Yves Smith, Stalinist Heroine Of Naked Capitalism, Comes Out For Michael Mann Never Once Mentioning His Nemesis Mark Steyn And National Review

The opponents of what is "right" do not exist, you see: If they were in the picture they'd remove them, but it is better to never have them in the picture in the first place.

She's got an Occupy Wall Street Movement sash on the right of her page, might as well put up a Joe Stalin sash on the left.

Here.

Thank John Boehner: Stock Markets Loved The Fiscal Cliff Deal And Proved It All Year Long In 2013

On January 2, 2013 here we noted how the stock market voted for the fiscal cliff deal by rising 2.5% to start the year. From 1426 on January 2nd the S&P500 rose all the way to 1848 by the last day of 2013, an astounding gain of 29.59%.

The broad market posted so many new highs in 2013 it was difficult to keep count. In point of fact the market averaged one new record high per week in 2013 (actually there were 53, and 54 if you count revisiting).

The fiscal cliff deal's main achievement was that it made George Bush's much maligned tax rates permanent except for the very top earners, for whom rates went up modestly but also permanently. And those same top earners went on to benefit the most from the deal's permanent fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax, a long hoped for resolution as improbable as Democrats surrendering to George Bush. The deal also restored revenues to the Social Security system to the status quo ante after two years of cuts which may have helped consumers but seriously hurt the nation's fiscal health. Deficits fell as a result of that and Republican efforts to hold the line on spending.

John Boehner deserves a great deal of credit for achieving these remarkable results with the Democrats in control of everything else, but I still haven't heard anyone on our side give him his due, except for Ralph Benko at Forbes.

Cough up you ingrates. 

The Atlantic Finally Catches On To The ObamaCare Part-Timing Myth

Derek Thompson, here, in "The Spectacular Myth of Obama's Part-Time America":

If you've been paying attention to a certain slice of the financial media—see: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Fox News—you know for a fact that Obama and his health care law have tag-teamed with global economic trends to drive America inexorably toward a part-time economy.

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

Beat ya.

We first expressed doubt in the part-time-due-to-Obamacare meme in July 2013, here, because the category "usually work part-time" showed no new highs since passage of the law three years prior.

We began calling the meme a myth in August 2013, here, because average hours worked were not declining, but rising modestly.

In September 2013, here, we pointed out that government statistics will NEVER capture the reduction of part-time worker schedules to 29 hours per week because everyone working 34 hours or fewer is already part-time as far as the government is concerned and those are the people most likely to have their hours reduced. But those workers in the aggregate are too few in comparison to all the full-time workers to reduce average hours worked overall enough to impact that measure. The real scandal is that ObamaCare may be reducing hours for a small segment of the population which is already part-time, but especially retail, restaurant and food service workers. Unfortunately most of the evidence is anecdotal and no one really gives a crap about them anyway, least of all Obama.

And in October 2013, here, we pointed out that part-time for economic reasons was slowly declining despite passage of ObamaCare and had been high in the first place because of the crisis of 2008, something Derek Thompson seems really proud of pointing out now to his middlebrow audience.

So where's my Pulitzer Prize already, huh? 

Total Nonfarm Employment Growth Under Reagan Is Still The Most Remarkable

total nonfarm under Ronald Reagan

Both George Bush and Barack Obama have had periods just under four years long with growth in total nonfarm employment averaging just under and just over 234,000 jobs per month, as we discussed yesterday here (all figures not-seasonally-adjusted).

But for impressive records of job growth you have to look back to Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

Total nonfarm under Clinton expanded by an average of just over 235,000 per month for all eight years of his two terms, with almost 22.6 million jobs added in total. 

Under Reagan the average was just under 166,000 per month for the full eight years, but measured from his post-recession nadir on January 1, 1983 total nonfarm expanded for the next six years at just over 250,000 per month, adding just over 18 million jobs in that time. The net total added under Reagan was 15.9 million.

When reports come out as one did yesterday that total nonfarm increased only 113,000 in the last month, you can understand why people are worried.

We can do a lot better.

67% Of Lower 48 Covered By Snow, Lake Superior With Record 92% Ice Cover

Total Nonfarm Employment Under Obama So Far Peaked Almost 1 Million Below Its Peak Under George W. Bush

Peak total nonfarm employment was achieved under George W. Bush on November 1, 2007 at 139.443 million, not seasonally adjusted, a peak which remains unmatched under Obama over six years later despite impressive jobs recovery since the depths of 2009. Peak nonfarm under Obama so far has reached as high as 138.536 million.

