This week the First Lady told an audience at a fundraiser that the economy has made “remarkable progress” these past three years. One example of a hiring spree uptick can be found in New York City, where a couple hundred workers have been or are being added to the payrolls due to wildly increasing demand. Sure, it’s to work in welfare offices, but the recovery has to start somewhere:

The Human Resources Administration added more than 100 workers last July and plans to hire another 100 to serve the burgeoning number of New Yorkers applying for food stamps and rent assistance at their offices, according to the Daily News.

About 1.8 million New Yorkers are now on food stamps, which marks nearly a 65 percent increase from four years ago, according to city records. The increase in applicants has led to overcrowding at HRA offices throughout the city, and the agency said at a council hearing Tuesday that it had to hire scores of new workers and supervisors to manage the situation.

The HRA has also expanded its waiting rooms to accommodate the swell in applicants.

I guess I owe Tom Vilsack an apology.

So, if Bush is the real “food stamp president,” will W also be given credit for adding these jobs, or just blamed for the food stamp part?

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Joe Biden has said the administration owns the economy now, but the President Obama has been a little slower to come on board… until now.

From Real Clear Politics:

WCCO-TV correspondent: “When I finally did have a chance to talk to President Obama one-on-one, I asked him at what point does the economy become his fault and not his predecessor’s?”

President Barack Obama: “It’s always my responsibility. I’m less interested in allocating blame then just making sure that we’re taking every step we need to, to move the economy forward. And, you know, traditionally after big financial crises like this the economy takes a longer time to heal and we’ve seen some progress. In the private sector, we’ve seen over two million jobs created and this year alone, over a million jobs created. But, it’s just not enough yet to have an impact on everybody who needs help out there.”

Does this mean no more blaming Bush?

Or Europe & earthquakes?

Or ATMs?

We’ll see if the blame game lightens up or intensifies heading into 2012. My money’s on the latter. The self-imposed three-year deadline for economic recovery is looming and the believability of Bush-blame is fading away over time, so the pressure’s on when it comes to finding something or someone new and original to blame.

In the same interview, President Obama was asked the question that voters will be asking themselves one year from now: “Are we better off now than we were $4 trillion… er, I mean 4 years… ago?”

“Well, you know, I think we are better off now than we would have been if I hadn’t taken all the steps that we took,” a hesitant Obama said. “I don’t think the country is stronger yet then it was when the economy was still booming and we didn’t have Wall Street crisis, and we didn’t have the housing bubble burst. But, we’ve made steady progress, we just need to make more.”

By way of Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, John Boehner was asked if the US is better off now than when Obama took office. Boehner’s reaction:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Yes, I’m still struggling. Like many of you, I am still carefully weighing all the costs and benefits of each declared GOP candidate. As the candidates continue highlighting each other’s unsavory left-wing alliances, I thought it might be helpful to compile a Hold Your Nose Tracker of the current top four front-runners. I’m just giving it to you straight. One way or the other, the plugs will come in handy. This is the hand we’ve been dealt, alas. Same as it ever was. (Flashback February 2008: The John McCain Nose Plugs.)

Update: Latest Rasmussen numbers are out. Cain: 43. Obama: 41. “Cain is tied with Romney for the lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination. Nobody else is even close at the moment.”

***

Newt Gingrich. This weekend, Gingrich called out Mitt Romney’s liberal Northeast Republican record. All well and good. But let’s not pretend away Newt’s own very recent strayings from mainstream conservatism. He snuggled up to Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore in 2008 (and laughably tried to spin the humiliating lovefest as a “debate”).

He went on tour with Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan and race hustler Al Sharpton in September 2009 and again in November 2009:

He endorsed ACORN-friendly, Big Labor-backing, tax-and-spend abortion radical Dede Scozzafava in the NY-23 debacle in October 2009, prompting rank-and-file conservatives to send back his book and GOP solicitations like this one from reader Barnaby, who sent back his crossed-out Republican solicitation forms with a “NO RINOS” sticky note for Newt Gingrich:

He’s played footsie with Hillary Clinton on health care, backed an individual health care mandate and aspects of Romneycare, and vigorously attacked Paul Ryan’s free-market-based Medicare reform plan.

