Some highlights and lowlights...

Planned Parenthood has the keys to the White House

At least metaphorically speaking, that is.  White House visitor logs reveal that, since Obama became President, the folks from Planned Parenthood have pretty much come and gone as they pleased, having access to top White House staffers throughout 2009.  Their first meeting there?  January 20 - Inauguration Day.  (And who says the White House can't get things done quick when they want to?)

As you can imagine, a lot of the meetings seem to have centered on Obama's proposed health care "reform" bill...and the desire of the Planned Parenthood folks to have abortion included as a covered "service" in any new health care system, (government run, or otherwise). And, for the record, it doesn't seem that the pro-life groups have had that kind of access.

ACORN funder and supporter to run government community service organization

Despite all of the scandals that have surrounded ACORN over the years, (most notably last years multiple instances of offering to aid and abet underage prostitution and tax evasion), it doesn't seem that Democrats are deterred from continuing to cozy up to them.  The latest example comes from recent Senate confirmation of Patrick Covington as the new CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service.  Covington is a former senior official of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a liberal group that granted almost two million dollars to ACORN in recent years, (almost a million of which went to one of the ACORN branches that were featured in last year's investigation.  The Casey Foundation also funded other left-wing all-stars such as the pro-amnesty group La Raza and the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

Birds of a feather...

One year after the Stimulus

It's now been a year since the "stimulus" bill passed, which is prompting a lot of looking around for results.  Part of the liberal rationale for the $787 billion dollar bill was that it was so large that it absolutely HAD to help the economy.  So how's that working out?

When the stimulus bill was passed, the jobless rate was 8.1%.  Today, it's 9.7% (after playing tag with double digits a few times).  Of course, any time anyone wants to bring up the unemployment rate, the folks on the left side of the aisle want to talk about Obama's new yardstick of "jobs saved or created", (a number that's impossible to prove or disprove...and has never been used by any administration in history).  They claim this number to be 2 million. But is doesn't seem that people are buying it.  According to a recent CBS News survey, only 6% of Americans believe the stimulus created a significant number of jobs.  That might have something to do with the fact that, since the stimulus, 49 states saw net job losses.

Also, one year later, our government debt is $1.6 trillion higher than it was when the stimulus was passed...meaning that interest on our debt now consumes a bigger portion of our annual spending that it did a year ago, (just like most of the years before, and all the foreseeable years in the future).  The debt is currently $12.4 trillion...and Congress just passed legislation authorizing the debt to go to over $14 trillion this year.  It's on track to be over $20 trillion by the end of this decade.

Happy Stimulus Anniversary!