"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."

So says Edward Leamer, Director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, here in The Los Angeles Times:

The country's tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn't creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday. ...

Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer . . ..

"It's not a recovery," he wrote. "It's not even normal growth. It's bad." ...

Young adults are facing staggering student loan debt that will force them to put off buying homes until later in life, said senior economist David Shulman.

Outstanding student loans have tripled since 2004, according to Federal Reserve Bank figures. In 2012, public and private student loan levels reached $966 billion.

"Never before have so many young people been saddled with so much non-mortgage debt, and that burden will keep them out of the home buying market for years to come," Shulman wrote.

Liberals Everywhere (and libertarian elites) Sneer With Doyle McManus: How Dare You Live In A Bigger House?

 

 

 

 

 

Today's liberal sneer comes from Doyle McManus for, you guessed it, The LA Times, here:

But don't take it from me. Take it from the economists at the Mercatus Center, a mostly conservative think tank at Virginia's George Mason University. ... "Recent empirical research suggests that the mortgage interest deduction increases the size of homes purchased but not the overall rate of homeownership," they wrote. ... You can be sure that home builders and Realtors, whose businesses thrive on big houses and high prices, will push back hard against any proposal for change. ... The mortgage interest deduction subsidizes big houses and bigger mortgages, but that's not a good use of tax dollars. Its benefits flow disproportionately to the wealthy and do nothing for the working poor.

In other words, God forbid that modestly incomed people with big families should live in the same comfortable digs as the elites. No, the only thing suitable for them is something small and cramped in keeping with their station in life. The "Realtors" is a nice touch, with a capital "R", the evil purveyors of this excess and offense against the crabbed liberal view of life. We have met the enemy, and he works for Remax. Puritanism still lives, my friends, in the indignant hearts of the America's liberals.

George Mason University, for its part, is a libertarian bastion, not a conservative one, and being socially liberal, libertarians are ever helpful to one side and one side only: liberalism. Make no mistake about it, the societal decision long ago to subsidize home ownership is a by-product of the conservative consensus of yesterday. That consensus recognized that the basic social unit was the family, defined as a husband, wife and children, the incubator for the transmission of the values of our civilization, and that shaping tax policy to support it materially was not only in the best interests of the present, but of the future.

The people who attack that now are either dimwits, or enemies. 

Privatizing The US Postal Service Is A Bad Idea On Mail Fraud And Privacy Grounds

Michael Hiltzik for The LA Times does a pretty good job of presenting the reasons why we shouldn't privatize the US Postal Service, but unfortunately misses an important one: mail fraud statutes come in real handy for felony convictions and long prison sentences for some of society's worst actors.

He draws this comparison on privacy:

Law enforcement can't open your mail without a judge's say-so, and any private individual who tries could face a long sojourn as an involuntary guest of the feds.

But laws governing the sanctity of your email are in their infancy. Actually, that's a gross overstatement: They're positively fetal. Government agencies may not need any warrant at all to read some of your emails. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and anyone else whose system carries your email can read your messages at whim, with no consequences.

Read his full argument here.

Hey Nolan You Hypocrite, Your "Home" Is Full Of Blood, Real And Imagined

There's nothing innocent and hopeful about the place you live in, you fraud.

Quoted here:

"The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.”

Europe Is Failing Because It's Already Taken So-Called Balanced Approach

Namely, very minor adjustments to spending combined with tax increases.

Veronique de Rugy has the details here, for The Los Angeles Times:

"In a 2009 paper, Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 examples in developed countries over 30 years and found that successful austerity packages — defined by a reduction in debt to GDP greater than 4.5% after three years — resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found that this form of austerity accompanied by the 'right policies' (easy monetary policy, liberalization of goods and labor markets, and other structural reforms) is more likely associated with economic expansions rather than with recessions. This makes intuitive sense: Austerity based on spending cuts signals that a country is serious about getting its fiscal house in order in a way that taxing and spending certainly does not.

