7.6 Million jobs are not here.  Where are they?  Ask President Obama.

Total employment in the United States economy now stands at 130.2 million. This is 7.6 million jobs short of where the President promised the economy would be by December 2010 if Congress adopted his economic policies. 9.6% unemployment. A 7.6 million jobs gap. Unemployment is actually higher now than when the recession ended in June. If this is not the definition of failure, then what is?

Ask Conn Carroll (no relation) from the Heritage Foundation asks, “when will Obama Administration admit that their economic policies have been a complete failure?”

Remember, the $816 BILLION stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment at 8.5%.  No higher.  They promised.  They said if Congress DIDN’T pass the Stimulus, things would get much worse.  They were both right and wrong.  Congress passed the Stimulus and now things have gotten much worse.  Quite the pickle for “the most brilliant” President evah, wouldn’t you say?

By contrast, when the 1980s recession ended in December 1982, unemployment stood at 10.8%. Fifteen months into President Ronald Reagan’s economic recovery, and unemployment had already fallen three full points to 7.8%. Why was the Reagan recovery such a success? And why is the Obama recovery such a failure? Well, for starters, President Reagan did not saddle our children with a brand new $1 trillion entitlement. But more urgently, President Reagan also did not threaten the U.S. economy with the largest tax hike in American history.

There still is time for Congress to act to prevent the Obama tax hikes. Tax hikes that include higher rates on individual income, capital gains and dividends. No Americans will escape the damage from the Obama tax hikes including: 1) Destroying an average of 693,000 jobs every year through 2020; 2) Draining $726 billion from disposable income, $38 billion from personal savings and $33 billion from business investments; 3) costing the average non-farm small-business owner $3,500 more in taxes, and much, much more.

This seems a good time to re-pimp the upcoming movie “I Want Your Money” which opens on October 15.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Here, in the heart of Obamaland, Californians don’t seem too enthusiastic about their choices for Senator and Govrrnor.  LIving just over two miles from the center of Hollywood. I often drive through some of the most liberal jurisdictions of the country. Henry Waxman is my Congressman. He’s going to have a close election this year. He’ll edge his opponent by just 25 points.

Yet, despite the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of this area,I have seen a total of three bumper stickers for the statewide elections, two on the same car, one for Jerry Brown, the other for his soon-to-be septuagenarian sidekick, a Ma’am Barbara Boxer.  On another car, I saw one for the unsmiling Senator. If Democrats aren’t slapping bumper stickers on their cars in this area (where such signs of support are considered a status symbol), where would they be doing it?

As a point of comparison. When I drove to the grocery store earlier this week, I passed more cars with Obama stickers than the number of cars I have seen with Boxer stickers during the entire campaign.  Indeed, in the average parking lot, I see more Obama stickers on cars than the number of Boxer and Brown stickers combined I have seen in this entire campaign.

A lesbian friend who lives in Venice (another very liberal jurisdiction) reports the same thing, “I have seen only 1. And I am [on the] road almost all day.”

Doesn’t sound like Southern California voters are too enthusiastic about their choices this time around.  How that will impact turnout is anybody’s guess.

UPDATE:  Just returned from the post office where I mailed the first draft of the last chapter of my dissertation and saw a car with Carly and Meg stickers.  So, I’ve almost seen as many Republican bumper stickers in this left-wing bailiwick as I have seen Democratic ones.

Well before I posted last night on the “It Gets Better” video, I had received e-mails from several readers alerting me to Dan Savage’s project, each with an almost identical recommendation, “Even though Savage is a partisan jerk,” they said is in so many words, “this is a good idea.”

I write today, fearing some might misconstrue that prior post on the project.  I’m not calling it a bad idea, merely questioning its effectiveness (as I believe Sady Doyle was also doing).

Simply put, I don’t know how effective this project will be.  To be sure, it does no harm  – and has the potential to do some good.  It sets exactly the right tone — an optimistic, upbeat one, that instead of gnashing their teeth and bewailing their fate, young gay people can look forward to a brighter future.

