Mass SNAFU

Our new America

Real unemployment tanking faster than Obama's approval ratings

So remember how I questioned the validity of the unemployment rate due to the way that it was calculated?  I argued that that measure was not an accurate indicator of true unemployment because it didn’t take into account discouraged workers - workers that do not have a job and have given up seeking employment.  Well it turns out that the group of discouraged workers is getting larger:

The number of people who have given up on finding work has been steadily rising over the past few months, from 685,000 in May to 796,000 in July.

So even though the most recent unemployment number went down from 9.5% to 9.4%, the number of discouraged workers increased by 111,000.  If you take the discouraged workers and add part-time workers who can’t find full time work and add them into the equation, economist John Williams argues in that same column that real unemployment is actually at 20.6% and that number is getting dangerously close to Great Depression levels.  Considering Fox News had that number at 16.3% three weeks ago, things have gotten considerably worse. Rather quickly.

So when you hear people like Chris Matthews argue that the Obama economic plan is the best thing since leg tingles, you might want to take it with a grain of salt.  Or just ignore it altogether and focus on the numbers above.

Hey let's win one for Teddy!

 

 

 

The body’s not even cold and already the politicization of Ted Kennedy’s death has begun.  Yup, in his honor, they’re planning on renaming the ObamaCare disaster to the KennedyCare disaster:

Democrats are hoping that Kennedy's influence in death may be even stronger than it was when he was alive as they push for President Obama's top domestic priority. Democratic officials hope that invoking Kennedy's passion for the issue will counter slippage in support for health care reform. […]

To infuse Kennedy into the health-care debate, Democrats are planning to affix the former senator's name to the health-care legislation that emerges from Congress.

It’s shameless and desperate politics by a bunch of shameless and desperate politicians hoping to get a bump in political sympathy.  It won’t matter in the long run because you can name a pile of crap after anyone but no matter what you name it, it’s still going to stink in the end.  And this health care plan is one big pile of crap.

I’ve suspended posting my feelings about Kennedy and his career after getting some flack earlier in the day about letting him rest in peace.  So, I’ll give it a day, but I’m not holding back tomorrow.

"You wonder which side they’re on."

Can’t say I disagree:

A "furious" Rep. Peter King, the hawkish, maverick Long Island Republican, blasted a "disgraceful" Eric Holder for opening an investigation of CIA interrogators and chided his own party for what he described as a weak response to the move in an interview just now with POLITICO.

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

Imagine if voters actually paid attention to all those red flags about Obama during the campaign?  We might have a President currently focused on defeating terrorists instead of CIA officers and soldiers who have kept us and our children safe for the past eight years.

Somewhere, a village is missing a bunch of idiots. Updated!

Here we go again.  Continuing its ongoing display of financial folly, the White House has again revised one of their fiscal projections:

U.S. unemployment will surge to 10 percent this year and the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion next year, both higher than previous Obama administration forecasts because of a recession that was deeper and longer than expected, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said.

The Office of Management and Budget forecasts that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year, worse than the 1.2 percent contraction the OMB projected in May. For next year, the budget office said the gross domestic product will grow 2.0 percent, less than the 3.2 percent expected in May.

So add that to the heaping pile of broken promises and projections with expiration dates that continue to mount at a daily pace.  The concerning thing in all of this?  Their projections haven’t even been close to the actual numbers, suggesting incompetence or outright lying to advance their agenda.

I’m going with a combination of both from a group of incompetent liars.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey backs up my analysis:

Why did the OMB hold out this long against CBO predictions?  Simple; the Obama administration needed sunnier numbers in order to justify its plans to spend vast sums of money on its social-engineering agenda.  Even in the best of times, these programs would be disastrous, but during a deep recession, they will kill any hope of economic growth.  In short, OMB indulged in political hackery, hoping to continue their deception long enough to get ObamaCare and cap-and-trade through a compliant Congress.  Now they have to admit that they either conducted an incompetent analysis while most significant economists scoffed at their projections for growth, or cooked the books.

Question to Obama supporters: Is that the Hope and Change you wanted?  I think not.

How can we get the attention off health care? Oh, I know! Update: Swine Flu too!

I know.  We don’t have a war on terror anymore, or terrorist attacks for that matter.  It’s now overseas contingency operations and made-made disasters we have to worry about.  And what is our main focus in our overseas contingency operations to prevent man-made disasters?  It just became prosecuting the people who have kept us safe for the past 8 years from those terrorists overseas contingency operatives who want to kill us.  Talk about missing the point:

Nearly eight years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Obama administration took a series of steps Monday that set the country on a course to confront whether actions taken in the name of defending Americans crossed criminal lines.

In simultaneous moves, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder opened an investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law, while the administration released a long-secret CIA report that catalogued allegations of agency prisoner abuse.

