If Spain Collapses, Europe Collapses. And If Europe Collapses, America Collapses. And Terrified Spaniards Are Bailing Out Of Spain As I Write This.

Be afraid.  Be very, very afraid.  Because to paraphrase Obama’s demonic reverend for 25 years, the chickens of socialism have come home to roost:

Fears Rising, Spaniards Pull Out Their Cash and Get Out of Spain
Published in the New York Times: Monday, 3 Sep 2012 | 9:22 PM ET By: Landon Thomas Jr.

After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks.

“The macro situation in Spain is getting worse and worse,” Mr. Vildosola, 38, said last week just hours before boarding a plane to London with his wife and two small children. “There is just too much risk. Spain is going to be next after Greece, and I just don’t want to end up holding devalued pesetas.”

Mr. Vildosola is among many who worry that Spain’s economic tailspin could eventually force the country’s withdrawal from the euro and a return to its former currency, the peseta. That dire outcome is still considered a long shot, even if Spain might eventually require a Greek-style bailout. But there is no doubt that many of those in a position to do so are taking their money — and in some cases themselves — out of Spain.

In July, Spaniards withdrew a record 75 billion euros, or $94 billion, from their banks — an amount equal to 7 percent of the country’s overall economic output — as doubts grew about the durability of Spain’s financial system.

The withdrawals accelerated a trend that began in the middle of last year, and came despite a European commitment to pump up to 100 billion euros into the Spanish banking system. Analysts will be watching to see whether the August data, when available, shows an even faster rate of capital flight.

More disturbing for Spain is that the flight is starting to include members of its educated and entrepreneurial elite who are fed up with the lack of job opportunities in a country where the unemployment rate touches 25 percent.

According to official statistics, 30,000 Spaniards registered to work in Britain in the last year, and analysts say that this figure would be many multiples higher if workers without documents were counted. That is a 25 percent increase from a year earlier.

“No doubt there is a little bit of panic,” said José García Montalvo, an economist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. “The wealthy people have already taken their money out. Now it’s the professionals and midrange people who are moving their money to Germany and London. The mood is very, very bad.”

It is possible that the outlook could improve if the European Central Bank’s governing council, which meets Thursday, signals a plan to help shore up the finances of Spain and other euro zone laggards by intervening in the bond markets.

But right now, if anything, Spain’s picture is growing dimmer.

On Friday, the government’s bank rescue fund said it would need to pump up to 5 billion euros into the failed mortgage-lending giant Bankia, which the state seized in May. And on Monday, Andalusia became the latest of Spain’s semiautonomous regions to ask the central government for rescue money.

The wider prospects for the euro zone are also still bleak. Moody’s [MCO 39.72 0.12 (+0.3%) ] Investors Service said on Monday that it had changed its outlook on the AAA rating of the European Union to negative, and that it might downgrade the rating if it decides to cut the ratings on the union’s four largest budget contributors.

Spain’s gathering gloom comes despite a gradual return of capital to banks in Greece and the relative stability of deposits in those other euro zone trouble spots, Italy, Ireland and Portugal.

The continued exodus of money and people from Spain could be a warning to European policy makers that bailing out the country — a step now widely expected — may not stem the panic as long as the Spanish economy remains in a funk.

It was a lesson learned in Greece, where despite successive European bailouts, about a third of deposits have been withdrawn from its banks since 2009, as the public worried that Athens might have to return to the drachma.

Spain is still a far cry from a nearly bankrupt Greece: it has a much larger and more diverse economy, lower levels of debt and a bond market that is still functioning.

It might be more accurate to say that money is leaving Spanish banks at more of a jog than anything close to a sprint.

Although retail and corporate deposits are down 10 percent compared with those of July 2011, the country remains relatively rich in savings, with 2.3 trillion euros in overall deposits, according to data from Morgan Stanley.

But once under way, the flight of bank deposits can easily overwhelm rational facts and analysis.

Setting off the flight was the failure of Bankia, which came as a shock to Spanish savers who had been assured by government officials that the bank was in good shape.

Instead of calming fears, the state takeover prompted comparisons to Argentina in 2001, when peso bank accounts denominated in dollars were frozen in order to stem the flight of deposits.

