Obama is the King of Unemployment

Initial claims for unemployment have been at or above 400,000 for 90 percent of Obama's presidency. By contrast, George W. Bush spent 25 percent of his time in office with unemployment that bad. Change . . . you asked for it.

Romney, Gingrich and Obama: Three Do-Gooders Shoving "Morality" Down Your Throat

Here's Romney recently: "[I]t is fundamentally a conservative principle to insist that people take personal responsibility as opposed to turning to government for giving out free care.”

Here's Gingrich in 2006: The Romney plan attempts to bring everyone into the system. The individual mandate requires those who earn enough to afford insurance to purchase coverage . . .. We agree strongly with this principle . . ..

Yankees everywhere agree: "Doin' right ain't got no end."

Newt Gingrich Has Believed in Healthcare Mandate and Subsidies Since 2006

These guys Gingrich and Romney and Obama are all about federal interference and compulsion in healthcare, a private matter between an individual and a doctor.

From Newt Notes, April 2006, here:

We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans. Individuals without coverage often do not receive quality medical attention on par with those who do have insurance. We also believe strongly that personal responsibility is vital to creating a 21st Century Intelligent Health System. Individuals who can afford to purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility on taxpayers.

The Romney plan attempts to bring everyone into the system. The individual mandate requires those who earn enough to afford insurance to purchase coverage, and subsidies will be made available to those individuals who cannot afford insurance on their own. We agree strongly with this principle, but the details are crucial when it comes to the structure of this plan. ...

While in theory the plan should be affordable if the whole state contributes to the cost, the reality is that Massachusetts has an exhaustive list of health coverage regulations prohibiting insurers from offering more basic, pared-down policies with higher deductibles. (This is yet another reminder that America must establish a cross-state insurance market that gives individuals the freedom to shop for insurance plans in states other than their own.)

In our estimation, Massachusetts residents earning little more than $30,000 a year are in jeopardy of being priced out of the system. In the event that this occurs, Governor Romney will be in grave danger of repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, Mike Dukakis, whose 1988 health plan was hailed as a save-all but eventually collapsed when poorly-devised payment structures created a malaise of unfulfilled promises. We propose that a more realistic approach might be to limit the mandate to those individuals earning upwards of $54,000 per year. ...

I hope that Massachusetts’ initiative to provide affordable, quality health insurance for all continues to ignite even more debate around the subject of how to best address our nation’s uninsured crisis and the critical problems within the health system at large.

Two Headlines Which Say It All: Obama Wins, You Lose

At RealClearPolitics.com:

To Romney, Calling Obama a Socialist is the Same Thing as Calling Him a Momma's Boy

From an interview on FOX as transcribed here by The Washington Post:

O’Reilly: Is he a socialist?

Romney: You know, I prefer to use the term that he’s just over his head. ... I consider him a big-government liberal Democrat. I think as you look at his policies, you conclude that he thinks Europe got it right and we got it wrong. I think Europe got it wrong. I think Europe is not working in Europe. And I’ll battle him on that day in and day out. But I’m probably not going to be calling him names so much as calling him a failure.

Flashback to Dec. 24, 2009: Democrat US Senate Rams Through Healthcare in Rare Vote

Reid The Arrogant

From The New York Times (link):

The 60-to-39 party-line vote, starting at 7:05 a.m. on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats closer to a goal they have pursued for decades and brings President Obama a step closer to success in his signature domestic initiative. When the roll was called, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. presiding, it was the first time the Senate had gathered for a vote on Christmas Eve since 1895.

Fast forward to today.

The US Senate is still controlled by Democrats, but it adjourned for the year on Saturday, Dec. 17, even though the Social Security Tax Cut measure it passed is different from the US House's bill and requires reconciliation before the tax cut can be take effect on January 1, 2012.

House Republicans have remained in Washington, willing to work on the measure, but Democrats have fled town.

Which Fascist Offends You More? Bush, or Obama?

Liberal Lawyer Jonathan Turley Rightly Attacks Obama Administration For Support of Repackaging Blasphemy as Hate Speech

In The LA Times (link):

This week in Washington, the United States is hosting an international conference obliquely titled "Expert Meeting on Implementing the U.N. Human Rights Resolution 16/18." The impenetrable title conceals the disturbing agenda: to establish international standards for, among other things, criminalizing "intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief." The unstated enemy of religion in this conference is free speech, and the Obama administration is facilitating efforts by Muslim countries to "deter" some speech in the name of human rights.

