Repeat after me:  “Hope and Change.”

<audience chant>

Now this: “Mmm, mmm, mmm… Barack Hussein Obama.”

<audience chant>

Now read this:

Exactly three years after Aretha Franklin’s hat launched the Obama administration, the Democrat’s annual job approval rating has sunk to his lowest level.

That’s not normally a good sign after 1,095 days in office. But who’s counting? Heading into reelection years, pols want to be at least at the 50% level. A new Gallup Poll just out reveals that the ex-state senator’s job approval for his third full year is 44%.

That’s down from 47% in his second year.

That’s down from 57% in his first year.

It’s also down from the 69% approval he enjoyed on Inauguration Day.

So, the better Americans have come to know the guy and to watch his record, the less they seem to think of him. Of course, what really matters is what they think of him starting with early voting this October and ending the night of Nov. 6.

Gallup’s 2012 results are based on about 175,000 adult interviews during the year, showing a brief high for Obama of 53% in May (can you say Navy SEALs’ success?) and a low two times of 38% in both August and October.

In terms of historical patterns, Obama’s third-year average is the lowest of any modern president except the doomed Democrat Jimmy Carter, who had 37.4%. The highest approval at this stage of a first term was Dwight Eisenhower with 72.1% and George H.W. Bush with just under 70%.

According to Gallup’s analysis:

“Comparing Obama’s third-year numbers with all presidential years in Gallup records, Obama’s 44% average job approval rating is well below average, ranking 53rd of the 68 presidential years measured.”

But this conflicts with what They all tell me: Barack Obama is The Smartest President EVAH!” 

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his interview with the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney showed that he understands the core issue facing conservative voters today:

So it is also notable that now Mr. Romney describes the core failure of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda as faith in “a wise group of governmental bureaucrats” rather than political and economic freedom. “It is a refrain that we have seen throughout history where smart people are convinced that smart people ought to be able to guide an economy better than hordes of individuals pursuing their self-interest,” Mr. Romney says, “the helter-skelter of free people choosing their course in life.”

The Republican presidential candidate says he never intended to run for office again after 2008 [, but] drawn back into public life amid Mr. Obama’s bid to “fundamentally transform” the country, to use the president’s own words, into “an entitlement society,” to use Mr. Romney’s.

“America can continue to lead the world from a values standpoint, from an economic standpoint, and from a military standpoint,” Mr. Romney avers. He says the coming election represents “a very simple choice” between Mr. Obama’s “European social democrat” vision and “a merit-based opportunity society—an American-style society—where people earn their rewards based upon their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams.”

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.  He gets that the major problem of the Obama administration (and even, to some extent, the Bush administration that preceded it) is to prefer the judgment of a handful of experts in Washington, D.C. (drawn from and at university campuses) to that of millions of Americans and the entrepreneurs among us acting independently in cities, suburbs, towns and hamlets across the country.

This is not to say I’m backing Romney, only to point out that he sees the stakes.  The article goes on to recount more episodes from the interview which makes Mr. Romney seem, at least in his approach to governing, more like Bill Clinton than anyone else.  He is wonkish, “highly analytical,” as he puts it, “driven by data”.

And like that Democrat, he does understand the tenor of the times and tapers his policies toward them.

From a small government point of view, that is not entirely a bad thing.

Earlier today, Dan asked “What’s the Matter With Kansas“?  The answer is, of course: NOTHING.

The same question & answer go for the booming state of North Dakota.  In that case it is ENERGY that is fueling the state’s employment. 

When it comes to creating jobs, North Dakota has found the right formula. The state has the largest percentage increase in employment over the past year and was the fastest of all 50 to recover from the recession.

The reason is simple: energy production.

“North Dakota has been the poster child for what can happen when we unleash free enterprise and allow states to develop and commercialize their resources,” Heritage’s Nick Loris wrote recently on The Foundry. “North Dakota is drilling at record pace.”

The state’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, the lowest in the country. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that North Dakota added 17,300 new jobs over the past year, which represented a 4.5 percent increase — the largest in the United States.

