From Rasmussen today:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 23% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove.

From Rasmussen Jan 09:

In the final full month of his Presidency, just 13% of American adults said they Strongly Approved of the way that George W. Bush performed his job as president. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapproved.

Wow.

And the what about the 10%pt difference in the “Strongly Approve” category?

African Americans represent 12% in Rasmussen’s “likely voter” polls. Three weeks ago Rasmussen noted “Seventy-four percent (74%) of African-Americans Strongly Approve…” 74% of 12% is 9%pts.

From Chicago Boyz:

…Obama is learning that people trust what you say based on the context in which you speak. The most dramatic example of this phenomena occurs when smooth talking sociopaths go on trial. Such sociopaths have spent their lives using their glib charm to manipulate people who give them the benefit of the doubt. They come to believe they can talk their way out of any circumstance. When they get on the stand at their trial they intuitively assume that the same benefit of a doubt exist. It does not. The jury looks at them with suspicion and all their superficial charm and glibness does them no good. Without the benefit of the doubt, the jury listens to what they say not how they say it. They usually end up in jail.

Obama will face something of the same effect. All his life he has been the up and coming ernest black man in a political subculture that fawns over such people. He’s never really had to decide and to produce. He campaigned on being himself. He campaigned on the story of being the first black President. People listened to him in the context of partaking in the story of the first black President.  As President, he no longer has that context. He’s no longer the mythic story but just another politician. People listen to him with a certain suspicion. They want to know the specific whys and hows of his proposals….

Lifted in its entirety from Powerline:

Eric Holder illustrates the dangers of ambition married to weak character. His subservience to the interests of Bill Clinton in approving the corrupt pardon of Marc Rich and the indefensible pardons of the FALN terrorists was a disgrace. His role in these pardons should disqualify him for higher office.

Holder himself does not defend his role in the Rich pardon. He concedes it was a mistake. He claims somewhat paradoxically that he learned so much from his mistake that he will be a better Attorney General. Holder makes no such concession or claim in the case of the FALN terrorists. Joseph Connor is the son of one of their victims. He testified against Holder in the confirmation hearing yesterday. In “Terrorists killed my father,” Connor writes:

At the time of the [FALN] pardons, Eric H. Holder Jr. was deputy attorney general. In considering his department’s recommendation on clemency, he met with supporters of the terrorists but ignored their victims. He pushed staff members to drop their strong opposition to a presidential pardon for the FALN members and alter a report they had prepared for the president recommending against clemency. Today, although two turned down their pardons because they were unwilling to renounce violence, many of the convicted FALN members walk free. And a man who was instrumental in their release may become the highest law enforcer in the land.

Holder said at his confirmation hearing Thursday that he thought Clinton’s decision to pardon the FALN members was “reasonable.” But they were bad people. During their Chicago trial, some of them threatened the life of Judge Thomas McMillen, who was hearing the case. Carmen Valentin, one of those later pardoned by Clinton, told the judge, “You are lucky that we cannot take you right now,” and she told other officers of the court, “You will be walking with canes and wheelchairs. … Revolutionary justice can be fierce.” She also declared war against the United States. Dylcia Pagan, another recipient of Clinton’s gift, warned the courtroom: “All of you, I would advise you to watch your backs.” McMillen was convinced the defendants would continue being terrorists as long as they lived. “If there was a death penalty,” he said at their sentencing, “I’d impose the penalty on you without hesitation.”

In its editorial today supporting the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General, the Washginton Post adopts Holder’s defense of the FALN pardons:

Mr. Holder defended his support for Mr. Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group based on the facts that none of the 16 had been convicted of murder and that most had served almost 20 years in prison. There is still much to dislike in the commutations themselves. But no new evidence emerged to challenge Mr. Holder’s assertion that the recommendation was based on his best judgment.

This defense of the FALN terrorists lacks a certain logic. Whether or not the FALN terrorists were convicted of murder, they wantonly perpetrated it. Does Holder dispute that? Morevoer, if the recommendation was based on Holder’s best judgment, Holder shouldn’t be a partner at a prominent Washington law firm, let alone the Attorney General of the United States.

From WaPo:

The Miami trial of a Venezuelan entrepreneur who grew rich doing business with President Hugo Chávez’s populist administration has exposed how some top government officials have profited from a corrosive web of corruption in the oil-rich country.

Kickbacks, bribes and secret payoffs have become a feature in the socialist administration, which had claimed a break from the past but instead has seen several officials implicated in multimillion-dollar corruption schemes, according to testimony and conversations taped by the FBI. The trial has also revealed the Chávez government’s determination to funnel state funds to its allies in Latin America and the lengths it will go to to keep the aid secret…

…Transcripts of the taped conversations reveal intricate details of the collaboration between Venezuelan businessmen and government officials during Venezuela’s recent oil boom as they pilfered public funds through no-bid contracts, kickbacks and secret commissions.

“It’s basically a bunch of guys in their late 30s, all of whom saw an opportunity when Chávez went into power,” said Kenneth Rijock, financial crime consultant for World-Check, a London-based firm that provides risk analysis for banks and other institutions. “They’ve been riding his coattails since, benefiting from sweetheart deals, kickbacks and other corrupt practices.”

Read the whole article. And consider, we’re about to elect a Socialist president who’s former principal financial supporter is in prison for pilfering state funds.

From the Boston Globe:

….As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama’s former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted….

….Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations….

Read the whole thing. Pretty incredible this doesn’t get more attention. There’s ample evidence Obama helped some very corrupt people get very wealthy, is there any evidence he ever did anything of note for his poorer constituents?

