Who Needs Cancer To Prove You Can Be Cured?

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Hanson does not see Obama doing irreparable damage.

I normally agree with Hanson and he could be right in this instance. That said, many people recover from cancer but why experience it to find out? (See 1 below.)
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Temporary jobs, temporary recovery? Quantity versus quality?  (See 2 below.)
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Some things just don't play well in Peoria! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Obama Who?

by Victor Davis Hanson 

Critics of the president are convinced that Barack Obama will do lasting damage to the U.S. I doubt it.

Obama came to power in the third year of large Democratic congressional majorities. In his first referendum, he lost the House and he may soon lose the Senate; in other words, there followed a somewhat normal reaction against a majority party. Obama’s popularity rating is well below 50%, despite an obsequious media and a brilliantly negative billion-dollar campaign that long ago turned Mitt Romney into a veritable elevator-using, equestrian-marrying, canine-hating monster.

In the second term, there is little of the Obama bully pulpit left. “Make no mistake about it” and “let me be perfectly clear” can incur caricature, not fainting. “Really,” “I’m not kidding,” “I’m serious,” “in point of fact,” and “I’m not making this up” often prove rhetorical hints that the opposite is true. When Obama warns about gridlock in Washington, the “same old tired politics,” the dangers of a tyrant or king in the White House, the need for an honest IRS, or the perils of government surveillance, these admonitions have tragically become a psychological tic to warn us about himself. Former jokes aboutsiccing the IRS on his enemies or using Predator drones to go after suitors of his daughters are as eerie as they are comedic.

Each new “historic” speech is by now mostly history repeating itself as farce. The Victory Column oration gave way to a flat vignette at the Brandenburg Gate. The Cairo speech follow-ups were mostly confusion about Egypt and Syria, without the fictions of the West’s underappreciated debts to Islam. The second Trayvon Martin aside on racial look-alikes was even more disturbing that the first. I don’t think Obama’s advisors will allow him to proclaim any more “deadlines,” or “red lines,” or any sort of lines at all in the Middle East.

Aside from Obama himself, no one in the post-Benghazi, -AP, -NSA, and -IRS scandal era references the president any longer as the former “professor of constitutional law.” In Obama’s case even the inflated title has become an oxymoron.

Ever so slowly, the press, albeit still for the most part privately, is learning that it has been had by one of its own. The breach of journalistic ethics turned out not to be a necessary means to an exalted liberal end, but instead was interpreted cynically by Obama as exemption for doing pretty much what he pleased — like going after AP reporters for leaking national security in a way the administration could only envy, given its own less impressive efforts to divulge what should not have been divulged. How odd that a truly adversarial press is an aid to conservatives in power, in keeping them on their toes about scandal, and how ironic that liberal media obeisance green-lights wrongdoing among those whom they deify.

What does the Arab Spring conjure up? Or “lead from behind”? Or “reset”? (If only Obama could envision Putin as George Zimmerman, we might get real on Russia.) Or an “OK” from the Arab League to act? Or CIA gun-running in Libya? Or the military non-response to Benghazi? Or the incarceration of Mr. Nakoula, the supposedly evil filmmaker? Or “al-Qaeda on the run”? Or the successive flip-flops on Mubarak, Morsi, and the Egyptian military? Or serial “deadlines” to Iran, or consecutive “red lines” in Syria? (If only these threats abroad carried as much weight as Obama’s promises to “bankrupt” coal companies and send our power bills “skyrocketing.”) Or the “peace-process” with the Palestinians? Or closing down the embassies of the Middle East? (If only Islamists were Republicans, they might be on the receiving end of real presidential threats like “punish our enemies.”) What do all these misadventures abroad have in common? I think the answer is nothing and everything: no consistency other than confusion.

In terms of future elections, Obama has created a new racial paradox for Democrats, the ironic wage of his own racial divisiveness.  As Obama turns off independent voters of all backgrounds by the now monotonous rhetoric — from “typical white person” to his racial grandstanding in the Trayvon Martin matter, with help always from the reliably polarizing Eric Holder (“my people,” “cowards”) — the president grows even shriller to make up the losses of moderate voters. Polls now show that the public is more likely to consider Obama racially divisive than a healer. In the upcoming midterm election, it is still unclear whether minority voters will continue to turn out in record numbers and vote in record lockstep Democratic fashion, a scenario increasingly critical to Obama as he loses independents. When one plays at zero-sum identity politics, each voter energized by racial referencing also means one voter — or more — polarized.