That’s not the only good thing about the video.  It doesn’t dwell on the evil of our oppressors (as do so many of the missives and ministrations of the various gay organizations), but on promoting a forward-looking attitude.

All that said, what teens need most is nurturing human contact.  And we must never lose sight of that.

Charles Krauthammer has the details:

For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling — largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.

That’s not all. Congress has not passed a single appropriations bill. To keep the government going, Congress passed a so-called continuing resolution (CR) before adjourning to campaign. The problem with continuing to spend at the current level is that the last two years have seen a huge 28 percent jump in non-defense discretionary spending. The CR continues this profligacy, aggravating an already serious debt problem.

Democrats haven’t passed a budget while they spent so much time forcing through an unpopular measure to overhaul our nation’s health care system!?!?  Do they think their job is to appease their base clamoring for reform while ignoring their basic obligations?

I wonder what one of Mr. Reid’s most loyal acolytes, a Mrs. B. Boxer of California, has to say about this.  Instead of waiting for her response, just send her a message by supporting the woman seeking to restore some fiscal sanity to the United States Senate.

With government spending rising by 9%, you’d think our politicians might be able to create a job here or there.  But, when, as Linda McMahon learned when questioning her rival for the U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut, Democratic Senatorial candidates are pretty clueless when it comes to creating jobs.  They just don’t know how it’s done.

Well, that hasn’t stopped some Democrats from trying.  And three-termer Barbara Boxer was all abuzz about the president’s stimulus plan she supported so slavishly.  More government spending, she said, it’s certain to create jobs because it is, because it is, because it is.  400,000 jobs were coming to the Golden State.

Well, Mrs. Boxer, the latest job figures are out and it just doesn’t look pretty:

A wave of government layoffs in September outpaced weak hiring in the private sector, pushing down the nation’s payrolls by a net total of 95,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent last month, the LaborDepartment said Friday. The jobless rate has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 straight months, the longest stretch since the 1930s.

Let’s emphasize that line, the longest stretch of a high unemployment rate since the 1930s.  And that rate’s even higher here in the Golden State.

Unlike the 28-year Washington veteran, Boxer’s challenger Carly Fiorina has a plan to create jobs.  Instead of growing government, she wants to reduce the burdens it imposes on entrepreneurs, the people, whom even the president has acknowledged, create jobs.  Boxer’s plan? More of the same.  Back in Washington a few months ago, she and her fellow Democrat were even considering another “stimulus.”

You can support the woman who’ll change the way things are being done in Washington here.

It speaks for itself.  I’m honored that John Schwarzman, the artist, emailed me to make me aware of his work!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

“Remember,” Dan Riehl asks, “when a Joe Miller staffer said something about the oldest profession in reference to Lisa Murkowski seeking endorsement from the Libertarian Party? Well, this looks to be far worse to me.”

He’s referring to a recording that memeorandum has signaled as an emerging issue and to which a reader also alerted me.  Jerry Brown agrees with a staff member’s assessment that Meg Whitman is a whore:

In a private conversation that was inadvertently taped by a voicemail machine, an associate of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown can be heard referring to his Republican opponent Meg Whitman as a “whore” for cutting a deal protecting law enforcement pensions as the two candidates competed for police endorsements.

The comment came after Brown called the Los Angeles Police Protective League in early September to ask for its endorsement. He left a voicemail message for Scott Rate, a union official. Brown apparently believed he had hung up the phone, but the connection remained intact and the voice mail machine captured an ensuing conversation between Brown and his aides.

With evident frustration, Brown discussed the pressure he was under to refuse to reduce public safety pensions or lose law enforcement endorsements to Whitman. Months earlier, Whitman had agreed to exempt public safety officials from key parts of her pension reform plan.

“Do we want to put an ad out? … That I have been warned if I crack down on pensions, I will be – that they’ll go to Whitman, and that’s where they’ll go because they know Whitman will give ‘em, will cut them a deal, but I won’t,” Brown said.

At that point, what appears to be a second voice interjects: “What about saying she’s a whore?”

“Well, I’m going to use that,” Brown responds. “It proves you’ve cut a secret deal to protect the pensions.”

