We’re a couple of hours into the trading day, and it is election day in Massachusetts. Reports continue to come in that there are almost no signs visible for Coakely (except for the ones illegally placed too close to polling places), and little enthusiasm among Coakley supporters. Reports also continue to come in about wild enthusiasm and optimism among Brown supporters.

Lots of news websites are carrying stories about Democrats pointing fingers of blame at one another for the Coakley loss–and the election isn’t over and a single vote has yet to be counted. But the expectation across the board is so completely in favor of a Brown victory that if, by some chance, Coakley does manage to edge Brown out the big story will be of an upset victory by a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, back on Wall Street, he Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 are all up–rather strongly up. That is news for three reasons.

First, because markets in Asia and South America have been going down for the last two days, and Europe has been mixed and unsettled. Second, because the dollar has gone up today, and for the last year, U.S. stock markets have gone down whenever the dollar went up (and up whenever the dollar went down–long story, but investors have basically been profiting from America growing weaker). The third thing that is newsworthy about the U.S. stock market gains today, however, is that the sector leading the advance is…

…get ready for it.

…you know what it is.

…it’s the health care sector!

Yes. On a day when all indications are that Scott Brown is going to be elected the next U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, effectively killing Obamacare, the health care industry is gaining in value and looking stronger, not weaker. What a tremendous surprise that is.

Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money, originally an Obama supporter (who jumped ship when he saw how disastrous the Obama administration policies were for the nation), has predicted that if Brown is elected there will be a very large stock market rally. It looks like the rally is starting today, just based on the expectation of a Brown victory that will reign in Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

For reason’s that I’ve discussed previously, our country is still in serious economic trouble, but I will be a lot more positive about our ability to get through the troubles coming later this spring and summer if Brown wins. I am anxiously waiting for the results tonight.

The message of the markets so far seems clear: What is bad for the Democrats is good for America and Americans. With a Democrat loss seeming expected today, the stock markets are up, the dollar is up, and oil prices are down. That is a simple, direct message that could figure profitably in a lot of campaign ads this election cycle.

Watch what happens tomorrow depending on the outcome of the Massachusetts election and the margin of final victory.

Final polls released the day before the Massachusetts special Senate election show a widening lead for Republican Scott Brown over Democrat State AG Martha Coakley. The latest bad news for President Obama comes from a poll conducted for Politico.com by Insider Advantage:

“I actually think the bottom is falling out,” said InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery, referring to Coakley’s fall in the polls over the last ten days. “I think that this candidate is in freefall. Clearly this race is imploding for her…this is a disaster (for Democrats)”

The Politico poll, based on factoring in the number of registered voters, voters who said that they were likely to vote tomorrow, and the different levels of enthusiasm of voter groups shows Brown with a 9 point lead over the Democrat. Insider Advantage assumed a final breakdown of 20 percent Republicans, 43 percent Democrats and only 37 percent independent voters.

Independent or “Unenrolled” voters make up 51% of eligible voters in Massachusetts. Historically, unemrolled voters show up at the polls in smaller numbers than registered Democrats or Republicans. “It’d be even worse for (Coakley),” said Tower, “if we weighed it towards more independents.”

And that may be the problem. The poll may actually be weighted too much in favor of Coakley. Already, the Insider Advantage survey shows a final vote of 52 percent for Brown, 43 percent for Coakley, 2 percent for Libertarian Party candidate Kennedy and 3 percent still undecided. If that poll is accurate, and those remaining undecideds break evenly for Brown and Coakley, that would propell the Republican candidate to an impressive win with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

The Obama Effect?

The final blow for President Obama, who raised the stakes this weekend by visiting the state himself to campaign for Coakley, is that late polls show that Brown has increased his “take” of Democrats. Polls show that 25 percent of registered Democrats now say they will vote for Brown, up from 20 percent prior to the President’s visit to Massachusetts.

Other polls released in the last three days show similar margins in favor of Brown. American Research Group gives Brown a 7 point lead, 52 to 45 percent. Suffolk University released a final survey of three bellweather Massachusetts counties, showing them all breaking late towards Brown by double-digit margins.

If unenrolled voters show up at the polls in higher numbers than in previous contests–which seems likely given their overwhelming backing of Brown–the win could be even more of a blowout for the Republican candidate. If that is the case, expect Brown to beat Coakley by the higher, double-digit margin suggested by Suffolk.

Intrade now shows Brown favored by nearly a 2 to 1 margin.

Current values are Brown at 65.0, up 12.5, with 66.0 required to buy, and Coakley at 35.0, down 12.9, with 39.2 to buy. Expect Coakley’s people to start burning up Intrade with buys to try to lift her sagging numbers before this is noticed and commented on.

