Sen. Diane Feinstein, Washed-Up Geezer, Thinks NSA Oversight Means Overlooking It

Senator Dianne Emiel Goldman Berman Feinstein Blum, I think

Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) is supposed to be leading the oversight of the NSA in the Congress, but to her "oversight" means something more like ignoring it. Easy to do during naps.

Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic reports here:

The [Washington Post] got its hands on the [internal May 2012 NSA] audit -- more than a year after the fact -- before she did! And the trend? "Despite the quadrupling of the NSA's oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009," [Barton] Gellman reports [link added], "the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012."

ObamaMan Spooks "Bill And Hillary Clinton" On SNL Halloween Party In 2007

Video here.

Only we can mock ourselves.

The Immorality Of Keynesianism Explained In A Thought Experiment

From the conclusion of Jeffrey Dorfman for Forbes, here:

"Actions by private individuals that are not beneficial to society do not suddenly become so when the government does them. Ask yourself if government policies [of printing money and income redistribution from the rich to the poor through the tax code] would be legal and have a positive effect if a private citizen did the same thing [by counterfeiting money and robbing banks]. If the answer is no, using government to accomplish the same aims will not change the policy into a good one."

Bernanke's Crime Against The Elderly: He's Cut Their Income 88%

From Kermit Zieg for The Washington Post, here:

The major architect of the recovery of the past five years has been the Federal Reserve System. ... Everyone seemed to win, but that’s not so. Retirees were badly hurt — devastated, in fact. They have not benefited from lower mortgage rates because their homes generally are paid off. They are not in the stock market because of the volatility. They primarily live on savings and the interest earned on these savings. Ten years ago, a retiree could have earned $40,000 annually on $1 million of savings in a bank. Today, that same $1 million would be lucky to earn $5,000 yearly. If a retirement lifestyle was built on expectations of $40,000 in annual interest income and the reality today is $5,000, the improving economy has no relevance. Economic survival in a low-interest-rate market is the focus for retirees.

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It is always the defenseless who are the first to go under the bus in this country: unborn children, the unemployed and the old.

Who's The Conservative? Rush Limbaugh Or The Prophet Jeremiah?

Now, Steve Jobs' version of what [Ashton] Kutcher said in the last sound bite was this: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice." Don't let other people talk you out of believing in yourself.  Don't let other people talk you out of believing that what you want to do is valid and good and worthwhile. Don't let other people's structure and formula make you feel second-rate or inconsequential. "And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

He said just have the courage, believe and think for yourself, live for yourself. And he's also saying something there that is really true. Your heart will never lie to you.  Your head will all day long, but your heart won't. Steve Jobs said that when you grow up, you tend to get told the world's the way it is and that your life has to be lived inside that world. Try not to get into too much trouble. Get an education, get a job, make some money, have a family, but don't make waves. And Jobs said, to hell with that. Make waves. Everybody else made waves. Change the world.

-- Rush Limbaugh, yesterday here

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? "I the LORD search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."

-- Jeremiah 17:9f.

Jobless Claims Average Plummets Below 300k For First Time Under Obama

First time claims for unemployment, not-seasonally-adjusted, have now averaged just under 298,000 per week in the last four weeks, the first time that's happened under Obama. Today's weekly report of 280,502 is the third in a row below 300,000 and only the fifth time in 4.5 years under Obama that weekly first time claims have been under that level.

The report is here.

The seasonally-adjusted figure at 332,000 doesn't quite capture the current facts on the ground and exaggerates what's going on by over 11% in the latest report. Even so, annualized we're looking at between 15.5 million claims per year to 17.2 million in the last month, conditions which should make it possible to make real improvements in hiring. Under George Bush claims never got below 16.2 million per year.

But there appears to be no driver for jobs anywhere in this depressed economy, just a driver for a golf ball in the hands of the president.

My Bazooms Are Bigger Than Hillary's

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is headed to Iowa

Ben Bernanke Is A World Class Thief And Should Be In Jail

The average annual return to cash for the three years since July 2010 has been 0.04%, for example in VMMXX, Vanguard's Prime Money Market Fund, but over that three year period inflation has absolutely raged at 7.18% overall, with the all items CPI soaring to 232.944 from 217.329. With about $10 trillion stuffed away in M2, returns to cash just keeping pace with inflation would have come to $718 billion to savers by now. Instead they've reaped just $4 billion (annually).

