As a candidate, Barack Obama made George Bush the target of his 2008 presidential run. Time and again Obama ripped into President Bush for the “failed policies of the last 8 years.”

He said it was a defining moment in this nation’s history and his policies would bring the country more prosperity and employment. Here's a little reminder....

Now we know the reality....

Not only were more jobs lost after the 9-11 attacks in 2001 than in the 2008 market crash, but more jobs were created by President Bush’s pro-business policies and tax cuts than by the Obama-Pelosi “spend your way to hell” Keynesian failure.
The Foundry reported, via HotAir:

For objective observers the failure of President Obama’s $862 billion stimulus has become increasingly difficult to deny. But not for the White House. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden told Charlie Rose on PBS that the stimulus was “an absolute success.” Betraying a common perception about unemployment, Biden told Rose: “[W]e lost 8 million brand new jobs … since … 8 million brand new jobs since we hit the skids. On top of the 6% that were already unemployed. It took us several years to get there, it is going to take several years to get back to that number.” That is not quite true. In fact, the American economy has shed 55.4 million jobs since the recession began in the First Quarter of 2008. But at the same time the economy has only added 46.5 million jobs. Putting the two together produces the net approximate 8 million jobs lost that Biden referenced.

But isn’t net jobs all that really matters? Why should anyone care exactly how many jobs were lost and created since all that really matters is the net number of Americans who are no longer employed? Here’s why: despitean unemployment high of just 6.4%, more jobs were lost in the first seven quarters of the 2001 recession than were lost in the first seven quarters of this recession. How is that possible? How could job losses have been worse in 2001 but unemployment so much higher now? Weak job creation. The latest Bureau of Labor and Statistics data show that employers have created 8.6 million fewer new jobs this time around than they did almost a decade ago. Heritage Senior Labor Policy Analyst James Sherk estimates that lower job creation accounts for 65 percent of the recession’s decreased employment.

Our nation’s unemployment rate is hovering near 10% not because of record job losses, as Biden suggests, but because of record job non-creation. Private sector employers have gone on strike. Contrary to what the President’s economic wizards and New York Times columnists believe, massive government deficit spending does not stimulate job creation. President Obama does not have a secret vault of money he can just throw at the American people. The resources the government spends come from the economy. When the government increases spending, it crowds out the resources that business owners could have invested in their enterprises. Private investment falls sharply when government spending rises. According to Sherk, annual private fixed nonresidential investment has fallen by $327 billion since the recession started— a 19 percent drop. Less private investment means less hiring.

And then there is the rest of the Obama agenda that has created, and is creating, significant economic uncertainty: Obamacare, EPA carbon regulations, financial regulations and impending tax hikes. Renouncing these policies, and canceling the rest of the stimulus, would do more to spur private sector job creation than anything this White House has done so far.

Don’t expect the state-run media to point this out anytime soon.

At a town hall speech on June 3, Christie laid out the scene that has become "politics as normal" in New Jersey: Teacher's unions, the NJEA in this case, have mastered the role of school yard bully.

And under Christie's watch there is 'no more' politics as usual in the Garden State.

Governor Christie may be speaking to a New Jersey audience, but the message rings true in New Jersey, California and virtually every other state in the union. With parents and taxpayers bleeding on the ground and the bully still standing.

It's time to put students, teachers, parents, and taxpayers first:

That sound you hear is a rattling of the chains that shackle both current and future generations with crippling and debilitating debt being racked up by Obama and the Democrats.

In his latest column at the Washington Post, George Will takes on the cult of big government:

Today, government finds the limitless power of dispensing not in [James] Madison’s Constitution of limited government but in Wilson’s theory that the Constitution actually frees government from limitations. The liberating — for government — idea is that the Constitution is a “living,” evolving document. [Woodrow] Wilson’s Constitution is an emancipation proclamation for government, empowering it to regulate all human activities in order to treat all human desires as needs and hence as rights. Unlimited power is entailed by what Voegeli calls government’s “right to discover new rights.”

“Liberalism’s protean understanding of rights,” he says, “complicates and ultimately dooms the idea of a principled refusal to elevate any benefit that we would like people to enjoy to the status of an inviolable right.” Needs breed rights to have the needs addressed, to the point that Lyndon Johnson, an FDR protege, promised that government would provide Americans with “purpose” and “meaning.”