Intrade may be of dubious value as an accurate bellweather, but I think it shows yet another example of people recognizing that a surge just might have become unstoppable. And that is quite a turnaround in the conventional wisdom against a relatively-unknown Republican being elected to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. The last time I looked, Intrade basically had the race trading as a dead-heat. Now, after The Great One campaigned for the Kennedy legacy today and reminded people how important it is for Massachusetts to send Coakley to Washington…the bottom seems to have dropped out of betting on her.

Hmm. The Olympics. The Climate Treaty. The New Jersey governor race. The Virginia governor race. Now Scott Brown is the Intrade favorite to become the first Republican Senator from Massachusetts in the last 40 years — and that comes after the President personally went to campaign on behalf of Brown’s opponent today.

Even if Brown doesn’t win, what kind of mixed-up, crazy, alternate reality has come out of the Obama presidency where the 41st vote against Democrat excess may come from a Massachusetts Republican who campaigned precisely on the promise to be that 41st vote? The high-pitched, turbine-like whine you hear emanating from Boston is the sound of Teddy Kennedy revolving rapidly in his grave.

If I was a Democrat (Lord forbid!), and if this potential new Boston Massacre was the latest in that string of first-term non-accomplishments that I could point to for President Barack Obama after all of the hype about hope and change…I think I’d be somewhat upset.

*Smirk*

It was a big laugh line for you in your Massachusetts rally for Martha Coakley.  Poke fun at the Republican candidate driving a pick-up truck in political ads.  “Anybody can buy a truck!”

Well, no, Mr. President. Everybody can not buy a truck.

Not in your America they can’t.

U.S. auto sales had their sharpest decline in 2009 since World War II. That was the first year of your presidency, and the year when your party, the Democrats, had a controlling majority in the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate. It was supposed to be the year of Hope and Change. Instead, it is the year of broken promises, failures and secret, back-room deals

It happened on your watch. The buck stops with you. And you seem to know as little about the state of truck, and car, sales in America as Martha Coakley knows about the Boston Red Sox.

Two of the Big Three automakers went bankrupt on your watch, Mr. President. The biggest of the big–GM–was for all practical purposes nationalized by your administration. After nationalization, GM saw a sharp drop in their sales and Ford Motor Company moved into the number one automaker spot.

Ford Motor Company, by the way, was the only U.S. automaker that did not accept a bail-out from the government and is still in complete charge of their own business.

Pundits and your government economists had been predicting a sharp rebound for auto sales all last year since your administration kept telling all of us how much the economy was improving. But there was no rebound. Even a 33% increase in Ford’s sales from their 2008 couldn’t drag the rest of the U.S. auto industry up to economic health. And the reason Ford’s sales could not do that is because “anybody” simply does not have enough money to buy a truck. Or a car.

A lot of people don’t even have enough money to buy a bicycle.

Unemployment is at record highs across America–high levels of unemployment that this country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. I’m not talking about that 10.0% figure your administration and the mainstream media likes to keep tossing around, although heaven knows that’s high enough. But when you go back to measuring unemployment the old-fashioned way–the way it was measured before the Clinton administration changed the way the numbers were reported–the Jobless Rate is actually 17.3% right now in Barack Obama’s America.

But let’s face it, the actual number doesn’t really matter. Call it 10% and ignore the long-term unemployed, or call it 17.3% and admit those extra millions of jobless Americans are there, the result is the same. People who are out of work do not buy new trucks, or cars, or homes, or televisions, or…much of anything. And as long as you fail to correct the problems of unemployment in America, the economy will not improve.

The casual way you tossed off that laugh-line about “anybody can buy a truck” in your Massachusetts speech shows how completely out of touch with the average person you really are.

Martha Coakley isn’t in danger of losing the Senate race in Massachusetts because she is a poor candidate with an elitist, entitlement attitude (although she certainly is all that). Martha Coakley is in danger of losing the Senate race to Scott Brown because people everywhere, all across America, are fed up with a government that is out of touch with their problems. A government that isn’t doing anything to help the economy grow and create real jobs for real people. A government that continues to rack up trillion-dollar spending bills that we cannot possibly afford on a laundry-list of liberal pet projects that will raise taxes, deliver nothing but more red tape and more government bureaucratic jobs, and bankrupt the whole country.

To put it even more clearly, the whole country is fed up with out of touch elitists who believe that “anybody can buy a truck,” in an eerie echo of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” if they can’t afford bread remark. Even in true-blue Massachusetts, people have had enough.

I don’t know if Scott Brown is actually going to beat the odds and the Democrat Machine to pull off a a win in Massachusetts this Tuesday. But I do know that even if he does not, he has already come a lot closer to winning than you or any of your cronies ever believed possible. Massachusetts was a “safe” state for you. They were predictably Blue, no matter what. They were a place where you didn’t have to worry, no matter what.

Well, Mr. President, you were wrong. You do have to worry…even in Massachusetts. And the fact that you are in Massachusetts today desperately trying to prop up Martha Coakley and boost her to a come-from-behind win against Scott Brown proves just how wrong you were.

And if it can happen in Massachusetts, then imagine what things are going to be like for Democrats running in this Fall’s elections in Red and Purple states all across this nation.

No, Mr. President, anybody can not buy a truck. Not in Massachusetts. Not in California. Not in Ohio, and certainly not in Michigan. Anybody cannot buy a truck or a car in any state in the country, and the number of people who can buy trucks and cars is shrinking each and every month while you do absolutely nothing about it.

And the fact that you do not know that simple, obvious fact is one of the main reasons that no state in this country is reliably and safely Blue in 2010.

Update Monday night: Swamp Yankee has written a very helpful Massachusetts Election Primer that has information on which cities and counties to watch, how to tell if Coakley is in trouble, how to tell if Coakley is in REAL trouble, etc. If you haven’t checked it out, you might find it both interesting and useful while watching returns come in. I know I’ve printed it out and am going to have a copy with me while watching.

The fact that Nate Silver, political statistician at fivethirtyeight.com, is giving Brown a 74% probability of winning the election has been talked about both here and elsewhere. What isn’t being quoted as much on lib, moderate and mainstream news sites is that Silver also said that his mathematical model “may be too slow to incorporate new information and may understate the magnitude of the trend toward Brown.”

“Coakley’s odds are substantially worse than they appeared to be 24 hours ago,” wrote Silver, “when there were fewer credible polls to evaluate and there appeared to be some chance that her numbers were bottoming out and perhaps reversing.”

Translation: She’s toast, barring some sort of miracle even beyond the usual Democrat dirty election tricks.

This is beginning to look like a victory margin shaping up for Brown far beyond any possibility of spin based on simply “another weak Democrat candidate” and a “fluke.” If Brown’s victory is anywhere near double-digits over Coakley, it will send shockwaves through the House. If it is in the double-digits–especially the mid-double-digits suggested by the Suffolk University bellweather counties polls today, expect the shock waves to cause major realignments and retirements in DC.

Don’t let up. Keep up the effort. Become part of the effort and help make it happen.

Updated Monday afternoon: New Boston Massacre? The latest reports from Massachusetts are that 25% of registered Democrats now say that they will vote for Scott Brown. It is beginning to look like this should be called the New Boston Massacre instead of the “Massachusetts Miracle.”

Update 2: After President Obama visited Massachusetts and campaigned on behalf of Martha Coakley, her poll numbers are in freefall! Scott Brown’s lead has widened in all but one poll (the lone outlier is a poll commissioned by DailyKos) from a 4-5 point lead up to a 7-10 point lead.

And Suffolk University’s bellweather poll of key Massachusetts counties is showing a mid double-digit lead of about 15 points for Brown over Coakley. Her support seems to have completely collapsed, even among Democrats.

Update 1: While Obama was talking about how “anybody can buy a truck” on the stump with Marcia…ah…Martha Coakley, the dean of political handicappers, Charlie Cook, sent out an unusual, special weekend update to his subscribers in which he said, “This past Thursday, Jan. 14, The Cook Political Report moved the open Massachusetts Senate seat rating from lean Democrat to toss-up, having moved it from solid Democrat to lean Democratic on Jan. 7…Given the vagaries of voter turnout, particularly in lower participation level special elections, this race could still go either way, but we put a finger on the scale for Brown.”

To put that in clearer words, Cook doesn’t want to say that he is moving the race from “toss up” to “leans Republican,” but he also doesn’t want to look like he misread the race, and it has now moved to “leans Republican.” Also, it quite obviously now looks likely enough that Brown will win that Cook had to send out a special announcement today.

The DOOMwatch continues.

Charlie Cook, writing in the National Journal has an opinion piece scheduled for tomorrow that basically writes the obituary for the Obama agenda, and the Democrat majorities in the House and the Senate. Cook title the piece, “Colossal Miscalculation on Health Care” and says some very interesting things about where Obama, Pelosi and Reid went wrong. He talks about how little can be done by Democrats to correct their mistakes now.

The latest unemployment and housing numbers underscore the folly of their decision to pay so much attention to health care and climate change instead of focusing on the economy “like a laser beam,” as President Clinton pledged to do during his 1992 campaign….

Last week’s disappointing December unemployment report was the final blow in what was already a bad week for Democrats. One of the most sobering findings in the report was that if 661,000 Americans had not given up even looking for work that month, the unemployment rate would have moved up rather than holding steady at a horrific 10 percent.

Yes. It would have gone to 10.4% to be precise.

It’s the economy, stupid. Remember the mantra of the Clinton campaign? Well, Barry, Nancy and Harry sure haven’t remembered it. And it is going to spell disaster for Democratic Party politicians up for election in 2010–and according to Cook, probably in 2012 as well. More below.

