David Moore: The Panhandler and the President - WSJ.com

David Moore: The Panhandler and the President - WSJ.com: "President Obama has become the "Great Divider" instead of the "Great Unifier" that we all hoped he would be.

I do not recall another president in my lifetime whose negative drumbeat about large segments of the population has been so relentless. I do not recall another president (even those similarly frustrated by congressional gridlock and the stifling of their agendas) repeatedly targeting a specific economic class, complaining as loudly and using his bully pulpit so consistently for bashing those who disagree with him."

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Review & Outlook: Green Jobs Brown Out - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: Green Jobs Brown Out - WSJ.com: "A new report by the Labor Department's Office of Inspector General examined a $500 million grant under the stimulus program to the Employment and Training Administration to "train and prepare individuals for careers in 'green jobs.'" So far about $162.8 million has been spent. The program was supposed to train 125,000 workers, but only 53,000 have been "trained" so far, only 8,035 have found jobs, and only 1,033 were still in the job after six months.

Overall, "only 10% of participants entered employment." In the understatement of the year, the IG says the program failed to "assist those most impacted by the recession.""

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Review & Outlook: Stimulus Lite - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: Stimulus Lite - WSJ.com: "Meanwhile, as amended last week by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the bill is financed by a new 5.6% surtax on millionaires. So a bill that the White House has sold as a temporary $265 billion tax cut for employers is financed with a permanent almost half-trillion-dollar tax hike on businesses and investors. What a deal."

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And a bill advertised in the name of job creation is now primarily about the new Democratic campaign theme of redistributing income. If history is any guide, that ploy will send employers and investors into a further hiatus, destroying far more jobs in the private economy than the government-financed jobs it hopes to create.

David R. Henderson: A Nobel for Non-Keynesians - WSJ.com

David R. Henderson: A Nobel for Non-Keynesians - WSJ.com: "Although the Nobel committee did not cite his work on unemployment insurance, Mr. Sargent, with Swedish economist Lars Ljungqvist, found that high, long-lasting unemployment benefits in Europe have caused many European workers who lose their jobs to stay unemployed for years and, thereby, erode their "human capital." This makes them less employable in the long run. The fact that the U.S. government has extended unemployment benefits in many U.S. states to 99 weeks, said Mr. Sargent in a 2010 interview with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, "fills me with dread.""

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SPIN METER: Obama disconnects rhetoric, reality | ajc.com

SPIN METER: Obama disconnects rhetoric, reality  | ajc.com: "When Obama accuses Republicans of standing in the way of his nearly $450 billion plan, he ignores the fact that his own party has struggled to unite behind the proposal.

When the president says Republicans haven't explained what they oppose in the plan, he skips over the fact that Republicans who control the House actually have done that in detail.

And when he calls on Congress to "pass this bill now," he slides past the point that Democrats control the Senate and were never prepared to move immediately, given other priorities."

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Barack Obama | Wall Street Money | The Daily Caller

Sunlight Foundation | Barack Obama | Wall Street Money | The Daily Caller: "Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush."

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistic

CIS and the Texas Immigrant-Job Myth - Chuck DeVore - National Review Online: "The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) has released a detailed rejoinder to a well-publicized study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that made a remarkable claim: “Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).”

Put simply, CIS used faulty methodology to make its main point. "

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Reid’s Power Play - By Andrew Stiles - The Corner - National Review Online

Reid’s Power Play - By Andrew Stiles - The Corner - National Review Online: "Indeed, Reid had opted for the so-called “nuclear option,” to toss history and precedent aside and change the rules of the Senate, all to avoid having to vote on a jobs plan the president has repeatedly called on Congress to pass. Instead, Reid intends to hold a vote next week on an amended version of the bill that includes a 5.6 percent “millionaire surtax” to cover the bill’s $450 billion price tag. "

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My Way News - FACT CHECK: Obama claims miss some evidence

My Way News - FACT CHECK: Obama claims miss some evidence: "Are President Barack Obama's ideas for job creation really bipartisan as he claims? Not when the means for paying for them are put in the equation.
The president dodged various facts and and left some evidence in the dust in his latest challenge to Republicans to get behind his jobs program or offer a real alternative."

