Cause and Effect

Rasmussen shows that President Obama's approval numbers are almost as bad today as they were good eleven months ago:

Perhaps the following chart at least partially accounts for the disparity:

We were told that the stimulus was necessary to keep joblessness at around 8%, but as the red line shows joblessness is much higher than it was projected to be had there been no stimulus at all. In other words, part of the President's problem is that his policies are exactly the opposite of what are needed to create lasting jobs.

By confronting businesses with looming tax hikes, environmental regulations, and higher employee insurance costs, the President has guaranteed that employers will choose not to risk taking on workers that they'll not be able to afford.

What can the policy makers and shapers in the White House possibly be thinking?

RLC

Intoxicating Rhetoric

All I can say is that it's a good thing for Senator Baucus that they don't administer breathalyzer tests to U.S. senators before they speak on the Senate floor, but perhaps they should:

Let's see. Senator Baucus is criticizing Republicans for not defying their leadership and voting for a bill that the American people don't want, even though no Democrats defied their leadership by voting against the bill that Americans don't want. Apparently, a strict party line vote is bad when Republicans do it and good when Democrats do it.

Maybe you have to be inebriated to think this way. Maybe inebriation explains why the Democrats are so insistent upon foisting this bill on the American people in the first place.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

The Obsolete Man

A student recommended this old half hour Twilight Zone episode as having a certain relevance to events we see unfolding today. It's pretty good.

To those who think it a bit far-fetched to suggest that we are threatened with the sort of Orwellian world depicted in this episode in which religion and books have been abolished needs, well, to read Orwell. Or a history of the twentieth century.

The totalitarian temptation is evidently fixed in the human genome, and there will always be men who seek to exert power and control over others, to strip away their freedom, and to rob them of that which is most precious to them. Such men, when they acquire the power, cannot forbear that others have the freedom to think in ways contrary to how they themselves think. They cannot tolerate any opposition to their vision of how society should be ordered. For such men those who defy their dreams must be crushed, and contrary ideas must be eliminated. Total uniformity must be imposed. This is and has been the goal of the left for 150 years, and, as the Chancellor says in the episode, the error of men like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao wasn't that they went too far but that they didn't go far enough. They failed to purge their societies of all of the undesirables and to rid themselves of the "obsolete men."

Thanks to Ashley for the link.

RLC