Love those Unions!

Chrysler workers canned for drinking on the job reinstated

MyFoxDetroit first aired the footage of the Chrysler workers in September 2010. Video showed them in a park during the work day, drinking alcohol from bottles covered in brown paper bags and smoking what appeared to be marijuana.

With the auto giant having recently received a federal taxpayer bailout, and President Obama having visited the plant where the employees worked just months earlier, Chrysler appeared to take a zero-tolerance attitude. The company fired 13 workers, and suspended two.

But MyFoxDetroit reports that following a union-backed arbitration process, the employees were reinstated. This week, they came back to work.

Chrysler said in a statement that it does not support the decision to bring back the workers but would like to move on.

Business as usual…

It’s all your’s, Barry

Can’t blame Bush for the mess now…

Earnings falling

Poverty rising

Food-stamp enrollment skyrocketing

Jobless claims jumping

Inflation creeping up

Coal plants closing

Small banks disappearing

Want some cheese with that whine?

Last Dance

MarkSteyn

Yesterday was apparently National Dance For Obama Day. In Manhattan it attracted all of twelve dancers . Of course, New York has been devastated by Hurricane Bloomberg, but the attendance in undevastated cities was not much better.  Still, I was sorry to miss it, having spent the last six weeks working on my interpretative dance of the Benghazi attack including an extended seven-hour coolly sensuous samba of the President deciding not to decide to do anything.

By the way, for any members of the Obama Youth Dancers reading this, tomorrow is National Hokey-Pokey For The National Debt Day. Timmy Geithner will put a US Treasury Bond in, Ben Bernanke will put it out, and unionized pom-pom heavies from the SEIU will shake it all about. Meet outside the Federal Reserve, 11am.

Audit: Green jobs stimulus program wastes cash

WashingtonTimes

President Obama’s green jobs training program, which was part of his stimulus, has failed on most key jobs measures, according to a new internal audit that found it was training workers who already had jobs that didn’t need green energy skills, and was failing to place new enrollees in jobs once they finished the training.

The Labor Department’s inspector general also said grantees who received the green jobs-training money did a poor job of reporting their results.

Only 38 percent of those who have completed training got jobs based on it, and only 16 percent kept jobs for at least six months — the key measure of success for the program.

“Outcomes for participants were far less than originally proposed,” the auditors said.

The government earmarked more than $400 million for green jobs training programs, and $328.5 million has been spent so far.

About half were already working in the energy sector and wanted retraining, and half were potential new energy workers.

Of those workers who already had energy-sector jobs, the auditors said they were retrained, even though they didn’t need it.

“We found no evidence that the incumbent workers in our sample required services or training to keep their job or obtain a new one,” the investigators said in their report.

The Labor Department challenged the findings, saying that auditors didn’t consider the full progress of those who got training. The department said some of those who got training found jobs before their training was completed and said they should have been counted.

Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training, also said as the rest of the training is completed, they expect the numbers to improve.

The audit was released by House oversight committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, who requested the update.

Mr. Issa said in addition to poor performance records, the green jobs money “served as a slush fund” for the Obama administration to dole out payments to allies “like the National Council of La Raza, the Blue Green alliance and the U.S. Steelworkers Union.”

The Incredible Shrinking President

MarkSteyn

‘We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos — the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one — bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s reelection campaign.

You’ll recall that a near-month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department e-mails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and special forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy — or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hellhole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’s father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaeda affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter — that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody.

This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional story line, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In electoral terms, it’s probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in their 2008 votes. Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al. seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that at the ceremony Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?” One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political bigshot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn’t even manage that.

But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obama’s own cue balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: “Osama’s dead and General Motors is alive.” But, as the al-Qaeda connections to Benghazi dribbled out leak by leak, the “Osama’s dead” became a problematic boast and, left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible. Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird, and binders, and bayonets, just to name the “B”s in his bonnet. At the second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the General Motors of the American abortion industry, half a dozen times, desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap. Yet oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.

Both videos — the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext — exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state’s most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer pressure: C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last hold-out?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.” Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep with a $16 trillion broke loser twice?

Obama’s Radical Agenda Ruined His Chance To Be Leader

InvestorsDaily

In this election year, the attention of the media and of the voters has turned increasingly to issues of leadership.