The corralito, or corral, as the Argentine action is known, has become part of the public conversation in Spain. The million-plus Argentines who have since immigrated to Spain have provided ample and gory stories of desperate legal battles and wiped-out savings.

Eduardo Pérez, a Spaniard who was working in Argentina during that period, remembers the events all too well. He said he lost four-fifths of the money he had kept in an Argentine savings account, though he declined to say how much money was involved.

“Some of my friends lost everything,” Mr. Pérez said. “So yes, everyone in Spain knows about the corralito.”

Recently, Mr. Pérez, who lives in the northern city of Bilbao, removed about a third of his euros from his Spanish savings account and sent them to Singapore, converting them to Singapore dollars.

Having lost his job at a multinational company a few months ago, Mr. Pérez, 48, is trying to make ends meet by focusing on his travel Web site and blog, which aggregate Spanish-language travel videos.

But as the job outlook worsens, he is contemplating following in the path of his savings and starting a new life in Singapore with his wife.

“Two years ago, we never would have thought of this, but now I have real fears that there will be a breakup with the euro,” he said. “And when you keep hearing people saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen’ — well, that is when you have to start worrying.”

Analysts said that the record-high outflow from Spain in July was probably spurred in part by July’s being a taxpaying month for many corporations, which prompted them to withdraw cash from deposit accounts.

Also playing a role were investment funds that moved cash reserves to foreign banks in light of the credit downgrades at Spanish banks.

Still, as the examples of Mr. Vildosola and Mr. Pérez show, individual deposit flight is becoming more pronounced.

Some people are willing to fly to London for the day just to open an account there, as most banks in the city require such transactions to be made in person.

Spanish bankers working for British financial institutions say they have been hit with a barrage of questions about how to open savings accounts in London.

“It seems as if everyone I know in Spain is getting on an easyJet to come to London and open a bank account,” said one such banker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing his company’s policy.

That is what Mr. Vildosola did before he took the more drastic step of moving his family to England.

“It’s sad,” he said. “But I just don’t think there is a future for me in Spain right now.”

This story originally appeared in The New York Times

You want scary?  CNBC reported that the withdrawal rate is equal to 52% of the entire GDP of Spain:

The flight of capital from Spain is now worse than what Indonesia, one of the hardest hit countries during the Asian financial crisis, experienced in the late 1990s, according to analysis by Nomura.

On a three-month rolling basis, portfolio and investment outflows from Spain totaled 52.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), (that’s) more than double the outflows from Indonesia, which reached 23 percent of GDP at the time of the Asian crisis, Jens Nordvig, global head of G10 FX strategy at Nomura wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday.

Spaniards and foreign investors have been pulling money out of Spanish banks as the economy has worsened in recent months, and Nordvig said without the single currency and the flows from the ECB, Spain would already be going through a major currency crisis. (Read More: Depression, Suicides Rise as Euro Debt Crisis Intensifies)

We would stress that the broad-based nature of the capital flight, which involves both banking claims and securities and flows from both residents and non-residents, makes for a rather extreme overall outflow, and one that raises serious concerns about the implications for banking sector stability and economic growth,” Nordvig wrote.

For the record, the French are fleeing France and they are making it very clear that they are fleeing France because of the socialism that France just chose for itself:

Indigestion for ‘les Riches’ in a Plan for Higher Taxes
By LIZ ALDERMAN
Published: August 7, 2012 763 Comments

PARIS — The call to Vincent Grandil’s Paris law firm began like many others that have rolled in recently. On the line was the well-paid chief executive of one of France’s most profitable companies, and he was feeling nervous.

President François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone’s income above a million euros ($1.24 million) a year. “Should I be preparing to leave the country?” the executive asked Mr. Grandil.

The lawyer’s counsel: Wait and see. For now, at least.

“We’re getting a lot of calls from high earners who are asking whether they should get out of France,” said Mr. Grandil, a partner at Altexis, which specializes in tax matters for corporations and the wealthy. “Even young, dynamic people pulling in 200,000 euros are wondering whether to remain in a country where making money is not considered a good thing.”

