Oooh, That's A Tough One, 'Guardiam'...

...but I'll venture the answer's 'by not doing anything wrong':

And when those 'eyewitnesses' are proven - by forensics - to be lying through their teeth, they don't count for as much as you might hope.

But you got your wholly predictable riot, so you're still happy.

A Lesson In Economic Reality

Willietta Dukes is going on strike. Why? Because she isn’t paid enough by Burger King, or so she thinks:

I make $7.85 at Burger King as a guest ambassador and team leader, where I train new employees on restaurant regulations and perform the manager's duties in their absence. Before Burger King, I worked at Church's for 12 years, starting at $6.30 and ending at just a little more than $8 an hour. I've never walked off a job before. I don't consider myself an activist, and I've never been involved with politics. I'm a mother with two sons, and like any mom knows, raising two teenage boys is tough. Raising them as a single mother, on less than $8 an hour, is nearly impossible, though.

Well, that's hardly surprising. There's a reason why 'single mother' isn't a career option anyone would recommend, except here, where the benefits can be better than working for a living...

Burger King says they can't pay employees like me higher wages because it would force them out of business. Yet last year it made $117m in profits and its CEO took home $6.47m. It would take me 634 years to earn that much.

So what? Burger King is a business, it exists to make money for its shareholders, not pay you a lavish salary for work which has little market value and can be done by anyone with a minimal skill set.

I've worked in fast-food for 15 years, and I can't even afford my own rent payments.

Worked in fast food for years. That's the epitome of her career. It makes you want to weep...

And, as Tim Worstall points out, the reason behind the cuts to your hours is most likely to avoid costs under ObamaCare. Who wants to bet Willietta voted for him?

As a guest ambassador, my job is to keep customers happy, greeting them at the door, checking in with them at their tables and picking up their trash. I'm good at what I do.

I’ve no doubt you are. And Burger King consider that $7.85 per hour is the worth of what you bring to their company.

And The Disillusionment Continues...

Poor Joan Smith:

The election of Barack Obama was supposed to mark a definitive break with the cowboy lawlessness of the Bush administration. It was supposed to be the moment when liberals could feel solidarity with the US again, instead of wincing each time an American president claims leadership of the free world.

Yes, her suspicions were correct; Obama has proven himself once more to be a President who does the thing that he believes is right for his country, not what sits well with a middle-aged Islington liberal.

How could he..?!? Poor Joanie will be weeping into her pillow this weekend.

I Didn't Mean It!

Velma Hart learns, as did Julian Assange, that criticism of The System brings dangers:

In September of this year, I had an experience that changed my life. I was the woman who told President Barack Obama during a televised town hall meeting two months ago that I was "exhausted" defending him and how I was disappointed not to see the change I had voted for.

Oh oh...

I worried jokingly that my husband and I might be headed back into the "hot-dogs-and-beans-era of our lives". I asked the president if this was "my new reality"?

Hush yo mouf, Velma!

I got an even stronger dose of this new reality two weeks ago, when I was laid off from my position as chief financial officer of AmVets, a non-profit veterans service organisation. I was told the layoff was a reflection of the weakening economy and was not at all related to my job performance.

Of course it wasn't....

Of course, there's plenty of finger-pointing going on. Media organisations in the US and around the world have seized on my questions to President Obama to imply criticism of his administration and of his handling of the economy. For me, this has been very troubling.

If that wasn't criticism - actual criticism, rather than implied criticism - then what was it?

But Velma's desperately trying to make amends:

After all, President Obama inherited a financial mess and has not received the level of support from Congress that we all thought he had when he was elected two years ago.

We shouldn't be surprised. It isn't long into an article on 'CiF' on the economy before someone mentions 'It was all Thatcher's doing!' after all...

A Message To President Obama

Getting Your Retaliation Excuses In First…

Gary Younge starts to lay the ground for the US voter’s inevitable verdict on the Obamanation’s woeful performance in office:

As the mid-term elections approach, Obama is struggling to renew the sense of optimism and ambition of two years ago and finds himself battling to keep both centrists and radicals on board. There are areas of the country where his presence on the stump would hinder rather than help; a handful of Democratic candidates are not just running against Republicans, but him.