And a friendly reminder for grass-roots Tea Party activists who were against the government bailouts before it was cool: When push came to shove, Gingrich supported TARP.

***

Herman Cain. His endorsement of pal Alan Greenspan’s Fed tenure shows too much trust for the central banking bureaucrats who helped inflate the housing bubble and who, like Naked Emperor Henry Paulson, engineered the era of endless bailouts.

For all his Tea Party cred and outside-the-Beltway status, Cain fell for the gun-to-our-heads, Chicken Little propaganda and supported TARP — vigorously — when America needed every consistent fiscal conservative voice possible to try and stop the predictable, all-purpose morphing of the bank bailout before it started.

***

Rick Perry. He tried to embarrass rival GOP gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison in September 2009 by painting her as soft on radical community organizing/fraud outfit ACORN — only to watch the attack wither after conservative opponents found him championing the group’s government shakedowns at a pro-ACORN bill-signing in 2005.

He has adopted the illegal alien DREAM Act agenda and echoed their attacks on opponents as “heartless:”

(Texans, by the way, are revolting against Perry’s lax attitude. Texas A&M students are petitioning Perry to call a special session to repeal the DREAM Act. Texas Tea Party leaders want Perry to come home and address illegal alien sanctuary cities now.)

He’s knee-deep in crony Merck lobbying ties and cash, a pair of massive government subsidy slush funds for friends and donors, and his own Solyndra-style penchant for picking taxpayer “investment” winners and losers.

And yes, he was for, then against, the government-knows-best TARP intervention. This weaseling about his position on a core Tea Party issue is typical Beltway behavior:

***

Mitt Romney . He embraced Nanny State Sen. Edward Kennedy and the federal dollars Uncle Teddy brought to the table to help subsidize Romneycare.

He put Romneycare/Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber on the map.

He took environmental advice from global warming zealot, eugenics/population control freak John Holdren, among other eco-command-and-controllers.

He stood by and watched NJ GOP Gov. Chris Christie smear Romneycare critics as “intellectually dishonest.”

Oh, and yeah: He supported TARP, too. And defends it today.

***

Gah.

***

As all of these candidates’ campaigns remind us — endlessly — there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate.

Yep, don’t we all know it? Politics is the Pageant of the Imperfects.

Every single one of these front-runners is a pro-TARP interventionist with a variety of problematic Big Biz/Big Government impulses and alliances.

Which one will do the least worst job against Obama in the debates, on the campaign trail, and ultimately in the White House? Which one will insult the base the least? Which one will actually have the energy, competence, and credibility to directly challenge Obama’s corruption, profligacy, class-warfare demagoguery, progressive pandering, and epidemic failures?

Watching, waiting, hoping, praying. And yes, preparing the nose plugs however this race turns out…

***

GOP debate viewership is nearly double the last presidential cycle’s.

The next one’s on Tuesday in Las Vegas, organized again by CNN.

Would be nice to get more conservatives to Occupy GOP Debates next time around.

I dream.

In 2009, a weepy Nancy Pelosi denounced rhetoric she claimed was coming from the Tea Parties, claiming the protest could lead to a climate of violence. Since then, however, Pelosi has given Occupy Wall Street her blessing.

Kelly Maher’s piece at the Daily Caller might have some wondering where Pelosi’s deep concern is now:

The young University of Colorado student may appear too young to have much life experience, but yessir — he’s mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore. He sure looks comfortable in that designer jacket, though. (Ladies: Is that Burberry or a knock-off?)

“There’s a lot of stuff that needs to change,” our boy added, “and if it doesn’t, violent revolution will come.”

How to change things for the better? Apparently it just takes a box of bullets and some rope.