President's Slaves in Congress Vote to Give Him Sweeping Powers Over You

Based entirely on his discretion, the president now gets to decide as commander in chief if you, an American citizen, are a terrorist. He can then send the US military against you here on American soil, and detain you indefinitely here or abroad without trial and without a lawyer.

American citizenship, American law, and the American constitution now really do mean nothing at all, courtesy of Republicans and Democrats alike. It may have started under President Bush and The Patriot Act, but the liberal savior Barack Obama is all too happy to have the sweeping new powers, powers which he has already arrogated to himself, without opposition from his slaves, by targeting and killing American citizens working for terrorists abroad. All this is being done under justification of the law of war, even though our Congress, long ago made subservient to the Executive, has never had the courage to vote to declare war.







The American fascist police state is now complete.

Welcome to tyranny.

And have a pleasant holiday.

Stories here, here, here, here and here.

The Increase in the Wealth Gap is Due to the Housing Collapse

The latest figures from the Federal Reserve (link: compare lines 4 and 42) show that enormous wealth destruction in housing is the overwhelming cause of the dramatic decline in household net worth between 2006 and 2011.

Of the $7.8 trillion decline in net worth over that period, $6.6 trillion of that is all from the bursting of the housing bubble . . . nearly 85 percent.

Hurt most by this are the millions of middle class Americans whose primary asset is their home. Desperately trying to hold on to what they have, by scrimping, saving and working, they don't have the luxury of time to occupy much of anything to protest what is happening to them.

It is impolitic to say so, but their plight is the frequent one of the undiversified investor: too many eggs in one basket.

But that's not a bug, it's a feature of entering the middle class, whose goal is owning a home and raising a family in it, not sophisticated money management and investing. Such people who can scrape together the income of $40,000 to $50,000 necessary to support home ownership typically aren't going to have significant financial assets to manage. Of the 150 million wage earners in America, after all, fully 99 million make $40,000 a year or less.

Neither Obama nor the Republican candidates for president, nor Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party for that matter, seem to talk much about any of this, yet the collapse of housing better explains the growing gap between rich and poor in America than do the supposed crimes of the one percent. The rich may be getting richer, but it's inspite of the fact that their own homes have declined in value, too. The middle class is being squeezed downward because its primary asset continues to lose value.

The deep frustration of so many of the American people with their elected leaders is that the leaders really don't represent them in this matter, in the same sense that sympathizing with, understanding, or trying to fix this problem doesn't have the urgency for them anymore than it does for the rich. The reason is that virtually none of them has personal experience of it. From our president to our senators and all the way on down to our representatives, we have leaders whose own high net worth and the insulation from our vulnerabilities that that affords make them remote, unfeeling, and unmotivated.

In point of fact, since it was Democrats and Republicans who conspired in the very policies which have misled Americans to drain $10 trillion in home equity over three decades (for example, dramatic changes to tax and banking policy in 1997 and 1999 under Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm), it shouldn't be surprising that none of them really wants to talk about this gorilla in the living room. They helped make and sell the bed we're now sleeping in. And we bought it.

Of about 132 million total dwellings in 2010 of all types (table 3), just 61 million occupied dwellings are single family homes occupied by their owners, with an additional 11 million occupied by renters, according to the latest Census data here (link). That means something substantially less than 46 percent of total dwellings in the country could plausibly represent the American dream of the traditional middle class. The richest quintile, those households making over $100,000 per year, let it be remembered, lives in houses, too.

The Economic Policy Institute, whose president is a socialist, here (link) provides a useful summary of how wealthier individuals avoided the severity of the housing decline precisely because more of their assets were diversified and were not all riding on real estate (emphases added):

In 2007—prior to the Great Recession—median net worth was $106,000 (consisting primarily of home equity, as discussed later). ... Net worth for the top 1% was $19.2 million in 2007 . . ..

The updated figures for 2009 reflect the enormous destruction of wealth due to the bursting of the housing bubble. As a general rule, households with less wealth have a greater share of their wealth embedded in their homes. Thus, it is not surprising that the fallout from the deflating housing bubble disproportionally affected them. On average, the top 20% lost 16.0% and the bottom 80% lost 25.1% of their total wealth in 2008 and 2009. Average wealth of the bottom 80% was just $62,900 in 2009—a dropoff of $40,900 from 2007 and slightly less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it was more than a quarter-century ago in 1983. Those at the top also lost ground but not nearly as much, percentage-wise. Average wealth of the top 1% was close to $14 million in 2009, down $5.2 million from 2007. ...

