The American public’s dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation.

The conservative think tank’s annual Index of Dependence on Government tracks money spent on housing, health, welfare, education subsidies and other federal programs that were “traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families.”

The increase under Obama is the biggest two-year jump since Jimmy Carter was president, the data show.

The rise was driven mainly by increases in housing subsidies, an expansion in Medicaid and changes to the welfare system, along with a sharp rise in food stamps, the study found. …

For those of you on the left, government dependence is a bad thing!

Numbers are racist.  Or something.

The White House sought Tuesday to soothe concerns over a controversial birth control rule that has led to Republican attacks and tension among close allies of the administration.

The efforts followed mounting criticism from Catholics and other faith leaders that a new rule requiring certain religious institutions to cover contraception as part of their employee health plans violates their constitutional rights.

And they came as White House officials began hearing complaints from some of their own allies and advisers, who view the rule as a policy mistake that feeds what they see as an unfair charge from Republicans: that President Obama is anti-religion.  (Yeah, really!  It’s unfair to note that the guy is pro-abortion, thumbs his nose at the church and the Constitution to throw a bone to his moonbat base, etc. … but hey, where would you get the crazy idea that the guy is anti-religion or anything? – CL)

Even Chris Matthews?  Dude, when Tingles says his boy’s wrong, that should make the front page of the comPost!

Normally, the Catholic church runs interference for the Democrats.  I’m guessing that’s why Chairman Zero shoved this down their throats: he figured they’d stick with him and his party like they always do.  Considering they backed ObamaCare in the first place, I’m not sure why they are surprised by this.  Unless they thought they could get a waiver just like every other B.O.-friendly organization that also didn’t want to be subject to ObamaCare’s onerous requirements.

Just when I thought there couldn’t be a bigger fool than Gibbsy, Carney proves me wrong.  Observe:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that the number of people dropping out of the work force, which artificially depresses the unemployment rate, can be regarded as an “economic positive.”

“A large percentage of that is due to younger people getting more education, which in the end is an economic positive,” Carney said. “This increase in the number of people leaving the work force has been a trend and a fact since 2000, because of an aging population, which is not to say this is wholly — that’s not to say that I would wholly disregard as an issue.” Carney had been asked about the 19 million underemployed or unemployed Americans, and about people who had left the work force.

Ah, I see.  People going to college and racking up massive amounts of student loan debt (which they later march, drum, and push old ladies down steps over having to repay) while earning degrees in such incredibly useful and productive subjects like Women’s Studies or Sanskrit is a net positive for the economy.  Got it.  Thanks for the clarification.

Anywho, continuing:

“I think some of those who, I suppose, don’t wish us well politically have tried to make a point about this,” he also said. “The facts are that in these most recent numbers, this is not an issue of people leaving the work force; the numbers are positive across the board.”

“This is not an issue of people leaving the work force”?  Um, yeah…it is.

So how is the labor force participation rate looking today?

At 64 percent, it is well below the peak of 67 percent during the dotcom bubble, and significantly below the steady state of 66 percent we saw during the 2000s. Given the Baby Boom retirement and other demographic shifts, CBO projections expected it to be declining – 65.3 percent at the beginning of 2012. We are now 1.3 percentage points below that demographic estimate, the equivalent of 3.2 million “missing” workers. If the “missing” people were in the labor force, the unemployment rate today would be 10.4 percent, not the current 8.5 percent.

Look at it this way: if a hospital loses a number of sick people because they died, they could claim the drop in sick patients as a “net positive” for their hospital, right?

California will run out of cash by early March if the state does not take swift action to find $3.3 billion through payment delays and borrowing, according to a letter state Controller John Chiang sent to state lawmakers today.

The announcement is surprising since lawmakers previously believed the state had enough cash to last through the fiscal year that ends in June.

New state motto: Sure, we’re bankrupt, businesses are fleeing like crazy, our taxes are oppressive, we have rolling blackouts, and no one here speaks English anymore…but hey, at least Republicans aren’t running the show, right?

An Indiana-based energy storage company that received a $118.5 million stimulus-law grant from the Energy Department filed for bankruptcy Thursday.

Ener1 is asking a federal bankruptcy court in New York to approve a plan to restructure the company’s debt and infuse $81 million in equity funding. …

The Energy Department, in 2009, approved a $118.5 million stimulus-law grant for EnerDel, a subsidiary of the company that develops lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles. The grant was part of a broader program aimed at promoting the development of electric-vehicle battery technology.

President Obama touted the program in his State of the Union address this year.

“In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” he said.

The company is now trading for $0.02 per share.  That’s our money, going down the crapper for more “green energy” boondoggles.

Please get this jack#ss out in November…we can’t afford four more years of this idiocy.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

The document adds, using more plain language, that such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies, which include the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to manage government responses to such events as the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Oh, I see.  So they’re only checking out Drudge and other blogs so as to know about earthquakes and whatnot.  Because that kind of info isn’t on CNN or Fox News or anything, right?

November can’t get here quick enough to get these jackbooted thugs out of our house.

While not news to Zero Hedge readers who knew about the final debt settlement of US debt about 10 days ahead of schedule, it is now official: according to the US Treasury, America has closed the books on 2011 with debt at an all time record $15,222,940,045,451.09. And, as was observed here first in all of the press, US debt to GDP is now officially over 100%, or 100.3% to be specific, a fact which the US government decided to delay exposing until the very end of the calendar year. We wonder, rhetorically, just how prominent of a talking point this historic event will be in any upcoming GOP primary debates. And yes, technically this number is greater than the debt ceiling but it excludes various accounting gimmicks. When accounting for those, the US has a debt ceiling buffer of… $14 billion, or one third the size of a typical bond auction.

Everything this economic ignoramus touches turns to crap.  But hey, he is sure is smoov talkin’ wit da Telebinky, so let’s allow him to “finish the job” (his words) of destroying the America he loathes.

In his latest interview with CBS News’s Steve Kroft, President Obama said “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.” CBS edited the statement out of the televised version of the interview.

How helpful of CBS!  They create proof where there is none if it advances their agenda (see Memogate 2004).  They erase proof if it advances their agenda (this is but one of a bazillion instances).  Nope…no liberal media bias!

What an a-hole!  This country needs this egomaniac out of office ASAP so our republic can begin to heal from his and his party’s moonbattery-induced damage.

Ed runs the numbers:

• Jobless rate in January 2009: 7.8%.  Jobless rate in November 2011: 8.6%.
• Number of employed in January 2009, in thousands: 133,563.  In November 2011: 131,708
• Civilian participation rate in January 2009: 65.7%.  In November 2011: 64.0%
• Unemployment level in January 2009, in thousands: 11,984.  In November 2011: 13,303
• Number of people not in labor force, January 2009, in thousands: 80,554.  In November 2011: 86,558

Whatshername-Schmuck is trying to argue that last month’s drop in unemployment means that unemployment has not gone up under Uhhhh-bama.  That’s like running your credit card up from a balance of $0 to a balance of $10,000, then you pay the balance down to $9,000.  “See?  The debt didn’t go UP…it went DOWN a thousand bucks!”  Um, no…it went DOWN a grand after you ran it UP nine grand.  And you’re proud of that measley one grand?

Additionally, she sure is proud that unemployment fell from 9.0% to 8.6%.  Impressive…except that while 112,000 people found jobs, over 300,000 people gave up looking for work.  The unemployment numbers no longer count people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and stop looking for work.

I do feel a tad sorry for her (yeah, I know, but it’s only a tad).  She’s been assigned the impossible task of polishing a turd.  She’s polishing as hard as she can, but in the end, her boss’ record is still a turd, and there ain’t no amount of polish in America to get that turd shiny.

Sums Tina Korbe:

Theoretically, for the stimulus to have worked, the government would have had to target idle resources. Instead, the government funneled money into already-existing government contracts. Similarly, for the stimulus to have worked, state leaders would have had to spend stimulus money on top of what they were already spending. All too often, they used stimulus dollars to cover general expenses rather than to increase overall spending.