The peak under Bush was achieved after three years and ten months of total nonfarm job growth averaging just under 234,000 per month beginning from January 1, 2004.

Total nonfarm employment plunged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to its most recent nadir at 127.736 million on January 1, 2010. The chart above shows how deep that plunge was: The last time in the data series total nonfarm employment landed lower than that was on March 1, 1999, at 127.409 million. 

The recent peak under Obama was achieved after an eerily identical period of three years and ten months of total nonfarm job growth also averaging just over 234,000 per month to November 1, 2013, at 138.536 million.

Obama's total nonfarm employment peak at that time was 907,000 off Bush's peak.

If the current trend continues, however, it is likely total nonfarm employment will finally exceed the Bush peak sometime in late 2014 after cycling through the seasonal downturn we customarily experience at the turn of the year.

Labor force level highs, usually full-time level highs, and total nonfarm employment level highs all tend to peak together in the summers and recede in the winters when part-time levels peak as students go back to school and seasonal workers take part-time jobs for the holidays.

Obama Is The Immigration Bill's Buzz Kill

The upside to Obama's disdain for the rule of law is that without it he'd have convinced enough Republicans to help pass another disastrous immigration amnesty.

Things actually could be worse.

The NY Post reports here:

[M]any Republicans reasonably conclude that no matter what immigration law they pass, the president will simply not enforce provisions he doesn’t like — in particular those dealing with securing the border.

January Unemployment Falls To 6.6%, Employment Growth Slows Nearly 42% From 2013 Average

The BLS reports here:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 113,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment grew in construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, and mining. Both the number of unemployed persons, at 10.2 million, and the unemployment rate, at 6.6 percent, changed little in January. Since October, the jobless rate has decreased by 0.6 percentage point. ... Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 113,000 in January. In 2013, employment growth averaged 194,000 per month.

Sorry, This Won't Work Because The Somebody Would Be A Guy

Jobless Claims Not-Seasonally-Adjusted Still Far In Excess Of Bush Era Levels

The report is here.

The current level annualized represents 18.5 million claims per year, far in excess of the best actual levels under Bush which were in the 16 million range.

Obama's best year for claims was in 2013 when actual not-seasonally-adjusted claims fell to 17.75 million. 

Propane Prices In MI Skyrocket In Part Because Supplies Were Used To Dry Late-Harvested Taxpayer-Subsidized Crops

But the story, here, never mentions the insane taxpayer-funded feedback loop of government interference in both agriculture and fuels:

Propane prices are up more than 70 percent over last year’s levels amid heavy demand caused by the abnormally cold winter and late harvest that required propane for drying grain throughout the Midwest.

So put it together: corn-growing is subsidized by the federal government which means by you the taxpayer, then the crop happens to be harvested late due to weather conditions and has to be dried with fossil fuel which impacts propane supplies, after which the corn is distilled into ethanol at taxpayer expense to put in your gas tank by government decree which you pay too much for at the pump, and then the hapless souls depending on propane get stuck with enormous bills during a cold snap and above normal snows where bad roads impact the deliveries of already stressed supply.

Brilliant! The taxpayers pay and pay and pay, and the governor, Rick Snyder, condescends to rebate just 10% of a tax surplus.

They should all be in jail!

Cheapskate MI Gov. Snyder Proposes Refunding Barely 10% Of Revenue Surplus

It's never your money in the first place to these people.

Story here:

LANSING, MI -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is calling for $103 million in refund checks for some low- and middle-income families who pay property taxes or rent. ... "Michigan has turned the corner from the economic turmoil that plagued the state for nearly a decade," reads the budget. "With nearly $1 billion in added revenue, the state is in a much stronger fiscal position, a position that affords not only making strategic investments but offering tax relief for hard-working families across Michigan."

ObamaCare Hostage Empathizes With Her Captor

Seen here:

Aliso Viejo resident Danielle Nelson said Anthem Blue Cross promised half a dozen times that her oncologists would be covered under her new policy. She was diagnosed last year with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and discovered a suspicious lump near her jaw in early January.

But when she went to her oncologist's office, she promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.

"I'm a complete fan of the Affordable Care Act, but now I can't sleep at night," Nelson said. "I can't imagine this is how President Obama wanted it to happen."

Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity, CBO, Obama used to validate it.

So says Dana Milbank for WaPo, here:

The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. ...

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers. ...

But there’s only so much White House officials could do. Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.

3,000 "Youngsters" Die Everyday From Abortion, But The NY Times Wants To Talk About 20 Daily Firearms-Related Injuries To Children

Here.