“If you get the thirteen families that own the world, including George Bush and his administration, get them in front of the White House and hang them and shoot them, because they deserve that.”

Roll tape (language warning):

Pundit Press has more about rhetoric that would be getting front page coverage from the MSM and crocodile tears from Nancy Pelosi if it were coming from the Tea Party.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Vice President Joe Biden spent some time in Florida talking to a class of 5th graders about the economy and his favorite three-letter word, jobs. In his discussion about the troubled economy, do you think Biden was forced to admit to the kids that the stimulus was a waste of a huge amount of money, “we have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt” is a ridiculous theory, “green jobs” is a disaster, and that trillions have been charged to their generation and beyond on the Sheriff’s watch alone?

Nah, he just blamed Bush:

“Because things got really bad before we came into office and an awful lot of companies said ‘there’s no more jobs for you here.’”

Is that the same Biden who just last week took ownership of the economy on behalf of the administration? Maybe he got a talking to (and if so he might get another one for this):

**Written by Doug Powers

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Look for the Obama campaign’s “let Joe be Joe” policy to be put under review fairly quickly back at the White House.

CBS News:

Vice President Joe Biden said in a live interview with Miami public radio station WLRN Thursday that the Obama administration – not the Bush administration – now has ownership of the struggling U.S. economy.

Biden said Americans have “good reason to be upset” because they lost jobs because of the recession, “something they didn’t have a thing to do with creating.”

“Even though 50-some percent of the American people think the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant,” said the vice president. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge.”

It might be politically advisable for Team Obama to start weaning themselves off the “blame Bush” rhetoric now that public sentiment is changing as we drift away from the W years. Asking voters to give you a second term so you can continue to point the finger at the second term of your predecessor is a pitiful strategy, but that doesn’t mean the blame-game is off the table — it’s just shifting to different culprits. Biden obviously missed the latest internal memo, because “Bush’s fault” is until further notice to be replaced by “Europe’s fault.”

If Sheriff Joe keeps taking ownership of the economy on behalf of the rest of the administration it’ll be “Biden’s fault” and the 2012 ticket might look a little different:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Clearly this must be Bush’s fault:

When a random sample of 1004 adults were asked to compare the 43rd and 44th presidents, 34 percent of respondents said Obama had been a worse president than Bush, while 22 percent said he was about the same.

Forty-three percent, a plurality, said they preferred Obama’s handling of the presidency.
[...]
Predictably, Democrats were most supportive of Obama, while Republicans favored Bush in the poll. The response from independent voters might be most telling for Obama: a troublesome 67 percent said they considered him about the same or worse than Bush.

The latest Economist/YouGov poll pegs Obama’s overall approval at 36%, and Gallup puts Obama’s approval among men at the same number (but that’s nothing a few more photo ops riding the hog can’t bring back up).

Today the president has convened an emergency meeting to figure out how to get those numbers back up. (Update: today’s golf partner is Bill Clinton)

Will Wolf Blitzer trumpet Obama’s new low like he did when Bush hit 36%? (h/t HAP):

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Earlier today, former President Bush placed a wreath at the Pentagon, and this afternoon he delivered a powerful speech at the dedication of a memorial for those who were aboard Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11/01:

(h/t Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Don’t worry — According to Warren Buffet this is nothing that can’t be easily remedied by raising Warren Buffett’s taxes.

CBS News:

The latest posting by the Treasury Department shows the national debt has now increased $4 trillion on President Obama’s watch.

The debt was $10.626 trillion on the day Mr. Obama took office. The latest calculation from Treasury shows the debt has now hit $14.639 trillion.

It’s the most rapid increase in the debt under any U.S. president.

The national debt increased $4.9 trillion during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush. The debt now is rising at a pace to surpass that amount during Mr. Obama’s four-year term.

Mr. Obama blames policies inherited from his predecessor’s administration for the soaring debt.

And “headwinds” — don’t forget to blame headwinds.

Not only that, but the federal budget deficit for fiscal 2011 is expected to hit $1.3 trillion.