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Greg Sargent of The Plum Line is reporting that Martha Coakley, in a private conference call this afternoon with top Democrat donors, said that the surge of Scott Brown to a dead-heat with her for the Senate seat in Massachusetts “frightened” her. Sargent had an opportunity to listen in on the call and was reporting based on what he himself heard the candidate say about her surprisingly tough battle for the seat in true-blue Kennedy country.

Coakley went on to say that the main issues she felt were responsible for Brown’s popularity with voters were terrorism, and unemployment. What a surprise that voters would be concerned about two practical, visible issues with immediate consequences for our country that are also the most obvious and visible failures of President Obama and the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress.

Sargent also reports that during the phone call, Coakley begged listening large donors to “max out” and send the limit of $2400 per donor to fund a last-minute advertising blitz to try to overcome Brown’s growing popularity with voters. She said that she needed $400,000 for additional Television spots, $325,000 for mailings to get out the vote, and $80,000 to fund robocalls.

Scott Brown, meanwhile, raised over $1,000,000 in one day, in small donations from countless people, via an effective word-of-mouth “money-bomb” campaign yesterday. This is allowing him to immediately respond to the last-minute, negative ads Coakley is running.

DNC Chair Tim Kaine reportedly told donors that Democratic leadership in Washington is “cautiously optimistic” about the Massachusetts Senate race, but urged them to give the limit as well. This runs counter to earlier reports that Democrat internal polling shows Coakley ahead by a comfortable double-digit margin. Teagan Goddard, meanwhile, reports that new Democrat internal polling shows Coakley’s lead has shrunk to about 5 points and is dwindling fast. And the new Rasmussen Reports survey taken last night shows Coakley with a razor-think 2 point lead.

Even if Brown loses, it looks like he is going to come close enough to winning to make a lot of Democrats up for election this Fall consider their votes this year very, very carefully.

There are currently 33,434,730 people unemployed in America. That figure comes from Bureau of Labor Department statistics, and is much higher than the 15 million unemployed officially reported by the Obama administration. The number of people in America who are unemployed but not officially counted as unemployed by the government is about equal to the entire population of the state of Massachusetts…plus the state populations of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York!

To put that into terms a Democrat can understand, that means that the true number of unemployed people in America is more than 55 times the population of Washington, DC, inside the Beltway.

The true unemployment numbers — 33,434,730 people out of work in America, or a 21.9% jobless rate in December of 2009 — are shown in this graph, courtesy of economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com

The government may try to hide the fact that there are a lot more unemployed people than they want to admit, but they cannot hide from the votes of those unemployed people, their families and their friends when elections roll around. Nor can they hide from the consequences of Democrats Gone Wild® in Washington as they over-spend, over-tax and have misplaced priorities that hurt rather than help the average American. And that is one of the many reasons that Scott Brown is so close to winning the Massachusetts Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy.

This chart above does not show a pretty picture of life in Obama’s America. And it is going to get worse. The top, blue line is the one to look at. The bottom, red line is the one the Democrats would prefer to keep people focused on. The difference between those two lines shows millions of American workers who are unemployed, but are not counted as unemployed by the government for various excuses and rationalizations. And those millions of unreported and forgotten unemployed Americans are one of reasons that approval ratings of Barack Obama and the Democrats are in free-fall despite efforts to say that the sky is not falling.

The fact that people around the country are angry at Washington is not a surprise to anyone who witnessed the Tea Parties. Many people, however, may be surprised that the government is deliberately under-reporting the actual number of unemployed. But the most surprising thing about the large difference between real unemployment at 22% and the “fudged” false rate of 10% is that one of the chief critics of this kind of government under-reporting is now a top economic advisor to President Barack Obama. But more on that below.

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It’s that time again. This morning, the Department of Labor released the official statistics for U.S. unemployment last month. And just as the Obama administration promised, things are getting better. Right?

Wrong.

Optimists were looking for the first signs of net job creation last month since 2007. At worst, they were hoping for the jobless rate to hold steady at 10.0%. And the worst is what is what they got.

The official unemployment rate for December remained unchanged at 10.0% at a time when the Obama administration really, really could have used some good news to offset all the bad news and screw-ups lately. No progress on the job front. Zip. The streak of monthly job losses is extended one more month to now total 24, with no sign things are getting better. And the only public event on the President’s calendar today is an afternoon statement to the press on joblessness.

It will be interesting to see if he again says, “the buck stops here.” For all too many Americans, the buck is stopping before it gets into their hands to pay the bills, buy food and pay for other necessities.

But before the spin hits the fan, here’s the really bleak news that you won’t hear the President talking about this afternoon. The real unemployment rate–the rate as it used to be calculated before the Clinton administration decided in 1994 that it all depended on what “unemployed” meant, actually crept upwards in December.

