Dick Durbin knows all about the back of the bus: He and 12 other Democrats voted against the first African-American woman Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State in 2005

The Washington Post reported here at the time:

The Senate voted 85 to 13 to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, providing the most negative votes cast against a nominee for that post in 180 years.

Maybe if Dick and Dirty Harry had gotten their shit together last fall Loretta Lynch could already have been confirmed as the first African-American female Attorney General.

From the AP story here:

Lynch was nominated last fall and Democrats are growing increasingly agitated over the holdup in confirming her, although they were in control of the Senate for some of that time. "Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar," Durbin said. "That is unfair. It's unjust. It is beneath the decorum and dignity of the United States Senate."

It's not like Obama didn't have plenty of time to fill the position while Democrats still had control of the Senate. Eric Holder resigned in late September 2014, and Obama didn't nominate Lynch until after Democrats had taken a good thrashing at the polls on November 4th.

Janet Yellen's Fool's Errand: Finding A Way To Fix What's Supposedly Fixed

Everybody believes the financial crisis is over, but apparently Janet Yellen does not. She's more right than she knows, but that's a sign of something into which angels fear to look. This could be rough.

Quoted here:

Yellen said regulators must focus on ways to prevent another financial crisis. She spoke via video to a financial markets conference sponsored by the Fed's Atlanta regional bank.

"In 2007 and 2008, short-term creditors ran from firms such as Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and from money market mutual funds and asset-backed commercial paper programs," she said. "Together, these runs were the primary engine of a financial crisis from which the United States and the global economy have yet to fully recover."

-----------------------------

Regulators specialize in keeping capitalism from cleansing itself through failure. According to this line of thinking, recessions are personae non gratae, and depression doesn't even exist as a conceptual category of the contemporary period. If one occurs, they call it something, anything, else, as in "The Great Recession". Bankruptcy? Fuhgeddaboutit. Until these are welcomed once again, that is, until reality penetrates into the penumbra of the reigning ideology, the zombie economics of the last 14 years are here to stay, or perhaps worse, and we shall continue to walk in the darkness.

Why Obama Should Not Be President: Even Recreational Pot Use Alters The Brain, Emotions and Motivation

It took Obama three days to respond to the Christmas Day bombing attempt by Abdulmutallab over Detroit. The New York Times noted his odd unresponsiveness several times in the article cited below. If you wonder why Obama's done nothing about the jobs and GDP crises, perhaps now you do.

The pot study story is here:

The 20 pot users in the study, ages 18 to 25, said they smoked marijuana an average of about four days a week, for an average total of about 11 joints. Half of them smoked fewer than six joints a week. Researchers scanned their brains and compared the results to those of 20 non-users who were matched for age, sex and other traits.

The results showed differences in two brain areas associated with emotion and motivation - the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. Users showed higher density than non-users, as well as differences in shape of those areas. Both differences were more pronounced in those who reported smoking more marijuana.

See here for the New York Times report on December 28, 2009, three days after the bombing attempt on the Christmas Day flight bound for Detroit:

Mr. Obama, making his first public comments since the episode, said he had ordered his national security team “to keep up the pressure” on terrorists. ... Although he had been out of sight for three days, he assured Americans he was on top of the situation. ... The visual contrast of a president on vacation while there was anxiety about air travel also drew fire. Although aides issued statements describing conference calls with counterterrorism advisers, pictures of passengers enduring tougher airport screening were juxtaposed with reports of the president picnicking at the beach and playing sports. Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, criticized Mr. Obama’s silence Monday before the president’s statement. “We’re now, what, 72 hours into this and the president’s not spoken, the vice president’s not spoken, the attorney general’s not spoken and Janet Napolitano has now told two different stories in two days,” he said on Fox News. “First, she said everything worked; now she said it didn’t.”

David Gregory, NBC's Fascist Tool

During his interview with NBC's Gregory, Greenwald declined to discuss where Snowden was headed. That refusal seemed to prompt Gregory to ask: "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?"

Story here.

Libertarian Sen. Rand Paul Embraces Form Of Amnesty For Illegal Aliens

Hardly anything good ever comes from libertarianism, including this "not-amnesty-amnesty" from so-called conservative Republican Sen. Rand Paul:

In year two of [Sen. Paul's] plan, illegal immigrants would begin to be issued temporary work visas, and would have to wait in line behind those already in the system before moving forward toward citizenship. A bipartisan panel would determine the number of visas per year. High-tech visas would be expanded and a special visa for entrepreneurs would be issued.

Different from other approaches, Paul would not attempt to crack down on employers by expanding working verification systems, something he says is tantamount to "forcing businesses to become policemen."

"My plan will not grant amnesty or move anyone to the front of the line," Paul says. "But what we have now is de facto amnesty."

All this will do is encourage a flood of more illegals looking for temporary work visas. And if it were really true that we have de facto amnesty now, one wonders then what is the urgency of the issue. Issuing a temporary work permit is the real de facto amnesty.

Sen. Paul must think that telling bald-faced lies works for Obama, so he might as well try it.

Republican Sen. Rob Portman Of Ohio Flips On Same Sex Marriage

As reported by The Associated Press, here:

Portman said his views on gay marriage began changing in 2011 when his son, Will, then a freshman at Yale University, told his parents he was gay and that it wasn't a choice but "part of who he was." Portman said he and his wife, Jane, were very surprised but also supportive. ... Portman told reporters Thursday that his previous views on marriage were rooted in his Methodist faith.

Portman voted for DOMA in 1996 as representative from Ohio's 2nd Congressional District, and was elected to the Senate in 2010 with Tea Party support.

Portman's wife, who used to work for Democrat Tom Daschle, flipped to the Republican Party when Portman agreed to flip to the Methodist Church.

There's a whole lotta flippin' goin' on, especially toward the voters. If Sen. Portman had an integrity, he'd resign.

How The Mujahideen Fight Against Drones

How the Mujahideen fight against drones, according to The Associated Press, here:

1 – It is possible to know the intention and the mission of the drone by using the Russian-made “sky grabber” device to infiltrate the drone’s waves and the frequencies. The device is available in the market for $2,595 and the one who operates it should be a computer-know-how.

2 – Using devices that broadcast frequencies or pack of frequencies to disconnect the contacts and confuse the frequencies used to control the drone. The Mujahideen have had successful experiments using the Russian-made “Racal.”

3 – Spreading the reflective pieces of glass on a car or on the roof of the building.

4 – Placing a group of skilled snipers to hunt the drone, especially the reconnaissance ones because they fly low, about six kilometers or less.

5 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using the ordinary water-lifting dynamo fitted with a 30-meter copper pole.

6 – Jamming of and confusing of electronic communication using old equipment and keeping them 24-hour running because of their strong frequencies and it is possible using simple ideas of deception of equipment to attract the electronic waves devices similar to that used by the Yugoslav army when they used the microwave (oven) in attracting and confusing the NATO missiles fitted with electromagnetic searching devices.

7 – Using general confusion methods and not to use permanent headquarters.

8 – Discovering the presence of a drone through well-placed reconnaissance networks and to warn all the formations to halt any movement in the area.

9 – To hide from being directly or indirectly spotted, especially at night.

10 – To hide under thick trees because they are the best cover against the planes.

11 – To stay in places unlit by the sun such as the shadows of the buildings or the trees.

12 – Maintain complete silence of all wireless contacts.

13 – Disembark of vehicles and keep away from them especially when being chased or during combat.

14 – To deceive the drone by entering places of multiple entrances and exits.

15 – Using underground shelters because the missiles fired by these planes are usually of the fragmented anti-personnel and not anti-buildings type.

16 – To avoid gathering in open areas and in urgent cases, use building of multiple doors or exits.

17 – Forming anti-spies groups to look for spies and agents.

18 – Formation of fake gatherings such as using dolls and statutes to be placed outside false ditches to mislead the enemy.

19 – When discovering that a drone is after a car, leave the car immediately and everyone should go in different direction because the planes are unable to get after everyone.

20 – Using natural barricades like forests and caves when there is an urgent need for training or gathering.

21 – In frequently targeted areas, use smoke as cover by burning tires.

22 – As for the leaders or those sought after, they should not use communications equipment because the enemy usually keeps a voice tag through which they can identify the speaking person and then locate him.



The Invasion Of The Body Scanners: Nude X-Ray Scanners To Be Out By June

TSA is getting rid of the invasive nude x-ray technology by June to comply with a Congressional directive.

But you're still being searched, and whether you get felt up or not is beside the point, because the generic image scanners will stay.

The Fourth Amendment means nothing in an airport, and I predict this "compromise" will speed the way for the invasion of the body scanners into every sphere of public transportation, including busses, subways, commuter trains and even tollways and interstates.

Story here.

To The Associated Press, Sadomasochism Is Just A "Subculture"

Crown Roast of Wiener

Seen here:

[Castro District] Supervisor Scott Wiener's proposal would make it illegal for a person over the age of 5 to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza" or while using public transit.

A first offense would carry a maximum penalty of a $100 fine, but prosecutors would have authority to charge a third violation as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Exemptions would be made for participants at permitted street fairs and parades, such as the city's annual gay pride event and the Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates sadomasochism and other sexual subcultures.

Since about 1994 sadomasochism et cetera have not been considered mental illnesses by medical authorities when such deviancies are "consensual". Evidently the public in San Francisco no longer consents to the regular assaults against their eyes from assorted naked exhibitionists of deviancy, which should on that logic make such malefactors henceforth technically mentally ill once again.

Wow, wasn't that easy?

Accordingly we should now be able to say that, since libertarians advocate freedom for such deviancies but habitually fail at the polls, libertarians also are mentally ill because they do not enjoy the consent of the governed. 

The followers of libertarian Jude Wanniski continue to assert that the electorate always gets it right, so since the electorate repudiates libertarianism time and time again libertarians must be mentally ill.

It remains unknown if libertarianism ever was considered a mental disorder by authorities, however.

Needless to say, the date from which civilization may be said to have ended now has been postponed thanks to San Francisco Castro District Supervisor Scott Wiener.

Great name.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Liberal Massachusetts Town Institutes Fines For Public Swearing

The move actually de-criminalizes public swearing in order to remove it from the penumbra of First Amendment applications, as reported here:

Middleborough, a town of about 20,000 residents perhaps best known for its rich cranberry bogs, has had a bylaw against public profanity since 1968. But because that bylaw essentially makes cursing a crime, it has rarely if ever been enforced, officials said, because it simply would not merit the time and expense to pursue a case through the courts.

The ordinance would decriminalize public profanity, allowing police to write tickets as they would for a traffic violation. It would also decriminalize certain types of disorderly conduct, public drinking and marijuana use, and dumping snow on a roadway.

Just another expression of the reactionary impulse and not really a bona fide idea, an irritable mental gesture which only resembles an idea, right?

"The Weakest Republican Field In History, And They Kicked My Butt"

So says Gov. Rick Perry, here.

High Gasoline Prices Are In The News Again: Up 55 Percent Since 2007

For example, from The Associated Press:

The national average for gasoline began the year at $3.28 a gallon. The average price for February so far is $3.49 a gallon. That's up from $3.17 a gallon last February, a record at the time. Back in 2007, before the recession hit, the average for February was $2.25 a gallon. ...

Americans spent 8.4 percent of their household income on gasoline last year when gas averaged an all-time high of $3.51 a gallon. That's double the percentage a decade ago. They could pay even more this year, even though demand is the lowest in 11 years as people drive fewer miles in more efficient cars, says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at OPIS. ...

World oil demand is expected to increase by another 1.5 percent to 89.25 million barrels a day in 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Read the complete story here.

Obama Plans To Cut Deployed Nukes To As Few As 300 From 1790 Now

So reports AP Obama here:

The potential cuts would be from a current treaty limit of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads.

A level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would take the U.S. back to levels not seen since 1950 when the nation was ramping up production in an arms race with the Soviet Union. The U.S. numbers peaked at above 12,000 in the late 1980s and first dropped below 5,000 in 2003. ...

The U.S. already is on track to reduce to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads by 2018, as required by New START. As of last Sept. 1, the United States had 1,790 warheads and Russia had 1,566, according to treaty-mandated reports by each. The treaty does not bar either country from cutting below 1,550 on their own.

There is No Democracy in Greece: 43 Lawmakers EXPELLED for Voting the Wrong Way

As reported here:

Lawmakers voted 199-74 in favor of the cutbacks, despite strong dissent among the two main coalition members. A total 37 lawmakers from the majority Socialists and conservative New Democracy party either voted against the party line, abstained or voted present. ...

Besides the 37 lawmakers who voted against the bill or abstained, a further six voted against sections of the proposed measures. After the vote, the coalition government announced those 43 lawmakers had been expelled.

