Jobs Bill, NY District 9, and the 43% rule View 20110914

View 692 Wednesday, September 14, 2011

 

Kick off the slippers and get to work! President Obama apparently liked the image of kicking off the slippers and putting on work shoes so much that he used it again in a speech this morning. Of course he does not mean to imply “All you people out there sitting around in your pajamas and slippers should get the lazy off and get to work!” He was speaking in support of his Jobs Act, which seems no different from measures that Congress refused to pass even in the full flush of enthusiasm following the Inauguration in 2009. It is full of permanent tax increases tempered with temporary tax relief – moratoria, actually – and the usual support for Green Jobs. I haven’t been through it all, but so far I have found nothing new, and I doubt that this will even pass the Senate. The White House strategy appears to be to propose that which can’t be enacted, then blame the Republicans for the Obama Depression. That may beat National Malaise as a reelection strategy, but the results of yesterdays by-elections do not bode well for the President.

 

Charged with making political speeches in the guise of appeals to national unity, the President rather petulantly said “This isn’t about me! This is about jobs.” Apparently he has discovered that there are not enough jobs in America, and it’s all the Republicans’ fault. Stay tuned,

 

Meanwhile New York lost a seat that hasn’t gone Republican in a hundred years, and the winner explicitly made it a referendum on Obama. The spin is that it was all local, but the fact remains that a pro-life Roman Catholic has won the seat formerly held by the liberal Jewish Weiner. The winner explicitly said the only real issue was satisfaction with Obama. The Democrats marshaled the big guns including President Clinton in a frantic effort to hold the seat.

Even CNN notes that this was a referendum on the President.

In California President Obama’s approval rating is 46%, below 50% for the first time in several years.

It has long been a political truism that no one with an approval rating below 43% ever wins reelection – at least it was when I was active in political management. It’s an empirical observation, not any kind of law, of course; but it’s suggestive. Obama cannot count on Brooklyn and Queens, even when the Democrats bring in the big guns like President Clinton. Now he has to worry a bit about California.

I told you that despair is a sin.

A barbarian is beating a woman. A citizen intervenes so that the woman gets away. Everyone goes home. Sometime later the barbarian returns and slaughters two of the citizen’s toddler age children, wounds his pregnant wife, and generally takes satisfaction for being disrespected, before going back into his enclave.

Had this happened at the edges of the Roman Empire, the local Auxiliary garrison would have understood the situation and evaluated what must be done to preserve civilization at the fringes of the Empire. Perhaps nothing: the garrison was not strong enough, and there were no Legions available. The local Auxiliary commander would have had to explain to the citizen that the Empire just didn’t have the resources. Civilization is crumbling, and we are doing our best with what we have. The old Centurion would have hung his head in shame.

Of course it did not happen at the Roman limes in the Third Century. It happened yesterday in San Bernardino, California. A local radio commentator is saying that it makes you think about what risks you can take in today’s world. “I have a wife and family, and I’m responsible to them.” He is, after all, a responsible citizen; he is also a husband, a father—and a realist.

Welcome to the New America.

I think I am no longer a Firefox enthusiast. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Firefox is taking forever to load my site, and doing it in an awful way. Explorer has no such problem.  I have just restarted Firefox and that seems to have mitigated the problem, but somehow whenever they improve Firefox it gets crankier. This sort of thing has happened before. Someone new jumps in to take on Microsoft, comes out with an improvement, gets a number of people to defect from Microsoft. Microsoft continues to plod along, embrace and extend, plod along, and somewhere along the line the new guy discovers that resistance is futile. His improvements become less reliable. There are various thrashings. Meanwhile Microsoft continues to plod along…

I got accustomed to Firefox and I probably abuse it by keeping too many tabs open. I haven’t given up on it yet, but I keep hearing the call of the Borg Queen…

 

The barbarians are both inside and outside the gates.

Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/14/mexico.violence/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn 

If you are up to a picture, there is one here: http://www.johnandkenshow.com/ 

The report is that “Two posters left near the bodies declared that the pair — a young man and woman — were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network…”

 

There is no indication of the nationality of the victims, and so far no one has claimed them. Some border incidents have involved known American citizens, but there have been no consequences. We no longer teach American Exceptionalism in the public schools. We do not want a single culture with the old Judao-Christian values. We prefer diversity. I don’t know what Mexicans prefer. We know what they have.