"On the other hand, they found that the so-called balanced approach — typically a mix of spending cuts and tax increases — is a recipe for failure. It fails to stabilize the debt, and it is more likely to cause recessionary economic contractions. And when it comes to plans such as Hollande's that would explicitly increase spending and taxes, they find little chance of either economic expansion or debt reduction."

Anita Dunn's Inspiration: A Monster Whose Excellence Was Killing Millions

Dunn, now 54, served Obama in 2009

"The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa — not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is: you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before. But here's the deal: These are your choices, they are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Zedong was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, 'How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all of the odds against you?' And Mao Zedong said, you know, 'You fight your war, and I'll fight mine.' And think about that for a second. You don't have to accept the definition of how to do things and you don't have to follow other peoples choices and paths. Ok? It is about your choices and your path. You fight your own war, you lay out your own path, you figure out what's right for you. You don't let external definition define how good you are internally, you fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path".

Red Guard member Wang Jiyu, 60, confessed killer

“The children now don’t know what happened. We are choosing to forget. We should not let them forget and everyone should know what happened to this country. Some people still miss and praise those years – let them go to hell.” (quoted here, Sept. 27, 2011)

"'I think the most terrible thing, when I recall that period, the most terrible thing that struck me was our indifference,' said Gong, today a 38-year-old graduate student at Harvard researching her own history. ...

"[D]ramatic new figures for the number of people who died as a result of Mao Tse-tung's policies are surfacing, along with horrifying proof of cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution.

"It is now believed that as many as 60 million to 80 million people may have died because of Mao's policies--making him responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin combined.

"Gong said killer is not a strong enough word to describe Mao. 'He was a monster,' she said." (Beth Duff-Brown in The LA Times here, November 20, 1994)

The ignorance of some is willful. 

Santorum Self-Destructs By Urging Real Liberal Obama Over Also Liberal Romney

Oops!

The reasoning makes sense, and is also correct, but that's not how you win in politics, let alone preserve your position for a future run.

Talk about a tin ear.

The LA Times has the story here:

"If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch-A-Sketch candidate of the future."

I think that spells the end for one Rick Santorum.

A Marine in Missouri Will Vote For the Republican Candidate, But Gives $ Only to Newt

From the LA Times, here:

Jim Crossland, a retired Marine handing out flyers about the national debt after a Santorum speech in northern St. Louis, shrugged when asked about the candidate, the apparent local favorite. “In Pennsylvania, his nickname was ‘Tricky Ricky’ -- talks one way, votes another,” Crossland said. “But if he’s elected for our side, I’ll get behind him.”

“I’m still sending money to Newt,” he confessed. So what if it’s Romney, like a lot of people predict?

Crossland paused. “I’ll vote for him,” he said, “but I won’t send him any money.”

Moochelle Obama's 16 Vacations in Three Years Fly in Face of Economy in Shambles

Detailed here.

The president here a year ago obviously was talking about a different family cutting back, not his own:

Just like every family in America, the federal government has to do two things at once. It has to live within its means while still investing in the future. If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, you might put off a vacation. 

Sen. John McCain, Who Approved 'A Tale of Two Mitts' Then, Now Endorses Gov. Romney

“It’s with some nostalgia that I return to this place that I love so well. I’m really here for one reason and one reason only and that is to make sure we make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States of America. And New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is the state that will catapult him onto victory in a very short period of time. That’s why I’m here.”

See the video here.

I don't know what's worse, Mitt Romney's flip flops or John McCain's.

Here's a recounting of 61 of the latter's, and that's just through June 2008. In the 2010 Arizona Republican primary, it cost McCain $21 million to convince Arizona's Republicans to vote for him again, flip-flopping even more all the way if that were possible, as recounted here:

Moving sharply to the Right, the senator supported the controversial new immigration law in his home state that opponents said would discriminate against legal residents of Hispanic descent.