Showing them all up: Texas.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

According to Jim Geraghty, the stste’s “unemployment rate is 6.5 percent, more than two percentage points lower than the national average. For what it’s worth, the rate is down two-tenths of a percentage point from last month. Kansas’s unemployment rate has been consistently below the national average, peaking at 7.6 percent in the summer of 2009.”

Guess it must be that conservative “populist movement that has done irreversible harm to the material interests of the common people it professes to love so tenderly“.

Maybe we should ask Thomas Frank what’s the matter with California where unemployment is currently three percentage points higher than the national average.  Democrats have run both houses of the California legislature for the past 14 15 years.  Can’t recall the last time they ran either in the Sunflower State.

Well, there is at least one sad aspect of Barney Frank’s upcoming retirement.  We won’t have the unhappy Massachusetts Democrat to kick around any more.  This guy is so ripe for ridicule.  It has been a lot of fun mocking his various statements, not to mention his juvenile reaction to the type of questions Republican politicians face on a daily basis.

“From his relatively petty transgressions related to his personal life,” write the editors of the National Review,

to his more consequential role in enabling Fannie and Freddie, Representative Frank personifies a great deal of what is wrong with American public life. Though a highly intelligent man, he made the wrong decisions at every turn, and compounded his policy errors with the petty and vindictive style of his politics.

Barney is, in short, an embarrassment. Now, I’m sure that if I scanned the various gay blogs, I would read numerous encomia to this prominent politician. Indeed, I received one such e-mail yesterday from a gay organization.

Instead of celebrating his career and lamenting his retirement, gay people should be cheering his departure.  Simply put, Barney is not a good role model for our community.  We should not want such a mean-spirited, petty man, wrong about so much, unwilling to admit his mistakes, childish in victory as a face of gay America.  That he will no longer be the most prominent gay politician is a good thing for gay America, a very good thing indeed.

RELATED: The Best Thing Barney Frank Could Do For Gay People . . .

UPDATE:  Indeed, even today, Barney demonstrates his juvenile inability to handle the type of questions Republicans face on a daily basis.   In the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering reports that the retiring Democrat “lashed out against the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie this morning for asking ‘negative questions’ during an interview about his recent retirement announcement.”  (Read the whole thing — and watch the video.)

Interesting that Barney only gets tough questions from the MSM after he has announced his retirement.

This is the guy the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn once dubbed a “Minority Wit“?

Last night before bed, I caught these headlines on Yahoo! Note particularly the last one:

Seems the AP is eager to tie the GOP to the Solyndra scandal, even though its reporter found no evidence that the aide in question Gary Andres, staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had ever “worked on behalf of Solyndra” nor that he was “aware until recently that Dutko [the lobbying firm where he had once worked] had represented Solyndra in 2008.”

Seems the AP is trying to create the impression that the GOP too was involved in the short-sighted (and likely politically-motivated) administration decision to offer a half-billion dollar (and then some) loan guarantee to the “green energy” firm with ties to Obama administration officials and Democratic donors.

In attempting to tie a Republican to the Solyndra scandal, the AP (and the other news services which repost the article) are attempting to distract us from the real story, crony capitalism of the Obama White House where the cronies donate heavily to Democratic candidates, causes and campaign committees in exchange for federal largesse.

Just as “green energy” is at the heart of the administration’s corrupt crony capitalism, so is environmental zealotry perhaps the biggest source of burdensome federal regulations crafted during the Obama years.  Blogging about such regulations, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency’s decree that “America’s fleet of passenger cars and light trucks will have to meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a doubling of today’s average of about 27 mpg“, Jeffrey H. Anderson gets at the heart of the record of Obama record:

This represents nearly everything that’s bad about the Obama administration:  a disdain for the normal legislative process and the rule of law; a disregard for consumer choice; a commitment to intrusive government regulations that sap Americans’ liberty and empty their wallets; and a general arrogance that this administration, not the American people, knows best. (more…)

Yesterday, I started Thomas Sowell’s Economic Facts and Fallacies, underlining many passages, including this one:

. . . the zero-sum fallacy had kept millions of very poor people needlessly mired in poverty for generations before such notions were abandoned.  That is an enormously high price to pay for an unsubstantiated assumption.  Fallacies can have huge impacts.

