Category: Politics

U.S. Economy Adds 248,000 Jobs in May

After bottoming out in August, payroll employment has posted nine consecutive monthly gains, restoring 1.4 million of the 2.6 million jobs lost during the first 31 months of Bush’s presidency.

Sorry, John, but by November the Bush Administration will be showing a net job gain.

Say what you want about crazy Al Gore and his bizarre speechifying to the Moveon.org brownshirts, the dude gets results. He called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Stephen Cambone, and already Tenet is gone, so it’s one down and five to go for Big Al. The President is following John Kerry’s advice on the role of the UN in the handover, so what’s the Administration doing in the way of policy these days, just setting back and waiting for the Dems to come up with the ideas?

It sorta looks that way on the terror front, and when you factor in prescription drugs and school funding, it looks even more that way.

So I guess the days of partisan conflict in Washington are officially over.

The resignation of worthless bureaucrat George Tenet took way too long. His agency blew the pre-9/11 warnings and the pre-liberation intelligence on Saddam’s weapons programs, either one of which is grounds for tarring and feathering.

A couple of years ago, I got some e-mail from a former CIA employee who was fired by Tenet for taking part in an on-line discussion group inside the agency where folks passed along jokes and movie reviews. The respondent, clearly disgruntled, told me that Tenet was hated by agency staff, which certainly appears to be true. In a normal organization, the underlings are going to prevent the boss from making an ass of himself over and over again, but nobody did that for Tenet.

RIP, loser.

Here’s an interesting chart on global migration trends, which shows the judgment of the authentic people regarding national quality.

Jill Stewart credits Schwarzenegger with improving the economy in California:

Our highly methodical governor is lining up many other boxes to blow up. California added 16,300 new jobs in April, according to the Department of Labor. Some analysts believe that’s not only due to stimulation from federal tax cuts, but also because of a buoyant attitude by businesses who think Schwarzenegger intends true change.

…and lists some of the reforms that promise to reign in the growth of public employee union costs. Good column, check it out.

OK, Paul, take this economic news and spin it if you can:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The economy grew at a 4.4 percent annual rate in the first quarter of this year, slightly faster than previously thought and fresh evidence that the recovery possessed good momentum as it headed into the current quarter.

Via Jane Galt

Yahoo! News – Bush Says U.S. Will Persevere in Iraq

“There are difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic,” he said. “The terrorists and Saddam loyalists would rather see many Iraqis die than have any live in freedom. But terrorists will not determine the future of Iraq.”

Unfortunately, the terrorists and Saddam loyalists aren’t the only threats to the success of a free Iraq — we also face partisans in the American political system and media establishment who’d rather keep the Iraqi people in chains than allow a Republican president to share their victory. We all know who they are – those who would rather obsess about Iraqi prisoners with panties on their heads than talk about the Iraqis whose heads and hands were amputated by Saddam’s torture goons, those who would assert equivalence between the Bush administration and the Saddam regime, those who still celebrate the defeat of the US and the Vietnamese people in the war that ended with a communist bloodbath that took 200,000 lives in less than a month, those who are so impressed by John Kerry’s war record they forgive his totally lackluster career in the Senate and his buddying up to the rapists of Chappaquiddick and Chappaqua.

I don’t think the American people are as vain and self-centered as these critics believe, but we’ll see in November.

Gov. Schwarzenegger has done the easy stuff – repealed the car tax increase and the illegal immigrant driver license bill, passed the deficit bond, and written a reasonably tight budget – and now he’s going after the real bad guys in California, the gaming tribes and the public employee unions. In particular, the prison guards got a sweetheart raise from Davis after spending millions to elect him:

The contract has come under fire for its generous pay raises and its semisecret provisions. Many legislators now say they were ignorant of its true dimensions when they voted to approve it during the Davis regime. If the Legislature refuses to appropriate money for the contract, as the 17 senators are urging, the CCPOA would be forced back to the bargaining table. The action would bolster Schwarzenegger’s call for renegotiating public employee union contracts signed by the Davis administration, saying the state can’t afford them since it’s running multibillion-dollar deficits.

Few pols have taken on the CCPOA and lived to tell about it, because their election tactics make Abu Ghraib look like Sunday School. In the Davis/Lungren contest, they bought up all the media time in the Central Valley so that Lungren couldn’t get his ads on in October when he was desperate.

Free speech belongs to the guy who owns the ads.

Jerry Brown wants to be California Attorney General:

“I’d bring creativity and innovation to that office. I have a lot to give,” Brown, 66, said Monday in an interview from London, where he stopped en route to a conference in Croatia. Brown last week quietly filed his required statement of intention to run for attorney general in 2006. The filing, a prerequisite to raising campaign funds, was an unusually stealthy move for a career politician who has been California’s secretary of state, governor, a three-time presidential contender, a U.S. Senate candidate and mayor of Oakland.

This is truly bizarre, but Brown’s an interesting guy who’s come a long wasy since the Gov. Moonbeam days. Likely Republican opponent Rod Pacheco would be my choice, but there’s an element of personal relationship there. When he was in the Assembly, he answered his own phone after 5:00; I really liked that.

This is a real shocker. After her party won national elections in India, Sonia Gandhi was the presumptive Prime Minister. But now she declines the post amid widespread fears of foreign-devil commie takeover:

Investors feared that if she became prime minister, Gandhi would have to backtrack on her pledge to go forward with economic liberalization, or that the leftists could block key reforms such as the privatization of state-run companies.

In the long run, this is best for the Congress Party.