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Policy Uncertainty Chokes a Recovery: Baker, Bloom and Davis - Bloomberg

Policy Uncertainty Chokes a Recovery: Baker, Bloom and Davis - Bloomberg: "So how much near-term improvement could we gain from a stable, certainty-enhancing policy regime? We estimate that restoring 2006 levels of policy uncertainty would yield an additional 2.5 million jobs over 18 months. Not a full solution to the jobs shortfall, but a big step in the right direction.
(Scott R. Baker and Nicholas Bloom are economists at Stanford University. Steven J. Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is a contributor to Business Class. The opinions expressed are their own.)"

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‘Darn Tooting!’ Obama Brags About HHS Reg Catholic Bishops Call Attack on Liberty | CNSnews.com

‘Darn Tooting!’ Obama Brags About HHS Reg Catholic Bishops Call Attack on Liberty | CNSnews.com:

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Cain's 'Chilean Model' - Investors.com

Cain's 'Chilean Model' - Investors.com: "Chile's system, enacted in 1981, took government out of the pension business altogether and replaced it with a system of personal retirement accounts.

It's one of most successful fiscal reforms in history.

It outperforms Social Security on returns, yielding about 9.23% compounded annual returns over 30 years under private management.

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That means Chilean retirees take home pension checks four times what they would have gotten if they had remained in their old Social Security system."

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Finally, The Cognoscenti Ask: What Could We Be Thinking? - IBD - Investors.com

Finally, The Cognoscenti Ask: What Could We Be Thinking? - IBD - Investors.com: ""Obamaism" was the Emperor's new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president."

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Environmentalists Clobber Texas - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Environmentalists Clobber Texas - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily: "On February 1, 1993, federal district judge Lucius Bunton, in Midland, Texas, handed down his ruling in favor of the Sierra Club; in case of drought, no matter the shortage of water hitting San Antonio, there will have to be enough water flowing from the aquifer to the two springs to preserve these four species. Judge Bunton admitted that, in a drought, San Antonio, to obey the ruling, might have to have its water pumped from the aquifer cut by as much as 60 percent. This would clobber both the citizens of San Antonio, and the farmers and ranchers of the area; man would have to suffer, because human beings are always last in line in the environmentalist universe, certainly far below wild rice and the fountain darter."

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Obama’s Jobs Bill: Read It and Weep | Hoover Institution

Obama’s Jobs Bill: Read It and Weep | Hoover Institution: "What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create."

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Getting Taxes All Wrong - Investors.com

Getting Taxes All Wrong - Investors.com: "The idea that a "modern industrial economy" needs high tax rates to be successful is a Keynesian fairy tale — sadly, one that President Obama and his dwindling number of true believers seem to actually believe.

History's verdict on taxes is quite clear: Cut to grow. If only our nation's top elected official knew more economic history and a lot less progressive ideology, we might be growing right now."

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Germany slams 'stupid' US plans to boost EU rescue fund - Telegraph

Germany slams 'stupid' US plans to boost EU rescue fund - Telegraph: "Mr Schauble told Washington to mind its own businesss after President Barack Obama rebuked EU leaders for failing to recapitalise banks and allowing the debt crisis to escalate to the point where it is "scaring the world".
"It's always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself. I am well prepared to give advice to the US government," he said."

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More Inconvenient Truth Leaks Out of NASA

 "NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed."

The science is settled, right AlGore?

The Genius of Obama

 "Barack Obama’s political genius is his ability to say things that sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says is to those who have. Shameless effrontery can be a huge political asset, especially if uninformed voters outnumber those who are informed."

- Thomas Sowell

It's All Because of Bush Spending...Right

"Under Obama, the government over the last two and a half years has borrowed on average about $4 billion each day. That staggering sum is far in excess of the $1.6 billion per day borrowed during the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush, who until Obama had borrowed more than any other peacetime president."