Takeaway line from video: “The main lesson of the stimulus is creating jobs is a very complex process and, certainly, it can’t be directed by a top-down institution that pretty much fails at everything it does”.

Uh…whiskey tango foxtrot?

You’ve got a project that will actually create jobs, and this economic ‘tard is claiming that giving people money NOT to work, and extending tax cuts to people who are ALREADY at work, is going to create more than the zero jobs we know that it will?

Wow…just friggin’ “Wow!”

Yet the left would have us believe that despite incubating in such an anti-American leftist cesspool, BHO was immune to all of the effects one would expect from someone with such a background.  If you lie with dogs, you get fleas…unless you’re Obama, in which case you’re immune from fleas.

Last week, Stern wrote a column telling Americans that our capitalist model was a failure and needed to be shaped to match the Chicom model.  Stern was one of many union bosses who have openly espoused communist…er, “pro-worker”…sentiments.  When you listen to their rhetoric, it sounds exactly like something you would have heard from Lenin, Chavez, Castro, et al.  It’s official: unions are nothing more than commie front groups.  Period.  The science is settled.

Oh, but I forgot: Just because ObaMao is best buds with Stern, Hoffa, et al, does NOT mean he shares their communist sensibilities.  To think otherwise is crazy.  I mean, aside from a rare moment of honesty with Joe the Plumber, when has BHO ever advocated anything other than a capitalist model?

Now.  The answer to the prior question is now.  In Kansas, no less.  Here’s what he had to say about capitalism:

“It’s a simple theory — one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work,” Obama said of supply-side economics, drawing extended applause. “It’s never worked.”

Oh, sure, some would argue that he wasn’t talking about capitalism per se, but of supply-side economics.  Folks, that is a distinction without a difference.  As Ace rightly notes:

He says “trickle-down economics” rather than capitalism, but “trickle-down economics” is merely an argument in favor of capitalism. There is no such thing as “trickle-down economics.” There is capitalism, and the argued advantage of it, which is the trickling down of created wealth.
…
…But Europe is probably going to plunge into something in between a recession or a depression, and may erupt in violence and political disorder.

And Europe is Obama’s lodestar. That’s where he wants to take us. To the extent we haven’t gotten there yet, it’s because Americans are soft, lazy bitter clingers who hate other sorts of people (and their politico-economic systems).

So Europe’s 60 or 70 year history with socialism is about to end in violent upheavals and misery… and here’s this ignoramus saying that it’s capitalism which is the proven failure.

As an intemperate interjection, might I note that if, by “never worked”, the organizer-in-chief means “increased government revenues every time”, then yeah, “never worked.”  If, by “never worked”, he means the creation of 16 million new jobs, then he’s right…”never worked”.

But that’s not what he means.  Those aren’t benefits…not to the people he seeks to please.  No, by “never worked”, he means “it has never taken more money from the producers and funded the non-producers’ chosen lifestyles of lethargy and dependence in perpetuity.”  That’s what he means.  See, when 16 million new jobs were created, you had to be handicapped or lazy to not get a job, because they were everywhere.  Every time supply side economics has been tried, the economy has picked back up, jobs have been created, and revenues to the government have increased as a result of more people working and paying income taxes (and not on public dependence).  But to ObaMao, public dependence is a feature, NOT a bug!

The son of a motherless goat is a commie.  He’s had it pounded into his head since he was a fetus (that, luckily for him, escaped medical procedures that he endorses, to the point of infanticide).  No amount of results will shake his belief that it is communism, and not capitalism, that has failed every time.  He just knows it will be different this time…it’s got to be!  (Sidebar: I know that communism and socialism aren’t exactly the same thing. But the differences are not great, so as far as I’m concerned, for the sake of B.O.’s leftist leanings, they’re the same thing.)

For the sake of the republic, this #sshat must be removed from office in next year’s election.  This country cannot survive eight years of Obamunism.