A chill is wafting over France’s business class as Mr. Hollande, the country’s first Socialist president since François Mitterrand in the 1980s, presses a manifesto of patriotism to “pay extra tax to get the country back on its feet again.” The 75 percent tax proposal, which Parliament plans to take up in September, is ostensibly aimed at bolstering French finances as Europe’s long-running debt crisis intensifies.

Europe is imploding.  Spain is one of the PIIGS (the ‘S’ in PIIGS, in fact) who are leading that collapse.  And Obama is pushing for an economic and environmentalist model that most copies collapsing Spain.

And liberals are DETERMINED to do the same thing here.  Go to Illinois, the king of the deadbeat states.  You watch a 60 Minute Story and you will be PISSED at what slimebag Democrat cockroaches have done.  Go to California, where Democrats have created a $500 BILLION unfunded pension black hole of doom.  Look at America under Obama and take note that America just passed the $16 trillion mark that was $10 trillion when Bush left office.  Barack Obama DEMONIZED George Bush for increasing the debt by $4 trillion over eight years – look what that Marxist weasel has done in HALF the time by piling on $6 trillion in debt in only FOUR years!!!  Oh, and America’s REAL debt isn’t a paltry $16 trillion; it’s actually a supermassive $222 trillion.  And all that debt was created by Democrat boondoggle-takeovers of what should have been privatized.

Democrats have murdered America.  And we are merely waiting for our turn to completely implode before the Antichrist comes and the Book of Revelation prophecy becomes the news story account of the end of human history.  You can hear the hoofbeats of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse riding hard toward us even now.

The last couple of years, as Europe has slowly imploded, the dollar has been given a boost as terrorized Europeans seek some haven from their weakening Euro.  But if Europe goes – and it WILL go – America will fall right afterward because Europe is our largest trading partner and there won’t be anybody to buy our stuff from us.  And because Obama has spent the last four years racing us toward that same direction and that same catastrophic collapse.  And when America goes the dollar will flush down the toilet right down with it.  And you better take a look at the terror on the faces of Spaniards; because YOU will have that same look on YOUR face soon thanks to your vote for Obama and Democrats in 2008.

In 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency, 300,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy.  In this last failed year of Obama’s failed presidency, 1.4 million – very nearly FIVE TIMES as many – businesses have filed for bankruptcy.  If we vote for Obama, we vote to die as a nation just as Spain previously voted to die and just as Europe previously voted to die.

Everything about this failed president is Marxist – including his damn Marxist slogans:

New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism
By Victor Morton – The Washington Times
April 30, 2012, 06:56PM

The Obama campaign apparently didn’t look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, “Forward” — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism.

Many Communist and radical publications and entities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had the name “Forward!” or its foreign cognates. Wikipedia has an entire section called “Forward (generic name of socialist publications).”

“The name Forward carries a special meaning in socialist political terminology. It has been frequently used as a name for socialist, communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications,” the online encyclopedia explains.

The slogan “Forward!” reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism.

The Obama campaign released its new campaign slogan Monday in a 7-minute video. The title card has simply the word “Forward” with the “O” having the familiar Obama logo from 2008. It will be played at rallies this weekend that mark the Obama re-election campaign’s official beginning.

Vote for Obama.  March “forward” right into hell, you fools.  Because that’s what you’ve got to look “forward” to under your demonic false messiah Obama.

You just watch what will happen to the DOW the day Spain goes the way of the Dodo bird.  And you realize that we’re going down hard in our own day of reckoning because we chose the same stupid and immoral course that Spain chose.

What’s Obama’s “strategy” to deal with this crisis???  To try to call on Europe to not collapse until after he’s reelected so he won’t have to face the voters’ wrath over what hell has befallen America under his failed leadership.

The collapse is coming.  Democrats gave us that when they voted for Obama and let him kill America with his socialism.  The Antichrist is coming.  He’ll be riding in on his white horse to save the day from the disaster and collapse caused by the previous false messiah Obama.  And Democrats will welcome the beast even more enthusiastically than they welcomed Obama and they will worship him and they will take his mark.

Get ready for hell on earth.  And then get ready for hell itself.  Because the beast is coming.