In a related note here, the contribution to GDP over the period from the Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing has mirrored the criminal returns to cash:

'But it turns out that the benefits of printing all that new money may have been negligible. According to a new study by two senior US economists, America's second programme of quantitative easing, nicknamed "QE2", boosted economic output by just 0.04pc.'

The rich have gotten richer the old fashioned way: they've stolen it.

Senator Rubio Fears Executive Orders Instead Of Fighting Them

He looks to his right, but to us it's left.

Sen. Rubio continues with his mission of disappointing the country and disappointing conservatives, here, expressly ceding his legislative authority to the executive:

“I have been saying now for over a year I believe that this president tempted, will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress he will be tempted, to issue an executive order like he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen,” Rubio said. ... “But we can’t leave it, in my mind, the way it is, because a year from now we could find ourselves with all 11 million people here legally through an executive order from the president, but no E-Verify, no border security, no more border agents — none of the other reforms that we desperately need.”

Bank Robberies: 2003-2011

We just had a bank robbery at a nearby bank this afternoon. The mope who did it is pictured at the left.

You would be wrong if you thought bank robberies are up because of the Obama depression. They are broadly down since 2003, almost 33%.

YEAR//BANK ROBBERIES

2003//7465

2004//7556

2005//6748

2006//6985

2007//5933

2008//6700

2009//5943

2010//5546

2011//5014

OK, there was a big spike up in 2008, but still nowhere near the 7556 in 2004.

It's kind of counter-intuitive. People rob banks 'cause that's where the money is. People had more money before the Obama depression. But after all the bank failures there were fewer banks and less money around, right? The FDIC had to come up with $88 billion to bail out all the failures. Anyway, it's still profitable to rob banks. Bank robbers get away with tens of millions every year, even now. That's why they do it.

(Data is from the FBI, here)

Present Savings To Business Of 5.5 Million Fewer Full Time Jobs

There are presently just under 118 million who work usually full time. In 2007 at the peak there were just over 123 million working full time. The difference is over 5.5 million.

Imagine all those workers not making the median salary from 2011, which was almost $27,000 per year. Or imagine all those workers not making the average salary from 2011, which was just over $41,000 per year.

The annual savings to business today in compensation alone because all those people are not working is somewhere between $149 billion and $228 billion. Add in the cost of benefits for each employee and then multiply by about six and you'll understand one of the reasons why stocks of businesses have done so well under Obama.

Flashback To January 2012: ObamaCare's "Not Worth Getting Angry About"

Santorum said, “Just so I understand this, in Massachusetts, everybody is mandated as a condition of breathing in Massachusetts, to buy health insurance, and if you don’t, and if you don’t, you have to pay a fine.”

Moments later, as the discussion over Romneycare and Obamacare continued, Romney rebuked Santorum, saying, “First of all, it's not worth getting angry about.”

4th Delay Of ObamaCare Provisions Revealed By The New York Times

The case builds for dropping insurance coverage altogether. Its basic cost only soars, and what it covers only plummets. That was the whole point behind ObamaCare, to completely wreck the free market in health insurance, and the entrepreneurs at the heart of it providing the healthcare, the doctors. 

Tip of the hat to Avik Roy of Forbes, here:

"According to the law, the limits on out-of-pocket costs for 2014 were $6,350 for individual policies and $12,700 for family ones. But in February, the Department of Labor published a little-noticed rule delaying the cap until 2015. The delay was described yesterday by Robert Pear in the New York Times."

Economic Stress: Top 10 Selling Cars In July All Get Combined 28-32 MPG

The top 10 selling cars in July 2013 all get a combined MPG between 28 and 32 in their four-cylinder offerings with automatic transmission. In June most consumer spending was on autos and gasoline, and when those were backed-out, remaining retail was actually down 0.1%, the first time in a year. Soaring gasoline prices have no doubt been at work in spending allocated to more fuel efficient vehicles. Gasoline has been averaging above $3.50/gallon nationally since the beginning of February. See Good Car Bad Car here for car sales data by month.

Toyota Camry 28 mpg

Honda Civic    32

Honda Accord 30

Nissan Altima  31

Chevy Cruze    30

Toyota Corolla 29

Hyundai Elantra 32

Ford Fusion (fwd) 28

Hyundai Sonata  28

Ford Focus          31

To Fix The Mortgage Market, Pay Wholesalers And Brokers Over Time, Not Up Front

So suggests Jeffrey Dorfman, here:

"If we want to avoid a repeat of the recent mortgage market meltdown, we would be wise to reform the incentive structure in the mortgage industry. No government regulation is needed to accomplish this. Wholesalers can change the way they pay brokers and investors can require wholesalers to keep some skin in the game by taking at least some of their profits over time along with the investors. Spreading payments over even as little as three to five years would significantly change the incentives.

