Obama’s approval rating shrinking like a Chippendale in a cold pool

President Obama’s approval rating is dropping like a baby grand piano from the 83rd floor of a Manhattan high rise.

Surprise, surprise, to quote that iconic wordsmith Gomer Pyle.

Americans simply don’t like Uncle Sam snooping in their underwear drawer where all sorts of nasties even worse than grumpy Republicans may be flourishing.

Obama’s approval rating dropped eight points from last month, according to a CNN poll released today, and it was because folks detest feds monitoring scads of emails, phone calls, smoke signals, telegraph messages and all legible notes on napkins.

The survey, taken at Sunday night’s Spurs-Heat NBA Finals playoff in Miami, found that 45 percent of respondents approve of the president, while 54 percent disapprove.

In mid-May, the numbers were essentially reversed — 53 percent approved and 45 percent disapproved.

Half of the respondents said they do not feel that Obama is honest and trustworthy — a nine-point drop from last month.

Two percent of respondents said they thought George Washington was still president.

The public disapproves of surveillance, and 43 percent of people think the administration has gone too far in sacrificing civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.

In fact, just the other evening the FBI was combing through my Aunt Edna’s casserole dish, looking for terrorists.

I didn’t realize that some terrorists could be as little as termites, the only creatures who can stomach my Aunt Edna’s casserole dish and live to tell about it.

Of course, termites can’t speak. But they can tweet.

You can bet your sweet Twitter that the feds are monitoring their tweets.

A Rose blooms at Merion

They had ancient Merion all lipsticked up this week in Ardmore, with rough tougher than Putin, greens slicker than Willie Sutton and fairways tighter than Jack Benny.

And if you got either one of the last two analogies, you must be older than the sand in the Merion bunkers.

The U.S. Open had a flourish of a finish today, with Justin Rose navigating the punishing closing holes at Merion with a calmness fitting a monastery friar.

Meanwhile, woeful, doleful Phil Mickelson was the U.S. Open runner-up for about the 947th time. This guy has more silver than my teeth.

Now Merion will recede back into the golf history books and sports fans in the Greater Delaware Valley will return to more important devotions, like who the hell is gonna quarterback Chip Kelly’s Eagles?

God said to Belichick, “Sign Tebow.” Belichick didn’t reply, “Man, you must be putting me on.”

Just when it appeared as if God had ended the strange and surreal NFL journey for his second chosen son, aka Tim Tebow, the pearly gates opened today and the full-time celebrity, part-time quarterback became a New England Patriot.

Granted, the perfect place for the pious Tebow is heaven, but his time for that has not yet come.

Next best place would be the Garden of Paradise, but an apple and a serpent foreclosed that posh place.

Third best destination for Tebow is New England, the land of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

Belichick is just the guy to snuff the distraction of Tebowmania that has transformed Tim into a leper with most NFL franchises.

The media swells Tebowmania like a gigantic blowfish but the prickly Belichick defuses the media by essentially shoving them in the corner and ordering them to shut the hell up.

Tebow was a Christian rock star in Denver and New York. There won’t be a third act in Foxborough because Belichick has a poison ivy personality, a prickly cactus of a guy who is more fried chicken and barbecue than lobster and arugula. Hype is anathema in the Patriots’ organization.

With Brady firmly entrenched as the superstar starting quarterback in residence, any thought of a sideshow quarterback controversy developing with Tebow’s presence is as laughable as Tebow’s passing mechanics and accuracy.

Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels was the head coach in Denver, the guy who made Tebow a first-round draft pick but got fired before good-time religion and black magic enabled Tebow to lead the Broncos to an improbable playoff-win season the ensuring year.

Tebow figures to be more anonymous than Woody Allen’s barber this season, where he can toil in relative obscurity and try one last time to straighten out his convoluted and elongated throwing motion that is clumsier than an arthritic giraffe on roller skates.

Obama hitches up Big Brother to plow under our civil liberties

If Barack Obama and Big Brother were any more intimate, they would be Liberace and Scott Thorson.

I know we can’t allow terrorists to blindside us like the cable companies do, but do we have to shred our personal liberties with a thresher of paranoia?

The president basically has been an underachiever, so why does he have to be so damn energetic about snooping on us?

Thank God Obama wasn’t president when I had all those magazines stashed under my bed as a teen.

What’s up with Obama? Has he been listening to so many Wagner operas that he’s starting to get the urge to conquer Poland when he’s done digging up all our dirt, including that squished under our fingernails?

Obama, of course, is giving the old soft shoe to all the Big Brother fears screaming like an alarm clock on crank.

Today the president vigorously defended the government’s newly disclosed collection of massive amounts of information from phone and internet records as a necessary defense against terrorism and assured Americans, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

Yeah, right. Are you swallowing that crock of spit?

“We have to make choices as a society,” Obama said in his first remarks about revelations of the huge scope of government surveillance. “It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

And when the hell did we have 100 percent security? Are you listening, Boston?

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers.

The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon’s land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies, too.

Another secret program revealed Thursday scours the internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine U.S.-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.

What’s next? Policing our sock drawers?

If all this wasn’t enough, Obama also reportedly has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber attacks.

The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging.”

The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the U.S., though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency.

With our personal liberties going up in smoke, my parting words on the subject are: “Don’t Bogart that joint, Big Brother!”

A killer fork in the road: The pursuit of happiness hits a dead end with a double suicide

A Brooklyn couple who hosted a radio show called The Pursuit of Happiness apparently thought that happiness was best pursued in the afterlife, where there are angels instead of Kardashians.

Lynne Rosen and John Littig, a psychotherapist and motivational speaker respectively who did a self-help radio show, were found dead on a couch in the living room of their apartment.

Evidently they were simply aching for eternity after committing suicide together by putting plastic bags over their heads and inhaling helium.

So much for self help.

Wealthy companies’ offshore tax dodges insult working stiffs like you and me

Everybody is picking on Apple for its offshore tax practices, probably because if Adam and Eve hadn’t taken a bite out of it, we all would be playing golf in the Garden of Paradise.

Instead, we’re stuck here in the Garden of Travail, which certainly has its fair share of unplayable and unfair lies.

Apple isn’t the only major company using creative if not so patriotic tactics to avoid paying taxes on billions of dollars in profits.

At least 18 companies, including Nike, Microsoft and the aforementioned Apple, are stashing profits in offshore tax havens in a bid to avoid paying taxes, according to a new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice.

Now here’s some math that certainly would prop up our fractured infrastructure and school districts and balloon our shrinking police forces: If the companies brought that money home, they would pay combined more than $92 billion in U.S. taxes.

Imagine the joy of driving from Reading to Allentown on a Route 222 North that isn’t more clogged than a Chris Christie artery.

Fantasize about the serenity of not having white-knuckle moments about safely crossing a crumbling bridge such as Penn Street or Buttonwood Street when you come to it.

Dream about navigating the West Shore Bypass without resorting to a cigarette and a blindfold.

Yep, tax dodges are not the Apple of my eye.