When You Hear The Media Assure You That Obama Is Unbeatable, Consider Something Called ‘Reality’

What’s going wrong with the Obama campaign?  I mean, they’ve got a great slogan and everything…

Maybe too many of Obama’s supporters already fell off the cliff following Obama “forward.”  One thing is for certain, at Obama’s opening campaign kick-off event – which you would expect to be enormously attended and which Team Obama boasted beforehand would be standing-room-only – the entire upper deck (i.e., half the venue) was completely vacant:

Trouble already: Why so many no-shows for Obama’s campaign kickoff?
By ANDREW MALCOLM
Posted 10:10 AM ET

WANTED: A new presidential campaign advance team that can count. Contact Obama for America headquarters in Chicago.

Of all the times to blow the political optics, it was to be the first “official” campaign event on Barack Obama’s billion-dollar reelection campaign. A huge rally in Columbus, Ohio, capital of such a key state this fall that Republicans have never won the White House without it.

We say “official,” of course, because Obama has never really stopped running for reelection since Aretha Franklin’s last note on the Capitol steps Jan. 20, 2009. Nor has Obama let up campaigning since he announced his reelection bid more than a year ago.

So, Saturday’s kickoff was to begin in Ohio and then take Air Force One to Virginia, another once-red state that Obama would like to re-snatch in 2012.

But, alas, all of the excitement that was being staged for the media was over-shadowed by the 4,000 or so empty seats in Columbus. The obvious lesson in Political Advance 101 is: Always pick a setting that’s too small for the crowd you expect. Better to have some angry people clamoring to get inside from outside than the media snapping photos like the one above that screams ZZZZZZZZ.

Mitt Romney learned this lesson several weeks ago when he assembled a decent dining room crowd for his major economic speech in Detroit. But his team plopped them down in the middle of a football field in a stadium seating 70,000. Obviously, the Obama campaign isn’t reading news coverage of their opponent, hopefully over-confidence.

We were going to publish the complete text of the president’s alleged “opening” remarks, but we changed our minds. Talk about going through the motions. It’s the same yada-yada he’s been peddling at his record-breaking number of fundraisers.

We read it so you don’t have to: 3,930 words recounting how he never said change was easy, he’s already done a lot to fix America, he needs to do more to cement the transformation of this country and this campaign will be harder than the last one.

The most interesting part of the event was actually not Obama’s. It was Michelle Obama’s. She campaigned in 2008. Remember, that was the first time she’d ever been proud of her country. But this time she’s been pushed even more front-and-center. She’s making her own cross-country swings of political fundraisers.

And Saturday she was the poised warm-up act for her husband. Except instead of a couple endearing stories about Barack, she actually gave her own speech. It was about 1,500 words-worth that wandered off into her own childhood and her father’s life of hard work and how he always paid his bills on time and how that’s what’s really at stake this year.

“More than anything else, that is what’s at stake, she said. “It’s that fundamental promise that no matter who you are or how you started out, if you work hard, you can build a decent life for yourself and yes, an even better life for your kids.”

She didn’t have time to explain how her husband’s economic stimulus plan ended up only stimulating the national debt, while the unemployed and under-employed soared into the many millions and the record foreclosures and the lame economic recovery because of financial fears, over-regulation and little Washington leadership.

She didn’t have time to go into the wasted weeks her husband campaigned for the so-called Buffet Rule that he knew full well was doomed in the Senate controlled by his own party. Or the birth control insurance regulation. And the college loan combat he’s trying to generate.

All designed to distract from the doubling of gas prices, the declines in federal drilling and what hasn’t happened under Obama’s so-called presidential leadership.

Michelle Obama’s “warm-up” speech ended up about as long as the prime-time one her husband flew 14,000 miles to and from Afghanistan to be seen reporting back to America last week. She got into Barack’s childhood with a single mom and his grandmother working at a bank and allegedly hitting that glass ceiling that female workers know so well. And how all of the wonderful progress that Barack has made is jeopardized by this reelection business.

She also made a fervent appeal to enlist more members for the army of community organizers the campaign is trying to construct nationally this summer and fall to solicit supporters and track opponents. See our previous story here.

For his part, her husband offered the familiar excuse about the historic economic troubles he inherited, those people who were playing the markets, the people who opposed his expensive automobile bailout and sellout to the automobile unions.

And then came our favorite Obama whopper of the day:

“Now we face a choice,” the president intoned. “For the last few years, the Republicans who run this Congress have insisted that we go right back to the policies that created this mess.”