Although progressivism’s ever-lengthening list of rights is as limitless as human needs/desires, one right that never makes the list is the right to keep some inviolable portion of one’s private wealth or income, “regardless,” [William] Voegeli says, “of the lofty purposes social reformers wish to make of it.”

Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is. Furthermore, by making a welfare state a fountain of rights requisite for democracy, progressives in effect declare that democratic deliberation about the legitimacy of the welfare state is illegitimate.

“By blackening the skies with crisscrossing dollars,” Voegeli says, the welfare state encourages people “to believe an impossibility: that every household can be a net importer of the wealth redistributed by the government.” But the welfare state’s problem, today becoming vivid, is socialism’s problem, as Margaret Thatcher defined it: Socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”

Wilsonian government, meaning (in Wilson’s words) government with “unstinted power,” is hostile to Madison’s Constitution, which, Madison said, obliges government “to control itself.” Thus our choice is between government restraint rooted in respect for nature, or government free to follow History wherever government says History marches.

You may have heard reports that we added 430,000 new jobs in the latest job report, and that the unemployment rate is down from 9.9% to 9.7%.

At first blush there's no doubt those are good numbers, but the reality is that hiring of temporary Census workers was projected to run at about 500,000 employees. And, indeed, that hiring figure ended up at 411,000. That means 95.5% of the new payroll growth was… government hiring. And just to be specific, that's for part time jobs.

The Labor Department's new employment snapshot released Friday suggested that outside of the burst of hiring of temporary census workers by the federal government many private employers are still wary of bulking up their work forces.

That indicates the economic recovery may not bring relief fast enough for millions of Americans who are unemployed.

Here is this month’s chart that shows the real unemployment rate versus the administration’s predicted rate with the passage of their trillion dollar stimulus package:

An excellent find by colleagues...

It's likely that Disney didn't have an ever growing bureaucratic government in mind when this scene was created. However, as you watch, think of the Heffalumps and Woozles as Bureaucrats and big government, and Pooh as the common taxpayer who simply wants to be left alone and to hold onto his hard-earned "Hunny".

Frightening how from that perspective it all makes sense isn't it....

Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation put it best....

The objective of the American Founding was to break free of the old despotism, characterized by the arbitrary will of the stronger, based on force and fraud, masked by the false claims of long inheritance or divine right.

Virtually every government at the time was based on a claim to rule without popular consent. The Founders’ object was to establish the rule of law, decentralize political authority, and limit government to secure the unalienable rights with which man was endowed by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” They held that man, though fallible and full of passions, is capable of governing himself and that none was so much better than another as to rule him without his consent.

And yet here we are today, covered by a vast web of rules and regulations, endless policies and programs, all emanating from a central government, mostly the work of agencies and bureaucracies that for all intents and purposes operate outside the consent of the governed.

The greatest political revolution since the American Founding has been the shift of power away from the institutions of constitutional government to an oligarchy of unelected experts. They rule over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, ostensibly in the name of the American people but in actuality by the claimed authority of science, policy expertise, and administrative efficiency....

The debate between the Founders’ constitutionalism and the Progressive paradigm meant to replace it is now engaged, perhaps as never before, in the American mind.

Over the next months and years, and the next few elections, the matter will be decided, perhaps definitively, one way or the other.

Either the party of the modern state will unify its control and solidify its centralized model of government, or a new coalition of its opponents — unified by a healthy contempt for bureaucratic rule and a determination to reassert popular consent — will gain control of the political institutions of government and begin the difficult task of restoring real limits on government.

In this choice, all rests on the continuing capacity and resolve of the American people to govern themselves. The test Abraham Lincoln spoke of at Gettysburg, whether this nation based on equality and liberty can long endure, has returned to try our generation.

“If you taught Leadership 101 this would be a case study on NOT what to do.”

Rudy Giuliani slammed Barack Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill crisis tonight on Hannity:



Rudy on Obama’s lack of leadership:

Sean Hannity: How would you rate the president’s handling of the Gulf oil spill crisis?