Cap and trade is dead. EPA director Lisa “Richard Windsor” Jackson proved a hushed-up embarrassment, a sort of asexual version of “Carlos Danger.” In any case, her quiet departure was no more noticed than was the entire tenure of Hilda Solis. Steven Chu and his hopes for gas prices to reach European levels will be as memorable a wish or prediction as was his sigh that California agriculture would dry up and blow away. Drivers have paid over $1 trillion more in collectively higher gas prices since Obama took office. That fact will be more remembered than the promised wave of new green electric cars and high-speed rail.

When Obama occasionally soars with the old “wind and solar” and “millions of new green jobs” tropes, most associate those references with “Solyndra.” How odd that those in the fracking business — reducing carbon emissions, lowering electricity prices, reducing dependence on foreign energy sources — have done Obama far more political good than his often inept and corrupt friends in the green subsidy racket.

One way or another, Obamacare will be repealed. If a House representative in 2009 had suggested that those in the executive branch should not enforce the employer mandate of the newly passed Obamacare, he would have incurred charges of being disloyal to the Constitution. Now the author of the bill calls it a “train wreck,” and the president chooses not to faithfully execute elements of his own law, his “signature” legislative achievement. With friends like these, why does Obamacare need enemies?

Why would the IRS, charged with enforcing Obamacare, wish its own employees to be exempt from the statutes it will enforce on others? Beware, Democrats: maybe Lois Lerner & Co. will do more freelancing and punish those who spiked their health care premiums. The more vehemently a group in 2009 demanded Obamacare — unions, government employees, pro-Democratic businesses — the more likely they were by 2013 to wish exemption from it. Is the lesson something like: “I should be excused from it, since I promoted it more than others”?

If anyone were to repeat the Obama reform mantra of 2008 — a new transparency, an end to lobbyists, no more revolving doors — it would incur laughter. A Larry Summers or Peter Orszag forgot Obama’s promises not to make millions of dollars from the influence gained during their government service. Citibank seems to be bankrolling the retirement plans of all those who worked at Obama’s Treasury Department. I think Obama will do the same when he leaves office, in the fashion of both Hillary Clinton and Lisa Jackson. Expect soon his $1 million speaking fees to lecture Citibank and Goldman Sachs on diversity and green energy.

When we recount Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS mess, the AP/James Rosen affair, or the NSA disclosures, we think not of modern scandals per se, but rather in historical terms: which prior administration was more corrupt and dishonest — Nixon’s or Grant’s? Is that comparison fair to either of them? Did Obama, in compensation, give us Reconstruction or an opening to China? Has he accomplished as much as Harding?

Americans are always up for a good class war. Obama gave them one, with all the talk of the “one percent,” “millionaires and billionaires,” and the “pay your fair share” boilerplate. But to be a good class warrior also requires the pretense of populism. Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich were at least not habitués of Martha’s Vineyard, did not make second homes out of tony golf courses, did not have the family jetting to Aspen and Costa del Sol to take time off with those who forgot when to quit their profiting. How can a president so rail at the 1% and yet so wish to play, vacation, and be among those who didn’t build their wealth?

The president’s signature achievement? He has established a precedent that the president can play all the golf he wisheswithout being caricatured as a distracted would-be aristocrat.

Jimmy Carter’s four years had short-term consequences — almost all negative — but little long-term damage. Obama’s eight years in theory should have far more lasting ramifications, given the huge debt, radical appointees, job-killing regulations, and dismal economy of the last five years. Yet we are learning that he is proving even a more inconsequential figure than was Carter. And so likewise in years to come, even his true believers will talk more of an iconic Barack Obama before and after he was president — but rarely during.

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2)77 Percent of Obama's New Jobs Are Part-Time

By Dan Weil

While many economists have described the employment picture as gradually improving in recent months, by one measure it's not improving at all.