Leadership is a difficult role, requiring knowledge of the tasks of the organization and a wide variety of organizational skills, including an ability to inspire support, to select and manage subordinates, and to work with critics. Self-knowledge, emotional stability and awareness of one’s narcissistic tendencies are also essential.

In addition, the leader’s political support inevitably involves a close communicative and emotional relationship between himself and his followers, a kind of emotional duet that sets up the expectations and constraints on him.

Barack Obama came into office on a great wave of hope and expectation, reflected in such slogans as “Yes We Can,” “Change You Can Believe In” and “Hope and Change.” He was seen by some as a messiah who would rid us of a faltering economy, bitter and divisive internal quarrels over foreign wars, and the general sense of things gone wrong.

Many felt that as the first black president, he also embodied the ideals of equality and opportunity so central to our national ethos.

But things go bad when messianic hopes are unfulfilled. As he assumed office, Obama was faced with a severe economic crisis, and he made some grandiose promises such as: “If I don’t have this (economic recovery) done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

But the economic problems received short shrift as the administration pursued radical domestic reforms that included a redistribution of wealth and a government takeover of the nation’s healthcare.

Obama was woefully unequipped to lead — that is, to set priorities and devise strategies. He lacked previous experience with leadership in any sizeable organization; made unwise, inept senior appointments, such as Attorney General Eric Holder, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; and failed miserably to work constructively with his critics.

In short, he has appeared to be overwhelmed by the substantive demands of the job.

Rather than analyzing realistically many causes and the range of possible remedies of the nation’s slow economic growth, Obama has chosen to demonize the administration of George W. Bush (and his supposed cronies — rich, self-serving, damn-the-poor-and-middle-class capitalists). He has blamed various sources of economic “head winds,” including the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the European debt crisis.

By adopting this strategy — arguably a necessary one in view of the dismal objective measures of his administration’s performance — Obama has abandoned the role of a unifying, benevolent messiah and instead become the highly partisan Fight Leader waging war against his political foes.

The president has ruled increasingly by fiat. From the beginning, Obama and congressional Democrats rejected any sort of bipartisanism, consistently ignoring congressional Republicans.

Even since he lost the majority in the House and the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama has continued his “imperial presidency” — ironically, the Left’s term of derision for the administration of Richard Nixon — by relying extensively on executive orders and arbitrary, extra-legal actions of federal agencies.

On the Heritage Foundation’s blog, Matthew Spalding recently offered a number of examples of the president’s utter disregard for “the powers of the legislative branch in favor of administrative decision-making without — and often in spite of — congressional action,” and of simply deciding not to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress.

As Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel put it so well: “Mr. Obama proposes, Congress refuses, he does it anyway.”

Many observers have noted the extraordinary frequency of the pronoun “I” in the president’s speeches, which suggests his preoccupation with himself. The president’s fight mode also reflects a narcissistic defense of his own image.

Political discourse that consists of little more than endless repetition of the same talking points, and incessant “gotcha” attacks traded by principals and their surrogates, is increasingly souring Americans on the whole process — and we’re still more than three months from the election.

Another important dimension of President Obama’s role has been that of Dependency Leader. He sees himself as The One who will take care of America’s poor and defenseless. This role dovetails with his role as Fight Leader:

The other party is characterized as caring only about “millionaires and billionaires.” The president’s opponents are attacked relentlessly as hard-hearted special interests who don’t care if the poor get poorer, starve and go without medical care.

Voters could be excused for wondering what, exactly, the president stands for. As reporter Mark Landler wrote in the New York Times on July 13, sometimes the “cyber-Barack Obama” is “at odds with the flesh-and-blood version.”

He related how the president “voiced his familiar lament that ‘there is so much negativity and so much cynicism’ in politics that he could understand if voters tuned out the election,” although “minutes earlier on Twitter, he had written, ‘Why Mitt Romney’s end date at his buyout firm matters,’” with a link to a blog post about the trumped up controversy over Romney’s departure from Bain Capital. The Obama campaign has continued to focus on this and other related non-issues.

One of the president’s advisers described his actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” Unfortunately, under Obama’s leadership the nation is falling farther and farther behind.

‘The entire Obama presidency, in one anecdote’

AmericanThinker

James Pethokoukis writing at the Enterprise Blog:

One of my favorite moments from the new book The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:

Energy was a particular obsession of the president-elect’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” But the numbers rarely budged.