The Only Insult In This Instance Is Sotomayor's Insult To Our Intelligence

How do we put up with these morons?

“I figure I may not be the smartest judge on the court but I’m going to be a competent justice,” she said. “I’m going to try to be the best I can and each year I think my opinions have been getting better. And I’m working at finding my voice a little bit.”

Competence, it appears, is a bar, uh hum, too high for The Supreme Court.

Criminal: "a person who has committed a crime".

Story here.

What Do You Call 1000 Democrats In Jail For The ObamaCare Fiasco?

A good start.

Healthcare.gov's "not my responsibility".

Broad Market Declines 2.28% Monday, February 3, 2013

click to enlarge

Dennis Prager: Everything In Conservatism Follows From The Belief That People Are Not Basically Good

Dennis Prager, quoted here:

Prager, a practicing Jew who, in addition to hosting a radio show, is a syndicated columnist and author, responded by suggesting several ways in which "this country is changing," each of which he tied to the loss of belief in a transcendent God or moral standard. Prager specifically noted a "loss of meaning" and a loss of objective morality.

"We live in the age of feelings," Prager said, citing abortion rights as the greatest example of individual feelings guiding contemporary morality. The unborn child's worth is "entirely dictated by the feelings of the mother. It is an unbelievable statement of narcissism, which is what happens when there is no transcendent morality," he said.

Extending his theological argument, Prager pointed to assumptions about the nature of humanity as the fundamental dividing line between liberals and conservatives today.

"Everything in leftism [both religious and political liberalism] follows from the belief that people are basically good," Prager said. "And everything in conservatism follows from the belief that people are not basically good. Judaism and Christianity were united in teaching that people were not basically good. With the death of traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity, you have the unbelievably dangerous belief that people are basically good, and everything flows from there to big government to believing that your opinion is what makes things moral. And that's where we now stand."

Rush Limbaugh, Confused About Conservatism, Talked Up Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED Just Last September

Here.

And also in May 2012 in "Atlas is Starting to Shrug" here, steering another caller to the book and drawing parallels to current members of the 1% abandoning the rest of us.

Committed conservatives understand the difference between conservatism and libertarianism and choose the former. Rush still thinks there's room for both under a big tent, which just shows he does not fully understand how libertarianism is inimical to conservatism.

One Reason Why America's Problems Are What They Are

I'll leave it to you to decide which is the one:

[I]n a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Read more here.

Both Political Parties Are Now Essentially Libertarian, And That's The Problem

Seen here:

John Carr, who now heads the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, thinks both parties are now essentially defined by their commitment to economic or lifestyle libertarianism. "These libertarian tendencies are reinforced by large campaign contributors and powerful interest groups on the left and right (e.g., Emily's List and the Koch Brothers, Planned Parenthood and the Club for Growth). Who died and left Arianna Huffington and Grover Norquist in charge? Is there any room left for compassionate conservatives and pro-life Democrats?"

Blame The Yankees For The Minimum Wage: A Northern Tariff On The South

Doin' right ain't got no end

Jay Cost for The Weekly Standard, here:

Obama’s [State of the Union] address inadvertently referenced the government’s proclivity to play favorites. The minimum wage is a hallowed talking point for wealthy liberals posing as hardscrabble populists, but in fact its original purpose was to serve as a sort of domestic tariff. By 1937 Northern industries had come to terms with organized labor, but the South still resisted. Fearing a flight of capital to Dixie, it was Northern businessmen who made the difference in pushing a minimum wage through Congress.

Liberal Democrats had outsized majorities during this period of the New Deal, but Southerners controlled key choke points within the legislature, notably the House Rules Committee. It was only a broad coalition that included liberals, organized labor, and, crucially, Northern industrialists that brought the Fair Labor Standards Act to a vote on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the wage floor was set so low that only the South was really affected. And even then, it only passed after it was loaded up with exemptions for all sorts of politically privileged groups.

This decidedly inegalitarian back story of the minimum wage has mostly been lost to history. One would be hardpressed to find a book about the New Deal in Barnes & Noble that discusses this at any length. This is not a coincidence; advocates of bold, activist government want to forget all the inequalities it creates. So it is with Obama. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is one of the most grossly unfair pieces of legislation to become law in modern times. Underwritten by a logroll among elite interests as varied as the drug manufacturers and the feminist left, it is an enormous redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, without due regard to socioeconomic status.

Bank Failure Friday: Boise, Idaho Bank Is Third To Fail In 2014

Syringa Bank, Boise, Idaho, failed today, the third to do so in 2014, costing the FDIC $4.5 million.

