Daily Beast and Newsweek contributor Michael Tomasky defines the Left’s alternate universe in one sentence. On advising Obama on how he should respond to the “deficit hawks” over House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s budget (that the president should listen to advice from the media is another topic), Tomasky says, “Obama should ignore them—and make it clear that jobs, not deficits, are his main priority.”

The alternate reality is that the only thing we’ve seen grow since Obama took office is deficits and debt. Not jobs. Which for normal people, begs the question whether Obama is sincere, lying, or has a clue on how to create jobs in the private sector? The left-leaning media, like Obama, don’t care about deficits and the national debt. In fact, reducing the national debt and arriving at a balanced budget isn’t in Obama’s proposed budget. And that alone should be cause for concern.

The reality is that Obama’s policies and deficit expansion have only worsened unemployment and expanded the need for government help. It doesn’t matter that he says jobs are his main priority. He’s been saying that since before his first inauguration. Both he, and Mr. Tomasky are of the belief that we can spend our way to prosperity and borrow our way out of debt. How’s that working for you? The reality is, the only way either of those things will turn around is by turning loose this economy and let it grow, instead of sapping the blood from it and holding it back. That’s when real jobs, not government jobs, will be created.

Note too that the Left has a word for being responsible with the people’s money. If you think that the government should not spend more than it takes in, then you’re a deficit hawk. Which ostensibly must be as bad as a defense hawk or war hawk. It follows that you’re a deficit dove (or ignoramus) if you think money grows on trees and can spend and borrow as much as you want, with no limit whatsoever. Which label do you think the low information voters identify with?

Link: How Obama Should Respond to Ryan

There’s a reason Obama’s economy and so-called recovery is referred to as the recoverless recovery. For much the same reason that drops in the unemployment rate don’t mean that we are creating jobs.

This video illustrates the performance of the last eight recessions and why the last three all look different.

In Obama’s jobless recovery, the unemployment rate is going down. Not because more people are working, but because fewer people are working.  296,000 less in February than in January. The BLS simply shrinks the job universe of workers, referred to as the labor force participation rate, before computing the unemployment rate. It is as though those unemployed whose 99 weeks of unemployment have run out, and are still unemployed, have died. The government stops counting them.

This is how the BLS describes it . . .

The civilian labor force is the sum of employed and unemployed persons. Those persons not classified as employed or unemployed are not in the labor force. The unemployment rate is the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force. The labor force participation rate is the labor force as a percent of the population, and the employment-population ratio is the employed as a percent of the population.

• When you include those unemployed as still living, the real unemployment rate, the U-6, is 14.3%.
• Multiple job holders, those needing and getting two or more jobs, grew by 340,000 since January 2013.
• There are 1,129,000 fewer workers in the work force in February 2013 than in February 2012.
• The number of unemployed that have been unemployed for 27 weeks or over increased by 89,000 from January 2013.
• Unemployment rate for “Black  or African Americans” ages 16 to 19 years old went from 37.8% in January to 43.1% in February 2013. Same age bracket for “White” was 20.8% in January and 22.1% in February 2013.

The “highlight” that The White House and the media report is “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 236,000 in February, and the unemployment rate edged down to 7.7. And, that 236,000 number includes second and third jobs found by the still employed. And,  when you consider that due to retirements and population growth, a break-even in job creation would be 250,000 jobs per month, that we not only have a recoverless recovery, but a jobless recovery as well.

The details are here . . .

Employment Situation for February 2013 by

You would never know it by listening to what comes out of The White House or the President’s mouth. But, according to this Washington Post / ABC News poll, cutting government spending is exactly what a vast majority of Americans want.

You can tell it pains the WaPo to say exactly what’s in their poll, because they don’t. You have to look at the graphic to see that not only do most “adults” support a five percent across the board cut in federal spending 61 to 33 percent, but they also oppose an eight percent cut in defense spending by a 60 to 34 percent margin. And those numbers reflect Democrats, Liberal Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

What the Post says in print is “Some 55 percent of liberal Democrats also back the eight percent slashing of the U.S. military budget included in the sequester.” That falls in line with the administration’s liberal bent. But in its entirety, the poll shows that the American people support the exact opposite of what Barack Obama is doing.

h/t Rush Limbaugh, “We are not on the losing side when it comes to the majority of thinking in this country.”

Link: Cut government spending? Sure….in theory.

It would be funny, if the debt wasn’t so serious, watching all the hand-wringing going on, on both sides of the aisle and in the media, over the impending ‘cuts’ that are planned in the sequestration legislation. The legislation gymnastics that was cooked up in The White House.

What’s funny about it all is that there are no cuts whatsoever involved. The gymnastics and linguistics of it all is that, in their mind (media included), a cut is equal to increasing the debt by 7 trillion dollars instead of 10 trillion dollars. Give or take a trillion.

In reality, and by those standards, if the government spent the same amount for each of the next 10 years as they will spend this year, they would call that a 10 trillion-dollar cut.

All of it is smoke and mirrors to put the real work, saving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, on the back burner. Kind of like putting their head in the sand.

If you listened to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) deliver the Republican’s response to the President’s State of the Union show, you would have heard a reasoned, common sense, conservative approach to solving our nation’s problems. On the whole, the response was more ideological, more big picture, than the more specific, policy-oriented theme that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) delivered in the Tea Party’s response.  Not surprisingly, the mainstream media (aka, the Obama-media) is not reporting the content of what he said. Instead, they have made hay over a sloppy production job and a not ready for prime time television personality. That’s all the excuse they needed to ignore what he said and to focus on how he looked. With this media, perception is reality. Rubio is a senator, he is not a TV personality with acting experience like say, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Mister Teleprompter himself, Barack Obama.

Google ‘rubio water‘ and you’ll see 229,000,000 hits. If you want to know what he said, you’ll have to do your own digging.

Or see it right here.

Link: Tea Party’s response by Rand Paul