Day 200: Obama's approval rating finally goes negative

Where's the 200-day headlines about President Obama's approval rating going into negative territory? There were none and I missed it until I ran across the latest chart and stole it from Gateway Pundit.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 32% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -2. That’s the President’s lowest rating to date and the first time the Presidential Approval Index has fallen below zero for Obama (see trends).

And over at the Contentions blog at Commentary, there's another poll report that Israelis are finally waking up and smelling the coffee about whose side Obama is on. And it is not Israel's.

The White House is atwitter after a new poll revealed a dramatic shift among Israelis regarding the administration’s policies towards Israel. The poll, conducted by Smith Research and commissioned by the Jerusalem Post, shows that only 6% of Israelis consider Obama “pro-Israel,” while 50% see him as “pro-Palestinian.” Compare this with the same poll from a month earlier, in mid-May, which had 31% responding that the Obama Administration is pro-Israel, and just 14% saying pro-Palestinian. What has changed in the last month? Not much, other than Obama’s dramatic Cairo speech, which described Israel as the product of centuries of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust; and Netanyahu’s no less dramatic response, which described Israel as the product of thousands of years of Jewish attachment to their ancient homeland.

There is a political calculus for the President here: As much as American Jews may have supported Obama without caring too much about his record on Israel, at the end of the day, American Jews tend to care deeply about Israel, and their sense of what’s happening with Israel is highly informed by what Israelis think (or, at least, Israeli elites). In other words, so dramatically lopsided a view of American policy towards Israel will not be lost on American Jewish voters. Midterms are not that far off.

What's going on? Is the kool-aid wearing off? Are voters finally waking up from the November nightmare? I sure hope so. One reason for the shift in polls -- in addition to the biggest reason, which is Obama's own performance, or lack thereof, as President -- is the law of unintended consequences. Obama got elected on the "Bush did it!" strategy. And since taking office, he has continued the "Bush did it!" excuse for all the ills of the world and his own administration.

And guess what? Former Bush administration officials, President George W. Bush himself and even his mild-mannered father, President George H.W. Bush, have finally responded after former Vice President Dick Cheney showed the way. All I can say is it's about time.

The Washington Times tells us who's on first among the Bush administration members who have finally found their voice after Cheney led the charge.

It's not just former Vice President Dick Cheney.

As former President George W. Bush offered his first public - though veiled - criticisms of his successor's administration last week, a growing number of his senior aides and advisers are also speaking up to defend Mr. Bush's record and take on the Obama White House.

A few of them are marrying their insider's policy knowledge with modern technology to critique, in detail, President Obama's economic program.

The day Mr. Obama left for the Middle East earlier this month, former Bush official Tony Fratto launched a broadside against the White House claim that it had "created or saved" 150,000 jobs with economic-stimulus money.

"What causes the jaw to drop is not just the breathtaking deception of the claim, but the gullibility of the Washington press corps to continue reporting it," Mr. Fratto, an economist who served in the Treasury Department and the Bush White House press office, wrote on a blog run by CNBC, where he is now a paid contributor.

When Mr. Obama returned from his trip, the jobs "created or saved" claim was front and center. The White House message of the day - that the stimulus would "create or save" 600,000 more jobs in the next 100 days - ran into a public relations buzz saw.

Perhaps I was wrong when I predicted President Obama's "Bush did it!" strategy would work well enough to see him through his first term and into his second. I sure hope so. C'mon 2012! And perhaps we won't have to wait for the inauguration of President Sarah Palin's first term to see some "change you can believe in." Midterm elections in 2010 would be a fine time to take the reins of power from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and return it to the sick-and-tired voters.

Depressing thoughts about the future of our free Republic

Haven't blogged much on politics lately as all the news is bad and getting worse. Depressing for a founding member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, as Obama/Pelosi/Reid consolidate power.

