CBS Poll Reveals Obama Hits NEW Low After Imposing Terrible ObamaCare

The Wicked President of the West isn’t dead, but he’s melting, MELTING…

April 2, 2010 7:01 AM
Obama’s Approval Rating Hits New Low
Posted by Tucker Reals

CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.

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Last week, President Obama signed historic health care reform legislation into law — but his legislative success doesn’t seem to have helped his image with the American public.

The latest CBS News Poll, conducted between March 29 and April 1, found Americans unhappier than ever with Mr. Obama’s handling of health care – and still worried about the state of the economy.

President Obama’s overall job approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 44 percent, down five points from late March, just before the health bill’s passage in the House of Representatives. It’s down 24 points since his all-time high last April. Forty-one percent of those polled said they disapproved of the president’s performance.

More results from this CBS News Poll will be released in Friday’s broadcast of the Evening News with Katie Couric, which airs at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

When it comes to health care, the President’s approval rating is even lower — and is also a new all-time low. Only 34 percent approved, while 55 percent said they disapproved.

Americans are still worried about the economy, with 84 percent telling CBS they thought it was still in bad condition. However, even that high number represents an improvement: nine in ten thought the economy was bad during the last half of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009, when Mr. Obama assumed the Presidency.

Concern about job loss remains high; slightly more Americans now (35 percent) than in February (31 percent) were “very concerned” that someone in their household would lose a job. Nearly six in ten Americans said they were at least “somewhat concerned” about a job loss.

As has often been the case, lower-income Americans tend to be the most concerned about job loss.

This concern is reflected in yet another low approval rating — this time for the President’s handling of the economy. Just 42 percent said they approved of how President Obama is handling the economy, only one point above January’s all-time low. Half of the public disapproves.

It gets even better as we learn how truly outraged independents are over the incredibly polarizing and partisan tactics this incredibly dishonest, cynical weasel has used to “fundamentally transform” a free market economy into socialism.  From the Washington Times:

Friday, April 2, 2010
Independent voters turn from hopeful to angry
Democrats no longer ride tide of support
By Jennifer Haberkorn

President Obama and congressional Democrats face an uphill climb to reclaim the support of independent voters who vaulted them to the White House and huge majorities in Congress in 2008.

At the end of the bitter, intensely partisan battle to pass Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul plan, independent voters, once captivated by hopeful campaign promises, are feeling burned and appear eager to oust Democrats in November’s midterm elections.

This is the time that we need to take a page from both Barack Obama AND Sarah Palin.

First we need to get “Fired up, ready to go.”  And then we need to RELOAD before getting fired up again.  And again.  And again.  And again, until the worst and most radical and most unAmerican president in history is long gone to go along with the Democrat disaster in Congress.

Obama and the Democrats KNEW that ObamaCare was reviled by the American people; and then they usurped the will of the people and used every parliamentary trick in the book to impose it anyway.

Now it’s the law of the land, and we’re starting to see what a stinking pile of crap it truly is.  First we learned that Obama and the Democrats flat-out LIED when they said that children with pre-existing conditions would be covered as soon as the bill was passed.  That’s just one of an avalanche of lies Obama told the country to push his health care takeover.

Then we learned that thousands of companies were going to be forced to take billions of dollars in writedowns forced upon them by ObamaCare.  The tally so far:

Company                  Charge
AT&T                     $1B
Verizon                  $970M
John Deere               $150M
Boeing                   $150M
Prudential               $100M
Caterpillar              $100M
Lockheed Martin          $96M
3M                       $85M
Exelon Corp.             $65M
AK Steel                 $31M
Eaton                    $25M
IL Tool Works            $22M
Xcel Energy              $17M
Valero                   $15M
Honeywell                $13M
Goodrich                 $10M
Allegheny Technologies   $5M

And the thing is that 3,500 companies are going to find out that they are in the same boat, to the tune of at least $14 billion in private sector profits that will be transferred to a power-hungry government instead of being used to create jobs and expand the economy.