The irrelevance of real money to the global fascist banking cabal

Jeffrey Snider, here, fascist emphases added in red for your reading pleasure:

For as long as there has existed the dollar, there has existed the temptation to make it pliable enough to fit the fancy of its masters. In the context of the economic system as it has developed since the earliest stirrings of industrial transformation.

In the current age, there is no mistake about where the dollars strings attach. The Federal Reserve sets policy but does not really operate the "printing press", that is reserved for the global banking cabal including eurodollar participants. There are relatively persuasive arguments on both sides as to which end is in actual control, the banks or the Fed, but in my mind there is no degree of separation, at least not meaningfully in this setting. The banking system operates as the business end of policy. Banking interests have become fully aligned with policy directives as the banking system has been re-oriented in that direction by progression in the past six or so decades.

A full part of that changing systemic character has been the gradual reduction in the relevance of real money. Convention always marks 1971 as the end of the gold era, but it really began its demise far earlier. The Bretton Woods system was plagued almost from the start by this impulse toward dollar pliability, whether for US government purposes, US banking purposes or global trade. The formation of the London gold pool in November 1961 was a symptom of market forces attempting to re-assert authority over currency; and how far government control would be stretched to wrestle free of any competition over monetary monopoly.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, Maybe Mormons Stayed Home In 2012!

Alex Beam in "Did Mormons Want Romney To Win?" for The Boston Globe suggests Mormons weren't ready for a Mormon presidency, here:

“No one would ever come out and say it, but I suspect what you are thinking is probably true,” says Matthew Bowman, a Mormon professor of religion and author of “The Mormon People.” “The whole Romney campaign was a shock to the system for a church that generally wants to move very slowly and is used to hashing out things out [sic] internally over a long period of time.”

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

Mormons in the US number about 6 million, but Kimberley Strassel has pointed out that Romney lost the election by fewer than 350,000 total votes in just four states: Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire. 

GDP Under Obama Is Nearly 42% Worse Than It Was Under George Bush

Obama's latest GDP performance report for Q4 wraps up 2013 at a measly 1.9% real GDP for the whole year, quite an achievement when the second half of the year was as good as it was.

It's possible the second and third estimates will be better than the initial report of 3.2% for Q4, but that is not likely to change the overall number for 2013 very much.

As it stands, Obama has now had an average annual real GDP report of just 1.24% vs. George Bush's 2.13%.

Obama's performance remains the worst ever since World War II.

When he said he'd transform the country, he meant it.

Q4 2013 Real GDP At 3.2% In 1st Estimate, Q3 Remains At 4.1%

The BEA reports here.

Change in private inventories added far less in Q4 than in Q3, just .42 points vs. 1.67.

As good as the second half of 2013 appears, real GDP for 2013 still clocks in at an anemic 1.9% vs. 2.8% in 2012.

Abenomics is a fart in a windstorm

Good Help Is Hard To Find: Drudge Leads With A Typo For Five Hours And Counting

You know the "artic", up north where the artists live, in "artica", as opposed to their southern home in antartica.

Yikes, Now Laura Ingraham Repeats Stupid

Just now Laura Ingraham said on her radio program that 3 million Republicans stayed home on election day in 2012.

The story was debunked in late November 2012 already, by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal.

She's starting to sound as dumb as Rush.

Get up to speed people!

Hey Obama! Job Change Is A Fact!

Americans in October 2013 are driving like it's still 2005!

Maybe all that reduced carbon pollution Obama is so proud of came on the backs of workers who have millions fewer jobs to drive to: miles-traveled has been stuck at 2004/5 levels for Obama's entire presidency, reducing carbon emissions. Only a blind communist would boast of increased food supplies because he starved his people to death.

Mark Levin Is Smokin' Something, Too

Tonight Mark Levin's calling on the US House to pass a resolution declaring our lawless president's executive orders null and void.

You know, the same House which is about to betray the people who put them in charge up there by passing another illegal alien amnesty.

The same House which just screwed veterans out of their retirements.

The same House which completely botched the so-called government so-called shutdown.

The same House which capitulated on the sequester and raised spending.

And that's the litany of woe for just the last couple of months.

Let's face it. This House isn't worthy of conservatives' support. And we aren't worthy to be called Americans if we support it.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Minimum temps in the US for 1/28/14

Self-Identifying As Middle Class Is Down 17% After 5 Years Of Obama, As Lower Class Up 60%!

Self-identifying as middle class is down 9 points since 2008, which is a 17% decline.

Self-identifying as lower class is up a whopping 15 points, or 60%.