Not surprisingly, adding $4 trillion in debt used to be an unpatriotic act.

The words below are from July 2008 — before the rise of the oceans began to slow, the planet began to heal, good jobs were provided to the jobless, wars ended, Gitmo closed and the national credit card was cut up. Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

How did Sheriff Joe’s visit to the loan officers at the Bank of China go, anyway?

Sound byte possibly coming to an RNC ad near you:

But that was all pre-Hope & Change™, back when the need to raise the debt ceiling meant a failure of leadership. Now it’s a symbol of responsible economic stewardship.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Here’s White House Press Secretary Jay Carney this week in response to a question about whether President Obama planned to carry on with a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard scheduled for later this month:

And I don’t think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the president would spend some time with his family. It is also, I think — as anyone who has covered it in the past, either in this administration or others, there’s no such thing as a presidential vacation.

Ten years ago, in a Time article Carney wrote while covering the Bush administration, it didn’t sound like there’s no such thing as a presidential vacation:

Back in July, when they were planning what the President should do during his month-long vacation (as part of their effort to persuade the public that he wasn’t actually on vacation in the generally accepted sense of what vacation means — i.e., having fun and not working), the image-makers hit upon a clever idea. Every week, they decided, they would send the President somewhere outside Texas for a day or a day and a half to hold an event of some kind in which he would mix with “real Americans.”

The events would have little in common, except for the fact that they would be held far from Washington in the middle of August. But to tie them together, to make it seem as though the President were engaged in some concentrated activity of presidential purpose, they would name the entire series of trips — together with his down time at his ranch in Crawford, Texas — the “Home to the Heartland” tour.

During his first week of vacation, Bush ventured all the way to Waco —about 25 minutes from Crawford — to “help build” a house with Habitat for Humanity. Though Bush actually spent about 15 minutes doing anything, the print media dutifully reported his activity. More importantly, of course, the images of Bush at work on a good deed were carried across the nation on television and in photographs.

Times have changed.

I’m also willing to bet that, years ago, Carney wouldn’t have claimed that unemployment checks mailed out during the Bush years were a great way to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

(h/t Fox Nation)

**Written by Doug Powers

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During a floor speech on Tuesday, Harry Reid said eight million jobs were lost during Bush’s years in office.

Politifact rates Reid’s claim “liar, liar, pomegranates on fire”:

During Bush’s eight years in office — January 2001 to January 2009 — the nation actually gained a net 1.09 million jobs. (Because there were gains in government jobs, the private sector actually lost 653,000 jobs during that period.)

This isn’t remotely close to what Reid claimed. Reid’s office didn’t respond to our request for information, but we think we know what he was referring to.

From the economy’s peak to its low point, the nation lost 8.75 million jobs. Here’s the problem: The peak for jobs came in January 2008, while the low point for jobs came in February 2010.

This means the starting point for Reid’s measure came seven years into Bush’s eight-year tenure, and the low point occurred about a year into Barack Obama’s tenure.

In other words, Reid had a point in saying that there was a “loss of eight million jobs” — but it didn’t come “during the Bush eight years.” The loss of eight million jobs occurred during a roughly two-year period shared more or less equally between Bush and Obama.

But is any president to blame here? According to Jay Carney, the White House can’t create jobs. Too bad we didn’t know about that before the White House unloaded $830 billion to “save or create three to four million jobs.”

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

To say that Kucinich longs for the days of George W. Bush would be a wild over statement — after all, Kucinich wanted to impeach him — but maybe it’s not a stretch to say Dennis appreciated that Bush was more constitutionally considerate than the current president on the issue of congressional authorization for a conflict:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) on Thursday ripped President Obama while giving credit to former President George W. Bush for asking Congress to authorize the war in Iraq.

The anti-war Democrat, criticizing Obama’s handling of the conflict in Libya, noted that Bush formally consulted Congress on the Iraq war in 2002.

“President Bush came to Congress…President Obama doesn’t feel like he needs to come to Congress,” Kucinich said during an interview on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program. Kucinich pointed out he was strongly opposed to the Iraq war.

Along with other lawmakers, Kucinich this week filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on the Libyan conflict, claiming the president violated the law by not securing congressional approval.

If he’s not careful, one of these mornings Dennis might wake up next to an olive pit.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Welcome to today’s debate on patriotism when it comes to unconditionally supporting a president at a time of war. Today’s debaters are MSNBC host Ed Schultz and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ms. Clinton won the coin toss and has elected to defer to Mr. Schultz. Take it away, Ed:

Republicans are attacking the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war! … There should be no debate: we should be kicking [Gaddafi's] ass … Whose side are you on, Sarah: are you with the terrorists, Sarah, or are you with the President of the United States? … And I have to ask the question tonight: where is the patriotism from all of these war-hawks? Where’s the patriotism of the Republican party? … What about being a patriot?

Thank you, Mr. Schultz.

Secretary Clinton — you have 16 seconds for rebuttal:

“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”

That wraps up today’s debate, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to tune in next week to see Claire McCaskill and Joe Biden hammer it out over the question, “Is paying more in taxes patriotic?”

(h/t Newsbusters)

**Written by Doug Powers

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Thanks to contingency plans, confusion in the air around Reagan National Wednesday night was avoided, but a controller has been suspended:

Authorities have suspended a control tower supervisor working alone overnight who couldn’t be roused to guide two airliners landing at Washington’s Reagan airport, the nation’s top aviation official said Thursday.

A lone controller manning the tower did an impression of me listening to a Joe Biden speech and fell asleep at the switch, so naturally the president of the controllers union blamed… George W. Bush:

“One-person shifts are unsafe. Period,” Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said in a statement Thursday. He said the union has long been concerned about single controller shifts, citing a 2006 air crash in Lexington, Ky., in which a Comair regional airliner attempted a takeoff at night from the wrong runway. A single air traffic controller was on duty in the airport tower at the time.

“The administration inherited an unsafe policy of staffing to budget instead of putting safety first,” Rinaldi said. “We fully support the administration’s aggressive actions to change this policy.”

I’m sure somebody will get around to blaming Reagan too (after all, this happened at his airport)… oh, and global warming, of course — not necessarily in that order.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, launched an attack on another country while in another country, without the congressional approval that George W. Bush had and with only about half as many other countries on board. Obama seemed to feel this constituted enough of a moral high ground from which to take a jab at the former president.

John Hayward at Human Events:

Speaking in Chile [pronounced Chee-lay -- DP] to defend his decision to launch Operation Odyssey Dawn, President Obama couldn’t resist taking a swipe at George Bush, in a clumsy attempt to make himself look superior.

As reported by Fox News, the President declared: “In the past there have been times when the United States acted unilaterally or did not have full international support, and as a consequence typically it was the United States military that ended up bearing the entire burden.”

As the folks at Fox quickly pointed out, Bush actually had twice as many international allies for the invasion of Iraq as Obama has put together for his adventure in Libya.

Here are the lists of members of the international coalitions, Iraq vs. Libya:

[Source: US State Department]

Coalition Countries – Iraq – 2003

Afghanistan,
Albania
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Denmark
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Hungary
Italy
Japan
South Korea
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Philippines
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom
Uzbekistan

Coalition – Libya – 2011

United States
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Qatar
Spain
Greece
Germany
Poland
Jordan
Morocco
United Arab Emirate

Team Obama often talks about what they “inherited” from Bush, but one of them was not over a dozen coalition nations — and that’s just got to be Bush’s fault. Either way, it’s certainly nothing worth bragging about. But these little slip-ups are bound to happen when the “blame Bush” switch is set to auto-pilot all the time.

Update: Maybe President Obama heard his list of coalition nations was several countries shorter than Bush’s, because he’s cutting short his Latin America trip by two hours to head back to Washington. Golf withdrawals?

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe