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President Obama is among the slickest practitioners ever of the Washington Wink-Wink -- what professional politicians in both parties do when they say one thing while planning to do something else entirely. There was, for example, Obama's 2008 campaign promise to "cut the federal deficit in half." And that "net federal spending cut" he would achieve by the end of his first term? Anybody think he didn't know then that his first term would explode the deficit and spending to historic highs? Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, sees more...

Following today’s report on the increase in applications for U.S. unemployment benefits, CNBC’s Rick Santelli decided to take on the Obama campaign and its claim that the president has created “five million jobs.” “You can slice it any way you want!” Santelli shouted in his inimitable style. “The president was sworn in in mid-January of ’09.” “If I go back and look at nonfarm — and I have all the data! — actual nonfarm payrolls, the establishment survey, the headcount survey, and I take the 818 minus thousand from January,” he added, referring to the monthly job loss numbers the...

At a campaign event for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, Bill Clinton said that Mitt Romney's argument "is true, we're not fixed": [VIDEO] "Governor Romney's argument is, we're not fixed, so fire him and put me in," said Clinton. "It is true we're not fixed. When President Obama looked into the eyes of that man who said in the debate, I had so much hope four years ago and I don't now, I thought he was going to cry. Because he knows that it's not fixed." UPDATE: A Romney spokesman comments: "We agree with former President Bill Clinton. The economy has...

It's funny what happens to a data series when consistency returns to its collection. Last week’s weekly jobless claims numbers dropped dramatically to nearly a four-year low, but later it was discovered that one large state didn't report all of its claims properly. This week, the level returns to the same range we've seen since the spring of 2011: In the week ending October 13, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 388,000, an increase of 46,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 342,000. The 4-week moving average was 365,500, an increase of 750 from the previous...

A new ad from the RNC... It contrasts Obama's 2008 Hope & Change rhetoric to his (hopeless) statement at the recent debate: “Candy, there’s some jobs that are not going to come back.” It then pivots to Mitt Romney’s more optimistic take on the economy. It ends: “When a President gives up hope, it’s time to make a change.”

In form, President Obama came back strongly in Tuesday's debate with Mitt Romney, but substantively he continues to lag behind the Republican candidate. That's because the president has a record to defend and it isn't a good one. Television being what it is, the president looked and sounded good, but the air seems to have gone out of his messianic balloon as voters focus more on facts and less on spin. If promises mean anything -- and they don't to most politicians -- Romney hit the president where it hurts: on his failure to live up to most of his...

Gallup: The Unemployment Rate Is Collapsing Joe WeisenthalOct. 17, 2012, 11:46 AM More evidence that the official 7.8% unemployment rate is not the wild outlier people initially thought. This just in from Gallup: -------- WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 7.3% in mid-October, down considerably from 7.9% at the end of September and at a new low since Gallup began collecting employment data in January 2010. Gallup's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is 7.7%, also down from September. October's adjusted mid-month measure is also more than a percentage point lower than October 2011. These...

Obama loves to tell you how long we've been in 'recovery' and how many jobs he's 'saved or created'- please. Yet Ronald Reagan actually created more than twenty million jobs over his two presidential terms- growing the country’s real GDP by nearly 30% in the process: [IBD chart] Those kind of results make one wonder how Obama’s multi-trillion-dollar spending orgy could have impressed anybody: he had pledged an unemployment rate in the fives by now, driven by 3.5M new and 'saved' jobs -whatever those are- still, a paltry figure 16.5M jobs shy of The Gipper’s towering accomplishment. We now know...

Early on last night, a voter asked about gas prices, leading to a rather heated exchange about a variety of energy-policy measures, including drilling leases. Eventually, moderator Candy Crowley tried to focus on a narrow point: "Mr. President, could you address ... what the governor said, which is: If your energy policy was working, the price of gasoline would not be $4 a gallon here. Is that true?" President Obama explained that "world demand's gone up," but I suspect some viewers were still confused about the overarching policy. We haven't really delved into this in earnest since February, so let's...

President Barack Obama needed a game-changing night here in Hampstead, New York and Mitt Romney made sure he didn't get it. Over the 90 minutes, Obama might have edged it - just - but strategically he did little if anything to blunt Romney's growing advantage. Just as Al Gore over-compensated for his poor first debate in 2000, we saw a completely different Obama this time around. He had clearly had some intensive coaching from his debate prep team and was acting under orders to do change everything. Romney strategist Stuart Stevens quipped afterwards that he became 'Joe Biden without the...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Bullish Democrats are calling it a blow-out. Pundits are giving the president the slight edge. And the late-night insta-polls splashed across cable news chyrons initially appeared to give Obama a solid, if not game-changing, win. But the Romney campaign spent the hours after the contest contending that the debate strengthened their position — and they may have a point. A CNN/ORC International poll published late Tuesday identified Obama has the overall winner, 46 percent to 39 percent. But the poll also showed that Romney won on virtually every issue he's chosen to place at the center of...