Identifying as upper class is down almost 29% under the regime.

Graph seen here at Time.com.

Balance Sheet Recession Continues To Restrain Aggregate Demand: US Halfway Through Its First Lost Decade

So says Stephen Roach for Project Syndicate, here:

As research by the economists Richard Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil Kashyap has shown, Japan’s corporate “zombies” – rendered essentially lifeless by their balance-sheet problems – ended up damaging the healthier parts of the economy. Until balance sheets are repaired, such “zombie congestion” restrains aggregate demand. Japan’s lost decades are an outgrowth of this phenomenon; the US is now halfway through the first lost decade of its own.

Mish: Credit Dwarfs Money Supply

Just as the Fed's overnight window dwarfed TARP in the 2008 panic.

Mish hits a homer, here:

I have little doubt the Fed (central bankers in general) will step on the money supply spigot in response to another slowdown. But credit dwarfs money supply. Once again, those who view inflation and deflation in the myopic eyes of money supply alone will come to the wrong conclusions about prices of goods, services and assets, just as they did in 2008 when they thought hyperinflation was just around the corner. Those who understand credit and credit market to market will get the picture right. I repeat my claim that I made in 2007. The US will go in and out of deflation over the course of a number of years. Deflation is once again nearly at hand, but Europe will be first.

US Electricity Consumption Remains 3.35% Off The 2005 Peak Through 2011

click image to enlarge

2011 consumption per capita was 13,246 kWh.

Rush Limbaugh Must Be High Again: Now Blames Tea Party For Staying Home In 2012

Up until now I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh blame the Tea Party specifically for staying home in 2012. It's always been the Republican "base" which he's been blaming for staying home, first 3 million of them, then 4 million. 

But now he's saying specifically that it's the Tea Party which stayed home in 2012, here on Friday:

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I was just wondering if the Tea Party is so strong, what the hell happened to us in 2012?

RUSH: Stayed home.

CALLER: I would have walked over broken glass to vote against Obama.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Nothing could have kept me from it.

RUSH: Yeah, but four million of you didn't.

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

Rush got this "stay home" meme in his head from some uncritical knee-jerk repetition of provisional reporting right after the election suggesting whites stayed home, based on admittedly incomplete exit polling data, which is kind of an irony since Rush used the same airtime on Friday to highlight how a false story about a country singer couldn't be erased no matter how hard she tried. Well this false story is well nigh impossible to erase from Rush's hard drive, and it's just getting worse now that he's singling out the Tea Party, which is probably more responsible for Romney's actual better performance than McCain's than people realize.

Within weeks of the election the whole idea that McCain got more Republican votes than Romney was decisively trashed by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal here and by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air here. Strassel points out the only losing state where McCain bested Romney was Ohio.

In point of fact, Strassel's numbers show Romney could have won the election but for 334,000 votes in just four states:

In the end, it was 334,000 votes—in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire—that separated Mr. Romney from the presidency.

In McCain's loss to Obama in 2008, the election similarly turned on just 1.4 million votes in the swing states. And for all the close states Romney lost to Obama in 2012, not just those four, the election turned on half that many in total.

So actually Romney did much better than McCain, it's just that Obama deployed his resources on the ground very effectively in a targeted manner, especially in Ohio, while Romney can't be said to have deployed much at all. Turning out your peeps in contested territories is key even if you lose those. Peeling off votes even in small numbers can increase the value of your turnout elsewhere in the same state, which is the point of campaigning on the ground in Hispanic and other minority strongholds, as Strassel points out. You don't have to win them, just weaken them.

Why Rush Limbaugh just keeps phoning it in on this issue is anyone's guess. But it is clear from much of what he says on the show that he increasingly relies on others to do his show prep for him.

Sympathetic critics of Rush Limbaugh are embarrassed for him, and Tea Partiers in particular can't be too happy. 

Energy From Solar Remains "Absolutely Inconsequential" Despite What Obama's Smokin'

Seen here at CNBC.com:

"Renewables are great, but solar generated 0.1 percent of [U.S.] electricity, and 0.5 percent across the globe. It's absolutely inconsequential," [Paul Genoa of the Nuclear Energy Institute] said. "It's growing rapidly and maybe will get up higher, … but we're not going to power New York, Tokyo and Mumbai with solar. It's a pipe dream."

Republicans Preach Unity After Eating Their Own

Republicans were preaching unity this week at their meetings, as reported here by TheHill.com, but those few of us out here who have politicians who actually represent us in our values and ideas can only cry, "Hypocrites! Liars! Cannibals!"