"If wholesalers and brokers got paid only if the mortgage borrowers made their payments, I suspect that we would have fewer mortgages with repayment problems."

Real 10-Year Cost Of Being In Cash

With an average annual return of 1.77% in the last 10 years, July 2003 to July 2013, the cost of being in cash in VMMXX comes down to the inflation-adjusted return because inflation has averaged in excess of the nominal returns to cash: 2.43% annually over the period. That results in an average annual real return of -0.644% in cash. Ouch. By contrast, the real rate of return of the S&P500 has been +4.63% annually June 2003-June 2013, dividends fully reinvested. Going back 38 years to the inception date of VMMXX, 6-4-1975, the S&P500 has returned a real rate of 6.83% per annum. Cash has returned a nominal 5.58%, but with inflation averaging 3.95%, the real rate of return in cash has been just 1.568% per annum since 1975.

Your Real Return In Stocks Since 2000? Just 0.32% Per Year!

Sad, but true.

Check for yourself, here.

The Bernank Bombs The Buck

US Dollar Currency Index watchers have been reaching for the gin in recent weeks:

This was supposed to be a summer when the U.S. dollar would stand tall, pumped up by higher interest rates and the prospect of an improving economy.

But instead it's been sagging, with the dollar index losing 3.6 percent to 81.02 since July 10. On that day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke clarified the Fed's intentions about what it means to 'taper' its $85 billion a month in bond purchases. He emphasized that even with paring back of bond buying, the Fed would take its time pulling back from easing, and it has no plans to raise short term rates any time soon.

Read the rest from Patti Domm at CNBC here.

Obama Can See The Gulf Of Mexico From Three Atlantic Ocean Ports

The world's smartest president strikes again:

"If we don't deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, S.C., or Savannah, Ga., or Jacksonville, Fla. — if we don't do that, these ships are going to go someplace else and we'll lose jobs," Obama said.

Video and story here (AP dishonestly added the "(and in)" to the quotation above before the word "places").

Affirmative action in editing.

The link is now dead. Mediaite still has it all, here.

Mark Levin Only Just Discovers TSA VIPR Program Tonight

Mark Levin's recent discovery of TSA VIPR operations reinforces his interpretation of the developing police state, but it's just old news to us.

Welcome anyway, Mark.

40 Million In Individual And Small Group Health Plans Will Be Hit Hardest By ObamaCare

McClatchy reported here in June:

Those two coverage areas – the individual and small group markets – face the biggest rule and cost changes next year, when the main provisions of the Affordable Care Act finally kick in. ... About 24.5 million people have small-group coverage through companies with 50 or fewer employees, according to federal estimates. Just 15.4 million people purchase individual coverage, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care research center.

Learn more at ObamaCareWatch.org.

Conservatives Have Completely Dismissed Sen. Marco Rubio And Rep. Paul Ryan

Poll at lauraingraham.com.

Long Term Care Insurance Getting Harder To Get As Firms Exit The Business

So reported CNBC here last week:

Three major plan providers, Metlife, Prudential and Unum, have stopped selling individual policies within the last three years.

"Companies have had a very difficult time hitting profit objectives," said Marc Cohen, chief research and development officer at insurer LifePlans. "Many of the assumptions underlying the pricing of these policies didn't hold true."

Among the assumptions firms made when they began selling plans in the 1990s was that policyholders would let their coverage lapse at about the same rate they do life insurance products. The lapse rate for long-term care has proven to be much lower. Policyholders who buy coverage during their senior years tend to hold onto their coverage and collect on their claims.

"The largest claim that's still open is from a woman," said Slome. "She's been on claim for 15 years. Her insurance policy has paid out one point $8 million to date and it continues to pay. She only paid $881 for three years before her claim began."

The industry has responded to that kind of bad underwriting by tightening qualifications for the coverage, setting caps on benefits and raising prices.

With 76 million baby boomers reaching retirement age over the next decade, the need for long-term care services is expected to surge.

Economic Distress: Average Age Of American Car Climbs To 11.4 Years From 9.9 In 2006

Story here.