The move was in contrast to failed legislation he had drafted in 2006 that would have provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and had dismissed the effectiveness of building a fence on the US-Mexico border. This year he filmed an advertisement with a border sheriff which delivered a message to the federal government of: “Complete the danged fence.”

In a further bid to please the party’s Right-wingers, who tend to vote in party primaries, the senator also reversed his support for a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military. He then distanced himself from a measure to cap carbon emissions that he had been developing with Sen Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat.

“What McCain did was recognise he had a real race to run and move to the right,” said Martin Frost, a commentator who was formerly a Democratic congressman in Texas.


Americans have the lowest opinion ever of the US Congress not because of gridlock, partisan bickering, or even its fantastic personal wealth, but because of the utter faithlessness of the men and women who populate it.

And people don't like to be reminded too much how these chameleons represent them all too well.

Alas, we have the government we deserve. 

Your Fascist Police State At Work: More Than 9,300 Unannounced Checkpoints Run in 2011

So says the story here.

And the LA Times here:

TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

"We are not the Airport Security Administration," said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. "We take that transportation part seriously." ...

In Tennessee in October, a viper team used radiation monitors and explosive-trace detectors to help state police inspect trucks at highway weigh stations throughout the state. Last month in Orlando, Fla., a team set up metal detectors at a Greyhound bus station and tested passengers' bags for explosive residue.

In the Carolinas this year, TSA teams have checked people at the gangplanks of cruise ships, the entrance to NASCAR races, and at ferry terminals taking tourists to the Outer Banks.

The instruments of fascism are slowly being introduced, and the American people accept it like sheep.

They deserve everything they're going to get.

Representation Without Representation: Our Unaccountable $6 Billion Congress

According to stories here, here and here, in addition to the 535 elected members of the US Congress, there are about 10,000 staffers under various classifications who are hired by these office holders to assist them.

The average staff budget is said to be $1.5 million, which is in addition to the $174,000 annual salary of the elected representatives and senators themselves.

While the latter costs the taxpayers upwards of $93 million annually, the former is upwards of $800 million annually.

In other words, we willingly spend close to $1 billion in tax dollars every year for congressional representation which is pretty much universally despised.

And about five times as much to elect it. A CBS News/New York Times poll in October found just 9 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, but someone, somewhere, is pretty happy investing $5 billion to elect the right people. And "the right people" end up with net worths ten times that of their constituents.

Maybe it's time to change this.

How about following the constitution for a change?

Article 1, Section 1 of the constitution stipulates that representation "shall not exceed one for every 30,000." By that reasoning we should have a US House today with 10,000 representatives. Instead we have 435, thanks to the Republicans in the 1920s who simply refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census and fixed the number of representatives at the then current levels in 1929 through legislation.

The constitution wasn't amended. It was ignored. And today Republicans would claim the mantle of originalism. I'll believe it when I see it.

The great fear of the anti-federalists, who opposed the language of the constitution, was that no one man could conceivably represent adequately or honestly the interests of 30,000 citizens. They wanted the ratio to be smaller than that. Much smaller. Say on the order of one representative for every 15,000 of their fellows. That would imply today a US House of 20,000.

Instead what have we got?

Representation of one for 700,000 in a district, and climbing. Which is why you are so disgusted with your rich, arrogant and corrupt representative. He represents the guy who pays him the money he needs to advertise on radio and television so that you at least recognize his name and picture every two years and believe some stupid lie he tells about how he represents your interests even though he doesn't even know you exist. The last thing he wants is the real competition and anonymity of being just one of 20,000.

Imagine if your representative represented only 15,000 people. Chances are he would have to work pretty hard to get elected because no special interest is going to fork over millions just for his lousy vote.

He might even ring your doorbell.

What would it cost?

Even if you paid them all the same salary as we do today, half the anti-federalists' number, 10,100 representatives and senators, would cost us $1.76 billion. Their legislation might actually improve if we eliminated all their staff positions and made the elected do the actual work for a change. Throw in some campaign finance reform which stipulates contributions originate within the new districts, and repeal of the 17th Amendment, and you have a nice little package a decent presidential candidate could win on easily.