In July, only 92,000 of the 266,000 jobs created were full-time — just 35 percent of the total.

You may wonder why the total number of jobs created isn't 162,000, the number commonly used by news services. That number is calculated from the Labor Department's establishment survey of employers. The 266,000 is calculated from the department's household survey.

For the year through July, only 222,000 jobs created were full-time — representing just 23 percent of the total of 953,000, according to Zero Hedge.

Some economists are raising warning flags over the fact that 77 percent of this year's new jobs are part-time, saying the numbers provide a bleak portrayal of the labor market.

"Essentially the economy is firing on three cylinders instead of six, growing at around 2 percent instead of the 5 percent it should, and as a consequence isn't absorbing as many new workers," Peter Morici, a professor of international business at the University of Maryland and a Moneynews Insider, told Newsmax TV.

"Many of those that it does hire are part timers. Increasingly Americans are relegated to a contingent work force where they work temporary jobs, part-time jobs and so forth. They can't get decent healthcare benefits despite Obamacare, and their wages continue to fall."

Morici and others economists also are concerned by the fact that many of the new jobs are low-paying. More than half of July's job gain came from retailers, restaurants and bars. Average hourly earnings dipped 2 cents in July to $23.98.

"You're getting jobs added, but they might not be the best-quality job," John Canally, an economist with LPL Financial, told The Associated Press.

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3)Fox poll shows “phony scandal” line playing worse that you’d think

BY ED MORRISSEY

After an avalanche of scandals hit the White House this spring, the Obama administration adopted the public-relations strategy of calling IRS political targeting, NSA domestic snooping, and the deaths of four Americans in an utterly predictable terrorist attack on a diplomatic facility “phony scandals.” How’s that working?  According to a new Fox poll, evenworse than you’d think.  The best response comes on the IRS story, where a whopping 33% agree that there’s nothing to worry about … but 59% disagree:

Benghazi. Snooping on reporters. The IRS and NSA. The White House dismisses them as phony and fake scandals. Americans do not.

A Fox News national poll released Thursday finds that 78 percent of voters think the questions over the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi should be taken seriously. Just 17 percent call it a phony scandal. …

Meanwhile, 69 percent of voters say the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance of everyday Americans is serious, while 26 percent call that a fake scandal.

By a margin of 59-31 percent, voters are also more likely to view the seizure of reporters’ phone records by the Justice Department as serious rather than phony.

And while the White House sees a Congressional investigation of the IRS targeting of conservative groups as a “distraction,” 59 percent of voters take it seriously. Some 33 percent agree with the administration that it’s fake.

Even Democrats aren’t buying the “phony scandal” line.  The internals show that a near-majority of Democrats think that the IRS scandal should be taken seriously (49/42).  The gap among Democrats is much wider on the DoJ’s pursuit of journalists’ phone records, 59/32, even though it’s mainly a case involving a Fox News reporter at the moment.

On the NSA, it’s a rout among Democrats, with 68/27 arguing it needs to be taken seriously, but the most damaging of all are the results on Benghazi.  Leaders of the Democratic Party have suggested that the investigation is nothing more than a sly attempt to damage Hillary Clinton in advance of her presidential run in the 2016 cycle, but only 25% of Democrats believe that the deaths of four Americans constitute a “phony scandal.” Seventy percent believe it should be taken serious, and that’s the lowest rating among any of the demographics in the poll on that question.  Furthermore, 56% of Democrats think the White House is covering up what happened in Benghazi, and that’s not a number that will damage Hillary alone.

There isn’t a lot of good news in the poll for Obama elsewhere, either.  His job approval rating dropped from 46/47 two weeks ago to 42/52, although a shift in the partisan sample could account for that (40/34 Dem to 38/37 Dem).  His new campaign to boost Obamanomics is a bust, even among his fellow Democrats.  More than six in ten respondents overall believe Obama should be working with Republicans on a compromise rather than going on tour (63/24), including a plurality of Democrats (47/42).  Wide majorities say they’re hearing nothing new from Obama in almost all demographics (71% overall), with a narrow plurality of Democrats agreeing (44/42).  Who does Obama think is listening, anyway?

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