Total Public Debt Outstanding Stuck At $16.738 Trillion For Over Two Months

The normal explanation for this would be that redemptions of Treasury securities are running at precise equilibrium with issues, which might imply there has been a big shift away from note and bond purchases by the public since the end of May when Ben Bernanke first floated the possibility of a tapering of Fed purchases in the secondary market. Bond outflows in June of nearly $62 billion dramatically reversed a trend (albeit declining) of purchases in 2013 through May.

Theoretically total public debt outstanding occasionally goes down in the rare cases when redemptions exceed issuances, but the maintenance of a consistent level equilibrium is indicative of a deliberate policy, that is, a policy not to exceed the debt limit of $16.7 trillion. This is effected by recourse to extraordinary measures on the part of the US Treasury Dept.

Tax revenues are also running higher in 2013, helping remove pressure from the situation as is the sequester which is curbing outlays. Revenue has also increased from the GSEs, in excess of $59 billion according to Reuters, here. The Associated Press has reported here for July 18th that the current fiscal year deficit is projected to come in over $300 billion less than last year when all is said and done.

Now you know why Congress felt it could take the traditional August recess without doing anything about the debt ceiling. They'll just let Jack Lew sweat it out.

The Kookiest Jobs Story In Months: Republican House Ways And Means Tallies Just 270k Full-Time Since 1-09

Story here.

What's next, 911 really was an inside job? Paul McCartney did die?

To believe this number you have to believe all the numbers reported all the time by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have been wrong for 4.5 years and that everyone who works there is content to keep a secret, and can, but I'll bet you those are precisely the numbers House Ways and Means have been "crunching" to arrive at the "truth". 

I realize John Crudele at The New York Post is fond of that skeptical pose now that a former BLS official has been talking to him about his skepticism about the numbers, but really, have we all gone off the deep end in order to drive home a political point about what ObamaCare is going to do to the nature of work in America when it's not really yet self-evident? For example, average hourly earnings should be plummeting if Ways and Means is right, but they are not. Wages are up nearly 1.9% in the last year. Nothing to write home about, but completely dispositive of the thesis.

As usual the devil is in the details, which in this case means the word "net", as in net total. Well, net from what benchmark? The all-time high of full-time at 123.219 million under George Bush? Full-time isn't anywhere near recovering to that level, so it's impossible that for the Republicans net means net above the all-time high by the paltry sum of 270,000, as in 123.489 million full-time jobs. Would that the Republicans were right!

Alas, they are not. Usually full-time is presently 117.688 million, 3.873 million above the January 2009 level when Obama took office, not 0.270 million above the January 2009 level. That's the nominal number. Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives could run the population-adjusted figures for us to show us just how far behind we really are in recovering to trendline at the Bush peak. Population has continued to grow causing employment-population ratios to plummet and labor participation rates to tank under truly dismal GDP conditions, so there is value in looking at it from that perspective. It's true. Obama is a total failure at job creation. When he turns his gaze to them, they seem to vaporize. Rush Limbaugh thinks this is on purpose.

Meanwhile the numbers continue to improve because this is a giant capitalist ship with tremendous inertia whose communist captain can't turn her on a dime for another go at the iceberg. He wishes we were China, but we aren't.

God bless the Republican House, but get off the number-of-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. It's August, and we have gin to drink.

US Marine Helps Flagging 9-Year Old In 5k Finish Race: "Will You Run With Me?"

The United States Marines, America's finest.

Story here.

Colorado Democrat Faces Recall After Narrow Victory Courtesy Of Libertarian Spoiler

Ross Kaminsky has the story in The American Spectator, here:

Forty-five miles north, Senate President John Morse is in even bigger trouble. Although his senate district includes the quirky (and liberal) town of Manitou Springs, John Morse won his 2010 election by only 252 votes in a race in which a Libertarian candidate won five times that number. In other words, if not for the presence of a third party candidate, Mr. Morse would likely have lost; this is not a safe “blue” seat, despite redistricting since 2010 having made the district lean slightly more Democratic than its prior configuration. ... [P]erhaps most galling, even to Morse’s liberal constituents, were comments he made on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show in which he proudly said (while claiming the mantle of Abraham Lincoln) that he counseled fellow Democrat senators to avoid reading e-mails from constituents. To be fair, Morse probably assumed that nobody was watching the show.

"The current state of valuation is as clear as a bell. We're not cheap here."