Besides, I've been busy as a one-handed paper hanger working at my new job at a gun store, where Obama's stimulus plan for gun shops shows no signs of slacking off since the election. That's so far as I know the only sector of the economy that's booming and the Good Lord opened a job for me there just in time before I got laid off as a technical writer/photography for a local industry. Proves once again how the Lord takes care of fools and drunks. I've been both and still a bit of the former.

Anyway, I had another depressing thought last night sitting in Bible study at church. We've been studying the "minor prophets," the small in quantity but not quality authors of the concluding books of the Old Testament, such unrecognizable names as Hosea, Amos, Habakkuk, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Haggai, Zephaniah, Zechariah and Malachi. I've read them all before several times in my trips through the Bible, but this is the first time I've participated in a study of these men who wrote during the closing years of the Northern and Southern Jewish kingdoms.

Their messages could be aptly summed up in four words: "The end is near." Their words were indeed prophetic as they warned of the defeat of the Northern Kingdom of Isarel first, when the Assyrians conquered and carried away the "Lost 10 Tribes" of the Jewish nation into exile.

They're called the lost 10 tribes because they never returned to Northern Israel. Gone forever.

And these minor prophets also warned of the coming collapse of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, which happened when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians conquered Judah and carried those two Jewish tribes into captivity. They were released by the Persian ruler who conquered Babylon and allowed to return to Israel, but the Southern Kingdom was never restored.

There were no further true kings in Israel following the period written about by the minor prophets. During the 400 "silent years" between Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, and Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, there was no true king in Israel, nor were there any prophets in Israel.

By the time of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, first the Greeks and then the Romans had conquered Israel and King Herod was nothing but a non-Jewish puppet/pretender placed on the throne of Israel by the Romans.

And here's the depressing thought that hit me last night during Bible study of Habakkuk. Are we in the times of the minor prophets here in America? Are the lights about to go out on our freedom as a nation as socialism is being proclaimed on the front cover of a leading magazine?

Prophets of our time have warned for the past few decades "The end is near!" but few have believed them. Seems to me the power grab under way by Obama/Pelosi/Reid could bring about the total collapse of our free-market economy and plunge America into third-world status.

That may be why you cannot find any mention of a nation that sounds even remotely like America in any of the prophetic writings about the last days before Jesus returns to earth.

The Book of Revelation and other end-time prophecies clearly describe the revived Roman empire in Europe, but have no hint of a free nation that is currently the world's sole superpower.

I fear our superpower status is soon to fall into the dustbin of history. Truly the end is near.

Obama-Pelosi-Reid: You won't be laughing at their routine

This new RNC ad is a vicious slur on The Three Stooges. Those guys were brilliant. This trio? Not!

The quotes that explain the entire financial meltdown

Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

For those who want a smoking gun to show the genesis of the financial collapse, this short sequence from a longer video I posted this week will do it. Clinton HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo announced a settlement of a lending discrimination complaint with Accubanc, a Texas lender whose prerequisites for mortgages came under attack from “community organizers” at the Fort Worth Human Relations Commission and the city of Dallas. I clipped out this sequence to underscore its importance:

Morissey continues:

Here, in fact, is the genesis of the problem, the ideology that created the monster. Cuomo, the Clinton administration, and Congress believed they had the right and the power to determine acceptable risk for the lenders, rather than lenders determining it for themselves in a free market. Even while imposing risk standards on lenders, Cuomo admits that he expects a higher default rate on the new loans — which is why the lenders didn’t want to write them in the first place.

In other words, the CRA didn’t get used to fight discrimination, but to force lenders to give money to high-risk borrowers for political purposes. And Cuomo knew it.

That was the political arrogance at the heart of the collapse. However, the CRA was more a sideshow than the actual problem. When Congress decided that enforcement alone wouldn’t generate enough mortgages to boost their political fortunes, they had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac eliminate the risk entirely for lenders through the purchase of the subprime loans. Without that risk and with almost-guaranteed short-term profits of subprime loans, lenders went wild while Fannie and Freddie repackaged them as quasi-government bonds for investors.

