Below The Beltway

The latest Gallup poll has more bad news for the President:

PRINCETON, NJ — At 36%, Americans give President Barack Obama his lowest job approval rating yet on his handling of the economy. By contrast, the president’s 51% approval rating on handling foreign affairs is up slightly from last month.

Gallup measured Americans’ ratings of the president on nine issues in its Feb. 1-3 survey. Obama’s rating on foreign affairs is second only to education at the top of the list; these two constitute the only issues on which Obama receives a majority approval rating. Obama’s rating on his handling of the economy is second only to the federal budget deficit as the lowest of the issues measured.

Here are the numbers on all nine issue areas:

Also, the American public continues to be pessimistic on the right track/wrong track question:

All of which explains why President Obama’s approval numbers continue to drop precipitously:

Absent a major economic turnaround, which seems unlikely in the near future, things are only going to get worse for the President.

Someone up there doesn’t like the Washington, D.C. area very much:

WASHINGTON – If this weekend’s record-breaking blizzard hasn’t left you wishing for summer, you probably will be by the end of the week.

Another storm is on the way. This time around, it could bring 10 to 20 inches of snow.

Although it’s sunny and temperatures are in the 30s, don’t expect too much melting as the region digs out from as much as 40 inches of snow.

Thousands of people are still without power and some neighborhoods haven’t been touched by plows. Many school systems have already canceled classes for the next few days.

ABC 7 Meteorologist Chris Naille says don’t expect the snow to go away anytime soon.

“We’re not going to get rid of it completely, not by a long shot before another system impacts us.”

A Winter Storm Warning has been posted from Tuesday afternoon until Wednesday afternoon.

The National Weather Service says accumulations of 10 to 20 inches are possible.

Frak.

Chuck DeVore, who’s running for the GOP nomination out in California to challenge Barbara Boxer, started running this ad recently:

It’s a perfect ad for California and, it appeals to my inner geek.

H/T: Vodkapundit

Well, I could have told you this was coming:

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin did not discount a 2012 presidential campaign on Sunday.

The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee said she would run, “if I believed that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family. Certainly, I would do so.” She said it would be “absurd” to rule it out

The only thing that’s absurd, Sarah, is the idea of you in the White House.

Just as Washington D.C. is starting to dig out from Saturday’s blizzard, there’s the prospect of more on the way:

In the aftermath of the weekend’s massive snowstorm, the region came to grips with the fact that digging out will take days, even as more potentially paralyzing winter weather appeared headed this way by Tuesday.

Snow might be falling again by the time the first snowplow arrives to carve a path into some neighborhoods isolated by about two feet of snow from the storm that ended Saturday. Although the National Weather Service said the next storm had the “potential for more than five inches,” other forecasts indicated that as much as a foot might fall.

“Four inches is a pretty good bet, and eight inches or more isn’t out of the question,” said Dan Stillman, a meteorologist with The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. “It will start out Tuesday afternoon or evening, possibly as a mix of sleet and snow. But after that, it will be mainly snow, with the heaviest overnight into Wednesday morning.”

Ugh. Just, ugh.

One blogger says yes:

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

Strong words, but this much is sure — if Sarah Palin is the face of the Tea Party, then there is no room in it for libertarians.

On the off chance you’ve been, well, on Mars, the D.C. Metro area is getting socked with a storm of historic proportions.

Thanks to a very cool neighbor with a snow blower, our driveway is clear and I’ve been spending the day drinking adult beverages and watching movies.

Back tomorrow.

Massachusetts has a Republican Senator for the first time since Jimmy Carter was President:

The Senate’s 41st Republican was sworn into office Thursday, a few minutes after 5 p.m.

Standing on the Senate floor, Scott Brown, the upstart Massachusetts Republican who won the right to succeed the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, took the oath of office while holding two Bibles owned by his daughters. They couldn’t make it to the ceremony but “were both with me in spirit,” he said.

“Congratulations,” said Vice President Joe Biden, who administered the oath and heartily shook the new senator’s hand. A short while later, Brown hurried to the third floor of the Capitol to convene his first official press conference, where he thanked the people of Massachusetts for sending him to Washington. “I can’t promise I’ll be right in every vote I make. I’m sure I’ll make mistakes from time to time. But I will try to give them my level best every day,” he said.

In a room packed with reporters, Brown plunged right into the middle of debate on Capitol Hill.

The filibuster is back.

Now things get interesting.

I’ll just let the National Weather Service tell the story:

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM EST
SATURDAY…

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM EST
SATURDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE…HEAVY SNOW.

* ACCUMULATIONS…STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 20 TO 30 INCHES.
LOCALIZED AMOUNTS OVER 30 INCHES POSSIBLE AT HIGHER ELEVATIONS.

* TIMING…SNOW WILL MOVE NORTH DURING THE MORNING AND WILL
CONTINUE THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING. CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE
RAPIDLY THIS AFTERNOON…WITH HEAVIEST SNOWFALL OCCURRING FROM
LATE AFTERNOON THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING.

* VISIBILITIES…HEAVY SNOW WILL REDUCE VISIBILITIES TO BELOW ONE-
QUARTER MILE TONIGHT AND SATURDAY MORNING.

* TEMPERATURES…HIGHS WILL RANGE FROM THE LOWER 30S IN THE
PIEDMONT TO THE UPPER 20S IN THE HIGHLANDS. TEMPERATURES WILL
BE IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S TONIGHT AND SATURDAY.

* WINDS…BECOMING NORTHEAST 10 TO 15 MPH LATE TODAY WITH GUSTS
TO 25 MPH TONIGHT AND SATURDAY.

Instructions: CONDITIONS IN THIS STORM ARE EXPECTED TO BE COMPARABLE TO THOSE OF THE STORM OF 19 DECEMBER. PLAN FOR SUBSTANTIAL DISRUPTIONS TO TRAVEL FROM THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH THE WEEKEND. A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TONIGHT.

And, as I look out the window, the snow has started.

This morning’s unemployment report gave us the seemingly good news that the unemployment rate dropped three-tenths of one percent, but when you look behind that number the news still isn’t good:

WASHINGTON — The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent from 10 percent while employers shed 20,000 jobs, the government said Friday.

The rate dropped because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.

The report also included an annual revision to the estimates of total payrolls, which showed there were 930,000 fewer jobs last March than previously estimated. The department also revised down its estimates for April through October of last year, adding another 433,000 job losses.

The November figure was revised higher, however, to show a gain of 64,000 jobs.

All told, the Great Recession has eliminated 8.4 million jobs, the department said. That’s the most of any recession since World War II as a proportion of total payrolls.

So, let’s add it up.

We lost 20,000 jobs in January. That’s the number that matters. The down-tick in the unemployment rate is related to the fact that the BLS included data from a different survey in calculating the rate. How legitimate that number is, and whether it involves something less than honest on their part, I’ll leave for others to determine. What’s important is that we lost 20,000 jobs in January even though the rate went down.

In addition to that, there were revisions to previous jobs reports:

The Labor Department also released an annual revision of U.S. payrolls on Friday, using data that wasn’t initially available. Losses for 2009 alone came to 4.8 million jobs, more than 600,000 more than previously estimated. The revision showed the economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007 — 1.4 million more job losses than initially reported.

The payroll number for December was revised to a net loss of 150,000 jobs. The government had previously indicated that 85,000 jobs were lost in December.

This isn’t over yet, by any means