Joshua Brown, here, who notes that value investors are raising cash:

"In the meantime, many famous value managers are husbanding their cash - either because they can't find compelling values or because they foresee better opportunities ahead."

Fox News Thinks Abu Ghraib Is In Afghanistan

How soon they forget.

They report, you decide.

Story here.

The Trend To Part Time Jobs Is A Myth, Otherwise Average Hourly Earnings Would Be Down

Earnings are up 1.87% in the last year

So says Jim O'Sullivan, here:

Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist of High Frequency Economics . . . is not convinced that part-time, low wage jobs are driving the nation's employment growth. Average hourly earnings most of this year have been rising about 2% at an annual rate, notwithstanding a slight dip in July. That's consistent with the rest of the four-year-old recovery. If low-wage jobs were growing much faster than other positions, they should be pulling down average wage growth, O'Sullivan says.

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Not only are earnings up modestly year over year, the not-seasonally-adjusted figures for usually full time workers show a year over year increase of 1.55 million jobs, or 1.34%. Usually part time is up more, 1.59%, but that's only a net 430,000 workers.

The Part-Timing Of America Has Been Slowing Down, Not Speeding Up

The part-timing of workers was a much more severe phenomenon from the 1960s . . . when teenagers used to bag groceries, for example.

That was a good thing. We should have more of it, not less.

Is it a coincidence that as the minimum wage rises over time part-timing decreases?

!

Usually Part Time Is Up Only 1.25 Million Since Obama Elected In 2008

That's a less than 5% increase in the size of this group over the period, and a less than 1% increase in usually part time compared to the total size of usually part and usually full time taken together in November 2008.

Full Time Jobs Are Almost Back To Where They Were When Obama Was Elected In 2008

That's not to suggest full time is back to the 123 million level as under Bush in 2007, but it is almost back to 118 million as in November 2008.

Did employers continue to shed full time jobs as a response to Obama and the Democrats taking over?

Full time is up over 8 million since 2010.

Obama Still The Worst For Unemployment: Above 7% For 56 Months Straight Since Elected

The average report of unemployment under Reagan was 7.58%, the absolute worst record in the post-war until Obama, who for the 57 months since his election in 2008 has had an average report of unemployment of 8.74%.

The Part-Timing Trend Still Hasn't Materialized In The Unemployment Report

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment situation report for July is here, where we learn that the unemployment rate has fallen two tenths of a point to 7.4%, and that jobs added monthly has fallen to 189,000 per month, or 2.268 million jobs added in the last year.

Since everyone is making a big deal of part-timing because of ObamaCare and generally moribund economic conditions, it is noteworthily absent in today's numbers.

The not-seasonally-adjusted numbers show those classified as part-time for economic reasons in all industries down 116,000 from June to July. Year over year the number is up only 8,000. In other words, there is no trend up to be seen there. For those part-time for noneconomic reasons the decline is much more dramatic month over month: 428,000. But year over year the number is up, but only 303,000 or less than 2% of the category.

Those classified as usually part-time are down 17,000 from June to July while those classified as usually full-time are up 288,000 from June to July in the not-seasonally-adjusted columns. Usually full-time also is up 1.557 million year over year. Usually part-time is up only 430,000 year over year or less than one half of 1% of all the workers in those categories combined, and just 1.6% of usually part-time workers from a year ago.

I don't call any of that "the part-timing of America."

Not yet.

The Redcoats Are Already Here: Proof Ordinary Americans Are Spied-On Online By The Police State Right Now

She googled "pressure cookers", he googled "backpacks". Weeks later the police showed up and interrogated him and searched their house for 45 minutes, without a warrant:

"45 minutes later, they shook my husband’s hand and left. That’s when he called me and relayed the story. That’s when I felt a sense of creeping dread take over. What else had I looked up? What kind of searches did I do that alone seemed innocent enough but put together could make someone suspicious? Were they judging me because my house was a mess (Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!). Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do."

I wonder what happens when you don't agree to let them search your house? Face down on the floor in handcuffs? The m/o of the tyranny is to intimidate you into relinquishing your rights. The Redcoats aren't coming. They're already here.

The story was related here in full, and here in part.

Rep. Mike Rogers, Ex-FBI Goon, Proven Wrong By Revelation Of XKeyscore

Chairman, House "Intelligence" Committee

The latest revelations from Glenn Greenwald here show Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan to be either ignorant or a liar:

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

Jobless Claims Plunge Over 60k To Lowest Level Ever Under Obama

For only the third time under Obama, first time claims for unemployment, not-seasonally-adjusted, have fallen under 300,000 and in today's report to their lowest level yet: 279,869.

