This'n'That; October 28th[Rochester;DrSowell;Polls]

Is Rochester, N.Y., A Rathole? There was a time when "The Big Three" employed two-thirds of the available workers in a five county area. No, NOT Ford and those two failing car companies that obama bought; Eastman Kodak, Xerox and Bauch&Lomb!! As recently as 2000, Kodak's local employees numbered 24,000; the 2008 number is 8,500. Employment with Kodak, Xerox and B&L currently are practically non-existent compared to earlier decades.

• The state's "tax and fee" policies have driven out or stifled, local small business development-the backbone of any economy!!
• The Monroe County budget is 79% controlled by state mandated payments, i.e., welfare and Medicaid payments.
• The Rochester City government invests in one fiasco after another, i.e., the "High Falls" district and the "Fast Ferry" debacles, just to name a couple!!
• The Rochester City School Board is populated with the most liberal of eligible candidates; some of whom are not above calling fellow board members "Mother F**kers" when they disagree with her [Cynthia Elliot's] desires!!
• Rarely has a day gone by that the local rag-The DemocRAT and Chronicle, headlined that another shooting occurred somewhere in the city!! Sometimes, we even have four or five shootings in an evening!! Slowly the welfare rolls are trimming themselves down to a manageable number.

I gotta tell ya, I'd be outta here if it weren't for health insurance coverage; NO-I don't support FluffyCare!! Government By Czar?? [I found this recent column on the internet. I've long admired Thomas Sowell's conservative thoughts and ways. Here's a likeness of Doctor Sowell........ ] Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President,......

• ...could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent? Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio?
• That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish? Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

• How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough. How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

• How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "God damn America!"

Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted.

Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children. Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely.

• Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House? Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government-- people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like.

Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year:

• Each bill more than a thousand pages long;
• Acted upon too quickly for either of them to be read, much less discussed.

That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation. Polls From "All Over The Map" There's lottsa folks doing polls, most notably Rasmussen, Gallup, Washington Post, CNN and Zogby. Here's some results: The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that

• 30% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that obama is performing his role as President.
• Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11.
• Eighty-five percent (85%) trust their own judgment more than reporters.
• 53% say the average reporter is more liberal than they are.
• Sixteen percent (16%) say reporters are more conservative.

Forty-seven percent (47%) of baseball fans expect the Yankees to win the World Series this year while 32% pick the Phillies.

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From Gallup:

The number of months in office before a drop below 50% in approval rating:

• Harry Truman 11
• Dwight Eisenhower 63
• John Kennedy JFK never had an approval rating below 50%
• Lyndon Johnson 29
• Richard Nixon 25
• Gerald Ford 03
• James Carter 13
• Ronald Reagan 10
• G.H.W. Bush[41] 36
• "Slick-Willie" 04
• G.W. Bush [43] 37

[NOTE: John Kennedy never had a sub-50% approval rating in his less-than-three-year term, though his ratings were on a downward trend at the time of his untimely death.]

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From Quinnipiac Polls:

For U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, the news is better but still not great.That's how Quinnipiac University poll director Doug Schwartz assessed the senator's latest poll numbers, released Thursday. Dodd continued to trail his most widely known Republican challenger, former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, but

• his disapproval rating fell to 49 percent, 3 percentage points below a July poll's results and well below a high of 58 percent in April.
• Dodd continues to lag below the 50 percent mark on three key measures of public support — job approval, overall honesty and trustworthiness,
• Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said that Dodd was not "honest and trustworthy,"

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From "Neighborhood Research [New York District 23]:"

• Conservative; Doug HOFFMAN 34%
• democRAT; Bill OWENS 29%
• republicRAT; DeDe SCOZZAFAVA 14%

Til Nex'Time....