Jobs and the economy (Part 1)

Barack Obama announced before his Asia trip that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month.

The media treated this in its customary, dutiful fashion, largely cooing about "how presidential he is!"

Serious question, though, people. Actually, two serious questions.

First, why are we almost a year into this administration, with unemployment worsening throughout, and only now the president's focus is on jobs?

And second, how seriously can we take this? I mean, Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress have spent the last 10 months in rabid pursuit of anti-jobs legislation such as Card Check, Health Care and Cap & Trade.

Perhaps the better question is whether anyone honestly believes that liberals know how to create jobs.

And save it on the stimulus nonsense, OK? For one thing, if the stimulus was about job creation, as Democrats have claimed for nine months, why has only 14 percent of the $787 billion been spent? I mean, libs are all about looking good politically, and double-digit unemployment is about seven shades of ugly.

Those jobs saved/created that Obama keeps talking about?

Besides serving as a multi-billion-dollar goody bag for liberal causes, the stimulus bill only provided struggling states with cash for extended unemployment benefits and to save teaching and other government jobs.

Temporarily. At least a dozen of those states that slurped up that stimulus already have figured out they're in deep financial trouble as they begin attempting to craft their 2010 budgets.

And by deep financial trouble, we're talking 10- and 11-figure shortfalls.

One of two things will have to happen. There will be massive layoffs among teachers and state workers. Or the fed will have to provide another injection of billions of dollars.

Tax dollars, of course.

I suspect a good amount will come from the unspent 86 percent of the stimulus money, because several Democrats floated the "Second Stimulus" idea a couple of weeks ago, and the tremors of immediate anger from the population at large registered on the Richter Scale.

That $787 billion won't last forever, though. And that, boys and girls, is precisely what's wrong when the government's idea of job creation equates to more government.

Somebody's got to pay for it.

And in this case and in this environment, with more people out of work week after week after week and the government's source of revenue steadily diminishing, it's simply an unsustainable course.

What's ahead, in the likely event this administration continues to ignore pro-growth policies, is even worse unemployment, much higher debt and a monstrous tax burden on every American who's lucky enough to still have a job.

Election returns

"Spin" can be a funny thing. What people say and what they do often are misaligned. The mouth may say "I'm not afraid" of that large, ferocious dog chained in a neighbor's front yard, but the feet nevertheless tend to use a path at least one foot beyond that chain's length.

Good sense, after all, often outweighs good spin.

We'll see if that applies to the post-election weeks and months ahead. On a number of fronts.

That liberals dismiss the ideological swings of 20-plus points from last fall's presidential election in Tuesday's Virginia and New Jersey governor races isn't all that surprising.

And I hold out little hope (OK, none at all) that Democrat Party leaders will reverse course on the reprehensible direction they're taking this country.

But there are a lot of Democrats in both houses of Congress who face elections next year and know they aren't as "bullet-proof" as Nancy Pelosi is in her ultra-liberal San Francisco district.

I assume a good number of those "blue-dog" Democrats would like to keep their jobs and, at the very least, are calculating the length of that large, ferocious dog's chain.

Good sense would dictate doing so.

Similar calculations should be going on across the aisle, though. At least at the highest levels of the GOP.

Just as Ronald Reagan "took back" the Republican Party for conservatives almost 30 years ago, those who hold his tenants, as well as The Constitution, sacred are moving in that direction again.

Yes, liberals spin this as right-wing extremism and charge that there's no room for moderate thought in the Republican Party.

Well, first of all, look at the pictures and video of this summer's tea parties and then the 9/12 march on Washington.

Extremists? More like a mix of veterans, retirees, young parents, everyday middle class folks who had never been part of any kind of political activism but were simply fed up with Washington's unprecedented power grab and gross mismanagement.

And moderate thought? Since when is supporting and voting for liberal idealism "moderate"?

It strikes me that in this decade, particularly, we hear all about how conservatives need to "move more to the center" and be more "big-tent" inclusive and so forth, yet I haven't heard once how Democrats should do anything similar.

My position is that Republicans have, and that precisely has been their problem.

Tuesday's other election that brought national attention, the House race in New York's very moderate 23rd District, bears that out.

The GOP saw fit to push a liberal "Republican" in Dede Scozzafava. The backlash from conservatives, already fed up with RINOs such Arlen Specter (before he jumped parties), Olympia Snowe, et al, resulted in the rapid ascent of a little-known conservative, Doug Hoffman, as a third-party candidate.

While Hoffman's support skyrocketed in the weeks leading up to the election, Scozzafava's dropped lower than whale dung, and she dropped out of the race (and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, by the way).

Regardless of Owens' four-point win, a message was sent to the GOP hierarchy.

Question is, are they also now measuring chains?

Their future, like that of those "blue-dog" Democrats, almost certainly depends on it.