Republicans these days specialize in nothing if not eating their own. Unfortunately they always choose unwisely from the menu. They enjoy a soupçon of conservatism here, and another there, when what they should be devouring is a full plate of Bushmen.

That's because there's only one kind of unity in the Republican Party anymore: Republican Establishment dictated unity, which is to say, rallying around liberalism in the vain hope of forestalling criticism from Democrats.

If you are a social conservative like Gov. Mike Huckabee or Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema of Michigan or Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, then shut the hell up, which is just what Democrats yell in the direction of Republicans all the time. It is another aspect of the way in which there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties.

The moment in history when this sorry fact became memorialized was in the 1920s when Democrats and Republicans conspired to fix representation at 435 so that they didn't have to listen anymore to the voices of the great unwashed from central and southern Europe who had swelled the population for forty years, nor have to rub shoulders with them in the House of Representatives.

If you want to hear that kind of crap on a regular basis, tune in to the likes of Royalist Republican David Frum. But I, for one, am sick of it. As far as I'm concerned the Axis of Evil runs from the Speaker's office to Reince Priebus' office to wherever Jeb Bush happens to be at the moment.

Republicans can go to hell with the Democrats for all I care. Democrats never get my votes, and this year Republicans won't.

The Broad Market Declined About 2% This 24th Of January, 2014

Bank Failure Friday: Two YTD In 2014

Bank failure number two of 2014 is The Bank of Union, El Reno, Oklahoma, costing the FDIC $70 million. 6,891 institutions remain members of the FDIC.

The Civilian Labor Force Level Is Flashing A Warning: Are Students Having Trouble Finding Part Time Work?

1) Civilian labor force level 2007-2013

After falling during the financial panic and its aftermath, the civilian labor force level has been trying to climb out of a deep hole, a hole which got close to, at the very end of 2010, but did not reach as deep as, the pre-recession level in the winter of 2006-2007.

In point of fact, the civilian labor force level has reached a new all-time high in the now much missed and lately departed summer of 2013, above the 157 million mark. That said, the prior trend looked at as an annual average indicates that the level should be much more like 165 million by now (graph 2). We are way behind in the growth of the labor force, which is as much an abortion problem as it is a demographic problem which includes not just retirements but smaller families of the baby boomers going on to have no families. At any rate, growth of the civilian labor force hit a major speed bump in the financial panic and aftermath, from which it is only slowly just lately showing signs of recovery.

As graph 1) shows, steady progress has been made since 2010 with steadily higher highs and ever shallower lows in the civilian labor force level, until recently. The steepness of the drop since the summer of 2013 is nearly as severe as the drop in 2009.

Normally the measure of the level of the labor force peaks in the summers, as does the number saying they work usually full-time. Then both measures retreat in the winters. I'm assuming this has to do with students who work full-time jobs in the summers going back to school in the winters, when, characteristically enough, the measure of those working usually part-time rockets up. The students leave their full-time summer jobs and get part-time ones during the academic year, or take on part-time work schedules at their old jobs while they hit the books. Seasonal holiday work by non-students also boosts the usually part-time measure. But after reaching a peak of 28.106 million in March 2010, usually part-time peaks have been flat to declining: 28.068 million in November 2010 (the level never got to 28 million in 2011), 28.096 million in February 2012, and 28.050 million in April 2013.

As the level of the civilian labor force has recovered to higher highs each summer, the level of the winter lows has fallen to ever shallower levels, but the recently logged level for December at 154.408 million narrowly undercuts the March 2013 low of 154.512 million, with three months to go. Maybe this year we are witnessing students, who are normally classified as not in the labor force, having trouble finding part-time work. Hence they have dropped out, again so to speak.

That's not good news.

2) Average annual civilian labor force level since 1950 hit a speed bump in 2008

Ann Coulter's Wrong Again: Obama's Dope-Induced Paranoia Makes Him Successful At Least At One Thing

Successful only at spying . . . because he's paranoid.

Spying.

For this I'll lift my ban on quoting Ann Coulter:

"Potheads are incapable of following simple instructions and getting a job done," Ann Coulter said on Wednesday's broadcast of Piers Morgan Live on CNN. "You can't get anything done with a pothead...I'm going to be paying for their food, housing, now for their health care apparently, because they can't perform any useful jobs."

It's 2014 But The Economy Is Falling Apart

Jeffrey Snider, here:

As much as these specialists of economic canon project their abilities as something like science, the reduction of economic benchmarks for success shows that it is nothing more than ideology, more closely operating as religion than science. Science is observation, leading to predictable and replicable results. Everything about the past five years is the opposite for the orthodox economist. Everything about the Panic of 2008 was as well - there was no predictability nor replicability in any of the orthodox models or theories. It is all blind faith.

