"We certainly have to give the full attention Benghazi deserves, but we cannot let it soak up all of the congressional attention," Pelosi said. "What would be the purpose of that?"
Sadly, folks, there were 195,000 fewer people employed in this country in July than there were in June. It might have been 172,000 new jobs. That's even debatable. But it was a net wash because -- these are numbers from the BLS report. I'm not making it up. Obama's Department of Labor's own numbers, 195,000 fewer people employed in the United States in July than there were in June. We lost jobs. We also lost more people from the labor force. The national unemployment rate went up, 8.2 to 8.3%. One-hundred and fifty thousand people simply dropped out of the labor force. Actually that number is 155,000, which means that this 172,000 new jobs that he's trumpeting are actually a wash, folks. No net new jobs, 195,000 fewer people employed, 150,000 simply dropped out of the labor force. That's the pattern.
July saw a slight move up in U-6, which had been coming down earlier in the year to the mid-14 range. That measure of un/underemployment has now risen to 15.2%, increasing in both adjusted and unadjusted measures. It’s the highest rating in this measure since February, and it’s now up more than a full point since April.Historically, no sitting president has won re-election with numbers like this.
Because the July jobs report affirmed the now-certain reality that the unemployment rate won’t drop below eight percent between today and November. And no sitting president since World War II has been re-elected with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent.
The numbers are daunting for Obama. The unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 42 straight months— its longest period ever.
Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.In his remarks yesterday, "the smartest president ever" redefined economic policy as we know it to work with his theory of trickle-up economics:
And keep in mind, we're talking about folks like me going back to the tax rates that existed under Bill Clinton. If you remember, that was when we created 23 million new jobs, we went from deficits to surplus, and folks at the top did well, too -- because when middle-class families have money in their pockets, they go out and buy that new car, or that new appliance, or that new computer for their kids, or they go out to a restaurant, or, heaven forbid, they take a vacation once in a while. And that money goes back into the economy, and businesses do well because they've got more customers.So the rich get richer because the middle class spends money? And the middle class gets this money where? Food stamps? After all, that's Nancy Pelosi's theory. She explained her food-stamps-as-stimulus theory back in 2010. That these people are running the country just scares the hell out of me.
Did you catch that? The money starts with the middle class, and as long as the middle class has money, then they go out and spend it, and that's how the rich get rich. Wow! Wow! Folks at the top did well, too, because when middle-class families have money in their pockets, they go out and buy that new car, that new appliance, or that new computer for their kids when they've got money in their pocket. So we gotta get money into the hands of the middle class. How we gonna do that? We're gonna do food stamps. Trickle up. So we got a brand-new economic definition here from Mr. Wizard of Smart.
Republicans are attacking Attorney General Eric Holder to help states purge their voting rolls ahead of November's elections, the top House Democrat charged Thursday.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday's committee vote to hold Holder in contempt of Congress — and next week's scheduled floor vote on the same resolution — represent a thinly veiled Republican scheme to distract the attorney general from his fight against state laws that have erected new hurdles to voting and registration, hurdles that would suppress areas that tend to vote Democratic.
Asked if there was a statute of limitations on blaming Bush, Pelosi said: "Well, it runs out when the problems go away.
"We've almost gotten where we think it's funny," the former first lady added. "Now we're all blaming George for something in our family."
House Democratic Whip James Clyburn appeared on Fox News this morning admitting that he still does not have the votes to move Obamacare forward. He says he WILL have them, he just doesn't now.House Republican leaders will announce this morning a plan to force a vote this week on a resolution that would require the Senate health care bill to be brought to an actual up-or-down vote...If passed by the House, the resolution would prohibit Speaker Pelosi from implementing the “Slaughter Solution,” the scheme by which House Democratic leaders are seeking to “deem” the Senate bill as passed without an actual vote in the House."
President Obama is planning to tell Democrats his preferred strategy this week. After letting the effort play out in Congress for many months, he recently stepped in to lead it. He issued his own proposal, held a bipartisan summit and is preparing to direct the next legislative steps.All this and Pelosi says she thinks Dems will keep the House in the fall. Seriously?Increasingly, the White House appears to favor having the House pass a version of the measure that cleared the Senate with 60 votes in December. The Senate would then pass changes to the bill to satisfy some demands of House Democrats. That Senate vote would take place under a parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation, which requires 51 votes rather than 60.