Yes, it’s all going pear-shaped, eh, Gary? Who’s to blame, then?

Is it the Obamassiah himself?

…the question many who backed him are asking is whether he raised their hopes too high or their expectations were unrealistic? The answer is neither.

Really? So who was at fault?

Ah. Of course. Those pesky voters, getting caught up in the hype:

Their mistake was to believe that transformational change was something you could impart to a higher power – the president – and then witness on CNN.

Dumb, stupid rubes, eh, Gary?

The problem was not that many set their hopes too high but that rather than claim those hopes as their own they invested them in a single person – Obama – and in an utterly corrupted political culture.

You see, Obama didn’t fail – the people failed Obama!

A winner-takes-all voting system where both main parties are sustained by corporate financing, the congressional districts are openly gerrymandered and 40% of the upper chamber can block anything, is never going to be a benign vehicle for radical reform.

It’s all a great big conspiracy against the progressives, isn’t it, Gary? We shall just overlook the fact that Obama is tied to corporate financing just as tightly as everyone else…

Moreover, rhetorically, at least, he projected a far more dynamic, idealistic and populist campaign than the one he was actually running. As the community organiser-cum-presidential candidate, he managed to simulate the energy and vision of a movement and then super-impose it onto a tightly run, top-down presidential campaign bid.

Yes, I remember you and all the other Democrat cheerleaders warning about this and…

Wait. No, I don’t…

Nowhere was this more evident than the manner in which he sought to harness the symbolic resonance of his race while simultaneously denying its political significance: at one and the same time posing as a direct legatee of the civil rights movement and little more than a distant relative.

He wanted to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. And he’s now learnt that, when the hounds find out, you’re in trouble…

Maybe the problem was that he wasn’t progressive enough?

But when it came to matters of substance, far from raising expectations too high he actually set them quite low. He stood on a moderate platform in the middle of an economic crisis that demanded drastic action. And even with that tepid agenda he won only 53% of the vote against a weaker candidate, with an even weaker running mate, who conducted an incoherent campaign.

Heh! Yes, that was pointed out by the right many, many times, and they were decried for it and slammed as ‘racist’.

So it’s rather amusing to see it creeping in as an excuse for the expected poor results in the mid-terms now.

All very unexpected, eh, Gary?

So, given the institutions in which Obama was embedded, it was no great feat to predict today's disappointment.

And yet, strangely, no-one on the left did.

Those on the right did, however.

Political Elite Still Utterly Baffled…

…by this new-found taste for Tea amongst the citizenry:

The swell of support for the Tea Party movement continues to grow in the United States according to a new poll released yesterday even as some of its standard-bearers show themselves adept at attracting attention that in normal times would spell political poison more than gold.

‘We just don’t understand it?! How can they vote for them, how..?!?’

A Wall Street Journal-NBC survey suggests that 71 per cent of Republican voters now support the Tea Party or say that they hope candidates running with express backing from it do well in congressional elections set for 2 November.

Ooooh, it’s going to be a bloodbath. I hope.

Without question, the movement is generating all important grass-roots enthusiasm just five weeks away from the congressional elections.

However, the conservative nature of the movement is shifting the party as a whole to the right.

The rightwingers are coming! The rightwingers are coming!

And when voting day comes, it is distinctly possible that independents who might have defected from Democrats to Republicans could have second thoughts.

If the fact that the Repubs are shifting rightwards is what puts them off, then maybe they were in the wrong party anyway?

It may also turn out that the craziness of a few Tea Party-backed candidates could do for the Democrats what Barack Obama and other leaders of the party have so far failed to do: impart on them a sense of urgency to get out and vote on 2 November also.

Now we can see just how toxic the Obama brand has become, and in such a short period of time.

They can’t point to their Obamassiah’s track record of successes. They can’t even rely on his popularity with the hard-core of the party. The best that they can hope for is that they can point to the Tea Party candidates and say ‘Look! Even Obama is better than that! Scary small-state people! Ooooga-boooga!’