[H]ousing equity is a far more important form of wealth for most households. ... In 2007, the middle 20% of households held $196,700 in non-stock assets, and only $10,200 in stocks. In other words, non-stock assets—which are over-whelmingly housing equity—made up about 95% of this group’s wealth.

In the United States homeownership has long been associated with solid footing on the economic ladder, and yet the housing crash has meant that for a broad swath of people homeownership is no longer a reality.

The stepping stone from the lower and working classes to the upper classes, obviously, is the middle class. Very few skip that step, on the way up or on the way down. Rags to riches and back to rags again is interesting, but not common. Rich liberals from both parties, however, have a vested interest in minimizing the middle class to polarize the country. Rich Republicans and Democrats alike don't want the competition entrepreneurial Americans threaten them with, and leftist Democrats need a servile, manipulable constituency they can feed table scraps to in order to keep themselves in power. Some so-called conservative Republicans also, it must be said, seek their own fiefdoms of influence and power at the expense of impulses to limited government. George W. Bush's play for senior votes with Medicare Part D comes to mind.

What middle Americans should demand is a bigger House of Representatives to co-opt these entrenched interests by de-concentrating the power which the 435 now enjoy. Tea Partiers in particular should be advocating a return to the constitutional principle of one representative for every thirty-thousand of population, if their protestations to originalism mean anything. Instead of the bloated, rich and corrupt 435 politicians we've been stuck with for a hundred years, we should have 10,000 lean citizen legislators.

When we get them, things will begin to change for the better because our representatives will have far less power and far more reason to listen to the people. Special interests will have much less influence over them, campaigns will be far less costly, and Congressional staffs could be reduced dramatically, saving us money and getting some actual work out of our politicians for a change. The move would also take away the enthusiasm for radical proposals such as the elimination of the electoral college by dramatically expanding the pool of electors in presidential elections.

We might even persuade such a House to overturn the 17th Amendment, another blow for originalism, which would help improve the US Senate almost overnight. By returning the corrupting influences of campaign cash to state houses where senators would be appointed, we might actually be able to do something about corruption more often because it would be closer to home and we'd be more aware of it.

ND Sheriff Calls in US Border Control Predator B Drone to Execute Search for $6K in Rustled Beef

Reminds me of Lincoln starting a civil war over a dead horse at Ft. Sumter.

Note the prominent emphasis on "law enforcement" at this government website (link). The use of military weaponry for law enforcement is the modus operandi of the US government at least since the Clinton regime used tanks to crush the Branch Davidians in Waco. 911 gave the strategy new impetus under the Bush regime, and the starry eyed leftist dupes who voted for Obama have witnessed nothing but a continuation of Bush policies under Obama building on the Patriot Act.

The crime here was a lousy misdemeanor offense, and escalated into a felony in part because of the sheriff's actions. More ominously, Federal level quasi-military resources were mobilized against citizens. The militarization of units of the FBI, DHS and BATFE, among others, is all part of the same pattern of Federals crossing the line into military tyranny (Is there any other kind?).

The LA Times has the story (link):

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

The Market is Not a Leading Indicator

It is a market that has followed . . . the ratings agencies, the Congress, the Fed, the EU appendage du jour. Anyone with any sense knows this and doesn't need an analyst to explain it to him. The smart money remains out of the market.

Herds keep following, and mostly in fear.

Today we're basically back to August 2 and the debt ceiling fiasco, falling then from the 1260 level and rising to it now.

This is a market longing for the days of QE II in late 2010 and early 2011, but it isn't happening, probably because Ben Bernanke doesn't want to be accused of getting Barack Obama reelected.

But all that QE really could do was reproduce a high level around 1360, last seen in June 2008 before all hell broke loose. 1560 might as well be Mt. Everest.

One false move and it's . . . say . . . 575.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Splat.

The Day The Jobs Stood Still: Obaamu Baracka Nikto

About 2 million fewer total non-farm workers are employed today than in January 2009, despite growth in the population.

Homeownership Under Obama Hits a New All-Time Low of 59.2 Percent

Even a broken clock is right twice a day:

"This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement."

-- President Obama, quoted here, Dec. 6, 2011

The fact is the moment has already broken against the middle class.

