Posted on 01/15/2010 4:36:48 PM PST by IrishMike
One year after his election, Barack Obama's approval rating is lower at this stage than for any US president since Eisenhower. So why has the optimism surrounding his victory disappeared so suddenly?
Every Wednesday at 4.30pm : a steady human trickle rolling down a ravine in Prestonsburg, western Kentucky towards the Town Branch church. They come in pick-ups, on foot, alone and with families. Some stop for just a few minutes. Others linger. They come for food and warm second-hand clothes. They come because desperation in this part of America has become a routine part of life.
More than a quarter of the families in Prestonsburg live in poverty; half of the children in Floyd County, where it is situated, are on food stamps. This Appalachian coal mining area has never been rich. But no one can remember when it has ever been this poor either. It sits on the old Route 23 – the country music highway of which Dwight Yoakam (a Floyd Country native) sang in Readin', Rightin', Route 23. It was the road that took people north to factory jobs in places such as Detroit and Cleveland and "the good life they had never seen". Now those cities are broke and there's nowhere left to go.
"We're getting more and more people coming here as time goes by," says Tom Price, who helps administer the church's Feed My Sheep pantry. "The bottom's just fallen out of it all." He blames it on Barack Obama. "Is there a direct correlation [between Obama's victory and the region's bad times]? I don't know. But I do know a lot of people are hurting."
A week may be a long time in politics. But a year has not been enough for the Democratic president to meet the expectations of his candidacy..
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
We could run a pool on how far they would get.
Yep. And ultimately, the best thing that could be shipped over would be capitalism, so that the western hemisphere's most impoverished Democrat welfare state (next to Detroit) might actually have a chance to become a viable nation.
All our capitalism has been exported to China.
I’m sure if we had any left, Barry would like to export that too.
I really don’t see any hope for Haiti as a nation. They have proven themselves incapable of self government. The closest they came to a functional regime was the neo-monarchy of the Duvalier family.
If you consider hacking the productive class with machetes and stealing their land functional?
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