Tom Wolfe, from Mau-Mauing to the Flak Catchers:

Everybody but the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you wanted out of the poverty program was a job in the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the idea. Never mind getting some job counseling. You be the job counselor. You be the “neighborhood organizer.” As a job counselor or a neighborhood organizer you stood to make six or seven hundred dollars a month, and you were still your own man. Like if you were a “neighborhood organizer,” all you had to do was go out and get the names and addresses of people in the ghetto who wanted to relate to the services of the poverty center. That was a very flexible arrangement. You were still on the street, and you got paid for it.

The mask slips…

“Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly superior to us (sic) now…”

Actually:

No informed, intelligent person would favorably compare China’s infrastructure to that of the US.

There’s an excellent chance that Obama is an idiot, but I think his comment here is driven more by ideology than (lack of) intelligence.

I think Obama genuinely admires China’s totalitarian, communist system. If the US were “doing the same thing,” Obama wouldn’t have to worry about petulant voters or press questioning his right to rule. He wouldn’t have to deal with uppity capitalists challenging his authority to restructure our economy, dividing the spoils among his cronies.

Obama’s model (from The Economist):

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow’s Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing’s new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing’s third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents.

For Beijing’s airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and 10,000 residents resettled. They were barred from unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges though their farmland had been grabbed. Officials threatened them with violence if they refused to leave.

The World Bank says that roads are sometimes built only to convert countryside into revenue-generating urban land. Combined with a lack of adequate public transport, Beijing’s polluted air and congested streets, to which 1,000 cars are added daily, are evidence of the problem.

The government wants to build a new mag Lev train line. Residents along the route are fearful of noise and radiation from the trains.

Complaints still abound about the way things work. Highways—both expressways and other intercity roads—are studded with traffic-slowing toll booths. China reportedly has 70% of the world’s tolled roads and its tolls are the highest in the world (using exchange rates adjusted according to currencies’ purchasing power). To cut costs, lorries routinely overload. This helps to make the roads among the most dangerous in the world (89,000 deaths in 2006 by official reckoning; the actual number may be much higher). And it pushes up the cost of maintaining them. 

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. “Democracy”, she says, “sacrifices efficiency.”

Hypocracy? Flip-flop? Maybe just oblivious. Fortunately for Obama, his base is probably oblivious, too. From AP:

Democratic candidate Barack Obama criticized Republican John McCain on Tuesday for taking a page out of “the Cheney playbook” on energy, overlooking his own support of oil-friendly policies that the unpopular vice president helped to craft.

Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oilman, early in the Bush administration helped draft an energy policy that Obama asserted is biased in favor of tax breaks and favorable treatment for big oil. Obama’s remarks were an attempt to capitalize on Cheney’s unpopularity.

“President Bush, he had an energy policy. He turned to Dick Cheney and he said, ‘Cheney, go take care of this,’” Obama said. “Cheney met with renewable-energy folks once and oil and gas (executives) 40 times. McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook.”

In stumping Tuesday in this key battleground state, Obama sought to link the troubled economy with Republican policies and offer his own energy plan in contrast. He has tried to cast McCain as more concerned about oil company profits and drilling than an overall energy strategy.

However, Obama himself voted for a 2005 energy bill backed by Bush that included billions in subsidies for oil and natural gas production, a measure Cheney played a major role in developing. McCain opposed the bill on grounds it included billions in unnecessary tax breaks for the oil industry.

The Obama campaign has said the Illinois senator supported the legislation because it included huge investments in renewable energy.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, said, “Barack Obama is opposed to offshore drilling and is also opposed to admitting that he voted for the same corporate giveaways for Big Oil that he’s campaigning against today.”…

 Hard to imagine McCain making a false claim like this. If he did the press would be all over it for weeks.

From Powerline:

Campaigning in Israel yesterday, Obama held a press conference in Sderot. There he claimed membership on the Senate Banking Committee that passed the Dodd-Shelby Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2008. The Senate Banking Committe passed the bill out of committee last week by a vote of 19-2. Obama stated:

Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.

…However, Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Obama claimed membership on the committee so that he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”The bill passed out of the Senate Banking Committee appears to derive in part from other Senate bills (S.3227 and S.970) with which Obama had essentially nothing to do. Last week Obama issued a press release applauding the Senate Banking Committee’s passage of the sanctions act, “which includes provisions Obama offered last year in the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2007 (S. 1430).” Whatever sanctions on Iran Obama supported in 2007, however, apparently did not constitute saber rattling of the kind that Obama imputed to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the Democratic primaries.

Barack Obama has proved himself an extraordinarily cynical politician. He doesn’t believe in much, but he certainly believes in his own power to make voters believe whatever he says, even when what he says today contradicts what he said yesterday, and even when it constitutes a bald fiction, such as his claim that the Senate Banking Committee is “[his] committee.”

Some day it may begin to dawn on attentive observers that Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he’s not giving it up now.

This NPR story about a poverty stricken family probably worked better on the radio.

The mother, on the right, is 40 years old. She did not graduate from high school and has never had a job. She says a car accident in 1990 left her depressed an unable to work. She claims “most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps.”

Despite never having worked she’s apparently eligable for Social Security - $637 per month. She also gets $100 in food staps. She has never worked in her life yet has an income that puts her in the top 25% globally.

The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore.

I suspect she’ll survive with a little less ice cream.

At least she have to miss work to vote for Obama.