Weekly approval rating: 37%

It seems that, despite my best efforts, a pattern has emerged with these rating posts. Since they are naturally gravitating towards Fridays, I'm going to cave in and start making that the day of the post from here on out...Until I forget. Or get busy. Or bored. Or whatever.

So, on to the rating! Let's start things off positive...

#1: Obama comes out against 90% executive tax. During a 60 minutes interview the President was asked if he believed the House Bill (which I discussed in a previous blog) was constitutional. (Side note: Here's an interesting WSJ article about this very question.) His response:

"Well, I think that as a general proposition, you don't wanna be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals. You wanna pass laws that have some broad applicability. And as a general proposition, I think you certainly don't wanna use the tax code to punish people. I think that you've got an pretty egregious situation here that people are understandably upset about. And so let's see if there are ways of doing this that are both legal, that are constitutional, that upholds our basic principles of fairness, but don't hamper us from getting the banking system back on track." (emphasis mine)

While the statement against was not terribly strong, it was definitely against it. Okay, so he did tell Secretary Geithner to take the bonus money out of the next installment of bailouts to go to AIG. Okay, so he still thinks the situation is 'egregious'. Nevertheless, he does realize that in this one instance the tax code should not be used as a bludgeon (belief in the other facets of our punitive tax code notwithstanding). For this tentative position, he will go up 2% in my book. (If the House bill should ever make it to his desk, which I doubt, he stands to gain a bit more if he veto's it.)

#2: Hey you! It's not a GWOT anymore! It appears the administration is trying to move away from the label "Global War on Terror", and instead prefers the term "Overseas Contingency Operation", according to Fox news. Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly in love with GWOT. Really, it wouldn't have mattered to me what they called it (Though OCO doesn't roll off the toungue so well). Its been fine till now, what's the big deal?

But if you have to change it, if you absolutely must move away from that term, can you go with something a bit more manly? "Overseas Contingency" sounds less like "Let's go overseas and blow those bastards up!" and more like "If we happen to be traveling overseas, and we lose our man purse, what's our contingency plan?" Why don't we go ahead and make our mascot a bunch of frolicking kittens while we're at it?

Come on, fellas. Let's at least try to pretend we've got some cajones. He loses 1% for not being able to cowboy up.

So, these two things leave Obama with a net gain of 1%, leaving him at 37% for the week. Not a big news week for the guy, but hey, apparently laying low works well for him.

At this rate, he'll be back at 100% in no time!