On June 1 the raw number of claims had fallen to just under 294,000. And before that, on September 8, 2012, raw claims fell to just under 300,000. Those are the only two prior instances under 300,000.

Break out the party hats.

Full report here.

Rush Limbaugh Finds A GDP Conspiracy Where There Is None

When it comes to numbers, I have observed that Rush Limbaugh can be counted on to get something horribly wrong, and today was no exception. Today he has misrepresented the routine revision of the GDP data every five years as a revision of the numbers for only the last five years, as if it were designed specifically to make Obama look better. In actual fact, the revision of the numbers goes back not five years, but all the way back to 1929.

Truly incredible, and embarrassing in the extreme, since the truth is the revision occurs every five years, and this is the 14th revision in the series. This is why conservatives hope Rush retires soon, nevermind why liberals hope he retires. He's making us all look stupid when he carries on like this.

I have shown "five" in red below from today's Rush transcript so you can appreciate the thorough-going depth of Rush's misrepresentation of the facts: 

RUSH:  Here's what the Commerce Department is doing. 

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years. 

They have revised data for the past five years to, they say, "reflect a more complete, as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture.  Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data?  To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama.  There's no question.  I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth.

Here, however, is the statement from the BEA in today's official release about the routine revision every five years, which has been telegraphed to every reader of BEA GDP reports for many quarters running going back at least to last year (meaning Rush Limbaugh has never read even cursorily a single one of those GDP reports from the BEA in the interim, let alone today's):

Today, BEA released revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and of other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2013. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA's regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.

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

1.7% GDP in Q2 2013 is horrible enough, but the average report for the last three quarters comes in under 1%, 0.966% to be exact. So if there is some conspiracy to make things look better than they are, whoever's in charge of that ought to be fired, stat!

This country remains in deep trouble, and there is no conspiracy to hide it. 

George W. Bush Falls To Last For GDP Performance Using 14th Comprehensive Revisions

"I redefined the Republican Party"

The revised GDP figures going back decades came out today, and may be conveniently viewed here. Using these figures based on time frames which span January on January of presidential term, calculating percentage increase in GDP overall and dividing by the number of months in term to arrive at a factor, the rankings are as follows:

1) .533 JFK/LBJ [best performance]

2) .458 Truman (72 months, 1-1-1947 to 1-1-1953)

3) .357 Clinton

4) .323 Reagan

5) .300 Carter

6) .245 Nixon/Ford

7) .214 IKE

8) .180 Obama (51 months, 1-1-2009 to 4-1-2013) 

9) .173 George H. W. Bush

10) .142 George W. Bush [worst performance].

Don't forget that government spending is counted as GDP.  

First Report Of Q2 2013 GDP At 1.7%, Q1 Revised Down To 1.1% From 1.8%, Q4 2012 Down To 0.1% From 0.4%

The press release, excerpted below, from the BEA is here, the full pdf with the 14th revision of the comprehensive GDP data is here. The revisions lower in the prior two quarters combined with the low 1.7% first report in Q2 2013 should be extremely troubling to everyone. The economy is crawling.

"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 1.7 percent in the second quarter of 2013 (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the first quarter, real GDP increased 1.1 percent (revised). The Bureau emphasized that the second-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the box on page 3 and "Comparisons of Revisions to GDP" on page 18).  The "second" estimate for the second quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on August 29, 2013. The increase in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and residential investment that were partly offset by a negative contribution from federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased. The acceleration in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected upturns in nonresidential fixed investment and in exports, a smaller decrease in federal government spending, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an acceleration in imports and decelerations in private inventory investment and in PCE."

CNBC Falls In Love With Its GDP Jailer: Average Report Of GDP 0.966% Last 3 Quarters

The only thing GDP beat was poor expectations.

The average report of GDP in the last three quarters is now 0.966%, thanks to 1.7% in Q2 2013.

It feels good in its way when your killer stops stabbing you.

Moronic Shills For Obama At CNBC Call 1.7% GDP "Upbeat"

Only ignoramuses or liars would call GDP of 1.7% "upbeat", so take your pick. Charity demands the former, but I'm fresh out of it.