Nobody is fighting to get into the middle class. The middle class is fighting to stay middle class, and is losing.

The president, who only now protests that he would rescue the middle class as the election season heats up, has actually presided over its demise, turning the middle class into the working class renters of yesteryear, and worse, according to this story from August 5, 2011 at CNN Money (link):

Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter -- its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.

That's the lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping quarterly records back in 1965 (before that, it recorded home ownership rates once a decade). The Census Bureau's statistics, however, do not factor in mortgage delinquencies.


When it comes to savings, the president speaks of modest savings and secure retirement as his goals for us, when the actual picture is a grim present and a worse future.

A survey using 2009 data and making the rounds in May 2011 said nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 for an emergency within 30 days (link).

And just two days ago a story (link) reported on a different survey which suggests that over half of the 151 million American workers have less than $25,000 saved while over half of the already retired are in the same boat:

More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ...

More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that.


The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (link) confirms that there has been a steady decline in the personal savings rate under Obama from 5.3 percent in 2010 to an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, a nearly 30 percent decline from what was already an inadequate level.

Some unemployed and now homeless families in hardest hit states like Florida are reduced to living in their cars, trucks and vans because shelters are already full. Their plight was the subject of a recent story (link) on 60 Minutes.

The American middle class is under siege on every front, from jobs, to homeownership, to family formation, to savings, to retirement. All this has unfolded under Obama's watch, who vacations, golfs, parties, fund-raises and speechifies, railing against business and the rich at every opportunity. But it is the middle class which is disappearing as he speaks, and he's done nothing to stop it.

The true meaning of class warfare.

Unemployment Under Obama is Over 8 Percent for 34 of 35 Months in Office

(source)

Obama Must Be Crackin' a Cold One Tonight: Herman Cain Finished Off in Record Time

The very likeable black Republican with the easily understood tax proposal was neutralized in record time by making him very unlikeable with half of the electorate.

It isn't just that our politics have degenerated into playing the race card, but also the gender card.

Herman Cain didn't help himself when on top of inspiring no confidence on some of the issues he mismanaged the lynching. The thing is, no one expected it would be a female lynch mob, probably Herman most of all. Men are stupid that way. That Herman should have known the Obama m/o in Illinois only demonstrates another disqualification for the big leagues.

What was he thinking?

The LA Times has the story of the end of the Herman Cain for president campaign here.

Obama Hasn't Had One Week of Initial Claims for Unemployment Below 375,000

By the only measure that counts: The seasonally-adjusted 4-week moving average.

LOOK IT UP: here.

The ONLY time it got that low was ONE week in February of 2011.

Every other single week has been HIGHER. In fact, I count just 13 weeks in the below 400,000 category for Pres. Obama, all of which have occurred in 2011. By contrast, Pres. George W. Bush had 318 weeks below 400,000.

Obama's entire presidency to date, nearly three years, is defined by doing NOTHING about unemployment at catastrophic levels: WORKERS COVERED BY UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE UNDER OBAMA HAVE DECLINED BY 8 MILLION.

President Obama is an unmitigated disaster to the American worker, who suffers silently because of Obama's policies.

President Obama is Headed for an Exclusive Form of Small Group Therapy, or a Psychotic Episode

As noted here in The New Republic by a psychoanalyst, who never once suggests Obama's cool demeanor, detachment from emotion, and passivity are also characteristic of psychosis and might have been compounded by his drug use:

As sensitive he is to group dynamics, as the President of the United States, he is now the sole member of an exclusive group of one.  And he's going to need to push through his fears in order to avoid joining the only other group available to him—that of the ex-presidents.

Things You Do When Democrats Get Elected President

Lyndon Johnson: Keep an eye on your shoes.

Jimmy Carter: Change your religion.

Bill Clinton: Buy a pistol.

Barack Obama: Upgrade to Life Member in the NRA.

Second Estimate of Q3 2011 GDP Falls to 2.0 Percent from 2.5 Percent

Per the BEA today, here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.0 percent in the third quarter of 2011 (that is, from the second quarter to the third quarter) according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the second quarter, real GDP increased 1.3 percent.

The GDP estimates released today are based on more complete source data than were available for the "advance" estimate issued last month.  In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 2.5 percent . . ..


So .4 in the first, 1.3 in the second, and now 2.0, for an average of 1.2 so far in 2011. That's not even treading water. Obama doesn't have a clue. The guy should pack it in and just go golfing for the rest of his life.