The more accurate unemployment rate, also released this morning by the Department of Labor, rose from 17.2% in November to 17.3% in December. And that is at a time when seasonal, temporary jobs for the holidays should have taken a lot of people off the unemployment rolls at least temporarily.

As I’ve reported before, the “official” unemployment rate bears about as much relationship to the true number of people who are unemployed in America as the Climate Research Unit’s fraudulent “global warming” data bears to the real average temperature people have been experiencing the last ten years. The unemployment numbers given out by the government are less than 50% of the actual number of people who are unemployed in this country.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a chart, courtesy of John Williams, of American Business Analytics and Research and Shadowstats.com and reproduced with his permission, that shows how bad unemployment in the land of Hope and Change® really is:

The lowest, red line on the chart is the official number the administration and the mainstream media will be talking about today. It is called the U3 rate. The middle, gray line is also an official government number–but one that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would just as soon you never knew about. That is the U6 rate. First, let me explain the difference between these two official government figures and why nearly everything you hear today on the news about unemployment is basically going to be a lie. I’ll talk about the highest, blue line afterward.

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The scene: The Oval Office. ENTER White House chief of staff RAHM EMANUEL, looking distracted and somewhat worried.

BARACK OBAMA, The Boy President®, is seated at his desk. He looks up, puts down the latest Golf Digest after looking at his picture on the cover one more time, and glances quizzically at his aide.

BO: “What’s up, Rahm?”

RE: “Mr. President, we have another problem involving…child pornography.”

BO: “Good Lord, Rahm. This time, he’s going to have to go. Tell him I want his resignation letter…”

RE: “No, no, Mr. President! It’s not about Kevin Jennings. It’s something else.”

BO: “Somebody else? Do you know what’s going to happen when Limbaugh gets wind of this? Fire whoever it is and back-date the resignation!”

RE: “Ah…we really can’t do that, Mr. President. Ah…I don’t really know how to put this, but…technically, Barry, you are the one in violation of the child pornography laws.”

Fade quickly to gray (about as quickly as President Obama’s approval ratings are fading…)

I can’t guarantee that is even a semi-accurate re-enactment of the conversation being held today or tomorrow at the White House. I can’t guarantee the conversation will take place in the Oval Office–Rahm might have to walk over to the White House Basketball Court to talk to the Center in Chief. Heck, I can’t even guarantee that Barack Obama will be told about this at all, since I don’t know how much “in the loop” he really is on important decisions.

I can, however, guarantee that what I’m relating is going to have to be talked about by the people in charge of the current administration. And there is nothing funny or light-hearted about the actual situation.

As The Guardian points out in an article published today, the new high-tech full body scanners that appear to be a cornerstone of the U.S. defense against Al Qaeda airplane bombings violate existing child pornography laws. The images are too graphic. I would include a sample image here, but I’m pretty sure that it would violate Redstate site policies.

The issue has come to a head in the U.K., where testing of the full-body scanners (called “virtual strip-searching” by the newspapers there), could only proceed after under-18′s were explicitly excluded from the tests. Contrary to early reports in the media, the scan images are so detailed that “genitalia and breast enlargements” are visible. Celebrities are concerned that scanner images of them will be leaked onto the internet–but the major problem is that the images produced in full-body scans are legally “indecent images or “pseudo-images” of children.”

The obvious solution to this problem is to exempt children under 18 from being scanned, which is precisely what the U.K. government has done. However, that really isn’t a solution to the problem. It is a potentially deadly loophole.

Does anyone seriously believe that terrorists who have convinced pregnant women to become suicide bombers would not focus their efforts on convincing children under 18 to carry bombs if a loophole exists to exempt them? Can anyone seriously believe that, in at least a few cases, they would be successful in brainwashing children into becoming living bombs?

What is the alternative? Forbid children under 18 from flying into Western countries? Search each child in an actual strip-search? And after years of politically-correct precedents involving profiling, can we now say that children of a certain ethic background, race, religion or national origin must be strip-searched while others are immune to something that could be potentially traumatic for a child?

The full-body scanner technology seems to be obsolete and ineffective even before it is fully deployed. Where now is the line of defense against in-flight bombings? Where is the safety Americans have a right to expect from their government?

All we are sacrificing for an ineffective, invasive technology is our time waiting at airports, millions of dollars in development money–by government standards “chump change,” and the tattered remnants of our dignity. I’m sure that counterterrorism czar John Brennan will assure us soon that the full-body scanners will work flawlessly to provide us with a comforting illusion of safety and security, except for those days that they do not work, of course.

But the ultimate irony of this story is that the scanners which violate Western child pornography laws and may therefore be for all practical purposes unusable do not really work anyway. Tests show that the scanners would not have revealed the explosives the Underwear Bomber had concealed in his briefs.