The economy is falling apart, not recovering as you hear from every mainstream outlet. It is a false narrative given cover by the fact that the very definition of recovery has been altered into something that only a few years ago would be easily recognizable as dire malfunction. Even in the highly adjusted statistical economic accounts that show as such are now couched as if they are representative of the opposite, as their meaning has been subverted by this ideology. And where measures of economic accounts clearly diverge from that narrative, such as the labor force participation and the more recent decline in the labor force itself, it is ignored as irrelevant to the heroic monetary chronicle.

Wisconsin's Governor Walker Says Surplus Is Taxpayers' Money, Michigan Governor Snyder ... Not So Much

Reported here on January 17th:

Wisconsin's budget surplus was projected Thursday to reach nearly $1 billion, money that Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders are eyeing for income and property tax cuts. ...

"The additional revenue should be returned to taxpayers because it's their money, and my administration will work with the Legislature to determine the most prudent course of action," Walker said in a statement.

Reported here on January 10th:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and state lawmakers are looking at $971 million in new one-time and ongoing revenue as they begin work on the next fiscal budget, setting the stage for a debate over possible tax cuts, rebates and new investments. ...

Michigan House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled an updated action plan that emphasized tax relief for residents. Gov. Rick Snyder has also signaled he is open to the idea but has stressed the need for long-term planning rather than knee-jerk cuts.

The Last Market Crash Was Preceded By 11 Months Of Corrections And Complacency, More Complacency And Then Fear

From the October 12, 2007 S&P500 high of 1561.80, the market corrected over a period of 11 months to 1255.07 on September 19, 2008, down 306.73 or 19.6%, just shy of bear territory.

Did we believe it would continue lower? No.

Then over the next 5.5 months the market crashed another 45.6%, 571.69 points, to 683.38 on March 6, 2009 (and fully 28% in less than a month between September 19th and October 10th, 2008).

The total decline was 878.42 points, or 56.2%, and took 16.5 long months to unfold.

After all that did we believe it had bottomed? No, in large part because by Thanksgiving 2008 the carnage seemed to be over, but it wasn't: From 800.03 on November 21 the market went on to lose another 14.6% over the next 3.5 months. At that point it was very hard to believe it was over.

The three dead cat bounces on October 31st at 968.75, January 2nd at 931.80 and February 6th at 868.60 tortured the hopeful all the way down.

Contempt For The Middle Class Was Standard Communist Fare In The 1920s, But Noemie Emery Never Mentions It

Here, in "Obama's polls fall as middle class gets his number":

Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute, whose latest book, The Revolt Against The Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, explains all you wanted to know about Obama, and much else. ... Siegel points to an alternative point of dissension: a contempt for the middle class, for commerce, and thus for most of the American culture, that predated the New Deal by more than a decade, and poisons our waters today. From this angle, the road to perdition (and/or Obama) was paved around 1920, when the best and the brightest, depressed by the Great War and the funk that came after, decided all was not well in the world and the nation, and the great middle class was to blame.

The progressives of the 1920s drank deeply from the well of Marxist disdain for the middle class and drew inspiration from it, for example from the likes of Bela Kun writing in Pravda, May 4, 1918, here, in "Marx and the Middle Classes":

“The internal enemy” of the proletarian Russian Revolution is constituted first and foremost by the lower middle classes. ... [T]hough the representatives of various shades of lower middle-class Socialism are constantly referring to Marx, in reality there is no greater sacrilege than this. ... The lower middle-class is not fit to wield power, and a long government by it is unthinkable. ... [T]he lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ... [T]he lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

Given Obama's early and deep appreciation of Marxism through the influence of people like Frank Marshall Davis, the pussy-footing around of people like Noemie Emery has gotten more than a little annoying at this late stage of the game. Obama is nothing more than a Trojan Horse trying to bring this communist vision into the present disguised as helping the middle class when what he really wants to do is wipe it out. He's off to a good start.

The black Florida Republican recently investigated by the Secret Service for suggesting Obama should be arrested, tried and hung as a traitor may be more right than he knows.

Commenters At Libertarian National Center For Policy Analysis Sure Do Hate The Baby Boomers And Their Houses

See the comments to this story at the website of the organization run by frequent Forbes contributor John Goodman.

Libertarian Free-Trader Immigration Amnesty Supporter Stephen Moore Moves To Heritage From The Wall Street Journal

Demented Jim DeMint makes good on his promise to make overtures to the libertarian movement by making Stephen Moore of Club for Growth fame its chief economist.