Rudy Giuliani: It couldn’t be worse. This would be an example if you taught Leadership 101 of Exactly NOT what to do. Minimize it at first. Two days after or three days after it happened, go on vacation. He’s been on vacation more often than by far he’s been to Louisiana… The reality is the Administration has made every mistake it could possibly make right down to the criminal investigation of BP… And, if they’re being criminally investigated then why are we allowing them to do it? If we got a bunch of criminals doing it then why are we allowing them to do it?

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

The Obama Administration has indicated that it's prepared to go to court if necessary in a bid to block Arizona's new immigration enforcement law. With the threat of a potential Federal Court Challenge in the near future, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's attitude is clear: BRING IT ON.

"We'll meet you in court," she said in an interview Tuesday. "I have a pretty good record of winning in court."

Attorney General Eric Holder, who has apparently now read the Arizona statute, met with a delegation of police chiefs from Arizona and elsewhere this week to discuss the law, has yet to indicate whether the federal government would file a legal challenge.

The American Civil Liberties Union is currently leading a court challenge.

Obama, who has called the law "misguided," will meet with Brewer at the White House on Thursday. It will be the first one-on-one meeting between the two since Brewer approved the law in April.

The new immigration law, implemented last month, allows police officers to check the residency status of anyone who is being investigated for a crime or possible legal infraction if there is reasonable suspicion the person is an illegal resident. Critics, including Holder, have said the law will promote racial profiling.

In her interview with CNN on Tuesday, Brewer said the law does not target an individuals specific race. She also made clear driver's licenses are not sufficient to prove citizenship.

"It wouldn't matter if you are Latino or Hispanic or Norwegian," she said. "If you didn't have proof of citizenship and the police officer had reasonable suspicion, he would ask and verify your citizenship. I mean, that's the way that it is. That's what the federal law says. And that's what the law in Arizona says."

Unions representing nurses and teachers in California have joined forces to fight legislation that would help ensure the health of 63,000 epileptic school children.

Senate Bill 1051, authored by Senator Bob Huff (R- Diamond Bar), would provide that in the instance an epileptic child is in need of life-saving medication, a trained school staff member could administer the necessary medication to the child. The staff member will first have to volunteer, then take about a half hour of training to learn how to successfully administer the drug.

So what's the real issue? Nurses consider this a threat to their job security.

Arguing in opposition to the bill, The California Nurses Association and The California Teachers Association have said that allowing non-nursing staff to administer the drug was hazardous to children and could put school staff in legal jeopardy if something went wrong during an administration of the drug.

Yet the reality is that Doctors have said the drug, Diastat, is safe and doesn't need to be administered by an expert.

During last week's hearing in the Senate Appropriation's Committee, big labor's opposition managed to stymie the bill in measure preventing it from advancing to the Senate Floor.

Despite the "success" of the unions in getting Senate Democrats to shelve the measure in Senate Appropriations Committee, debate on the merits of the measure spilled over to the Senate Floor on Friday. Following is a video of the discussion that took place:

So why would Democrats and the California Nurses Association fight so hard to keep non-medically trained people from administering a potentially life saving drug to a child in an emergency situation? The answer is jobs. Nursing jobs. Many of which could still be cut given the state's budget crisis.

It's no secret that California's unions have played a key role in the state's fiscal catastrophe, but there is no excuse for them to play politics with a bill that could literally be an issue of life or death for some 63,000 kids.

There's only one way to break the chain of unionized power in Sacramento... vote accordingly.

California voters are still closely divided over the crackdown on illegal immigration in Arizona, but according to a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll a majority of Californians support Arizona's new immigration enforcement measure.

Overall, 50% of registered voters surveyed said they support the law, which compels police to check the immigration status of those they suspect are in the country illegally, while 43% oppose it.

The survey of 1,506 registered voters was conducted between May 19 and 26 for The Times and the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm American Viewpoint. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points for the overall sample and slightly larger for smaller breakdowns.

UPDATE: The Arizona immigration law continues to receive high marks in national polls from registered voters even as it remains unpopular in liberal circles. In the latest Qunnipiac University poll, released Tuesday, 48 percent said they want their state to pass legislation similar to Arizona's, while 35 percent said they do not. Overall, 51 percent approve of the law, opposed to 31 percent who disapprove.