Now let’s fast forward to this past September:

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show. The program – designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans – has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.

So where are the new jobs coming from, at least the good-paying ones? From the industry Obama wants to replace as much as possible with “clean” energy: oil and gas. A new report from the World Economic Forum estimates the sectors “added approximately 150,000 jobs in 2011, 9% of all jobs created in the United States that year.”

Those numbers are even more impressive once you realize that some 40% of all new jobs are being added in low-pay sectors such as retailing and leisure. So nearly 20% of new “good jobs” are in oil and gas.

Obama hasn’t a clue. You can almost hear him saying “Do you mean to tell me we invested tens of billions of dollars into research and development of wind farms and it’s not creating jobs? Or bio-mass energy? Or algae?

The objective reality of the market escapes this president and his advisors. He has created a reality where wishful thinking takes precedence over logic which allows him to fiercely believe that all of his alternative energy schemes should produce jobs.

But believing in something doesn’t make it so – something Obama has found out the hard way.

Obama’s second-term agenda will prove devastating to U.S.

AaronKlein

Americans may think they know what President Obama would do if he wins four more years. But, in reality, they have no idea just how radical and far-reaching his agenda would be.

Obama himself has been clear about using another term to “reform” our financial sector and ensure the implementation of ObamaCare. The president also has said he would attempt progressive-style immigration reform, with the presumption of amnesty for illegal aliens.

Many figure Obama would continue his relentless expansion of federal government power; increasing even further his crushing, multitrillion-dollar intergenerational debt; and pursue a weak foreign policy coupled with the evisceration of America’s military.

These generalized ambitions, however, do not scratch the surface of the specific, transformative assault that is planned upon our country.

Months of painstaking research into thousands of documents have enabled Brenda J. Elliott and me to expose the detailed template for Obama’s next four years — the one actually created by Obama’s own top advisers, strategists and associated progressive groups.

This second-term blueprint is laid bare in our upcoming book, “Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed.”

We found that, just as in 2008, when Obama concealed his true presidential plans behind bland rhetoric of ending partisan differences and cutting the federal deficit, his 2012 re-election theme of creating jobs conceals far more than it reveals about his true agenda for a second term.

 

Here are some of the second-term plans we uncovered:

• The re-creation of a 21st-century version of FDR’s Works Progress Administration program within the Department of Labor that would oversee a massive new bureaucracy and millions of new federal jobs;

• An additional government-funded jobs program that provides “good jobs” capable of supporting a family with a “decent standard of living.”

• A new government mandate to force businesses to provide twelve weeks of paid benefits to employees who need time off to care for a new child, a sick family member, or their own illness. Plus, a higher, required minimum wage that would raise the floor for all employees.

•       An expansive, de facto amnesty program for illegal aliens via both executive order and interagency directives linked with a reduction in the capabilities of the U.S. Border Patrol.

•     Plans to bring in untold numbers of new immigrants with the removal of caps on H-1B visas and green cards.

•     Government-funded, neighborhood-based programs to better integrate the newly amnestied immigrants into society, including education centers and health care centers. A “federal solution” to ensure that the amnestied immigrants are treated “equitably” across the United States.

•     A National Infrastructure Bank that would evaluate and finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional and national importance” and would finance “transportation infrastructure, housing, energy, telecommunications, drinking water, wastewater, and other infrastructures.”

•     The wresting of control of the military budget from Congress by placing an ”independent panel” in charge of military spending while slashing  the defense budget in shocking ways.

•      Spreading the vastly reduced resources of the U.S. Armed Forces even thinner by using them to combat “global warming,” fight global  poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations and step up use of  “peacekeeping” deployments;

•     A new “green” stimulus program and the founding of a federal “green” bank or “Energy Independence Trust,” which would borrow from the federal treasury to provide low-cost financing to private-sector investments in “clean energy. “

•  A “green Manufacturing” revolving loan fund to create 680,000 manufacturing jobs and 1,972,000 additional jobs over five years

•     Detailed plans to enact single-payer health care legislation controlled by the federal government.

 

How did we obtain this expansive blueprint? By investigating the policy papers and legislative proposals of the same progressive shadow groups that crafted Obama’s first term.

