D.C. centered job creation is that politicians almost NEVER consider anything without FIRST considering the impact it has on their re-election opportunities and their positions within the Capitol pecking order.

Behind job creation as a “theory” is the over-riding temptation on the part of politicians to create self-serving projects, positions and economic solutions that are about THEM, not US, about POWER and not PEOPLE.

Left alone, the D.C. machine is wholly counter productive to what we, the people (remember us?) understand as a real “JOB” or a real business that must be self-motivated, creative, sensible, conservative and forward-thinking in order to sell products and survices and survive the battles they face which are mostly created by D.C. Those of us who don’t live in Oz know that jobs and business creation in America has always been very, very sensible and not at all complicated, unless of course D.C. muddies the waters with thier filthy self-serving hands.

When the D.C. machine empowers itself as the employment Oz pulling the levers and ropes behind a curtain we can expect to wake up and find ourselves involved in the land of Oz and not the real world of Kansas.

Do not be surprised if NASA’s recent discover of H2O on the moon turns in to a massive works project, funded with your tax dollars and manned with members of the D.C. SEIU.

As we enter the holiday season we can give thanks that the D.C. politicians and bureaucrats have not been able to get to Santa and his hard working, non-union elfs. It should come as no surprise that government can only disrupt reality…yours and mine.

The per person debt is at $38,199 and climbing with each day. Is it any wonder that the people of America are enraged over the disregard, and in some cases, contempt, that our elected officials have toward average citizens who see the national debt being used as a tool to control vitually every aspect of the economy.

Below is the screen shot of USDebtClock.org on September 1, 2009 at 7:18 a.m. Pacific time. Check out the clock and look at all of the RED.