Awsome.

Barack Obama’s presidential job approval rating is 47% in the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update, a new low for his administration to date. His approval rating has been below 50% for much of the time since mid-November, but briefly rose to 52% last week after he announced his new Afghanistan policy.

Any slight bump in support Obama received coincident with his new Afghanistan policy proved to be very short-lived, as his approval rating returned to below the majority level by the weekend, and slipped further to 47% in Dec. 4-6 polling.

Feel free to discuss.

This actually came out on Friday – you know, in a data dump designed to get it out there, but not have anyone notice it:

In October and November, the government spent $292 billion more than it took in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.

That was even worse than the same period last year, when the government was on its way to posting a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

According to the linked report, outlays were down, so the extra deficit comes from lower revenues – naturally, they look for a tax cutting culprit (in this case, an easement on corporate write-offs), but that is just idiotic – a 9% decline in revenues doesn’t come from such things. Not even close. The real deal is that economic activity is vastly less than it was in the Oct-Nov 2008 time frame – and its not like the economy was going gang-busters in late 2008.

Its all a smoke a mirrors recovery, good people – and things like idle ships, idle trucks, lowering tax revenues are what to pay attention to…not banker/bureaucrat reports on bogus profits at bailed out corporations.

UPDATE, by Matt Margolis: Obama’s two-month deficit Is more than the Bush deficit For the entire 2006 calendar year

Yeah, no kidding:

The high-profile lawyer hired to investigate ACORN has found no pattern of intentional illegal conduct in the community organizing group — a finding that was dismissed as “damage control” by one of the two filmmakers who, posing as a pimp and prostitute, videotaped staffers offering advice on how to operate a brothel.

One wonders why they even bothered….but, then again, liberals will believe it and sure as night follows day, we’ll eventually get liberal comments saying that ACORN has been investigated and cleared…

Hey, if you can’t get it done via democratic means, it doesn’t mean you don’t get it done, right?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will formally declare that greenhouse gases endanger human health on Monday, allowing President Barack Obama to show action as a major climate change summit opened in Copenhagen.

The EPA finding will allow it to regulate planet-warming gases even without legislation in the U.S. Congress, and will inject some optimism into the two-week global meeting on controlling climate change in the Danish capital.

Keep in mind that “greenhouse gasses” include the stuff you exhale a zillion times a day – you, my friend, are a threat to the earth! The EPA has decided that controlling your breathing is so important that they’ll act outside the law. Cool, huh? All it takes is a collection of pinheads in government who haven’t the faintest notion of what a law is. Oh, and you have to continue to believe that human beings are causing global warming…or, at least, pretend you believe it because its such a handy tool to gain control of peoples’ lives.

UPDATE: 1,200 limos and 140 private planes transport global warming fascists and dupes to conference

Noted over at Big Government:

Insuring 30 million people at a 10 year cost of $849 billion would mean a per person cost of $28,300. Over 10 years that would be $2,830 a year, but this isn’t a 10 year plan. The bill before the Senate doesn’t take effect until 2013, well after the next Presidential election. And while the Congressional Budget Office score covers the years 2010 through 2019, only in the years 2013-2019 is anyone actually insured. So we’re looking at a window of 7 years, which give us an average cost of $4042.85 per person, per year people are actually being insured. The average person could find a cheaper health insurance plan.

But, of course, its not about health care – its about control. Liberals want fascist control over our lives, and they figure the best means of doing this is getting control of our health care. That done, we’ll be easily pressured in to conceding the rest of our liberties – with liberals grandly allowing us the freedom to be freakish in our sex lives, should we so choose; they’ll take care of everything else.

Its all a big scam – not, at this point, as big a scam as global warming, but right up there.

UPDATE: And now Reid, believe it or not, plays the race card on the health care debate.

Mish, once again, goes over the real numbers and, among many other things, shows this:

Highlights

* 11,000 jobs were lost in total vs. 190,000 jobs last month.

* 27,000 construction jobs were lost vs. 62,000 last month.

* 41,000 manufacturing jobs were lost vs. 61,000 last month.

* 58,000 service providing jobs were added vs. 61,000 lost last month.

* 15,000 retail trade jobs were lost vs. 40,000 last month.

* 86,000 professional and business services jobs were added vs. 18,000 added last month.

* 40,000 education and health services jobs were added vs. 45,000 added last month.

* 11,000 leisure and hospitality jobs were lost vs. 37,000 last month.

* 07,000 government jobs were added vs. 0 added last month.

A total of 69,000 goods producing jobs were lost (higher paying jobs). Retail and professional services contributed massively to to the plus side.

In my view, this is very bad – and I highly suspect the 86,000 number for “professional and business service” jobs, as well as the 58,000 for “service providing”. It seems to me that the numbers for October and November were tailor-made to have jobs lost number come in just where, say, a banker or bureaucrat would want it to be – presuming that said bankers and bureaucrats want us to doubt our lying eyes and believe them about the state of the economy.