Emphasis added.  In the margin, I wrote, “Obama’s ‘stimulus’: was there evidence it would work — where have similar programs tried & succeeded?”  Yes, we read economists explaining how the president’s plan was supposed to work, but they derived their explanations from Keynesian theory and not marketplace experience.  They reached their conclusions on unsubstantiated assumptions.  And we’re paying an enormously high price for that.

It does seem that Democrats and left-of-center pundits, not to mention intellectuals, make their cases on faith, er, theory rather than experience.  A few hours after reading Sowell, I caught something  on Instapundit which helped confirm that hypothesis:

JIM TYNEN: “Here’s what interests me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own? . . . Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class.”

Tynen adds that “journalists and others on the low rungs of the Knowledge class defend the dogma. And of course this also goes for the dogma of Keynes, and multiculturalism, and much else.”  Emphasis added.

Last Thursday, a blogger at Ace of Spades quoted White House flack Josh Earnest’s contention that the president’s American Jobs Act is “the only plan before Congress that independent analysts confirm would create jobs right away“. And just who are those independent analysts, Josh? And did they show how the president’s plan was similar to other government programs which led to job creation or did they base their conclusions on economic theory?

It seems sometimes that so much of liberal theory is just that, theory, based not on how the world works, but on how some very smart people believe it works.

Despite the president’s campaign contention to be a new kind of politician, one who would rise above ideological divisions to unite the nation, he — and his team — have a very poor understanding of why Republicans oppose his policies.  They can’t seem to understand that most conservatives just don’t believe his “stimulus” would stimulate growth or that his jobs bill would create jobs.

Instead, as Greg Sargent reports, White House political advisor David Axelrod is telling CNN’s Candy Crowley that Republicans might be sabotaging the economy on purpose:

They don’t want to cooperate. They don’t want to help. Even on measures to help the economy that they traditionally have supported before, like a payroll tax cut, like infrastructure, rebuilding our roads and bridges and surface transport. These — so you have to ask a question, are they willing to tear down the economy in order to tear down the president or are they going to cooperate?

Emphasis in original.  Axelrod was, as Sargent reports, “pushing back on . . . Crowley’s suggestion that Obama bears some of the blame for Congress’s failure to act on the economy”.

Remember, this is the White House that crafted its jobs bill in secret without input from Republicans (throwing in ideas that they contended Republicans, as Axelrod put it, “traditionally have supported before”) and then demanded that Congress “pass this bill.”

Not just that, after all the concerns expressed about our burgeoning federal debt, the White House throws out a bill that increases federal spending.  And then blames Republicans.

Why isn’t this administration — and its party — able to acknowledge the opposition’s legitimate policy concerns?  Perhaps, they should find that politician who was “trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“”

Earlier this month, Tina Korbe blogged at Hot Air that the White House was “irked by rumors Obama plans to drop Biden“.  You gotta wonder why the president wants to keep ol’ Joe on the job.  He doesn’t shore up his base as Dan Quayle helped George H.W. Bush (Bush 41) with conservatives, particularly social conservative in 1992.

He is not well regarded for his intellect.  If a Republican put his foot in his mouth as often as does the Delaware Democrat, he’d become the favorite punching bag of a great number of TV hosts as well as the poster boy for conservative incompetence.

But, their Joe is, well, used to fawning attention from the Beltway media that he bristles at the type of questioning prominent Republicans deal with on a regular basis.  As he did the 2008 campaign when he “lambasted” a reporter’s “questions as ‘combative and woefully uninformed about simple facts’”, now he’s whining that journalist Jason Mattera asked him if he regretted “using a rape reference to describe Republican opposition to the president’s bill“:

Joe Biden’s office has complained to the Senate press gallery about a confrontation the vice president had with a conservative journalist last week on Capitol Hill.