Obama’s first-term strategy did not materialize out of thin air. The president’s signature policies, including the “stimulus,” defense initiatives and even ObamaCare, were crafted over years by key progressive think tanks and activists, usually first promoted in extensive research and policy papers. Some first-term plans were even recycled and modified from older legislative attempts that had previously been pushed by progressive Democrats.

Many of these same progressive groups and activists have been hard at work planning Obama’s second-term strategy: jobs, wages, health care, immigration, defense, even electoral reform.

One joke going around the capital after the rare Washington earthquake of August 2011 was that Obama had proclaimed it: “Bush’s fault.” Yet it was Bush who must be credited with dusting off an old American saw that well applies to his White House successor: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Will we, the American people, allow ourselves to be fooled again?

Census Shows 200,000 Small Businesses Shut Down From 2008-2010

Breitbart

According to Census figures, some 200,000 small businesses disappeared from the rolls between 2008 and 2010. Those businesses were responsible for some three million jobs. The Obama administration claims that they’re moving in the right direction – but the direction of the economy is now reversing itself.

Not surprisingly, Gallup finds that business owners are turning on President Obama. The national poll showed a 59-35 disapproval/approval split. Workers are split in favor of Obama, thanks in large part to Obama’s heavy emphasis on class warfare.

It is no coincidence that government spending has expanded dramatically during the same period that private sector businesses were going under. And it is no coincidence that, even as the economy falls back into a slump, from the mildest recovery in our lifetime, Obama believes that only more government spending can solve the problem.

Please, sir may I have another?

Government Motors: GM Stock Hits New Low, Taxpayer Loss Hits $35 Billion

General Motors (GM) shares closed down 1.5% to 19.02 on Monday, hitting 18.85 intraday. That’s the lowest since the U.S. auto giant came public again in November 2010 at 33 a share. Update: GM shares early Tuesday fell 1.4% to 18.76, hitting a new low.)

That raises the taxpayer loss on the GM bailout to just shy of $35 billion. Here’s the math:

GM doesn’t have to pay back anything else, but taxpayers are still out $26.4 billion in direct aid. The Treasury still owns 26.5% of GM — 500 million shares. The stock would have to rise to about 53 to break-even on that direct aid. At the current price, the Treasury’s stake is worth just $9.51 billion. (Taxpayers lose $5 million for each penny that GM stock falls).

That would leave taxpayers out $16.9 billion. But the true cost is much higher.

President Obama let GM keep $45 billion worth in past losses to write off future earnings. These carry-forwards are typically wiped out or severely cut along with debts as part of bankruptcy. But in this case, the administration gifted huge tax breaks with an $18 billion book value. (That’s how GM avoided taxes last year despite a bumper $7.6 billion profit.)

Including those tax write-offs, taxpayers are sitting on a bailout loss of $35 billion.

GM’s big 2011 profit benefited hugely from the supply-chain woes at Toyota Motor (TM), Honda Motor (HMC) and other Japanese automakers due to Japan’s tsunami and Thailand’s flooding. That temporarily boosted its U.S. market share. But its share is rapidly receding, with Toyota finally back on track and Volkswagen (VW) rapidly expanding in America. And GM is padding its books, recording “sales” by stuffing dealers’ lots with more and more inventory.

Overall U.S. auto sales appear to be leveling off or edging lower after a strong start to the year.

GM’s big problems are in Europe, where the debt crisis continues to intensify, sending the region into a sharp recession. Auto sales in much of southern Europe have crashed. Even before the plunging demand, the region was plagued with chronic overcapacity. National governments resisted efforts by automakers to rationalize the production.

Longer term, GM still faces relatively high costs at home. After some union concessions, labor costs are almost even with Toyota. But Toyota is a relatively high-cost rival that can charge a premium over GM vehicles. Meanwhile, Hyundai and VW have lower U.S. labor costs.

Ford Motor (F) reports earnings Wednesday morning. Last month Ford warned of weak European sales, sending shares sharply lower. Ford’s stock fell 1.2% to 9.06 on Tuesday, hitting its lowest level since the end of 2009. Update: Ford reported lower, but better-than-expected earnings per share as North American gains offset European losses. The company did lower its full-year profit target. Shares fell 0.8% in early trading to 8.99.