But even if these numbers are rock-solid, the loss of 102,000 manufacturing jobs and 89,000 construction jobs over the past two months indicates to me that if we are growing our economy, we’re growing it in the wrong way. We need to be doing more real work and less paper shuffling – the jobs numbers indicate that whatever growth we’re having, its at the expense of those who actually create wealth.

We need to return to the economy of making, mining and growing our own stuff – until we do, we’re just spinning our wheels.

Steyn picks it out in bold colors:

“Our goal in war,” wrote Basil Liddell Hart, the great strategist of armored warfare, “can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will.” In other words, the object of war is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but the enemy’s will. That goes treble if, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, he hasn’t got any tanks in the first place. So what do you think Obama’s speech did for the enemy’s will? He basically told ’em: We can only stick another 19 months, so all you gotta do is hang in there for 20. And in an astonishingly vulgar line even by the standards of this White House’s crass speechwriters he justified his announcement of an exit date by saying it was “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” Or, as Frank Sinatra once observed, “It’s very nice to go trav’ling/But it’s so much nicer . . . to come home”:

“It’s very nice to just wander the camel route to Iraq . . . but it’s so much nicer, yes it’s oh so nice to wander back.”

It is to be hoped that a combination of circumstances will force Obama’s hand and not allow him to precipitously withdraw on his time line if victory isn’t yet secured. If we have a string of successes showing that we’re winning – thus building up public support for continued effort – coupled with a public wariness of a cut-and-run, Obama might not have the political power to scuttle Afghanistan right before the 2012 campaign opens. Ultimately, it will be up to the solders to pull Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire. I have confidence in them.

Much less confidence in Obama – and a great deal of worry that his left wing base, especially if not fed the socialist meat of socialized medicine – might start to insist upon an early withdrawal with the threat of backing a third party if not given the desired defeat of the United States in war. Ultimately, it comes down to this: can the military win the war before the liberals force us to lose it?

Write large:

About 25 percent of borrowers helped under the administration’s massive foreclosure prevention plan have already fallen behind on their new mortgage payments, according to government data that raise new questions about the program’s effectiveness.

The delinquency figures reflect the latest troubles of the program, known as Making Home Affordable. Earlier this week, Treasury officials announced a campaign to put new pressure on lenders to do more to move struggling homeowners into loans with easier terms.

So far, more than 650,000 borrowers have been enrolled into the initial, or “trial,” phase of the program…

Why isn’t it working? Because for someone who loses their job, no modification will work. For someone who is massively “underwater” on their loan, lowering the payment doesn’t change the overall financial picture.

As I’ve been saying for a while, the only way out of this housing mess is to send America’s housing market it to bankruptcy reorganization. Its a big, old poop sandwich and everyone is going to have to take a bite. For those out there of an entirely ungenerous view – those who are employed and not underwater and are insisting that everyone just sink or swim – we can give you some tax breaks, or something, if you need a bribe to just agree to people being helped in a manner which does no immediate harm to you and will help you, in the long run (by sustaining housing at its current value, thus ensuring you don’t lose any of your existing equity).

Some people will have to lose their homes – the assistance, for them, should take the form of helping them to easily go through foreclosure/short sale and in to a rental property. For those who will keep their homes but who are underwater, it should take the form of reducing the principle balance to fair market value – which will be a huge loss to those who have paid for years and will now lose all the money they’ve paid to date; this will also be a hard hit on the banks, but at least everyone will know what the real value of their loan portfolio is, and the fear of a massive, new wave of foreclosures will recede.

My dear, fellow Americans – we borrowed ourselves in to oblivion and in the process massively over-inflated the value of our real assets, most especially our real estate. Its time to suck all the gas out of the bag and start afresh. Or, we can just let things fall apart even more – more people to lose their homes or just walk away from them, more banks going under, more jobs to be lost…its our choice.

Now, if we can just force this inhuman organization out of business:

Last week, InsiderCatholic.com issued a story referring to a Harvard Business School case study which outlined some of Planned Parenthood’s recent financial difficulties. According to Mauricio Roman’s article, Planned Parenthood has recently consolidated its affiliates, pushed for more cost effective procedures such as chemical abortions versus in-clinic abortions, and has tried to increase its sale of emergency contraceptive kits.

The Harvard case study, released in April of 2009, claims that “tough economic times, a hostile political environment” and inability to raise philanthropic dollars are among the reasons for Planned Parenthood’s financial difficulties, despite the fact that the non-profit organization claimed $85 million in profits in 2008.

Part of the reason Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups are pushing hard for federally funded abortion via ObamaCare is because of this increasing financial stress. We must fight hard against putting the abortion industry on the federal dole – and then our continuing actions against the Culture of Death will eventually see such groups consigned to the ash heap of history.

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