Biden aides asked whether Senate rules were broken in the wake of the contentious exchange between the vice president and the reporter.

Why is it that so many Democrats get so upset when reporters ask them tough questions?

As Michelle Malkin observed

Biden’s crude response to Mattera’s challenge — “Don’t screw around with me” — is par for the Beltway Bubble Boy’s course. This entitled blowhard has long sought to bully reporters and ordinary citizens who question Bidenrhhea of the mouth. . . .

Anything less than total sycophancy from the Obamedia is considered “combative,” you see. Biden then cracked the brass knuckles and punished the Florida television station by canceling a previously scheduled interview with his wife.

Guess these folks have forgotten how a celebrated Democrat countered a politician who complained about harsh rhetoric on the campaign trail.   “If you can’t stand the heat,” Harry S Truman used to say, “stay out of the kitchen.”

RELATED:  Recall how Katie Couric tossed softballs to Joe when he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee while asking tougher questions of his Republican rival in 2008?  Seems he and his ilk have come to expect deferential treatment from the media.

When our President is beholden to union special interests and a failed Keynesian economic dogma, most of us could have  did predict his “recovery” plans would have been a complete FAIL.

From Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com:

When running for President, Barack Obama decried the decline of American household income, which certainly dropped during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.  Since the recovery began in June 2009 — a recovery for which Obama has repeatedly claimed credit — that trend has gotten worse, not better.  A new report shows that the percentage of decline in household income during the so-called recovery actually doubled that of the recession:

During the recession, which economists say lasted from Dec. 2007 to June 2009, the median annual household income fell by 3.2 percent, from $55,309 to $53,518, according to a report authored by two former U.S. Census Bureau officials. But in the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the figure fell by 6.7 percent, from $53,518 in June 2009 to $49,909 in June 2011. …

The study found that during the post-recessionary period, families with just a male or female head with no spouse present saw a 7.3 percent decline in income compared to the 4.5 percent drop for married-couple households. Income for households with a head under the age of 25 fell by 9.5 percent, significantly more than the 5.5 percent decline for households with a head who is 45 to 54 years old.

Again, I repeat: Our President Spent $787 Billion Dollars Of Our Money And We Got Was This Lousy 9.1% Unemployment Rate (Forever…)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I am proud this morning to announce my support for Herman Cain for President.

This is a personal decision by me and does not reflect the views of my co-bloggers nor should be construed as an official endorsement by GOPROUD of which I am a board member.

Now that I’m done with that disclaimer….let me shout this from sea to shining sea — AMERICA NEEDS HERMAN CAIN!!!! I have been flirting with the Cain candidacy for over a year now. I had the pleasure to meet him at CPAC and I have been closely following his campaign long before most people knew his name.

I felt it was important to declare my preference publicly today as I have decided to become actively involved in Team Cain to assist in the South Carolina primary and beyond. I owe my readers the transparency of knowing why I am writing about certain things and not to be confused by my intent.

Why Herman Cain? Well, haven’t been this excited about a Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984 (the first year I was old enough to truly know anything and make a difference).

Some will now say, “now Bruce….there will never be another Ronald Reagan!” And that is true. And I am NOT equating Mr. Cain to Mr. Reagan. What I am saying is that Mr. Cain excites me with his common sense ideas, love of country, and ability to connect to the American psyche. Choosing a President has always been a “gut feeling” thing for America. I have a great feeling about Herman Cain.

Herman Cain has been plucked by destiny to arrive at America’s electoral doorstep at just the right time. He has a solid business background, is an inspirational leader of people, and understands the complexities of the world economy. He wasn’t a community organizer, he is a jobs and growth creator. He wasn’t a concocted creation of America’s radical left and academic centers of power, he is a true child of the American Experience. He has never scoffed at American values, he embraces our nation’s special place in the history of mankind and knows we are teetering on the edge.