It is now four years to the day since Ben Bernanke pointed to the need for 2.5% GDP to reduce unemployment (here):

'Bernanke's core message was similar to that he delivered last week in congressional testimony: that the recession should end soon, but that considerable risks remain -- especially relating to the labor market. It takes GDP growth of about 2.5 percent to keep the jobless rate constant, Bernanke noted. But the Fed expects growth of only about 1 percent in the last six months of the year. "So that's not enough to bring down the unemployment rate," he said.'

The Bureau of Economic Analysis comprehensive revision of GDP and related measures going back decades, available here in pdf of 83 pages, now shows the last three quarters to be truly abysmal for this point in a so-called recovery: growth of 0.1%, 1.1% and 1.7% in the last three quarters. Obama's best year to date, 2012, now comes in at a measly 2.8%, far off the new post-war average of 3.4%.

There's nothing upbeat about any of it.

Presidents Haven't Done Their Job In 20 Years Reporting On Visa Overstays

So says a scathing report in The Washington Times here which says the General Accounting Office can somehow do an audit and find out that we've got 1 million overstaying visas right now, or that previously the number was 1.6 million, but the executive branch hasn't ever been able to figure it out in any year in two decades, nor has Homeland Security fulfilled its legal obligation to track exit compliance since 2004.

Maybe it's because presidents don't give a damn? Maybe it's because there's an unspoken agreement between the two parties to keep the flow coming despite what the people want? Because businesses want the cheap labor, and politicians want the extra votes? And oops, some terrorists get in, so sorry, so now we have to spy on everybody to fix that?

Excerpts:

"The GAO said most of the overstays came by airplane, but 32 percent came through land ports of entry, and 4 percent came by sea. The average length of overstay was 2.7 years. ... The executive branch is supposed to report annually to Congress on how many people have overstayed their visas but has failed to do so for the past two decades, saying the information isn’t reliable enough. ... The total of 1 million potential overstays in the country is an improvement from two years ago, when the GAO found Homeland Security had lost track of 1.6 million people. Homeland Security went back and looked at those names and found that more than half had either actually left the country unbeknownst to the government, or had gained legal status that allowed them to remain in the U.S. Of the others, the department decided most were deemed not to be security risks and so there was no need to track them down. But 1,901 of them were deemed significant national security or public safety threats, and 266 of those were still unaccounted for as of March."

Anthony Weiner's Wacky Gifts To Drudge: A Brief History Since 2012

And now a sampling of the treasure trove of innuendo* supplied by Anthony Weiner to Drudge's, er, headlines:

Weiner pulls out

Will Weiner rise again?

Can Weiner rise again?

Weiner's poll rising . . .

Weiner spotted shooting . . . video

Weiner plunges in

Weiner in

Weiner goes in

Cuomo flogs Weiner

Pre-mature Election: Cuomo slaps Weiner

Shumer shies away from Weiner

Poll: Weiner inside . . . margin of error

Weiner erupts after crowd confronts

NYT pulls Weiner . . . story

Shock Poll: Weiner spurts to lead

Poll: Weiner thrusts into lead

Weiner's lead peters out

Huma gathering women for Weiner

Poll: Weiner, Spitzer thrust to NYC lead

Erection Update: Weiner stays in

Erection Update: Pressure mounts on Weiner to pull out

Electile Dysfunction . . .

Poll: Weiner sags

Poll: Weiner goes soft

Dirty Dems: Weiner roasting

Weiner sticks it out

Poll: Younger women love Weiner

*Attention Rio Linda residents: an innuendo is not an Italian suppository

Obama's Jeffersonian Hero, Ho Chi Minh, Was A Mass Murderer

The pro-Hanoi Vietcong began a guerrilla campaign in the late 1950s to overthrow Diem's government. In the North, the communist government launched a land reform program, and executed between 50,000 and 172,000 people in campaigns against wealthy farmers and landowners, amid broader purges. In 1960 and 1962, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam signed treaties providing for further Soviet military support. In the South, Diem went about crushing political and religious opposition, imprisoning or executing tens of thousands.

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The 44th president conveniently forgot Vietnamese history and slandered ours by linking a founder of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, to the mass murderer Ho Chi Minh. [Vietnamese President Truong Tan] Sang had brought Obama a copy of a letter sent to President Truman from Ho in which the communist dictator spoke hopefully of cooperation with America. Obama, stopping short of yet another apology, mused about what might have been, and noted "we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."

Unemploy An Illegal: Bring On The Lettuce Bots!

