links for 2010-08-24

After months of withering job losses and weak economic growth, summer was going to be the season of recovery, the Obama administration heralded in June.

Thousands of infrastructure and construction projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were to come on-line during June, July and August, helping to "create jobs for American workers and economic growth for businesses, large and small."

The White House dubbed it "Recovery Summer" and President Obama declared the economy had begun "growing at a good clip." Vice President Joe Biden predicted weeks earlier that creation of 250,000 to 500,000 new jobs a month could soon be on the horizon.

But with summer quickly coming to an end, those jobs gains and a robust economic recovery have not yet materialized, leaving Democrats on the verge of a fall election campaign in which Republicans are poised to make them eat their words.
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Obama and the Dems made wrong policy choices and now will pay at the polls.

The good news for President Obama is that this week is likely to be better for him than last week was. The bad news? Last week! A week so bad, as we observed Friday, that the president ended it by clinging to his religion as the media revived the stupid-people-think-he's-Muslim trope. This, of course, was the result of his decision at the end of the previous week to weigh in on, then run away from, the debate over the Ground Zero mosque.

All week, the professional left hurled accusations of bigotry at the two-thirds or so of Americans who take offense at the idea of a fancy new mosque near the site of the 9/11 attack. But one familiar claim was notable for its absence. Hardly anybody asserted that the growing anti-Obama sentiment was the result of racism against a black president.
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Sentiment towards Obama certainly has changed quickly.

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