Kim Jong Mentally Ill Leaves Terrestrial for Celestial North Korea, Meets Christopher Hitchens!

The Associated Press announces tonight, tonight!, that Kim Jong Il has died.

What a week for Christopher Hitchens. The Iraq war ends, he dies, and now he's stuck with a dwarf playboy, forever.

Kim Jong Il supposedly died of heart failure at the age of 69 on a train.

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.

ObamaCare's Long Term Care Insurance Provision Bites The Dust Already

Because its costs were too high to attract participation, as reported here:

Monthly premiums would have ranged from $235 to $391, even as high as $3,000 under some scenarios, the administration said. At those prices, healthy people were unlikely to sign up.

Well duh! Healthy people who signed up at age 50 not long ago could get excellent coverage for two people for less than $60 a month through Barack Obama's favorite fascist, Jeff Immelt of GE.

Government does very little well, and never cheaper than the private sector.

Senate Democrat Millionaire Tax Would Pay Less Than 10 Percent of Jobs Bill Cost

In the first year. The Democrat trick is to levy the tax over ten years to pay for a spending bill this year, and to rely on data which is suspect.

So one would have to infer from an AP story here, but you have to do the math:

About 392,000 households would get hit by the Senate Democrats' proposed 5.6 percent tax on income above $1 million, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. In 2013, the first year the tax would take effect, those households would see their taxes increase by an average of $110,500, according to the analysis.

The latter figure extracted from that many households comes to just $43 billion, $404 billion short after the money has already been spent.

Socialsecurity.gov reports here, however, that fewer than 80,000 individuals had net compensation in excess of $1 million in 2009, collecting in the aggregate $184 billion. Taxing each and every dollar of that amount, not just the adjusted gross income over $1 million as the Democrats propose to do, would net just $10.3 billion.

The Tax Foundation here has a much more conservative estimate of the numbers than The Tax Policy Center. It says that for 2009 there were just 230,323 tax returns reporting adjusted gross incomes in excess of $1 million, and just 8,148 reporting $10 million or more. (Adjusted gross income captures more than just wage compensation). It calculates that the 5.6 percent millionaires' surcharge all by itself would take an extra almost $45,000 in new taxes from the median filer in this group. That also comes to $10.3 billion in new revenues annually if that median filer is typical of millionaires.

Even over ten years for a one year jobs program Obama needs to get re-elected next year, either the rest of us will be paying the $344 billion the scheme is short, or it just gets added to the deficit, crowding out other spending.

The fact of the matter is, taxing the AGI of everyone in the top half of the country with an extra 5.6 percent surcharge still would not pay for Obama's one time $447 billion jobs spending bill.

That doesn't make any sense!

US Homeownership Rate Falls at a Great Depression-Like Rate

So says a story here, but written to obscure that fact:

[T]he U.S. may never return to its mid-decade housing boom peak in which nearly 70 percent of occupied households were owned by their residents. ...

Nationwide, the homeownership rate fell to 65.1 percent - or 76 million occupied housing units that were owned by their residents - from 66.2 percent in 2000. That drop-off of 1.1 percentage points is the largest since 1940, when homeownership plummeted 4.2 percentage points during the Great Depression to a low of 43.6 percent.

Since 1940, the number of Americans owning homes had steadily increased in each decennial census due to a mostly booming economy, favorable tax laws and easier financing. The one exception had been 1980-1990, when ownership remained unchanged at 64.2 percent.


So the recent drop to 65.1 from nearly 70 is 4.9 points (not even mentioned!), or 7 percent, compared with a Great Depression drop to 43.6 from 47.8 (again, not mentioned!), or 8.8 percent.

Instead, the article spins the story with the statistical irrelevancy of the homeownership rate in the year 2000, evidently because the 2000s was the bubble decade, which doesn't count, unless George Bush did it, if it's bad thing.

Another deliberate diversion by AP Obama. 

Admitting You Drive Drunk Declines 30 Percent Since 2006 Peak To Lowest Level Ever

In other words, the bad economy is producing more lying.

The AP has the full story here:

That led to a CDC estimate of more than 112 million episodes of drunk driving in 2010. CDC officials lamented that finding; still, it was the lowest estimate since the survey question was first asked in 1993, and down significantly from the 161 million incidents in the peak year of 2006.