Story here:

"Technology is about to take over America's fruited plains - robots, it seems, are all the rage down on the farm, and their introduction and spread will make human farm work a thing of the past."

Home Prices Still Too High: Nationally 24% Pay More Than Half Their Income On Housing

Case Shiller Home Price Index @multpl.com

Joel Kotkin reflects on the still expensive housing market here:

Ownership levels continue to drop, most notably for minorities, particularly African Americans. Last year, according to the Harvard study, the number of renters in the U.S. rose by a million, accompanied by a net loss of 161,000 homeowners.

This is bad news not only for middle-income Americans but even more so for the poor and renters. The number of renters now paying upward of 50% of their income for housing has risen by 2.5 million since the recession and 6.7 million over the decade. Roughly one in four renters, notes Harvard, are now in this perilous situation. The number of poor renters is growing, but the supply of new affordable housing has dropped over the past year. ...

According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39% of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, 35% in the San Francisco metro area and 31% in the New York area. All of these figures are much higher than the national rate of 24%, which itself is far from tolerable.

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Kotkin nowhere mentions that currently expensive housing is explicit Federal Reserve policy. ZIRP and QE are specifically designed to reduce long term interest rates to make home mortgages affordable. Instead those policies have re-inflated housing prices to their historical highs before the bubble and reversed the downward trajectory of price resetting those prices were on.

In June 2013 dollars, the Case Shiller Home Price Index reached its low point after the bubble at 126.30 for the quarter ended March 31, 2012. That level hadn't been seen since June 1998. But from the long term perspective prices should have reset to 120 on the index or lower as they have in the past. This expectation holds even more considering the excesses of the bubble which needed to be wiped out, but haven't been.

The Fed has done nothing but interfere with the free market in housing, creating the bubble in the first place and preventing its deflation now. To fix the problem, the Fed needs at a minimum to focus solely on price stability by maintaining a strong dollar. Markets will take care of themselves after that.

Dear Christopher Buckley: "Go Away" Is Not A Solution, Unless You're A WASP

Occupy Wall Street: The Mirror Image Of Congress

Reviewing "This Town" by Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, here, Christopher Buckley wishes in the end that most of the denizens of DC would just go home or, better yet, go away, citing the important fact that the lobbyists are really mostly just former elected officials:

'There’s a phrase in journalism-speak called “burying the lede,” which Leibo­vich appears to do by waiting until Page 330 to cite this arresting figure (previously reported by The Atlantic): in 1974, 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. “Now 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of congressmen do.” No one goes home anymore. Cincinnatus, call your office. ... By the end, one is left thinking that our country would be so much better off if, after putting in their years of “public service,” all these people would just go home. Or just away. But then what would we do for entertainment, being left with a mere Parliament of Bores?'

When the US Congress and the executive conspired way back in the 1920s to restrict representation to 435 in the US House to repress the growing political influence of the grown large immigrant population, mostly from Europe, which they also evidently wished "would just go home" or "away", it merely pushed on a string. So that today instead of worse representation we have representation of the worst sort: lobbyists whom we cannot dislodge at election time, and the 435 people who depend on them for campaign financing whom we cannot dislodge, either.

Today we should have a US House of Representatives of 10,490. Instead we had in 2012 12,411 registered lobbyists, and the 435 mopes the lobbyists, and we, routinely return to Washington, DC.

Representation is messy, but we desperately need more of it as the founders intended, not less.

Presidents Ranked By Level Of Income Inequality: Gini Ratio Of Families, End Of Term

1. .349 JFK/LBJ (least income inequality)

2. .359 Truman

3. .363 Nixon/Ford

4. .369 Carter

5. .374 IKE

6. .401 Reagan

7. .429 Bush 1

8. .435 Clinton

9. .443 Bush 2

10. .450 Obama, to date (most income inequality) 

The IRS Is Obstructing The Investigation Into Its Crimes

Peggy Noonan here:

House investigators this week said they have in fact received less than 1% of the documents they have been asking for from the agency. The IRS itself at one point identified a whopping and rather intimidating 65 million documents that might be relevant to the tea-party scandal. To date—almost three months since the scandal became public—the House Ways and Means Committee says the IRS has turned over only 13,000 pages. And some of them were duplicates. It's gone beyond what staff aides were, last month, calling "slow walking." Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement the IRS's actions look "a lot like obstruction." One aide said: "Patience is wearing thin."