President Barack Obama has put $5 billion in taxpayer money behind his goal of having 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015. The Republican presidential ticket says it’s money wasted on “losers.” Whether the technology itself is a loser or consumers are merely slow to adapt to new things, car buyers so far haven’t embraced electric vehicles in numbers close to Obama’s goal. Electric-vehicle sales since 2011 totaled fewer than 50,000 through September, just 5 percent of the president’s target. “The reality is: that business model isn’t there yet,” said Brett Smith, co-director of manufacturing, engineering and technology...

The signature achievement of President Obama's four years of office was the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. "ObamaCare". Passed into law in 2010, and initially upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2012, ObamaCare has had an ongoing negative effect upon the employment situation in the United States since it was crammed through the House of Representatives and the Senate solely by members of the Democratic party. Unfortunately for Americans, the ObamaCare job killing spree will only continue and get worse. The reason why has to do with a penalty tax that will...

View this image › Posted Oct 16, 2012 12:24pm EDT WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Last week’s jobs report provided President Barack Obama with perhaps the only bit of good news since his disastrous debate against Mitt Romney, but there are suggestions that the figure could wind up having been too much, too soon for Obama.The unexpected decline in the unemployment rate based off the monthly household survey from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent was a needed boost for Obama at one the worst moments of his political career. The next one is due out at 8:30 a.m. on November 2,...

The upstate economy took another significant blow today as General Motors announced it will close its fuel cell plant in Honeoye Falls, just south of Rochester. The decision means the 220 salaried employees who worked in the research and development facility won’t be employed in the area. The company said most of the employees will be offered the opportunity to transfer to the Global Powertrain Engineering Headquarters in Pontiac, Mich., the Democrat and Chronicle reports. “This decision has significant business advantages for the company,”said Kim Carpenter, GM spokeswoman. “For example, it will enable GM to capitalize on synergies with the...

Al Gore is about 50 times richer than he was when he left the vice presidency in 2001. According to an Oct. 11 report by The Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, Gore accumulated a Romneyesque $100 million partly through investing in alternative-energy firms subsidized by the Obama administration. Two days after that story ran, Mitt Romney proclaimed at a rally in Ohio’s Appalachian coal country: “We have a lot of coal; we are going to use it. We are going to keep those jobs.” Thousands cheered. The juxtaposition speaks volumes about the Democratic Party, and about modern liberalism generally. As the Democrats...

We all know that the employment situation in the is horrible. Average duration of unemployment of 40 weeks and a 14.7% unemployment/underemployment rate. \ Since January 2009: The good news is that 827,000 more people have been added to the labor force! (Blue line) The BAD news is that 8,206,000 more people are NOT in the labor force! (Red line) That is almost a 10:1 ratio of people NOT joining the labor force over people who are joining the labor force. As John Taylor at Stanford University has noted, this is the WORST economic recovery since 1882. These figures support...

A new chart from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee details the fact that, since January 2009, for every person added to the labor force, 10 have been added to those not in the labor force. Here's a chart showing the dwindling labor force: "For Every 1 Person Added To Labor Force Since January 2009," the chart reads, "10 People Added To Those Not In Labor Force." That is, in nearly the four years, since President Obama took office in January 2009, only 827,000 people have been added to the labor force, while during that same time period,...

Back in August, the Left went bonkers over a story alleging that coal miners were forced by their employer to protest against President Obama. At the time,HuffPo, MotherJones,etc. all ran with that version of events. Well,the miners have responded. Five hundred of them have written to the president asking him to stop lying in his campaign ads. Via The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register: BEALLSVILLE – Coal miners at the American Energy Corp. Century Mine said they want President Barack Obama to stop what they term “the war on coal”–and to stop spreading “mistruths” about them. Miners gathered Friday afternoon to express their...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported last Friday that 114,000 new jobs were created last month, according to its Establishment Survey of business payrolls that has been emphasized by the Obama Administration. That is pitifully weak, especially for what is supposed to be the fourth year of a recovery (the National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as officially over in June, 2009). As economist John Lott noted at FoxNews.com on October 5, the working age population grew by 206,000 last month. With two-thirds of those working as would be expected during a normal recovery, 138,000 new jobs...