So the question that every American has to ask now is: Do you feel safer in 2010 than you did in 2008?

I don’t.

Now that Senator Reid apparently has the 60 votes he needs for cloture, and it looks certain that the “health care reform” (sic) Bill will pass the Senate, there is an interesting development that is passing almost unnoticed. And it may make the passage of the Bill completely moot in the long-run.

The Chinese government yesterday made what may be the most definitive and important votes on ObamaCare…and also on a second “stimulus” package, U.S. economic recovery, job creation, and the future of America itself. The implications of what the Chinese officially said and did yesterday are going to be felt throughout 2010 and many years beyond.

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UPDATED: President Obama met China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao, on the Asian Apology Tour. As I predicted, President Obama bowed again, this time in a country in which bowing is considered an outdated custom indicative of a servile position at odds with the “social equality” that is part of the Communist philosophy.

At a “Town Hall” style meeting the Chinese government set up for him in Shanghai, President Obama also bowed to Chinese Presiden Hu Jintao (watch at about the 1.0 minute mark for several small bows and one deep one):

While Obama’s behavior before Asian heads of state isn’t headline news here in the United States — and is being excused as “simple courtesy” by Democrat political hacks — Daily Mail in the UK headline read: Obama branded “Groveller-in-Chief” after deep bow to Emperor son of Japanese ruler who authorized Pearl Harbour attack.

So why would the President of the United States bow to the leaders of a country in which bowing is considered a breach of their political and social philosophy, etiquette and protocol? Well, one Chinese writer tweeted that “he acts like someone that never meet an asia person & is eagar to please. ignorant!…however, I believe that it is more a matter of common cents…and falling dollars.

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While I fully agree with Erick Erickson’s post that that the health care bill must not be just about abortion, I, and a lot of other Americans, are now on the horns of a true moral dilemma. The Democrats seem to be making publically-funded abortion another litmus test for their health care legislation, along with the “public option.”

And that means that if the current Senate bill passes, every taxpayer is going to be required by law to pay for abortions to be performed. No matter what your personal feelings, moral values and religious principles are, your money will be going to fund countless numbers of abortions. And if you don’t participate in the system, as Moe Lane pointed out, with video showing Nancy Pelosi stating it clearly, then you will go to jail.

This is becoming a problem of Biblical proportions.

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President Obama bowed to the Emperor of Japan on his current tour of Asia. It was a full bow, with his upper body almost at right angles to the ground. Here’s the video:

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the President of the United States bowing to the Emperor of Japan:

…the image…was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan. Canadians still bow to England’s Queen; so do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about?

…But the “thou need not bow” commandment from the State Department’s protocol office maintained a constancy of more than 200 years. Administration officials scurried to insist that the eager-to-please President had not really done the unthinkable.

From this point on, things just get worse for “the first Pacific President. Much worse.

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Doug Hoffman conceded defeat on election night after being told that he was down by more than 5,300 votes with 93% of the vote counted, and that he had nearly lost his own stronghold of Oswego County. His concession allowed Bill Owens to be sworn in as Representative of the 23rd District in New York–and after breaking four of his campaign promises within the first hour of being sworn in, Bill Owens gave Nancy Pelosi the vote she needed to pass her Health Care Bill the following day.

The problem is…Bill Owens might not have won the 23rd District Congressional seat after all.

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What if the Fort Hood shooter had been named Major Joseph Robert Lee, instead of Major Nidal Malik Hasan?

What if he had been a Caucasian born in Selma, Alabama, instead of an Arab-American born in Arlington, Virginia?

What if knowledge of his family roots had caused Joseph Robert Lee to list his nationality as Confederate States of America rather than “United States of America,” the way that Nidal Malik Hasan–born in Arlington, Virginia of immigrant parents, listed his nationality as “Palestinian” on a document he filled out at the Silver Springs, Maryland mosque he attended?

What if he had signed himself as JoeBob while posting on websites where he advocated violent overthrow of the U.S. government if there was an attempt to disarm citizens in violation of the Second Amendment, instead of signing himself NidalMalik in online postings praising suicide bombers as heroes making a sacrifice “for a noble cause,” and suggesting people “strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square?”

What if it had been Joe Bob who attended the same Evangelical Christian church at the same time as Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, instead of Nidal Malik attending the same mosque at the same time as Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, two of the September 11 hijacker terrorists?

What if it had been Joseph Robert Lee proselytizing colleagues and patients while on the job, inviting them to become Christians, instead of Nidal Malik Hasan proselytizing patients and co-workers and inviting them to become Muslims? What if Joseph had passed out Bibles the way Nidal passed out Qu’rans? Would being placed on probation and warned not to do it again have been enough in that case? Or would it have ended his career?