The above is a gift that is going to keep giving – or rather keep taking profits away from businesses and jobs away from citizens.

Then we saw that ObamaCare had prompted a massive sell-off of US Treasuries:

Sell-off in US Treasuries raises sovereign debt fears
Investors are braced for a further sell-off in US Treasuries after dramatic moves last week raised fears that the surfeit of US government debt is starting to saturate bond markets.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 9:06PM BST 28 Mar 2010

The yield on 10-year Treasuries – the benchmark price of global capital – surged 30 basis points in just two days last week to over 3.9pc, the highest level since the Lehman crisis. Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the US Federal Reserve, said the abrupt move may be “the canary in the coal mine”, a warning to Washington that it can no longer borrow with impunity. He said there is a “huge overhang of federal debt, which we have never seen before”.

David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff said Treasury yields have ratcheted up 90 basis points since December in a “destabilising fashion”, for the wrong reasons. Growth has not been strong enough to revive fears of inflation. Commodity prices peaked in January and US home sales have fallen for the last three months, pointing to a double-dip in the housing market.

And why is this?

The trigger for last week’s sell-off was poor demand at Treasury auctions, linked to the passage of the Obama health care reform. Critics say it will add $1 trillion (£670bn) to America’s debt over the next decade, a claim disputed fiercely by Democrats.

Dispute away, you loathsome liars.  But the facts are on the table.

Why you’re explaining away how ObamaCare will cost massively more than you falsely claimed, maybe you can also explain away Obama’s stratospheric spending deficits that make Bush’s worst year look like stringent fiscal discipline.

What we are seeing is Thelma & Louise policies.  Those are the kind of policies that see us insanely driving off a cliff at top speed.

Democrats own all of this now.  They can’t blame anybody but themselves, because they were the only ones who voted for it, and who polarized the country to ram it down our throats.

What’s the result of the Democrats’ idiotic policies?  Ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who just told us that sky-high “unemployment is likely to remain unacceptably high for a long time.”

The unemployment rate “is still terribly high and is going to stay unacceptably high for a very long time,” Geithner said.

Of course, if unemployment is going to stay “unacceptably high” for “a very long time,” you’re pretty much accepting it, aren’t you?

You can accept an “unacceptably” awful one-party rule that is destroying the American way of life chunk by chunk, or you can refuse to accept the “unacceptable” and vote these radicals out of office in seven months.

Democrats are betting that you are too stupid and too short-sighted to hold them accountable.

Whether that’s true is up to you.

ObamaCare Destroying Demand For US Treasury Bills

Boy, this ObamaCare deal just keeps looking better and better.

First, we see US corporations and businesses forced to take writedowns to the tune of billions of dollars of profits that would otherwise have gone into getting the economy out of recession and creating jobs.  Why are they losing all this money?  Because they committed the unpardonable sin of trying to give their retirees excellent private health care.  The Democrats – whom we’ve been saying all along want to socialize the health care system – can’t be having that.  So they took away the tax incentives that made providing such benefits worth doing for the companies.

That’s bad.  That’s really bad.  And anyone who is actually paying attention should be coming unglued that our new law of the land health care system is not only going to destroy American jobs, but American employee-based health care, too, all in one fell swoop.

But as it so often has been with Obama, it actually gets even worse:

Sell-off in US Treasuries raises sovereign debt fears
Investors are braced for a further sell-off in US Treasuries after dramatic moves last week raised fears that the surfeit of US government debt is starting to saturate bond markets.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 9:06PM BST 28 Mar 2010

The yield on 10-year Treasuries – the benchmark price of global capital – surged 30 basis points in just two days last week to over 3.9pc, the highest level since the Lehman crisis. Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the US Federal Reserve, said the abrupt move may be “the canary in the coal mine”, a warning to Washington that it can no longer borrow with impunity. He said there is a “huge overhang of federal debt, which we have never seen before”.