Story here.

Central England Temperatures In 2013 107th Warmest Going Back . . . 354 Years!

2013 just barely made it into the top third of the warmest years in the last 354. Hey, it beats 118th, the piker.

As reported here:

"Last year was also the 107th warmest on the full CET record, going back to 1659, tying with 1900."

"The longest instrumental temperature record" in existence (here).

Gee, how come 1900 was so similarly warm without all those contributing human factors we have today? NASA claims it was the 7th warmest year since 1850.

Flashback 9/12/12: Obama Lumped-In "Acts Of Terror" In General With The "Brutal Acts" Of The Benghazi Attack

Mitt Romney famously overlooked the phrase "acts of terror" from President Obama's Rose Garden remarks the day after the Benghazi attack during the second presidential debate of 2012: "You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror. It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you're saying?"

It came up again here recently discussing a new documentary about Mitt Romney's campaign:

"How bad was it?" asked one Romney family member in the green room immediately after the debate, but before Romney himself had returned.

"It wasn't good," said another.

"Who briefed him on [Benghazi]?" one of the sons asked. "Someone got it wrong."

Of course, the video of the president's remarks in the Rose Garden shows that the "acts of terror" statement was simply the obligatory cya type of generalization he had to make in a situation like that. The whole tenor of the ensuing weeks' comments from the regime blaming Benghazi on an anti-Muhammad video was set at the outset of the president's Rose Garden remarks when he stated rather abruptly and intrusively without mentioning that video: "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." The attempt to shape the event in that way looks increasingly like a diversion in light of the number of CIA on the ground in Benghazi revealed last summer and the military's ignorance of the annex just recently revealed in the Senate's report on the incident. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, those things came out way too far after the election to do him any good. Something obviously still stinks in Benghazi.

“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

(at about 4:18, here)

"Feminists are the main reason why we have broken families, high divorce rate, illegitimacy"

Phyllis Schlafly, quoted here:

Radical feminists, Schlafly said, still think men are the enemy, but the feminists, she contended, are “the main reason why we have broken families, high divorce rate, illegitimacy.”

“I think the feminists have been responsible for destroying the family,” she said. “They are the biggest enemy of the family.”

Is Obama's Interminable Recourse To Racism Charges Marijuana-Induced Paranoia?

Obama recently blamed the sudden drop in his popularity on racism in the country, a surprisingly paranoid response from someone who has won two national elections rather decisively.

Maybe he's still smoking more than cigarettes in the White House (on the night of Benghazi, perhaps?):

Christian Thurstone, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the head of the teen rehab center Adolescent STEP: Substance Abuse Treatment Education & Prevention Program, told ABC News recently that 95 percent of patient referrals to the program are for marijuana use.

“Anecdotally, yes, we’re seeing kids in treatment here who have paranoia and seeing things and hearing things that aren’t there,” said Thurstone. “Adolescent exposure to marijuana [raises] risk of permanent psychosis in adulthood.”

For more from this story, go here.

Nat Hentoff Says Obama Wasn't Fully Qualified To Teach Constitutional Law At The University of Chicago

Here, but that's just for starters:

Hentoff called this the worst state the country has ever been in, “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.” Compounding the problem he says, is the digital age, which has allowed the president to engage in unprecedented domestic spying with the apparatus of the National Security Agency. WND asked if Obama really posed such a threat, considering he was a professor of constitutional law. “People forget, he taught a course that he was not fully qualified to teach. But nobody seemed to care,” Hentoff observed.

He also pointed out that Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to never publish an article, something that went virtually unnoticed when voters considered his qualifications. “See, that was a case of affirmative-action and people feeling, ‘Hey we ought to do something important, symbolically, and here’s a black guy, and he’s articulate, so we’re gonna do this.’”

Hentoff mentioned that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the man Time Magazine once called “the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court,” once personally lectured him that “Affirmative-action on a racial basis is a total violation of the 14th Amendment, no doubt about it.” And, referring to Obama’s presidency, the journalist said, “That’s what that kind of affirmative-action did for us.”

He told WND that he firmly believed the president does not care about due process, the separation of powers, the concept of a self-governing republic or many other basic American ideals. And that’s why, he said, “What Obama is doing now is about as un-American as you can get.” Hentoff wanted to make sure no one thought he was engaging in hyperbole. He said it was literally true that Obama is “the most un-American president we’ve ever had.” And just to make sure everybody heard him, he added, “I hope the FBI got all of that.”