A touch of otherness is, of course, precisely the quality that some Tea Party followers want in their candidates. That was roughly the response, for example, of Mr Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, when tackled about the past legal histories of some of his boss's inner-circle. "This is a campaign of junkyard dogs, not pedigreed poodles," he said.

To which I can only say…

‘Woof!’

I’m Only Making Plans For Nigel Excuses For Obama…

Mary Dejevsky on the problems facing America’s Obamassiah:

…the slew of early departures from Obama's team, the most recent being the head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. Again, early departures in themselves are not novel. Clinton suffered a similar haemorrhaging of his early appointees. Arguably, George Bush was unusual in the number of senior figures who served two terms. Some people fail to settle in Washington; others find the work of government, as opposed to campaigning or advising, not to their taste. Sometimes chance intervenes, as with the unexpected decision of the long-serving mayor of Chicago not to run for another term, which could deprive Obama of his White House Chief of Staff. Or it could be that a new president has a relatively limited pool to choose from and tries to play safe, while a more experienced President discovers that there are people better suited to his purpose out there.

The only people 'experienced at being President', Mary, are those who've done it before. There aren't many of those...

Give her credit, she's quick to realise that error:

This is not to argue that presidents require more experience before they take the job.

That's lucky, eh? So, since no-one in the progressive world wants to lay the blame at the feet of America's Sining One, what's the problem?

Would you believe, it's the Constitution?

…make the case for more continuity higher up the echelons of a new administration. Would the system not benefit from something more akin to Britain's non-partisan civil service to advise and manage both the official Transition and beyond?

No, she isn't joking...

Worse, because it unnecessarily hobbles a new administration, is the extent to which possibly significant proposals broached by another country to the outgoing administration can go missing. While the US takes it for granted that a new administration starts with a blank page – outgoing officials take their files with them – others do not appreciate how total the disconnect is, and may feel offended when the new administration fails to follow up.

Ah, right. You see, when the voters decide to 'throw the bums out', they don't really mean it. They actually WANT all the policies and promises that the incumbent guaranteed them. It's just that they want a new figurehead at the top.

It works so well here, after all..

The functioning of government is predicated on a degree of bipartisan give and take in the two houses of Congress. Fiercely adversarial party politics was for the likes of Britain and its Parliament. What the US faces now is a Republican Party that will brook no compromise, within a system that requires members to reach across the aisle. Nor is there any immediate prospect of that changing, as the Republican mainstream feels the populist Tea Party movement pushing it further right.

And god forbid that any government do what the voters want, eh? Mary has hope, though. She's looking to the future:

It is possible that the stalemate will turn out to be temporary; possible, too, that the Tea Party tendency will turn out to be the last gasp of a dying demographic group and that US politics will slot back to the more productive equilibrium of before. The sharp decline in social conservatism and the greater tolerance charted in surveys of younger voters – attitudes which helped Obama to the presidency – could eventually shift the centre of US politics to a different, more European, place.

Those attitudes that helped him to the Presidency are slowly coming to realise that they bought a pig in a poke. And now they have the biggest case of buyer's remorse we've ever seen...

But that is to jump ahead. In the meantime, the US Constitution and the way US politics functions are looking somewhat frayed around the edges. President Obama's inexperience may have made his first 18 months more difficult than they might have been, but his country's outdated institutions made things much, much worse.

Well, I suppose it's a little better than the progressives usual cry of 'change the voters, not the government!'.

Has as much chance of coming true, mind...

Sauce For The Gander Turning Out To Be Far Too Bitter To Swallow….

Well, at the time of writing and setting up for posting tomorrow morning, it seems the Florida Koran-B-Q is still on (despite a last-moment hiccup), and the outrage it is causing amongst the usual suspects is wonderful to behold.

The blogs have been excellent reading, with opinion divided between ‘Good idea!’, ‘Bad idea!’ and ‘A plague on ALL their houses!’…

Longrider points out that it’s just a book, and the furore in the ‘Muslim world’ is playing into the hands of those who point out the hypocrisy in their approach to other outrages, as noted by Blognor Regis.