Hmmmm… the timing of this is a tad bit questionable, you know with this whole health care reform fiasco and Obama's plummeting approval ratings.  Not to mention, this whole scenario was shot down by Obama a few months back but now it's a go?  I’m betting Rahm Emanuel is pushing this as a distraction to shift the national focus.  And in doing so, he’s targeting heroes who have done a great job in protecting American lives.

Jack Bauer would be so pissed.

UPDATE: Hey we can use the swine flu too!  90,000 deaths this winter!

Hey, remember that stimulus thingy?

Forgotten about in all this controversy over the health care disaster?  The stimulus disaster.  The stimulus has been an absolute catastrophe.  There have been very few jobs created and the majority that have been created have been temporary government jobs.  The private sector is in shambles.  The unemployment rate is at 9.4% and will continue to grow.  Additionally, the number of people with an actual job has been declining since January, in my opinion a more accurate stat of true unemployment.  All this mind you, because if we didn’t rush the stimulus through, unemployment would hit – gasp! – 8%.  Well, it’s currently 18% over that projection with this pork-riddled boondoggle in place.

And as unemployment numbers head toward Great Depression levels, Obama expects us to ignore this hard data when he says, with a straight face, the stimulus is working great and has “saved or created” a million jobs, or 2 million jobs depending on who’s listening that day.  Of course, “saved” jobs can’t be measured but it’s cute when Obama throws out make believe numbers that mindless followers digest as scripture but fact check websites rip to shreds.  

Let’s also not forget what the stimulus has done to the deficit and national debt.  This week, the White House revised their deficit projections to the tune of a 27% increase.  Turns out they were off by a couple of trillion; merely some pocket change in the grand scheme of the Obama agenda.  Nonetheless, since the Obama takeover, we have become the 3rd most indebted developed nation in the world.  When you hear people say we’re ruining our future with this out of control spending, they’re not talking 20-30 years from now…they’re talking like next Tuesday.  According to last month’s IMF report, our government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and hit an unimaginable 99.8 percent of GDP next year.  That is INSANE!  Throw in a $trillion “cost cutting” health care initiative (ha!) and Obama will be appointing a national bankruptcy czar relatively soon.  

An interesting fact from abroad: the vast majority of the world’s biggest economies grew in the 2nd quarter, signaling an end to their recessions.  The three countries that experienced a contraction were the U.S., Great Britain and Italy…and what do they have in common?  They all had expensive stimulus plans to “help” their economies grow.  

Unfortunately, the outlook doesn’t look any brighter as future fiscal and political disasters lie ahead in the pipeline of Obama’s extremist agenda: cap and trade II, amnesty for all illegals, mandatory recruitment camps community service for our children and the creation of a national civilian security force as well funded as our military, to name just a few.  

Hopefully the stimulus and health care disasters reduce his political capital significantly enough that Congress can feel a little more comfortable laughing in Obama’s face the next time he wants to toss trillions around for some asinine plan of his.

The One's Waterloo

In mid-July Sen. Jim DeMint took a ton of heat for suggesting a failure of Obama's health care initiative would end up being his Waterloo.  Waterloo was Napoleon's last battle; he lost and surrendered to the British and was exiled.  DeMint's starting to look like Nostradamus...

The daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14. These figures mark the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for this President. The previous low of -12 was reached on July 30.

This fall from grace has been of an epic nature.  Remember the fanfare?  The Hope?  The Change? 

Kiss. It. Goodbye.

FUBAR baby!

If there was one of my photoshopped pics to sum up what's going on with the Obama administration at the moment, this would be it:

Epic failures everywhere you look.  Regardless, for those of you who may not know, the acronym in this site's title, SNAFU, is a military term that represents "Situation Normal All Fouled Up."  Although, soldiers have always replaced the word "fouled" with a more descriptive F-word. 

As for this site's name, I put "mass" in front of SNAFU to represent the definition of the word: "a large number or amount or extent" to show the degree of the "foul" ups.  Since I started this site however, the political climate has deteriorated so much that I just bought massFUBAR.com.  

FUBAR is the acronym that follows TARFU (Things Are Really "Fouled" Up) in severity and stands for "Fouled" Up Beyond Any Repair.  In my humble opinion, we've skipped TARFU and are right in the midst of a FUBAR situation, as the pic above suggests.

I'll drop some stats and facts on why this is the case when I get some free time in the next day or so but believe me, we are FUBAR'ed.

"He's such a charming liar though."

You know it's getting bad when the excessively liberal Air America is calling you a liar and a fascist.  The clip below from Naked Emperor News exposes Obama's very shady back door deal with the pharmaceutical companies.  Companies, as the video shows, that he campaigned on crushing, in a very "transparent" way, all in the best interest of the American public.  And as we are starting to see all too often, what you say to get elected and what you do once elected are two very different things:

 

It’s good to see the left opening their eyes to the deceit of the administration.  They have been blindly following this man of hope and change into the abyss of big government and some may finally be realizing this change is not what they had hoped for.