So far, however, none of them have enough imagination to see that 91 percent of the country is already ripe for the ideas.

If only they had some.

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.

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.

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.

For Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Occupy Wall Street Anger Counts, ObamaCare Anger? Not So Much.

As quoted in the LA Times here:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco on ABC’s “This Week,” essentially called [Rep.] Cantor a hypocrite for criticizing the Wall Street protesters while embracing the “tea party” movement.

“I didn’t hear him say anything when the tea party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol, and he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them,’ Pelosi said.

Pelosi said she supported the movement’s “message.”

“I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen,” she said “We cannot continue in a way that does not — that is not relevant to their lives. People are angry.”

Smartest President Ever Says We Built The Intercontinental Railroad

Ah, that would be transcontinental.

Andrew Malcolm for The LA Times, here:

"We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad," Barack Obama.

That's what the president of the United States flat-out said Thursday during what was supposed to be a photo op to sell his jobs plan next to an allegedly deteriorating highway bridge.

A railroad between continents? A railroad from, say, New York City all the way across the Atlantic to France? Now, THAT would be a bridge!

It's yet another humorous gaffe by the Harvard graduate, overlooked by most media for whatever reason. Like Obama saying Abraham-Come-Lately Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party. Or Navy corpseman. Or the Austrian language. Fifty-seven states. The president of Canada. Etc.

"[Obama's] probably the smartest guy ever to become president."

(Michael Beschloss, Harvard MBA, presidential historian, interviewed on Don Imus in November 2008, transcript and appropriate commentary mockery here.)

No wonder Obama keeps his college transcripts sealed.

"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?"

The Obama Jobs Bill 'Right Now' Farce

Jobs 'right now' had to wait for Obama's August vacation to conclude, and for over 2.5 years of his first, and hopefully last, term of office.

Then 'right now' got serious in the speech to Congress in early September, where he actually said 'right now' seven times.

News outlets reported Obama actually had a bill on paper to introduce on the day of the speech.

Obama waved around for the cameras over a hundred pages of something he claimed was the jobs bill.

But despite 'right now' a bill hasn't been introduced in the House, and now Democrats in the Senate expect to have a bill sometime in October, about a month from the fierce urgency of 'right now'.

Andrew Malcolm ridicules the whole thing here in The Los Angeles Times:

Well, here we are on the next Monday after that next Monday and we've just learned from the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, that actually it seems that body won't really be seriously getting into the legislation for a while yet. The Senate has some other more important business to handle. And then there's this month's congressional vacation, which in Washington is called "a recess," like elementary school. 

Communist idlers.

Oh yeah. Great shot of Obama doing The Mussolini, too:

The blended strongman

Gov. Rick Perry Would Fight Dollar Collapse, Maybe With A Little Tar and a Few Feathers

"Bernanke also is facing external dissent of a different type. This week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's running for the GOP presidential nomination, made a controversial comment that appeared to encourage bodily harm to Bernanke if he continued to 'print money.'" -- Tom Petruno, LA Times, here.

"Gov. Rick Perry scorched the political pot on Tuesday with a red-hot rhetorical attack on Fed-head Ben Bernanke. When asked about the Fed reopening the monetary spigots, Perry said, 'If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we -- we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.'

"And that wasn’t all. In a more controversial slam, Perry said, 'Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous -- or treasonous -- in my opinion.'" -- Larry Kudlow, here.

"There is no known case of a person dying from being tarred and feathered in [the Revolutionary] period. During the Whiskey Rebellion, local farmers inflicted the punishment on Federal tax agents." -- Wikipedia entry, here.

This dramatization shows the victim stripped naked from head to toe, whereas to the waist only was more customary. -- (source)

Cash in Bank Savings Accounts Hits New Record of $5.86 Trillion

As reported by Tom Petruno for the LA Times, here.