While Democrats like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi keep blaming “greed” for the collapse, it was Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd building that “greed” into the system in order to drive the subprime lending market. And it was Democrats like Frank, Dodd, Maxine Waters, and Lacy Clay who suggested that regulators like Armando Falcon were racists for blowing the whistle on the Ponzi scheme they created.

The Democrats decided, as Michelle says, that mortgages were a civil right, and wouldn’t cost the American taxpayers a dime. How well is that working out, America? And now, the question you have to ask yourselves is this: Do you want the nation’s economic policies run by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank for the next two years?

Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd and Frank, just the crew to take us back into the Great Depression.

Gen. Petraeus: Ignored Hero of Iraq War

You mighta missed it on the news yesterday. It certainly didn't lead off on TV or get a big headline in The Washington Post or New York Times.

General David Petraeus, commander of our troops in Iraq, passed the baton to General Ray Odierno and moved on to a higher command post.

Petraeus was not a household name in the dark days of early 2007 as he took command of the war in Iraq. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were leading a baying pack of hounds, quite sure they had President Bush treed at last as they took turns with the whipsaw blades.

Then came Petraeus and the surge, which Bush supported virtually alone in his own administration and with slim backing in Congress. A senator from Arizona whose political obituary had already been written by the mainstream media was one of the few lonely voices pushing for the surge.

But as 2008 dawned, Jewish pundit Charles Krauthammer commented that he might have to revise his view on the resurrection of the dead because reports of the death of John McCain's campaign for President turned out to be greatly exaggerated. The same could also be said of the war in Iraq, because as McCain's fortunes improved, Petraeus was performing a resurrection miracle in Iraq, while at the same time performing mass reverse resurrections on Osama's thugs. Harry "The war is lost!" Reid and Nancy "Cut and run!" Pelosi grew strangely silent about the war.

Obama stubbornly refused to admit the surge had actually worked until he grew so desperate about Palin-McCain that he asked Bill O'Reilly to let him end his boycott of Fox News. And when O'Reilly pressed him about the surge, Obama cheerfully said with a straight face that the surge had "exceeded our wildest dreams!" Our dreams? I may have to revise my view of Hillary and Bill being the World Champions at telling whoppers.

Maybe it exceeded Obama's worst nightmare, but more recent events have probably taken that rank in the shapely form of one Sarah Palin.

But where is the hero's welcome home, the ticker-tape parade for Gen. David Petraeus, the hero of Iraq? I suspect he'll never get that well-deserved honor. He and his troops coming home will get roughly the same thing us vets from Vietnam got, indifference or even worse.

At Petraeus' change-of-command ceremony Tuesday in Baghdad, Secretary of Defense Williams Gates did give him an appropriate tribute.

"Darkness had descended on this land; merchants of chaos were gaining strength. Death was commonplace, and people around the world were wondering whether any Iraq strategy would work.”

"Slowly, but inexorably, the tide began to turn, our enemies took a fearsome beating they will not soon forget. Fortified by our own people and renewed commitment, the soldiers of Iraq found new courage and confidence. And the people of Iraq, resilient and emboldened, rose up to take back their country."

Is there an echo in here? As I read that quote, I thought I heard a faint, shrill voice somewhere in the background cying out some nonsense about this being the day the oceans will begin to recede and all the ills of humanity will begin to heal. I was probably just hearing things.

I guess I'll know for sure whether my ears were playing tricks on me when the returns come in on the first Tuesday in November. Because that day, the people will decide whether they're on the side of Gen. Petraeus and McCain or Obama and the "General Betray-Us" move-on crowd.

Caspar Weinberger Jr., son of Reagan's Secretary of Defense, is one of the few joining Gates in extending a hero's tribute to Gen Petraeus.

Here’s to General David Petraeus. He never betrayed us. Indeed, he saved America’s war in Iraq. Maybe not single-handily, but there is no doubt whatsoever that without General Petraeus’ bold move to push for more troops to turn the tide against the insurgents, which has paid off handsomely, America would have been severely weakened both at home and around the world.