It remains unclear whether Democrats have enough votes within their ranks for this strategy to work. At the same time, it is only "one option" the president is considering, a senior White House official said Sunday.
And by the way, the health care bill is a jobs bill. It will create four million new jobs, several hundred thousand immediately upon enactment. And it will also encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in our country where people can take risks and be entrepreneurial because they know they have health care.Are we to assume all those people with health insurance now are just not taking advantage of the entrepreneurial options that having health care gives them?
The thing about watching this debate on CSPAN today is that I can feel my blood pressure alternately swoop and dive, rise and fall. I listen to some of these people and I hear the gamut of human condition. Some of them are rational, some incensed, some clueless, and some slap crazy. Some are just posturing. Some don't believe a word coming out of their own mouths. Thus is the Democratic process, I guess.
ression of the bill. He asserts that the AMA and AARP both endorse this bill, and that's true on the surface, but you talk to doctors and seniors and you don't get that same impression.
I've been so involved in NY-23 over the past couple of weeks that I haven't paid a lot of attention to the Obamacare situation. That's the thing with this administration - if you blink, or look at some other critical issue, you get ambushed on your flank by some 1,990 Nancy Pelosi bill.For full-time workers, business will have to contribute at least 72.5 percent toward individual health insurance policies, and 65 percent for family policies. For part-time workers, the required percentage would be based on a proportion of how many hours they worked relative to the hours worked by a full-time employee. The exact proportion would be determined, once again, by the Health Choices Commissioner, in conjunction with the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Any employer with a total annual payroll of over $500,000 that does not meet these requirements will be subject to a new tax, which reaches as high as 8 percent once payroll reaches over $750,000.
This is a killer for small business. And larger businesses will be inclined to lower their payroll in order to avoid penalties.
The Wall Street Journal also breaks the House bill down:
Creates government-run health-insurance plan that would negotiate rates with doctors and hospitals.Of course, low income families will get subsidies to buy health care. The public option is still in there but now we learn that it won't provide lower cost coverage. And yes, it will still drive your regular provider out of business. In fact, as Jammie Wearing Fool reads it, no new private insurance companies will be allowed to form.
With regard to the cost issues, Hot Air has a post on all the new taxes that come with this bundle of joy:
Today is Friday for me - we are off school tomorrow for Fall Break. I might stay up past 9:30 tonight. Woot!
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers!
Sometime next week the Democrats in the House will censure Rep. Joe Wilson with a Resolution unless he publicly apologizes on the House floor for calling Obama a liar last week.
Michelle Malkin says Nancy Pelosi is coming unhinged, and I'm trying to figure out when she ever WAS hinged. At any rate, "Nasty" Pelosi has lashed out at insurance companies today with these remarks:"But when political winds shifted, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have decided to use enhanced interrogation as an issue to attack Republicans. It is disgraceful that Democrats who discovered their outrage years after the fact are now braying for disbarment of the government lawyers who justified EITs and the prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized them. Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising."
and Jacobson: "What will Democrats do if they find that other Democrats were morally if not legally culpable in waterboarding? Do the Democrats have an exit strategy?
"Here's my prediction of what will happen if Democrats push the investigation to the bitter end causing damage to national security, a political death match with the CIA, and Democrat-on-Democrat finger pointing:
Stenny Hoyer, Speaker; Jane Harman, Majority Leader; Nancy Pelosi, Chair of the House sub-committee on fresh water fisheries; Republicans, unexpected gains in 2010 mid-term elections."The Democrats wished hard for an investigation into waterboarding and other interrogation methods. They may have wished too hard, because they are about to get what they wished for, with no way out."
"Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
-- We understood what the CIA was doing.
-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have."
Nancy Pelosi is lying when she says she didn't know. She knew. We knew she knew when she said she didn't know. She's a buffoon. (She's the same buffoon that Obama left in charge of the Porkulus bill.)"The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. The terrorists captured by the CIA perfected the act of beheading innocents using dull knives. Khalid Sheik Mohammed boasted of the tactic of placing explosives high enough in a building to ensure that innocents trapped above would die if they tried to escape through windows. There is simply no comparison between our professionalism and their brutality.
Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. "Name, rank and serial number" does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost. "
