Like this:

…thanks to Barack Obama and democrats, the US Unemployment rate is worse today than if they never would have passed their stimulus package. The Obama Administration predicted the unemployment rate with and without President Obama’s stimulus package, the one that is supposed to “create or save” 3 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the red line shows the actual trend since the Stimulus was passed.

It wasn’t stimulus, it was scamulus. And it’s scandalous. Or it would be if we had a press that was a watchdog, rather than a lapdog, when Democrats are in power.

[Afternoon update]

Andy McCarthy noted Austan Goolsby’s dancing around this issue this morning, with two left feet:

I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administrations’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Because they’re economically clueless, and willing to drive the economy deeply into a ditch if it will expand and entrench their political power?

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts from Stephen Green:

Let’s pretend for a moment that, god forbid, you break your arm. And somehow you end up with a team of doctors all trained at Obama University. As you lie there on the table in the ER, one doctor treats your arm by banging on the unbroken one with a ball-peen hammer. The second doctor takes the unusual course of setting your hair on fire. And the third one uses leaches.

Undeterred by your arm’s stubborn refusal to set, soon the doctors start blaming one another. And even though all of them are doing nothing but compounding your injury, none will take any blame. In fact, the louder you scream, the harder they go to work on you.

That, apparently, is what’s going on in the West Wing these days. Our economy is being managed by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard.

It’s Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

[Bumped]

…by stealth:

The editorial hints that these sorts of provisions have been inserted because the bill’s authors are counting on fellow members of Congress not to read what they’re voting on. They undoubtedly remember how easy it was to get Congress to ban incandescent light bulbs by sneaking a provision into the Bush-era energy bill.

Tar. Feathers.

A warning to modern “progressives” to be careful what they wish for:

I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.

Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.

President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.

That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.

The record should give sober pause to anyone who’s mesmerized by the progressive promise.

But they don’t even understand their own intellectual history.

Half full, or half empty?

I was surprised that no administration officials were on the business news channels this morning. That is highly unusual for Jobs Day. Maybe they are afraid of the following sequence of questions:

1. Is the economy recovering? (They would like to answer this one, “Tentatively yes. We’re seeing positive signs, but there’s a long way to go.”)
2. If so, is the economy recovering because of the stimulus? How can you claim that it is if only $40-ish billion has gone out the door so far?
3. Or are the green shoots growing just because it’s springtime? Is the less worse economic news primarily a result of financial institutions raising capital and the passage of time?

In addition to being inefficient and wasteful, the stimulus was poorly timed. By deferring to congressional desires to shovel taxpayer funds to slow-spending infrastructure projects, the administration got a stimulus law that isn’t helping GDP growth now, and won’t have a quantitatively significant effect until 2010. The administration is in a tough spot — if the economy is not healing, then at some point the president will take the blame. If instead the economy is healing before the stimulus takes effect, then maybe the stimulus was unnecessary or even counterproductive.

Gee, it’s not like nobody predicted this months ago when the fool bill was passed without anyone having a chance to read it.

Many on the left predicted (usually without even reading it) that Jonah Goldberg’s book would end up remaindered shortly after publication (I even had such idiotic prophecies in my own comments section here).

Well, the new edition, in paperback (with a new afterword on the Obama phenom), came out today, and it’s #32 at Amazon.

There’s an interview with the author on the new edition over at NRO:

One of the points of Liberal Fascism isn’t to simply say “I know you are but what am I?” to the Left (though that’s definitely in there), it’s to point out that because we’ve made fascism into this cartoon villain we’ve allowed truly fascistic (or if you prefer, statist or progressive) assumptions to suffuse modern life on both the right and the left. I don’t think all of this stuff is evil or even necessarily bad. Rather, I think it advances without us questioning it. I have a chapter in the book called “We’re All Fascists Now.” I wasn’t aiming that purely leftward, but inward. People need to understand that these movements didn’t arise out of a society-wide desire to be villains. It arose out of a desire, a yearning, for progress. I think that’s one of the most basic points I failed to communicate as clearly as I should have.

LOPEZ: Speaking of Liberal Fascism’s endurance, what do you make of events since the book came out, specifically the election of The One?

GOLDBERG: Well, first of all I think I have to thank Barack Obama. Here I wrote a book, working on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee (hardly a harebrained assumption at the time), about how contemporary progressivism is a political religion with its roots in German state theory, sharing a close family resemblance to fascism. Among the anatomical and genetic similarities: cult of unity, sacralization of politics, philosophical pragmatism, corporatism, relativism, Romanticism, hero-worship, collectivism, and so on. And out of nowhere comes a guy who campaigns as a secular messiah, spouting deeply spiritualized political rhetoric, claims the Progressives as his inspiration, and proudly sees himself as carrying out FDR’s mission. I haven’t counted them, but I’d guess I’ve received a couple hundred e-mails from readers telling me how they thought the whole book was written with Obama in mind, even though I finished it before he was even ahead in the Democratic primaries.

It does seem prescient now.

[3 PM Eastern update]

The book has moved up to #30…