Mr. Cain is familiar with rescuing failing enterprises, which to me is his most important qualification. In a sheer coincidence to the timing of my announcement, Daniel Henninger wrote this yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

Does a résumé like Herman Cain’s add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But after watching the American Idol system we’ve fallen into for discovering a president—with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents—I’m rewriting my presidential-selection software. [Emphasis added.]

Conventional wisdom holds that this week’s Chris Christie boomlet means the GOP is desperate for a savior. The reality is that, at some point, Republicans will have to start drilling deeper on their own into the candidates they’ve got.

Put it this way: The GOP nominee is running against the incumbent president. Unlike the incumbent, Herman Cain has at least twice identified the causes of a large failing enterprise, designed goals, achieved them, and by all accounts inspired the people he was supposed to lead. Not least, Mr. Cain’s life experience suggests that, unlike the incumbent, he will adjust his ideas to reality.

No other GOP candidate can bring the fight to Obama over the sorry state of the American economy than Herman Cain. Our other choices are, I’m sad to say, more of the same old thing — career professional politicians. Yes, even Ron Paul, folks.

So there you have it. My big announcement. Herman Cain is the first Presidential candidate I will actively and ENTHUSIASTICALLY campaign for through blood, sweat, money & tears since Ronald Reagan in 1984. That’s a long time of being unmoved by GOP nominees, don’t you think?

There will be more to say about Herman Cain and the issues. But I wanted to stand up today and proudly declare my support for the 45th President of the United States of America and the next true heir of the American Experience — Mr. Herman Cain.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Wow.  This from Gallup today:

• 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.
• A record-high 81% of Americans are dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed, adding to negativity that has been building over the past 10 years.

Oh, there’s so much more…. read the whole thing.

Hey, someone should write more about this “Low Grade Civil War” thing!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Our famously even-handed media have long subjected us to the myth of the long-suffering, noble Democrat, too decent a human being to engage the vile, mean-spirited Republican rabble who regularly make angry accusations and engage in dishonest discourse. If only these high-minded Dmocrats had fought back, lament the well-educated pundits reaching for their smelling salts, they would win more elections.

As Eric noted earlier today, the famously dispassionate Maureen Dowd is the latest liberal pundit to count Barack Obama among the number of Democrats who have seen their standing in the polls slip because they just aren’t as mean as their right-wing adversaries. Calling the president “conflict-averse” and fearing that with that Democrat, “there is always the danger of a relapse into the passive, we’re-all-reasonable-people style,” E. J. Dionne shared this view, relishing the emergence of a fighting Obama.

Guess the columnist missed all those group Eric mentioned and hadn’t been listening, say, to the president’s budget speech on April 13 or his debt speech on July 25.  He has engaged in some of the most divisive discourse of any U.S. President,  even this week on his taxpayer-funded campaign-style swing through the Midwest where he “he fired off his most intense criticism of Congress yet, warning lawmakers they will be defeated if they continue to obstruct his policies.”

Republicans have good reason to “obstruct” those policies.  Instead of turning to policies which work to create jobs, the Democrat is returning to those that failed.  In Cannon Falls, Minnesota, he indicated that despite the 2010 election and the mounting federal deficit, the “balanced” approach he favors means higher taxes and more government spending: (more…)

in a piece comparing responses to the riots in London and Los Angeles, Joy McCain gets at the essence of liberal support of gun control:

The left is right to fear firearms, since exercise of that particular freedom and experience of that self-sufficiency (however limited it is in scope) can be a “gateway drug” to other forms of independent thought and action.

It’s all about wresting control from individuals and delivering power to the state, an entity which, they believe, will run by those better and brighter than the common man (or woman) and so better able to tell such commonfolk how to run their lives.

Perhaps that is also why gay leaders refuse to embrace policies (e.g., concealed carry) which would give gay individuals another tool to protect ourselves.

Guess it’s part of that equality notion for the gay community rather than that freedom ideal for gay individuals.  To have equality, they contend, you must needs have a stronger state.

When I recently commented to a liberal Facebook friend’s status update mocking the GOP, one of her ideological confrères (well technically a consoeur) quipped that the GOP was “The Grand Obstructionist Party, creating nothing but mayhem.”  Does seem this notion of the GOP as obstructionist is gaining traction on the left.

In a July 13 segment on Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist and his no-new-taxes pledge, CNN’s Lisa Sylvester included this critique of the libertarian and his pledge from Michael Ettlinger of the Center for American Progress (CAP (tbg*)):

Grover Norquist is a big problem, but I think the people whose feet he’s holding to the fire are getting tired of it.

You know, we’re getting to the point where we need serious people to sit down and make serious decisions, and drawing really hard lines in the sand the way Grover does is hurting the country.

Ettlinger didn’t quite call Grover an obstructionist, but did fault him from preventing “serious people” (i.e., those who don’t want to rein in the federal government) from making decisions he deems serious (find federal solutions to all manner of societal ills.)  The pledge isn’t quite hurting the country as it is hurting Mr. Ettlinger’s plans — and those of the president — to expand the size of the federal government and the scope of its power.

Folks like Grover who draw a line in the sand when it comes to higher taxes seek to obstruct those plans.  So, if that’s what obstructionism is, I’m all for it.

* (more…)

Perhaps, I should de-clutter my apartment more often.  When I do so, I keep coming across fodder for blog posts.

Last night, when tidying an old “roll-top” desk I inherited from my grandmother, I came across a passage on liberal arrogance I had printed out from James Taranto’s Best of the Web:

Liberals can be suckered precisely because they think they are the only intelligent people in America. This smug confidence insulates them from having to pay attention to what anybody else is saying. The conventional wisdom among liberals is that people disagree with them only because they are stupid, uneducated, or have been bought off by the sinister forces of American capitalism. . . .

You cannot find a liberal intellectual anywhere who can give you an honest, objective accounting of conservative positions on major issues. All they know is that conservatives are “stupid,” racist” and “scary”–boilerplate terms but unfortunately the exact words employed by [NPR executive Richard] Schiller on the tape. . . .

By assuming they are smarter than everybody else, liberals leave themselves utterly vulnerable to anyone who plays on their sense of superiority.

Feeling so superior maybe they just assume that their policies will work. And when they don’t, they seem unable to figure out why, so they start blaming conservatives.

But, if they’re so smart, wouldn’t they learn from their mistakes?

…if that’s what you call this nightmare we are living in. The following stats are provided by Investors Business Daily, but they are courtesy of the Obama Regime:

There are 2 million fewer private-sector jobs now than when Obama was sworn in, and the unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points higher.

• There are now more long-term unemployed than at any time since the government started keeping records.

• The U.S. dollar is more than 12% weaker.

• The number of Americans on food stamps has climbed 37%.

• The Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) is up 62%.

• And the national debt is about 40% higher than it was in January 2009.

In fact, reporters who bother to look will discover that Obama has managed to produce the worst recovery on record.

Hope and Change continues to ruin our nation…

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his address last Thursday to the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s President Dmitri Medvedev charted a new for the largest republic of the former Soviet Union, choosing to scrap the “excessive government role in the economy and the excessive centralization of power are the taxes on the future”.

Yet, as the Russians move away from centralized government, John Hinderaker finds American Democrats digging in their heels and defending policies which have failed, thwarting entrepreneurial innovation and stymying economic growth:

Here in the U.S., Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid must realize that they are fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of an ideology that already has been consigned to history’s trash can. But they and their colleagues are like the dog that can whistle, but only knows one tune. They have no other ideas to offer, and will ride their discredited theories all the way to ruin, if the voters let them.

*yet still championed by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Reporting that Russ Feingold, voted out of office last fall by the voters of Wisconsin, said, “Russ Feingold says “The game’s not over until we win”, Glenn Reynolds quipped, “By any means necessary, apparently.”

Given that Mr. Feingold voted for Obamacare, even as the American people (and apparently also those in his home state) were rejecting it, it seems he and his ilk are bound and determined to impose their agenda on America, no matter what the voters say.

ADDENDUM:  Can you imagine the media reaction if a Republican had made a comment similar to Feingold’s?