Wait! What? The Republicans lost control of Congress way back in November, 2006. They won control of the House in an historic electoral blowback against Obama ignoring the economy and his insistence on Obamacare. John Boehner became speaker 16 months ago. The GOP still doesn’t control the Senate.

So, once again the ongoing mess on Obama’s watch is somebody else’s fault. It may actually have been lucky for him that more than 4,000 of the Ohio State seats went empty. Those folks might have gotten the joke and laughed him off the dais.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

The best way for Republicans to feel is energized and expectant of victory IF they work hard to get rid of this socialist turd and actually show up to vote.

Dick Morris is predicting a landslide for Romney and for Republicans in 2012.  Obviously, I hope very much for the sake of my country that Morris is right.  I’ve also got next to zero confidence in the accuracy of Bill Clinton’s former pollster.

Pundits on the Obama side talk about the lack of “enthusiasm” for Mitt Romney.  And all of their polling data that they bother to consider looks at “registered voters” and completely ignores “likely voters.”  They also studiously ignore the fact that Romney has opened up a ten point lead with independent voters who historically decide close elections.

Well, dang, I’M totally unenthusiastic about Mitt Romney.  I will also climb out of my own grave to go vote for him in November.  And that is because my “enthusiasm” doesn’t depend on Mitt Romney, but rather on the Marxist clown who has spent the last four years rotting America from its roots up.

I have a feeling if the pollsters bothered to ask the right question, they would actually get a lot more answers like the one above than they are willing to hear.

Andrea Mitchell Forgets That Mainstream Media ‘Journalists’ Aren’t Supposed To Consider Themselves Members Of The Obama White House When The Camera Is On

Oopsie:

Andrea Mitchell Slips Up, Says “We” Instead Of “White House” Politicizing OBL
Posted on May 1, 2012

[See embedded video at site or see at Newsbusters]

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell made what some may call a not-so-Freudian slip on her daily cable news show that broadcasts on MSNBC.

Mitchell asks former Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) what he thinks of Republican criticism that “we” are politicizing the bin Laden killing. Mitchell quickly corrected herself and said it is the White House that is being accused of politicizing the event.
 
Actual quote from Andrea Mitchell: “What do you think of the Republican criticism that we are politicizing it — that the White House, I should say, is politicizing it?”

Yeah, Andrea: you damn well SHOULD say “the White House” instead of “we” when the White House says something.  Not that you ever made the mistake of conflating your thoughts with the White House when it happened to be the BUSH White House, did you???

Obama to mainstream media at last year’s White House Correspondence Dinner: “I am Barack Obama.  Most of you covered me.  ALL of you voted for me.”  And their response was to laugh because it was true and they all knew it was true and it is by now obvious to anyone with more brains than a jellyfish that it’s true.  Well, that and the fact that Dear Leader told a funny and all journalists are required to laugh whenever Messiah tells a funny.

When Obama shouts out his latest campaign slogan, how does Andrea Mitchell and her fellow “reporters” respond?

Which is incredibly weird, given that Obama’s slogan – “Forward” – means forward into ruin:

And of course this crap from Andrea Mitchell – and pretty much most of her fellow commisar comrades – just goes on non-stop.  Not even a full week ago Bill O’Reilly was exposing Andrea Mitchell as a biased left-wing hack propagandist masquerading as a “journalist”:

O’Reilly Exposes Andrea Mitchell’s Liberal Bias [Video]
By Don Irvine  Friday, April 27, 2012

On Wednesday night, on the Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly took on the subject of media bias, focusing specifically on a recent report by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC which showed that she was less than objective when it came to covering Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

O’Reilly discussed this bias with Sally Quinn, the editor of The Washington Post’s On Faith blog.

O’Reilly: I told you the other night that NBC News runs MSNBC. It’s the same management. I also told you they use the same people. Andrea Mitchell is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News. Here’s what she said yesterday on MSNBC:

Mitchell: “I had the advantage, or disadvantage, as the case may be, of watching Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich at the same time on side-by-side screens. It’s my job; someone has to do it.”

O’Reilly said that Mitchell crossed the line by disparaging an entire political party (the GOP) when her job is to be an objective reporter, to which Quinn disagreed.

Quinn: I don’t see it that way at all, Bill. I don’t understand what the fuss is. I read that quote over and over and I kept thinking, “What is wrong with this?” I mean, have you ever tried to watch two speeches at once and then try to report or speak about either one of them? It’s impossible. So when she says, “I had the advantage or the disadvantage,” it’s really hard to try to make something—

O’Reilly: Alright, but in the context of the discussion on MSNBC, it didn’t have anything to do with Sally’s (he meant Andrea’s) technological problem. It had to do with who she was watching. And she—

Quinn: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Because she said she thought Romney’s speech was good, and Romney’s speech was good. So I think that she was—

O’Reilly: So you’re giving her the benefit of the doubt?

O’Reilly then pointed out that if Fox News’ Carl Cameron said the same thing about reporting on Obama, there would be an outcry from the liberal press, which even Quinn agreed with:

Quinn: Well, you’re right about that. You’re right about that: the liberal press would have said that they were—they were somehow ideological, but—even though they weren’t.

Quinn has a very high opinion of Mitchell, calling her “beyond reproach.” But in a 2007 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Mitchell told O’Reilly that there wasn’t a bias at any of the major broadcast networks and that she didn’t think Chris Matthews was a “liberal thinker.”

Talk about living in a bubble.

Mitchell’s lament wasn’t the first time she showed a flash of her disdain for Romney and the GOP.

In January, when discussing the Iowa Caucus, Mitchell said that the rap on Iowa was that it didn’t represent the rest of the country because it was “Too White, Too Evangelical, Too Rural.” More recently she suggested, without any verifiable proof, that Romney’s family entered the country illegally from Mexico.

I’m sure other liberals besides Quinn will rush to Mitchell’s defense. But Mitchell’s reporting, on a daily basis, clearly reveals a liberal bias.

Of course, Chris Matthews is the guy who famously had the “thrill going up my leg” as he heard his messiah speak.  So when you ask a transparent liberal like the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn if a fellow transparent liberal like Andrea Mitchell is transparently liberal, and what do you think the transparent liberal is going to say about the transparent liberal?

It’s kind of like the massive documentation that the OWS (“Occupy”) Movement is intrinsically fascist and violent; somehow – no matter how many arrests there have been or how much violence there is – it’s a complete surprise every single time and clearly the latest episode of fascist terrorist violence has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Occupy.

And that’s exactly how NBC’s Andrea Mitchell is going to report it.

NBC actually was selling Obama campaign paraphernalia on its site.  NBC’s love for Obama paid off – literally.  So when you talk about NBC, the “B” is for “Bias.” 

Which is why “journalists” like Andrea Mitchell fit right in.

Hypocrite-In-Chief Obama Calls Slick Willie BACK To Sell His ‘FORWARD’ Snake Oil

It might work in “Back to the Future”; it doesn’t work in logic.

Obama says he wants to move America “forward”:

But just like “Hope and Change,” what does that really mean?  “Forward” in which direction?  “Forward” toward communism?  “Forward” toward totalitarianism?  Just like “hopey changey,” this is an intrinsically meaningless slogan that pretends to stand for something.

Hope is looooooong gone in Ohio under Obama’s wildly failed policies (LA Times):

MINGO JUNCTION, Ohio — Hope has been absent for so long from Appalachian Ohio that many people have forgotten what it’s like.

Idle steel mills run the length of several city blocks, empty and rusting on the thickly wooded banks of the Ohio River, like hulking tombstones for a past that died and the promise that died along with it.

What optimism exists has little, if any, connection to the presidential campaign, which for all its import feels distant and somehow beside the point.

James Rogers worked happily in the mills for 23 years, until he was laid off in 2009. He is studying to be a nurse; a job, true, but one he doesn’t really want. Still, at 44 he has a mortgage, a home deep underwater and two kids to put through college. He figures healthcare offers his best shot at a reliable paycheck.

With the coal mines giving out and the steel business decimated — about 1,500 people work in the few surviving mills, compared with 30,000 at the peak — the medical industry is by far the largest employer in Jefferson County. Young people here tend to escape if they can, leaving the frail and aging behind.

To Rogers, it doesn’t matter who wins the White House in November. He’s a Democrat and supports President Obama but doubts much would change in a second term.

“We elect this guy and all they do is bicker,” said Rogers, still big and burly from his days manning a blast furnace. “Nobody will do this, nobody will do that, it’s all partisan [bull] and what did we do? We lost four years.”

That utter lack of enthusiasm, shot through with anger and cynicism, is shared by many in rural Ohio, a target state for both sides in November. Timothy Bower, 30, runs Mama G’s pizza place, a few miles up the river in Toronto. Rolling and slicing a mound of dough, he described Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, as a “typical empty suit. I don’t believe a word he says.”

Still, Romney has this going for him: He’s not Obama. The president frightens Bower with his expansive healthcare overhaul, his rhetorical shots at the rich and the red ink that has gushed over the last three years. More frightening still, Bowers said, is the prospect of Obama spared future elections and thus free to push even more radical policies.

Hope is looooooooooon gone in Los Angeles due to Obama’s policies.  South Los Angeles has a bleaker jobs picture than they had back in the day when they burned down their own neighborhoods:

Blacks in South L.A. have a bleaker jobs picture than in 1992
Median income in South Los Angeles is lower now than during the 1992 riots, and the unemployment rate has reached even more dire levels.
April 28, 2012|By Ricardo Lopez, Los Angeles Times

 Two decades after the L.A. riots brought pledges of help to rebuild South Los Angeles, the area is worse off in many ways than it was in 1992.

 Median income, when adjusted for inflation, is lower. Many middle-class blacks have fled in search of safer neighborhoods and better schools.

 And the unemployment rate, which was bad at the time of the riots, has reached even more dire levels. In two areas of South Los Angeles — Florence Graham and Westmont — unemployment is almost 24%. Back in 1992, it was 21% in Florence Graham and 17% in Westmont.

 Last summer, thousands of South Los Angeles residents showed up to a job fair that brought out almost 200 employers at Crenshaw Christian Center on Vermont Avenue. The event, organized by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), was seen by some as grandstanding.

 “People were really skeptical,” said Kokayi Kwa Jitahidi, a community organizer with the nonprofit Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. “People thought, ‘Another job fair?'”

Of course, the same people who burned down their lives in 1992 are the same people who burned down their own lives when they voted for Obama in 2008 and will burn vote to burn down their own lives again in 2012.

Well, if Obama ran on “hope and change” again, even his own voters would openly laugh in their Fool-in-Chief’s face.  Hope is gone because Obama has poisoned hope in America.  And the only “change” you’re going to see is the change to open communism and (“hopefully”) a few cents’ worth of “change” in your otherwise empty pockets.

So we’re going to go “Forward” in some nebulous undefined direction now instead.  And if we re-elect Obama, the United States is going to go “forward” into more ruin and depression and implosion than this once unconquerable nation has ever seen.

To make the hypocrisy even MORE hypocritical, Obama is selling “Forward” by pimping the past: Slick Willie Clinton is doing the voice-over for his campaign now.

What’s funniest about that is that the centerpiece of the ad is how Obama was the guy who made the courageous decision to get Obama; and the Obama campaign then asserts that Mitt Romney never would have had the balls to do that.  That ad is vile for ALL KINDS OF REASONS, as I pointed out yesterday.

Beyond all the other issues – such as the fact that Obama didn’t actually make the “courageous decision” at all; Obama delegated the decision to Admiral McRaven so he’d have a scapegoat if something went wrong; such as the fact that the decision to get bin Laden was pretty much a political no-brainer given that had Obama NOT gone in to get bin Laden he very definitely would have lived in infamy as the president who refused to get the man most responsible for the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans – there’s the fact that Slick Willie is a guy who could have prevented the 9/11 attack altogether if he’d just accepted Osama bin Laden’s head when the man was literally offered to Clinton on a silver platter by the Sudanese (and see here for more background on Slick Willie and terrorism).  If Slick Willie had wanted to be honest, he could have at least have said that Obama made the hard decision that Bill Clinton was too much of a gutless coward to make or something to that effect.  The media would have loved him even more, if anything.

“We’re going to go forward … back to Clinton.”  It works in the movies even if it has no relation to real life.  Just like Hollywood liberalism itself, which Obama exemplifies as no president ever has: