How many of y’all out there are negotiating with the people you pay your monthly bills to, trying desperately to keep your head above water?  Staying home instead of going out to eat or to a movie?  Praying that you have enough to pay your mortgage/rent?  Sacrifice is something that average Americans are having to practice everyday in order to survive. President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) spoke about it in his inaugural address to the nation, and he’s rubbed our noses in it several times while lecturing the country on how to get back on its feet.

But while we little people are chin deep in the morass of this horrible economy, the Obamas don’t seem to sacrificing a cotton-pickin’ thing.  While we’re all eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, the First Lady is spending the next few days in a five-star hotel on the chic Costa del Sol in southern Spain with 40 of her “closest friends.” According to CNN, Michelle (ma belle) and her posse are expected to occupy 60 to 70 rooms, more than a third of the lodgings at the 160-room resort. Isn’t that just lovely?

Reports are calling the accommodations at Michelle’s vay-cay par-tay, the Hotel Villa Padierna in Marbella, “luxurious,” “posh” and “a millionaires’ playground.”   How much per room?  Up to a staggering $2,500. Method of transportation? Air Force Two.

I don’t care what the Obamas do with their money.  What they do with ours is another thing entirely.   Transporting and housing the estimated 70 Secret Service agents who have to go with her will cost the taxpayers a pretty penny.

Maybe the word sacrifice does not mean the same thing to the Obamas as it does to us peons.  Remember when Michelle Obama accompanied her husband to Copenhagen along with best buddy Oprah Winfrey?   At the time, she said the trip, an ultimately unsuccessful bid to bring the Olympics to Chicago was:

As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the President to come for these few days, so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.

A tax-payer funded trip to Denmark is a sacrifice?  I do not think that you know what this word means.

The way the Obamas roll is the most transparent thing about their administration.  Between lavish trips to Spain to reportedly flying Bo, the President’s Portuguese water dog, on a separate aircraft to vacation with them in Maine, to a date night in New York City that perhaps cost nearly $100,000, they seem to be content to be eating Wagyu beef and arugula while the American public is eating nibs crackers and vienna sausages.

This does not help the PR effort to paint the Obamas as “just your average American family”.  Earlier this month, Obama told ABC that he and Michelle are:

…not that far removed from what most Americans are going through.  It was just a few years ago that we had high credit card balances, we had two kids, thinking about college. We had our own retirement accounts, wondering if we were going to be able to get enough assets in there.

And then George Soros, anonymous foreign donors, and your sycophants within the Chicago Democratic machine came along, and here you are..worth millions.

Meanwhile, among us members of the Proletariat…

Initial requests for jobless benefits rose last week to their highest level since April, proving that “Recovery Summer” was nothing but a big, fat lie.

The Labor Department reported today that new claims for unemployment insurance rose by 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 479,000. Claims have risen twice in the past three weeks.

Home sales and construction have slumped after a popular homebuyers’ tax credit expired on April 30. The Porkulus bill has been a total bust.

Apologetic analysts said seasonal factors that began in early July are still skewing the numbers and must be considered before reading too much in to the report.

Pay no attention to the reality around you.

The Labor Department was expecting claims to go down last week as many auto companies usually shut their plants temporarily in early July. Claims were expected to rise during the shutdown and then fall. But this year General Motors and other manufacturers skipped the shutdowns, so claims didn’t fall last week as much as expected.

The seasonally adjusted four-week average of claims, which smooths out volatility, rose by 5,250 to 458,500.

Applications for unemployment insurance have fluctuated between 450,000 and 480,000 all year, after declining steadily last year from a peak of 651,000 in March 2009. If America was experiencing a health economy, claims would fall below 400,000.

The total number of laid-off workers continuing to claim unemployment benefits fell by 34,000 to 4.54 million. That doesn’t include an additional 3.9 million people receiving extended unemployment benefits paid for by the federal government.  Nor does it include those who do not receive unemployment checks any more and have given up applying for jobs.

The economy had a small growth spurt  in the spring. It spurred some modest hiring, but not enough to make much of a difference in the unemployment rate, which is 9.5 percent.

Without jobs, people cannot spend money.  Without consumer spending, America’s economy will not grow.

On Friday, the Labor Department will issue the July jobs report and economists predict it will show the nation lost a net total of 65,000 jobs. That includes the end of about 150,000 temporary census jobs.

Excluding government employment, private companies are expected to add a net total of only 90,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May, coinciding with the jobless rate hovering near a 27-year high.

Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 19 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.9 percent from April, the US Department of Agriculture said in a statement on its website.