Now,this is far more newsworthy that a partisan Democratic attorney claiming Meg Whitman knowingly hired an illegal alien while waving a letter which said explicitly that it “makes no statement about your employee’s immigration status.”

Having listened to the recording, my reader believes “the voice mail sounds like Jerry saying it,” and indicates that a “‘major’ media source will say that it is Jerry Brown who says it.”  Interesting insight.

UPDATE:  From my source comes word that KCAL is saying that it was Jerry Brown who called Meg a “whore.”

UP-UPDATE: Dana Perino asks where’s the outrage:

One of Jerry Brown’s aides called Meg Whitman a whore. Outrageous? Yes. But don’t expect a slew of women’s-rights groups to come to her defense. They rarely do stick up for Republican and conservative women. I think that Whitman should put up an ad saying, “Stop the name-calling now. I have a singular focus — I want to bring jobs back to California. I want to make sure our beautiful state is as prosperous as it can be. I have a plan to do just that. I will be a leader you can be proud of.”

You’d think that Gloria Allred, with all her concern for supposedly wronged women, would be leading the charge to castigate men like Brown who think this is the way to refer to an ambitious women.

If Sady Doyle had not decided to use a word other than “queer” to describe gay youth at the end of her essay addressing the question, “Does [the Web Video] ‘It Gets Better’ Make Life Better for Gay Teens?“, I would highly recommend her piece.   Semantics aside, it remains a thoughtful contribution to the conversation on what to do in the wake of the suicides of Tyler Clementi and other young gay people.

So, let me just recommend the piece, wondering at the same time if the use of the term, “queer”, to describe people like us, increases the sense of marginalization that young people in our situation feel when they start coming to terms with their difference.

In considering the benefits of the video, Doyle gets at the issue which has been at the top of my mind since I first read of Clementi’s suicide:

However, if we keep telling suicidal people that their situation will “get better” without actually taking any steps to improve it—if we don’t provide support and medical care for people with depression; if we don’t help people who are being abused to find a safe place; if we don’t make sure that the systematic, community-wide abuse of GLBT youth is eliminated—then belief alone can wear thin. And this seems to be one of the main contentions of Savage’s critics.

“There is actually no path to change in this vision,” alleges blogger Zoe Melisa, in a post from her personal blog which was re-published at Queerwatch. “Promoting the illusion that things just ‘get better,’ enables privileged folks to do nothing and just rely on the imaginary mechanics of the American Dream to fix the world.”

Now, much as as I’d like to see the disappearance “the systematic, community-wide abuse of GLBT youth”, I don’t know that we can ever eliminate it.  More on this anon.

That said, I particularly like her focus on providing support to young people in need.  I believe that if such young people find a place where they belong and mentors and friends who can help them find their own inner strength, they will be better situated to deal with their difference, even in a hostile environment.

Her left-wing class rhetoric notwithstanding, Melisa is also onto something.  Is promoting this video merely a feel-good project for well-being people?  It is nice to tell a kid that it’ll get better; it’s better to help him find the means to make it so, that is, to take the time to listen to troubled teens. (more…)

Don’t think Nevada Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rory Reid helped his Dad Harry’s campaign when, in a debate with the next Governor of the Silver State, he acknowledged that “President Obama’s signature achievement could negatively affect Nevada“:

“I don’t deny, however,” Rory Reid said, “that Nevada needs to be vigilant on this issue. The law that was passed gives time for the new system to go into effect, but there is potential for it to put significant pressure on states because Medicaid rates could go up significantly.”

The elder Reid, reporter Bob Cusack reminds us, “played a leading role in the passage of healthcare reform.”  He even kept Senators in Washington until the Eve of Christmas.

Someone I don’t like ol’ Harry likes the fact that his son is reminding Nevada voters about the issue on which he made the Senate work overtime.  While the Democrat made it his signature issue on the Senate floor, he doesn’t seem to be making it much of an issue on the hustings.  Wonder why that is.

And  now junior’s gone and injected the issue into the campaign.  Don’t think this’ll help the outgoing Majority Leader’s plummeting polls.