David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff said Treasury yields have ratcheted up 90 basis points since December in a “destabilising fashion”, for the wrong reasons. Growth has not been strong enough to revive fears of inflation. Commodity prices peaked in January and US home sales have fallen for the last three months, pointing to a double-dip in the housing market.

Mr Rosenberg said the yield spike recalls the move in the spring of 2007 just as the credit system started to unravel. “The question is how the equity market is going to handle this back-up in rates,” he said.

The trigger for last week’s sell-off was poor demand at Treasury auctions, linked to the passage of the Obama health care reform. Critics say it will add $1 trillion (£670bn) to America’s debt over the next decade, a claim disputed fiercely by Democrats.

It is unclear whether China is selling US Treasuries after cutting its holdings for three months in a row, or what its motive may be. There are concerns that Beijing may be sending a coded message before the US Treasury rules next month on whether China is a “currency manipulator”, though experts say China is clearly still buying dollar assets because it is holding down the yuan against the greenback. Some investors may be selling Treasuries as a precaution against a trade spat.

Looming over everything is the worry that markets will not be able to absorb the glut of US debt as the Fed winds down its policy of bond purchases, starting with an exit from mortgage-backed securities. It currently holds a quarter of the $5 trillion of the MBS market.

The rise in US bond yields has set off mayhem in the 10-year US swaps markets. Spreads turned negative last week, touching the lowest level in 20 years. The effect was to drive credit costs for high-grade companies such as Berkshire Hathaway below that of the US government. This may have been a technical aberration.

Democrats can say whatever the hell they want, but people who AREN’T arrogant, incompetent, ignorant fools understand that ObamaCare is going to be to the US deficit what the HMS Titanic was to the cruise liner industry.

Let’s sum up the above article in bullet points.  Stop me when I get to something that sounds like it ISN’T a complete unmitigated disaster in the making:

• Investors are braced for a further sell-off in US Treasuries after dramatic moves last week raised fears that the surfeit of US government debt is starting to saturate bond markets
• The yield on 10-year Treasuries – the benchmark price of global capital – surged 30 basis points in just two days last week to over 3.9pc, the highest level since the Lehman crisis
• Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the US Federal Reserve, said the abrupt move may be “the canary in the coal mine”
• there is a “huge overhang of federal debt, which we have never seen before”
• Treasury yields have ratcheted up 90 basis points since December in a “destabilising fashion”, for the wrong reasons
• the yield spike recalls the move in the spring of 2007 just as the credit system started to unravel
• The trigger for last week’s sell-off was poor demand at Treasury auctions, linked to the passage of the Obama health care reform
• Looming over everything is the worry that markets will not be able to absorb the glut of US debt
• The rise in US bond yields has set off mayhem in the 10-year US swaps markets
• Spreads turned negative last week, touching the lowest level in 20 years

I tried to explain this growing economic crisis facing the US last month in an article entitled, “Greek Crisis Coming To Your Neighborhood Soon“:

We’re borrowing huge sums of money at a current rate of about 3% interest.  But as the lenders start getting nervous, they’re going to want to increase that interest.  We are in plenty of trouble paying these trillions of dollars back at 3% – but what happens if the interest increases to 5% or 7% as it could very quickly do?  The costs of paying these loans would rise to catastrophic levels, and we could find ourselves literally bankrupt overnight.

And we’ve just jumped from 3 to 4 percent in a great big hurry.

Like I’ve been saying: ObamaCare will ultimately be the anvil that breaks the camels back.

Democrats are telling you this is all just so good.  It’s good that the Democrats created the most gigantic and sweeping legislation in 60 years on a hard-core partisan vote.  It’s good that said bill was shenaniganized to create the illusion that it was “deficit neutral” while in reality it will cost over $6 trillion dollars.  It’s good that companies are going to lose billions of job-creating dollars as Democrats robbed every money-bag they could to fund their next boondoggle.  It’s good that Obama is sending our deficit into the stratosphere while setting up a banana republic-style debt-to-GDP ratio.  And, of course, it’s good that we’re seeing the value of our national holdings rapidly dissolving away.