Would Joseph Robert Lee have been dismissed by the FBI as harmless and promoted by Army brass from Captain to Major after exchanging about a dozen emails with a Christian preacher who had ties to the Tea Party movement or the Minuteman Project? Captain Nidal Malik Hasan was cleared by the FBI and promoted to Major after provably exchanging 10 to 20 emails with radical Muslim cleric Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a known supporter of armed jihad against the United States, and also after Captain Hasan tried to contact several other Al-Qaeda terrorist leaders.

What if Joseph Robert Lee had been a minor member of President Bush’s transition team when he took office in 2001, prior to the 9-11 tragedy, identical to the way Nidal Malik Hasan was a minor member of President Obama’s transition team (see page 32 of the linked, official pdf) when he took office in 2009? Would that have been headlined on the evening news and in newspapers across the nation?

How much of a difference do you think it would have made if the shooter had been an Evangelical Christian who committed this act of treason — the first time in United States history that a commissioned officer in our Armed Forces turned a gun on fellow soldiers and murdered them in premeditated, cold blood? Especially if it had not been the first time in recent years that a member of this particular religious faith had used the teachings of that faith and passages from a book the faith considered to be holy as justification for killing fellow American soldiers? Do you think it would have been reported differently by the Mainstream Media?

How many calls of “don’t rush to judgement” would have been heard from President Obama if the shooter had been Evangelical Christian Joseph Robert Lee?

How many politicians and media pundits would have leaped to defend Evangelical Christians and insisted that they are not all tarred with the same brush because of the actions of the murderer?

How many would have worried about a “backlash” against Christians, or the danger of stereotyping and profiling white southern Americans?

How many questions would have been raised about the judgment, intelligence and fitness to serve of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces if this tragedy had happened while George Bush was president? How many allegations would have flown about Republican failures to make Americans safe if the GOP had still controlled both the House and the Senate?

Of course, the outcry that it is America’s love of guns that caused the deaths would have been a lot louder, because that’s the one thing you can count on as a politically-correct, enlightened, knee-jerk response no matter what the shooter’s name would have been. But the response from the Democrat President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader would certainly have been a lot quicker, a lot louder, and a lot less cautious and concerned about stirring up bigotry and feeding negative stereotypes if the shooter had been named Joseph Robert Lee.

And I believe that I can say this quite positively based on other recent events that showed much more of a “rush to judgement” feeding bigotry and negative stereotypes. And in this I am completely agreeing with Rush Limbaugh, who said it earlier today.

But the real question the Fort Hood murders raises is how long we are going to continue to allow “political correctness” to place American lives in jeopardy?

Major Nidal Malik Hasan himself warned of the dangers of Muslims in the U.S. Armed Forces, in a presentation he gave while still at Walter Reed titled, The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military. He warned that for pious Muslims, He ended that presentation with a statement that is even more chilling in hindsight than it first appeared: “We love death more then [sic] you love life!”

And the most chilling thing about that statement, ending a presentation in which Hasan, among other points, justified armed overthrow of a non-Islamic government such as our own and establishment of a world-wide Islamic state under strict Shari’a law, is that it is a view shared by 65.2% of mainstream, non-extremist Muslims throughout the world, according to a 2007 survey conducted by the University of Maryland and World Public Opinion.

But in the face of statistics, and statements to the contrary from radical Muslims, the liberal media prefers to view Hasan’s actions as just another example of a solider — trained to violence — “cracking” under stress and reacting violently as he was trained to do. Basically, the same response we heard President Obama give today. The same response that will no doubt become the official verdict on this couldn’t-possibly-be-a-terrorist-act “incident” unless men and women of principle within the military and intelligence communities make sure that the full truth is told.

How very different things might have been if the shooter’s name had been Major Joseph Robert Lee.

And how much simpler for the current Powers That Be.

Dave Camp, ranking Republican member of the House Ways and Means Committee, today released a letter from the Joint Committee on Taxation revealing that the Pelosi health care bill currently being forced to the floor for a vote (H.R. 3962) includes a penalty of imprisonment of up to five years, and fines of up to $250,000 for failure to maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage.

And what exactly is acceptable health care coverage in Nancy Peolosi’s Brave New America?

Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the lowest cost for a non-group family insurance plan under the provisions of Speaker Pelosi’s bill would be $15,000 a year in 2016. The bill requires that coverage include all individuals (or married couples, if filing jointly) at a rate of 2.5% of their income. It also requires a similar level of coverage for each of their children.

The Senate version of the bill removed the jail-time penalty, but keeps in the fines. Speaker Pelosisi obviously feels that more coercion than simply a quarter of a million dollar fine is necessary.

If you were wondering if it is important to be in Washington tomorrow to be part of the Second Health Care “House Call” on Washington…now you have another reason why it is important. And if you needed any more reasons to call the Representatives most likely to need reminders of why they should vote NO on the Speaker’s bloated, health care budget-buster…now you have 15,000 more reasons.