So this competition for new jobs and businesses and middle-class security, that’s the race I know we can win. But you don’t win it by saying every American is on their own. We’re not going to win it if we just hand out more tax cuts to people who don’t need them, let companies play by their own rules without any restriction, and we just hope somehow that the success of the wealthiest few translates in the prosperity for everybody else.

We have tried that, by the way. We tried it for 10 years. It’s part of what got into the mess that we’re in. It doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover, when it was called trickle-down economics during the Depression. It didn’t work between 2000 and 2008, and it won’t work today.

There’s just one problem with that…it’s not even remotely true.

Obama is dead wrong. Data from the White House’s own website shows that Hoover increased, rather than cut, spending in the Great Depression, and ran up deficits that were huge by historical standards.

As Ed points out, “Hoover’s spending policies look a lot like Obama’s.”  Hoovermania: Catch the fee-vuh!

“I think the whole situation is nutty,” said Jan O’Connell, a 47-year-old artist from Los Angeles. “Somebody’s got to save us, and if the government can’t, who can?”

Ho. Ly. Shiite.

I’ve got a radical idea.  How about you fend for yourself and stop depending on the government to “save” you?

Beacon Power, a Massachusetts-based company that won praise from renewable power activists and loan guarantees from the federal government, has filed for bankruptcy, potentially leaving taxpayers on the hook for $43 million.

The company, which promised to build storage devices for intermittent power produced by wind and solar power facilities, was never able to attract investors. Coming on the heels of the Solyndra bankruptcy and ensuing scandal, the Beacon Power bankruptcy has a growing number of people calling for an end to federal loan guarantees for risky alternative energy start-ups.

No word yet on whether or not there were any political connections involved in this one, or if this was just another in a long list of stunning and expensive failures of the administration.

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

Right.  Because Christmas is so underappreciated and undercommercialized!

H3ll, I’ve been hearing Christmas music and seeing Christmas trees since November 1.  What, is the Obamanation wanting to ensure that I start hearing Silver Bells and seeing wreaths in July so that Christmas is duly promoted?

Exit question:  Did Congress cede the power of taxation to the Ag Department and I just didn’t get the memo?

In an interview late last week, House Minority Leaeder Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told CNBC that Boeing should either unionize its production facilities in South Carolina, or shut them down entirely.

“Do you think it’s right that Boeing has to close down that plant in South Carolina because it’s non union?” asked host Maria Bartiromo. Pelosi’s reply: “Yes.”

The minority leader quickly added that she would rather it simply unionize and stay open. But barring unionization, by Pelosi’s reasoning, it should simply shut down.

Apparently, the only jobs worth creating are union jobs.  Never mind that S.C. workers chose differently when given a chance:

Pelosi may or may not know that workers at the South Carolina plant in question voted resoundingly (199-68) to decertify their union two years ago. Government policies that would close the plant for being a non-union shop would simply be punishing those workers for exercising their right to determine union representation for themselves.

Yeah, well what do they know about their own factory, right?  San Fran Nan is much more in tune with SC working conditions than the workers actually there, huh?

#sshat.

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.

Self-reliance is a bad thing?  As opposed to reliance?  How’s reliance been working for you, liberals?

And to think that Normal America perceives B.O. to be a socialist!

President Barack Obama told an audience in Nevada on Monday that he will be regularly announcing “executive actions” his administration will take to “heal the economy” without the “dysfunctional” Congress.

“I’m here to say to all of you and to say to the people of Nevada and the people of Las Vegas, we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will,” Obama said.

“I’ve told my administration to keep looking every single day for actions we can take without Congress, steps that can save consumers money, make government more efficient and responsive, and help heal the economy. And we’re going to be announcing these executive actions on a regular basis,” the president said.

Right, because growing the leviathan of Big Government is a great way to…um…save money and make government efficient.  Alrighty then.

Well, when the economy doesn’t improve (and there are no signs that it will), he won’t be able to argue that it wasn’t his fault.  OK, he’ll try to argue that (and, naturally, blame it on Bush), but that dog won’t hunt anymore.  Normal America sees right through it.

Remember when the left hated a perceived overstepping executive branch?  Good times, good times.