You’re not that stupid, are you?

I mean, I have to ask: after all, you DID vote stupid when you elected Obama and loaded Congress with Democrats.

ObamaCare Already Rearing Its VERY Ugly Head

You’ve got to be amazed at the Democrats’ arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance.

They are apparently having their version of Casablanca’s Captain Renault moment: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Only, in this Democrat-retelling, Captain Renault instead says, “Gambling?  There’s no gambling going on here!  It’s just gaming, not GAMBLING!  Why, it’s nothing more than two parties engaging in a predictive enterprise, in which the accurate prediction is rewarded in a monetary transaction.  But gambling?  You’re a violent racist to call that ‘gambling’!!!

Oh, my goodness.  I think you just spat on me!  It’s just the kind of thing you haters who attack us as “gamblers” would do!”

MARCH 27, 2010
The ObamaCare Writedowns
The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.

As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them.

Meanwhile, John DiStaso of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that ObamaCare could cost the Granite State’s major ski resorts as much as $1 million in fines, because they hire large numbers of seasonal workers without offering health benefits. “The choices are pretty clear, either increase prices or cut costs, which could mean hiring fewer workers next winter,” he wrote.

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

The Democrats passed their totally partisan bill (the only bipartisanship was in the “Hell no!” vote, with 34 Democrats joining every single Republican).

The New York Times reported that Obama’s core promise was his pledge that he would transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, move beyond the divisive politics of Washington, and build a new governing majority that brought Democrats, independents and Republicans together.  And now we know that his fundamental, core promise was just a total lie, a massive lie of the devil.  Not only did he not try to become a unifying figure, as he cynically and deceitfully promised, but he became the most polarizing president in the history of the nation.  And that broken promise is now erupting into open rage like we have never seen in this country.

Obama is trying to demonize Republicans for the anger, but HE WAS THE ONE WHO PROMISED TO BE A TRANSCENDENT FIGURE.  HE WAS THE ONE WHO LIED.

Democrats have obfuscated every fact with spin and lies, and every single truth teller they could not bribe or intimidate they have tried to destroy.

Democrats can pass a pile of stinking lies on a 100% partisan ideological vote, but what they can’t do is make that pile of stinking lies that comprise ObamaCare actually work.  The Democrats health care law is already an open disaster, and it will continue to grow into a bigger and bigger disaster no matter how many congressional kangaroo courts they hold to demonize businesses who reported that their costs will skyrocket under this evil bill.

Obama said if you liked your health care you could keep it.  ABC was reporting that that promise was questionable back in July of last year.  Now it is a proven lie.  It was just another whopping lie of the devil all along.  Businesses are taking hits in the millions and even in the billions of dollars.  And one of them after another is going to start dumping their retirees into Medicare as the cost of offering private insurance plans soar under ObamaCare.

Obama’s reckeless spending is simply staggering.  The CBO is reporting that it is a gigantic $1.2 TRILLION more than Obama said it would be.  And they are reporting the terrifying news that the federal debt will soar to 90% of Gross Domestic Product.

Business costs are soaring.  AT & T will take a billion dollar hit because of ObamaCare.

As bad as that is in dollars, the bigger hit may well be the one taken by Caterpillar, because it shows the abject hypocrisy and fraud of ObamaCare.  Last year Obama said that “you can measure America’s bottom line by looking at Caterpillar’s bottom line.” And now that same Caterpillar is taking a $100 million hit due to ObamaCare.  Now that same Caterpillar is saying, “From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time.”

That means fewer jobs for Americans.  A LOT fewer jobs.  And no denials by our Democrat version of Captain Renault can change that with his sputtering denials.

And there are other hidden provisions that are starting to leap out of this bill that Democrats passed, but apparently never bothered to read.

Now we’re finding that Americans are going to take a hit as high as $2,000 under another dark tunnel provision in ObamaCare.

“The damage is coming sooner than expected.”

That’s the nutshell summary of ObamaCare.