The Nameless Libertarian thinks that ‘turn the other cheek’ instruction should come into play. It would, I'm sure, be more 'Christian', but I can't see that that has worked out so well for us so far.

Anna Raccoon thinks that this might, one day, come to be seen as a turning point.

TravelGall at A Very British Dude can see a potential upside…

For myself, I have to confess that the greatest pleasure is seeing Obama caught between the proverbial rock and hard place:

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's leader, has written to the American President asking him to personally intervene to stop irreparable damage to relations between the West and Muslims "threatening world peace".

Except, as we saw with the Victory Mosque….he can’t. Rightly so.

US law is quite clear on the restrictions the American public will accept on their freedom of speech, and this doesn’t meet that test.

The personal appeal from Indonesia will put President Obama, who spent four of his childhood years living in Jakarta, under intense pressure to ban the Koran burning in order to prevent a violent backlash across the Islamic world.

Yet if he does try, he’s going to get it in the neck from his own electorate, who only elected him by 52% and that support has been steadily waning since last November:

But Mr Obama is also under domestic pressure not to give into Muslims ahead of Saturday's ninth anniversary of September 11 terrorist attacks amid a heated American row over Islam and a proposed mosque near New York's Ground Zero.

Heh! The buck stops with YOU, Obama. How do you feel about your triumphant ‘victory’ now?

And since they must realise they can’t count on the Obamassiah, they are turning to other options:

Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, has asked Interpol, the international police organisation to examine whether a Florida church's planned book burning can be banned to stop a "massive reaction" across the Muslim world.

Good luck with that…

Old conspiracy theories are being dusted off:

"This is a plan by Zionists to put the entire world into trouble, so it should be foiled," said Tariq Naeemullah, the head of the Joint Civic Front, a coalition of non-governmental organisations in Multan.

It seems other countries have whackadoodle quangos too! They’re more like us than we thought, eh?

General David Petraeus, the US military commander in Afghanistan has warned that the burning will have global repercussions and endanger US military personnel serving abroad.

Yes, it’ll make them plant IEDs and launch mortar attacks and…

Oh, wait.

Having seen where appeasement has got the West, the pastor isn’t for turning, and who can blame him?

Despite the mounting pressure, Terry Jones, the pastor of an tiny extremist Christian church in Florida, has dismissed the calls for him off a bonfire of 200 Korans, to mark 9/11.

"As of right now, we are not convinced that backing down is the right thing," he said.

But you can always count on someone to make more of an idiot of themselves than anyone else.

So step forward, Hillary, for your turn in the spotlight:

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State said: "It is regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, with a church of no more than 50 people can make this outrageous and distrustful, disgraceful plan and get the world's attention."

Welcome to 2010, Hillary. It’s a whole new ball game now…

If You Can’t Get Your Way Under The Rules….

..tear ‘em up and impose your will.

At least, that’s the startling suggestion from Stewart J Lawrence on the US immigration deadlock.

It seems thinks aren’t going well for the Democrat’s poster boy:

A month after a federal judge struck down most of Arizona's tough new immigration law, the White House campaign to stigmatise the GOP as the party of bigotry and intolerance has backfired. Rather than rally independents, it's further polarised white swing voters against the Democrats.

And its real purpose – to galvanise disaffected Latino voters – hasn't borne fruit either.

Oh, dear. What’s an Obamassiah groupie to do?

With Republicans still hostile to comprehensive immigration reform, Democrats prefer to punt on immigration until after the mid-terms. But with the GOP surging fast, that's likely to delay further progress until after the 2012 elections – and perhaps even longer.

America, already convulsed by nativism on a scale not seen since the 1920s, can't afford to wait that long. And neither can the president's restive Latino base. We need to act now.

Oh, really? What’s the rush?

Couldn’t be the dreadful poll numbers, could it?

As the nation's chief executive, Obama has the power to institute policy action on immigration that does not require a formal vote by congress. It's not a power he should use lightly, but it's there, and current circumstances warrant its use.

Translation: We’re losing, so we need to change the rules of the game before the people we are supposedly elected to serve get wise and dump our asses on the sidewalk.

As a stopgap, Obama has already sent word to the department of homeland security not to target illegal aliens guilty of only minor crimes.

Wonderful! ‘Agents of the State, do NOT do the jobs the people of the US pay you for…’

It's important, however, that Obama couple any concession of this kind with continued efforts to tighten immigration enforcement.

Which can, like the example just given, be ignored at a later date by executive fiat?

The president, under GOP pressure, has already signed a bill to beef up border enforcement. Now, on his own initiative, he should take similar action at the workplace – to deter illegal hiring.

How? By ordering that "E-Verify", the workplace verification system that's currently in restricted use, be extended nationwide and made mandatory for all employers.

Hmmm, yet another burden on businesses. I’m surprised to see the Repubs are in favour of that…

… congressional Republicans, as well as Blue Dog Democrats, are among its staunchest supporters. They'd be hardpressed to oppose the president for taking up their cause.

And what about the people? Do they get a say?

Executive action is risky.

No kidding!

But it's far less risky, politically, than convening a "lame-duck" session of congress, as some Democrats like senate majority leader Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada) now propose, to try to ram through the Dream Act or other broader immigration measures, much as they did with healthcare reform.

And look how well that went…

Most outgoing Democrats aren't going to play ball, especially if they have to vote to expand enforcement. And even those who survive the mid-terms still have to face the voters in 2012. Supporting legalisation in a GOP-controlled congress could well cost them their seats.

So, let Obama take the decision (and the flack), right? Only one problem…

As president, Obama is uniquely placed to step in and exercise Solomon-like leadership…

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Are you kidding me?

At a time when the public discourse on immigration is degenerating into near-hysteria, and congress remains paralysed, even-handed executive action can point the country forward. It sends a powerful signal to voters that the president still has the courage to stick his neck out, even when a nervous and recalcitrant congress, including members of his own party, won't.

Unfortunately for you, Obama has about as much of a reputation for courage as our late, unlamented Prime Monster.

So, looks like the Dems can expect a rocky reception this time around. Buckle up, boy!

When Identity Politics Goes Bad…

Opponents of the "don't ask don't tell" policy on gays in the US military interrupted President Barack Obama with heckling at a Los Angeles fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer.

Oh, how I sympathise. Riding that tiger is so, so hard, isn’t it, Barack?

You never know when it’s going to turn around and take a great big chunk out of you…

The protesters shouted to ask Mr Obama what he was going to do about the policy, which prohibits gays from serving openly in the military.

The shouts grew so insistent that Mr Obama responded.

The president said that he supported overturning "don't ask don't tell" and suggested the protesters should be shouting at the people who don't.

Whining about how they should be shouting at others..?

Hey, you’re the guy in charge! You’re the man now, Barack! Act like it.

Or, get your wife to do it for you…

Mr Obama also told the crowd that Ms Boxer opposed "don't ask don't tell" in the first place.

Pointless. They want their pound of flesh. Facts aren’t going to get in the way of that.

Enjoy the Frankensteinian monster you nurtured and coddled and fed. It’s your turn now.

Rowing Back The Acclamation…

Gary Younge in ‘CiF’ on Obama:

A full year after he took office, people have not found a sensible way to talk about him. One minute Jesse Jackson, in an unscripted moment, says he wants to "cut his nuts off"; the next he is crying in Chicago's Grant Park as Obama delivers his victory speech. The same people on the right who insist he is a Muslim fulminated over his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When you point out that Muslims don't have pastors, they just shrug. Europeans who wish he led their country also wish their countries would pull their troops out of Afghanistan – the very war he is escalating.

This is by way of rowing back on all the star-struck rhetoric, now that the glitz has worn off and starry-eyed progressives realise they have elected, not the progressive messiah, but a politician.

And a Chicago politician at that…

Those who misunderstood how Obama came to office are now struggling to understand what has happened in the year since he has been in it for three main reasons.

Ooh, I bet Gazza knows, though.

Sit and listen, dupes, as he tells you how it all came to pass…

First, Obama was never a radical. He won on a decidedly middle-of-the-road Democratic platform. Beyond the Iraq war, which he opposed and she supported, there was little to chose (Ed: sic) between him and Hillary Clinton in terms of their programmes. They had voted the same way in the Senate 90% of the time.

All those hopes and dreams you had? Forget it. You duped yourself.
The con was on…

Those who think they have been let down by a leftwing champion must answer for their own selective hearing.

Get that, dupes? The signs were there, but you ignored them. It wasn’t Obama’s fault, oh dear me no…

What really distinguished Obama's campaign from Clinton's was its grassroots energy. Which brings us to the second point. While it was a grassroots campaign, it was never a movement. That didn't mean there wasn't the possibility that it might have become one. But its sole function was to get him elected.

Stupid sheep! Why did you ever believe anything else?

In a handful of areas, the energy and determination of those days is still evident. But for most of this year the right has been making all the running outside of the electoral politics and forcing the administration on to the back foot.

Look, dummies, that was then, this is now. Sheesh, I bet you believed that the cheque was in the mail, the dog ate our homework, and I wouldn’t come in your mouth too, am I right?

Finally, for all his financial and organisational advantage, the fact that he ran a far better campaign, had a far more impressive running mate, was a far more charismatic candidate, and was campaigning against a party that had overseen a huge economic crisis and two unpopular wars, Obama did not win by much. In terms of the popular vote he won 53% of the vote against John McCain's 47%.

I wonder how Gazza is feeling now?

You know, I’m struck by something here. And that something is how, after the war, all those French people claimed to have been in the resistance.

And also how no-one could seemingly be found who’d voted for Nixon, after his fall from grace…

Socialised Medicine…

…there’s a good reason the US are wary of it:

Thousands of women are being denied better osteoporosis drugs because of unnecessarily restrictive Government guidelines, a doctor said last night.

All to save money.

Yet if you are a convicted murderer who’s upset about a birthmark, money’s no object…

Professor David Reid, an expert on brittle bones, said the rules are so stringent that GPs are often prevented from giving alternative treatments to those suffering side-effects from their pills.

A once-a-year jab that could save thousands from the misery of broken bones is also not going to be assessed for use on the NHS in England and Wales for at least three years, despite being available in Scotland

Again, due to cost. Yes, it’s more expensive in the short term, but in the long term could well save money, as well as time for both patients and staff.

But bean counters rarely look at the long term when they are working on yearly budget forecasts.

It means that sufferers are being denied drugs that could have a major impact on their health and their quality of life. The news will reignite the debate about the evaluation system used by drugs rationing body the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.

At least someone’s calling it what it really is…

Up to a quarter of patients taking the first-choice drug, the £50-a-year alendronic acid, will be troubled by indigestion, with some experiencing crippling stomach pain.

But under guidelines, sufferers may have to wait up to five years for their condition to deteriorate before being put on more expensive treatments with fewer side-effects.

The fact that those fewer side effects therefore means fewer symptoms to treat seems to have escaped the Simple Shopper…

Mr Reid said: 'The guidelines indicate that a lady can have alendronic acid at a certain level of risk.

'If that person doesn't tolerate the drug and goes back to their GP, the GP might have to say, "Your risk isn't high enough to have the next drug" - and frankly, that is just bad medical practice. It defies logic.'

Not to mention basic humanity…

But it seems they don’t select for ‘basic humanity’ when finding NICE workers:

A spokesman for NICE said the guidelines 'provide postmenopausal women with consistent access to the most cost effective treatments'.

Note that phrase – ‘cost effective’. Not ‘effective’. NICE isn’t about that, oh dear me no…

It’s all about money. Never let anyone tell you different.

Over at 'CiF', Jane Hamsher has a post on Obama and the 'public option' which...well, let's just say that it's impossible not to read it in the voice of a pudgy, tear-streaked two year old screaming 'Daddy promised me a pony and I want it RIGHT NOW!!!.

It's lovely when the mask slips and the Left reveal themselves for what they really are, isn't it?

"You thought that was fast? I thought it was fast. Well, was it? "

The 'Independent' on the morning after the inauguration Coronation of St Barack the Magnificent:The 'Independent' one day later: