Latest Video from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and its a good one.

I think Obama says it best: "There is a time to campaign, and there is a time to govern."

Throughout this last year, as our debt grows to monstrous proportions, Iran steps closer to a nuclear bomb, and unemployment remains around 10 percent, Obama has consistently shown by his actions that for him, it is never the time to govern.

By Peter Nicholas and Katherine Skiba, The Seattle Times

As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sunsplashed Spanish resort this week may be sending a different message.

First lady Michelle Obama is on a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, Sasha, aides and Secret Service personnel. Her office said the first family will pay for personal expenses, but declined to reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees. The president stayed home in the United States, as did daughter Malia, 12, who is at camp.

The trip provided plenty of fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers.

Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone deaf to the economic anxiety back home. Earlier in the week, the first lady was photographed walking through the streets of the Costa del Sol region wearing a one-shouldered Jean Paul Gaultier top.

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By William Tate, American Thinker

The Obama administration, already under fire for unprecedented allegations of racial bias, faces a new bias claim from a most unlikely source: one of the administration’s own inspectors general.

Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout — closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler — were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky.

[D]ealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships. [Emphasis added.]

Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.

As has been widely reported, the Inspector General’s study skewered the Obama Gang for strong-arming the companies into closing 2,000 dealerships, costing an estimated 100,000 people their jobs during a recession.

But the news media has ignored key elements of Barofsky’s report — elements that are far more damaging, if possible, to Obama. As we reported earlier in the week, a top Obama official, manufacturing czar and "Auto Team" leader Ron Bloom admitted that the dealerships could have been kept open, saving those jobs, "but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for ’shared sacrifice.’"

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Obama says it could be worse at a speech yesterday in Racine, WI. According to Obama, Unemployment could be 15 percent, and not 9.6 percent as it is.

Lucky Us!

His argumentation is that of a kindergartner. If it were 15 percent he could say, "at least its not 20 percent." If 50, "at least its not 75 percent."

Can’t he get it in his head that 9.6 percent is an abysmally bad number on top of the fact that it is higher than the maximum 8 percent that he promised if his stimulus got through?

Americans have longer memories than you think, Mr. Obama,  and we are not going to let you get off downplaying a 9.6 percent unemployment rate.

There are 15 million people who won’t accept, "at least its not 13 or 14 or 15."

Obama:"The problem is, number one, it’s hard to argue sometimes, things would have been a lot worse. Right? So people kind of say, yeah, but unemployment is still at 9.6. Yes, but it’s not 12 or 13, or 15."

By JULIE PACE, Associated Press

 With high unemployment, Obama’s claims of recovery fall on deaf ears

Even as he touts his efforts to put more Americans to work, President Barack Obama faces a public increasingly skeptical of his ability to bring jobs back to Main Street.

During stops in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, Obama will try to convince voters that his economic policies are working, despite an unemployment rate that’s expected to remain at painfully high levels for months if not years.

Those voters – many of them crucial independents – will be key to Obama’s re-election prospects in 2012. And his fellow Democrats, facing a tough political climate in the November, need their support even sooner.

"The bottom line is that the Democrats are almost certain to be campaigning in economic circumstances that will not be politically favorable," said William Galston, a former domestic policy aide in Bill Clinton’s White House and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, AP

 Wait… a jobs bill that won’t create jobs…. brilliant!

It sounds great: A big jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed victory and please Republicans with tax cuts at the same time. But there’s a problem: It won’t create many jobs.
Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation’s centerpiece – a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers – would work only on the margins.

As for the bill’s effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers.

"We’re skeptical that it’s going to be a big job creator," said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business. "There’s certainly nothing wrong with giving a tax break to a business that’s hired a new worker, especially in these tough times. But in terms of being an incentive to hire a lot of workers, we’re skeptical."

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AP

So much for a recovery…

A surprising jump in first-time claims for unemployment aid sent a painful reminder Thursday that jobs remain scarce six months into the economic recovery.

The surge in last week’s claims deflated hopes among some analysts that the economy would produce a net gain in jobs in January and help fuel the recovery.

A Labor Department analyst said much of the increase was due to holiday-season-related administrative backlogs at the state agencies that process the claims. Still, economists noted that that would mean claims in previous weeks had been artificially low. Those earlier declines had sparked optimism that layoffs were tapering and that employers would add a modest number of jobs in January.

The January employment report will be issued Feb. 5. But the surveys used to compile that report were done last week, so economists are paying close attention to the jobless claims figures from that week.

"The trend in the data is still discouraging," Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial, wrote in a note to clients. "Hopes for a positive employment number in January … are rapidly dimming."

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By Christopher Chantrill, American Thinker

 Obama has overseen a precipitous drop in employment

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the December employment report on January 8, and the mainstream media reported that 85,000 jobs were lost. The big story, as usual, was in the Household Survey. There was no mild leakage of 85,000 jobs there, but a whopping 589,000 jobs flushed down the drain.  Here are the numbers from the Bureau:

                                    |    Total        |     Change

Civilian labor force ….| 153,059,000|    -661,000

Employment ………….| 137,792,000|    -589,000

Unemployment ………|  15,267,000|     -73,000

Not in labor force …..|  83,865,000|     843,000

These are the numbers used to calculate the unemployment rate. Note the reason why the rate didn’t skyrocket. A total of 661,000 people dropped out of the labor force in one month. Don’t think that things are going to get better any time soon.

But let’s look beyond the numbers to the trends, also available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is where things really get scary.

Employment in the U.S. is now down from the peak of 146.5 million reached back in November 2007. That’s a loss of 8.5 million jobs in two years.

Thank goodness the mainstream media has not made invidious comparisons to the Bush recession of 2001-02. Back then, only 2 million jobs were lost, a mere scratch compared to the gaping wound in jobless Obama America. You can see why knowledgeable people speak of 2009 as the year the locusts ate. What was President Obama doing flogging health care reform for a whole year when his policy should have been — from noon on January 21, 2009 — jobs, jobs, jobs?

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By Larry Kudlow, National Review

 The Stimulus has helped bring our unemployment to 10%, maybe it’s time we try a new appoach

To get America back to work, the tax-and-regulatory obstacles from Washington must be removed.

After the arrival of a disappointing December jobs report, my thought on putting America back to work is simple: de-stimulate. That’s right. Get rid of the Obama stimulus monster, including the government takeover of health care, cap-and-trade, and all this nonsensical talk of creating green jobs. Get rid of the increase in marginal personal tax rates and capital-gains tax rates. Get rid of the payroll tax hike from the health-care talks. Get rid of the spending that is a counterweight to growth. Get rid of it, every part of it. It’s creating so much uncertainty that even profitable businesses are afraid to hire new workers and expand.

It’s like business is on hold as it waits for the next Washington shoe to fall.

Check this out. On Friday, the day of the sub-par jobs release, President Obama comes out with a new green-jobs program that will cost taxpayers $2.3 billion. He predicts targeted tax credits for all of his faddish “energy savers” — presumably determined by hoards of EPA bureaucrats — will create 17,000 new jobs. This is out of a total workforce of 153 million.

And wait, it gets better. The average cost of these alleged new green jobs will be $135,000 per job. It’s sorta like the $780 billion stimulus plan, half of which has supposedly saved 1 million jobs at roughly $200,000 per job.

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