And if your Congressional Representative is on this list of people leaning no, wavering or having said they will vote no, then this weekend is a really good time to call them personally and tell them exactly how closely you are watching what they are going to do about Speaker Pelosi’s bill.

I’m in Asheville, North Carolina. Heath Shuler is my Representative. He’s been hearing a lot from me lately about how we are counting on the Blue Dogs keeping their word. And hearing what is going to happen to them in the next election if they don’t keep their word and vote No.

Go thou and do likewise. They need to hear from us enough to shut down their phone lines.

The official U.S. unemployment rate hit 10.2% in October, the highest since the recession of 1983. But bad as that is, at least we are nowhere near the unemployment levels of the Great Depression, right?

Wrong.

That official 10.2% figure really doesn’t tell the truth about unemployment in America. The real unemployment figure is more than twice the official 10.2% rate–a lot higher than you know, even if you already know about some of the number-jumbling that is normal in “official” government statistics. The bad news, and the full facts, paint a bleak picture of the months ahead.

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If you are a Republican strategist, Party leader or candidate for election in 2010, looking at the multitude of current polls is probably giving you lots of reasons to feel good. Republicans are generally leading or at least heavily competitive in generic Congressional ballots. That hasn’t happened in several years. For the first time in a long time, polls show that Republicans are trusted by equal or greater numbers of Americans to handle key issues like Education and Health Care that have been Democrat strongholds.

At the same time, support for the Democrat-led House and Senate has fallen to all-time lows. Support for massive government programs like Obamacare and ongoing, nationalizing bailouts is below 50% and dropping farther every day. In addition, poll numbers indicate, at this point, that the GOP will capture current Democrat-held governorships in Virginia, and in New Jersey. Things, for the GOP, appear to be looking quite good.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. If you are an elected Republican official, party leader or strategist, and you aren’t seriously worried right now about your prospects for 2010, 2012, and beyond…you should be. Let me tell you why.

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The Dow has closed about 350 points as I write this, and if the 777 point drop on Monday is “blamed” on the House rejecting the Pelosi Bailout Bill, then we have to blame this drop on the Senate passing their version of a Bailout last night. Fair is fair. When you factor in the Dow gain on Tuesday, the two net drops are close to one another. The excuses are starting to fly, and the blame is beginning to be slung about, and everybody is starting to feel sort of…depressed.

Which brings me to my topic.

The D-word has passed the lips of many people over the last couple of weeks. That was unthinkable even a month or two ago, and would have had the speaker labelled as a kook and marginalized as an alarmist. But now, we routinely hear people warning that another Depression-not-recession is looming and can only be staved off by swift, decisive action by the Government.

Take a deep breath for a moment, let the panic subside, and let’s consider what exactly causes a Depression and how we can avoid one before it happens, or get out of one after it starts. That is, after all, what we are talking about. It is what everyone wants. And it should be a part of any discussion of the crisis we are facing.

Now, discussions of economics and economic theory have a tendency to make people’s eyes glaze over, so I am going to keep this direct, specific and cut through some of the tech-speak. This is a basic pocketbook issue for all of us, and I firmly believe that you don’t have to have a doctoral degree to understand it. A lot of it is common sense, but there is not a lot of common sense demonstrated in politics and economics usually. As a sort of guide and outline for discussion–and as a fairly impartial assessment of current thinking–I am going to be quoting passages from the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression. It isn’t perfect, but it is in this case quite useful.

So, from the Wikipedia article on The Great Depression:

“Recession cycles are thought to be a normal part of living in a world of inexact balances between supply and demand. What turns a usually mild and short recession or “ordinary” business cycle into a great depression is a subject of debate and concern. Scholars have not agreed on the exact causes and their relative importance.”

We begin, therefore, with an admission that there is no consensus of opinion among economic and financial experts on exactly what causes a Depression. Which of course means that there is no consensus of opinion on how to prevent one, or what to do to get us out of one. And that raises big questions about the need for speed this past week in passing legislation most Senators and House members didn’t have a chance to read, and wouldn’t have understood even if they had read it since it was long on money and short on explanations. And things get even more amusing, confusing and worrisome after the jump…

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The few–the very few–who voted against the Bailout tonight. 15 Republicans, 9 Democrats and 1 Independent.

Allard (R)
Barasso (R)
Brownback (R)
Bunning (R)
Cochran (R)
Crapo (R)
DeMint (R)
Dole (R)
Enzi (R)
Inhofe (R)
Roberts (R)
Sessions (R)
Shelby (R)
Vitter (R)
Wicker (R)

Sanders (I)

Cantwell (D)
Dorgan (D)
Feingold (D)
Johnson (D)
Landrieu (D)
Nelson (FL) (D)
Stabenow (D)
Tester (D)
Wyden (D)

As gamecock has written elsewhere, let’s defeat it in the House….