Huge Revision DOWN To Q4 2013 GDP, 25%, From 3.2% To 2.4% In Second Estimate

From bea.gov here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  In the third quarter, real GDP increased 4.1 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the "advance" estimate issued last month.  In the advance estimate, the increase in real GDP was 3.2 percent. With this second estimate for the fourth quarter, an increase in personal consumption expenditures (PCE) was smaller than previously estimated . . ..

Obama Regime Doubles Down On Using IRS To Silence Political Opponents

Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal, here:

Democrats are instead fully vested now in using the IRS to shut down criticism by outside groups of ObamaCare, overspending or (ironically) the IRS targeting. Even liberal groups are howling about the White House's use of the IRS to silence political speech, and the House on Wednesday passed a bill to delay the regulations. The White House's response? A veto threat.

Monica Lewinsky Said In 2004 That Bill Clinton Completely Desecrated Her Character

Quoted here:

"Instead, he talked about it as though I had laid it all out there for the taking. I was the buffet and he just couldn't resist the dessert," she was quoted as saying. "That's not how it was. This was a mutual relationship, mutual on all levels, right from the way it started and all the way through. ... I don't accept that he had to completely desecrate my character."

Ten years later that's exactly what he did, so that now she's just a verb to a black female popstar.

No one gets Rosa Parksed last time I checked, except for Republicans on Barack Obama's bus.

S&P500 Makes New High Of 1854

Rush Hits A Homor To Open The Show: Gay Bar Can Refuse To Serve Conservative Legislators, But Christians Must Bake Cakes For Queers

The gay bar ban on conservative legislators is in the news here.

A Colorado judge ruled last December that a baker cannot refuse to provide service for religious reasons for a gay wedding reception. Story here.

One law for me, but another for thee.

Obama's Red Diaper Doper Babies Attack Atherton, California, 94027, America's Richest Zipcode

Story here.

Obama Regime Admits Late Last Friday Afternoon That ObamaCare Will Increase Costs For Most Small Employers On Top Of 90% Increase Since 2009

WaPo here:

Nearly two-thirds of small businesses that currently offer health insurance to their workers will pay more for coverage as a result of new rules in the health care law, as will millions of small-business employees and their family members, according to new estimates released by the Obama administration. ... roughly 11 million of the 17 million individuals who have health care plans through a small employer will see their premiums increase as a result of the new rules on insurers in the law, while 6 million people will enjoy lower premiums. If accurate, it would continue a steady climb in insurance costs for many small businesses. Ninety-six percent of small businesses say their premiums have increased in the past five years, with the average monthly insurance cost soaring from $590 per employee in 2009 to $1,121 in 2014, according to poll released earlier this month by the National Small Business Administration.

Who do you love?

Google Finance Doesn't Show The S&P500 Breaking Above The January High Today

Idiot Republican Hagel Does Obama's Bidding: To Retire Our Deadliest Close Air Support A-10 Warthog

What's next, the B-2 and its 19 megatons of nuclear payloads? The Minuteman Missile? 

Video of the craft in action here, capable of killing tanks by sneaking up at 100 feet of altitude and flying in formation at 20,000 feet. The sucker is built around a 30mm cannon which burps rounds 11 inches long by the thousands, rounds so fast you'll freak.

There's nothing like it, and the traitors running our country want to get rid of it.

Story here:

To pay for the programs and the new engine, the Air Force will shrink the size of its tactical air squadrons and completely eliminate its A-10 attack airplane fleet, to save $3.5 billion over five years, Hagel said. The move would let the Air Force concentrate its resources on the F-35 made by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT)

Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire isn't going down without a fight, here (this source incorrectly says she represents Arizona, the dopes):

Ayotte’s office said this: “It is not accurate to say the A-10 is a single mission aircraft. For example, the A-10 conducts close air support (CAS), forward air controller-airborne (FAC-A), combat search and rescue (CSAR), and strike coordination and reconnaissance (SCAR) missions.”

Sentiment Survey Finds Americans Like Community Banks Much More Than Big Banks

The story with video interview is here.

The top commenter on the story points to nickel and dime fees by big banks as the single most important reason why Americans switch to community banks from big banks.

The survey finds customers of big banks twice as likely to say they get gouged by fees.

The Fed is subsidizing all banks to the tune of $100 billion per quarter in artificially depressed income to depositors

Chris Whalen, last November, here:

Chief among the data points to be noted is that net interest expense, which is the money paid to depositors at banks, continues to fall.  While all banks earned about $118 billion in interest income last quarter, they paid just $13 billion to depositors, a graphic example of the “financial repression” used by the Fed to subsidize the US banking industry.  Via QE, the Fed is subsidizing all banks to the tune of over $100 billion per quarter in artificially depressed interest cost and income to depositors of all stripes.

Another blooper from Drudge's incompetent help

Dinesh D'Souza's Mistake Is Failing To Take The Enemy For An Enemy

Conservatism in the United States is fatally flawed because it is incapable of imagining that the opposition is the enemy, even when the enemy openly comes after it. Under the influence of Christian teaching, it turns the other cheek also only to get slapped again, as if naming the enemy were itself a transgression. This makes them no different in spirit from the disarmament crowd, as misguided by utopianism derived from religion as revolutionaries are by ideology.

Conservatism is full of people like Dinesh D'Souza who keep saying "so and so should say this", "so and so should not say that", and "so and so ought to do such and such" or "they shouldn't be doing that" when the facts staring them in the face at every turn demonstrate that the opposition is not behaving in any way like countrymen who act in good faith as the opposition but like foreign agents working in the service of a different loyalty. Continuing to protest that the enemy is not playing according to the rules is not going to stop the enemy.

Seen here:

“I think it is the broader pattern of going after people who are critics,” he continued. “Not just me, but the Hollywood guys, the group Friends of Abe, these are Hollywood guys who are conservatives. So I think there is a sense here that Obama treats his critics not merely as people who disagree, but as enemies.”

When the rubber hits the road, as in the critical period just before an election, as here in October 2010, the president makes it plain how he wants his peeps to view us:

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

Why You Should Boycott ObamaCare If You're Under Age 44

Because at your age you are most likely to die of violence, not disease, and you'll get better care for violence without insurance.

Story here:

Researchers from the Stanford University of Medicine found that patients with insurance are less likely to get the best care than those who do not have insurance. They found that insured patients taken to non-trauma hospitals were 13 to 15 percent less likely to be transferred to trauma centers than uninsured ones. ...

Shootings and traffic accidents are the most common causes of death in this county among people under 44-years-old.  Previous research has shown that severely injured patients are 2 percent less likely to die if treated at a top-ranked trauma center than at a non-trauma center.

And Now A Word From The Paternal Fascists At Wells Fargo

Seen here:

“Retirement security is a shared responsibility between government, business, and individual and a system that is designed to motivate all stakeholders will drive the best outcome for Americans to achieve retirement security, said Joe Ready, director of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement and Trust.

In the good old days your retirement was no one's responsibility but your own.

How Speculators Redistribute Wealth: Find The Greater Fool

John Hussman, here:

It is certainly possible for any individual investor to realize wealth from an overvalued security by selling it, but this requires another investor to buy that overvalued security. The wealth of the seller is obtained by redistributing that wealth from the buyer. 

Drudge Can't Spell "Auschwitz"

Yeah, "Auchwitz", as in what, "also a joke"?

My Whirlpool Appliances Have Had 5 Failures In 5 Years While They've Tried To Hire 765 H1B And Green Card Foreigners At High Salaries Since 2001: Coincidence?

Image source here.

Actually, Just 10% Of Arizonans Defeated The Speed Cameras

Before Gov. Brewer pulled Janet Napolitano's speed cameras, 676,668 violators simply ignored their $181 or greater speeding tickets, about 10% of the 2012 population.

Imagine 31 million Americans not paying the $95 fine for not having insurance: that's only $3 billion. But 31 million Americans each not buying a $5,000 policy is $155 billion.

If 61% Of Arizonans Can Defeat Big Sis' Speed Cameras By Not Paying, Americans Can Do The Same To ObamaCare

Flashback to the November 2010 story in CAR AND DRIVER, "Arizona's Speed Cameras Come Down . . . Arizona drivers win one with civil disobedience" here:

Last summer [2009], with Arizona locked in a national shouting match over its clampdown on illegal immigration, the state’s Republican governor was quietly pulling the plug on a two-year photo-camera reign of terror that nailed 1,109,035 motorists, mostly along a Phoenix freeway, with mail-in citations that started at $181. Governor Jan Brewer called the cameras “invasive” and said she believed they were put in place by Janet Napolitano, her Democratic predecessor, as a “revenue-generating solution to solving our budget [problems].” Others pointed out that the state got only half the cash projected by Napolitano—about $64 million instead of $120 million. And that was because only 39 percent of those ticketed drivers (432,367 of 1,109,035) knuckled under and paid up—the other 61 percent simply tossed the tickets and then avoided process servers for 90 days.

Ann Coulter Says The Only Way To Get Rid Of ObamaCare Is To Elect The Republicans Who Invented It

And anybody who tells you differently is a con man or scam artist.

Here.

Uh huh.

Corporate Cash Is At $1.9 Trillion

Story here.

GLD is down to 795.61 tons

Seen here:

SPDR Gold Trust, the world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, said its holdings fell 0.70 percent to 795.61 tons on Wednesday from 801.25 tons on Tuesday.

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

Holdings have fallen 25% since May 2013.

Oops: Last Fall NOAA Predicted Above Normal Temps November Through January

Reported here:

Surprised by how tough this winter has been? You’re in good company: Last fall the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states. ... The big red blotch in the top map represents parts of the country in which the Climate Prediction Center forecast above-average temperatures. The frigid-looking blue blotch in the bottom “verification” map shows areas where temperatures turned out to be below average. “Not one of our better forecasts,” admits Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director.

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

How come the experts are always surprised?

This is another climate model failure, you know the kind, like the ones which claim global warming continues even though it stopped fourteen years ago.

Peggy Noonan Wants To Know: "What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?"

Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu

This, Peggy.

Column here.

How The 2009 Stimulus Has Hidden The Obama Decline

As everyone knows by now, when the Democrats swept into power in the 2008 election one of the first things they did was pass the stimulus spending bill in February 2009, five years ago this month.

The passage of the stimulus has been a boon to Democrats and their program. One, the added spending for fiscal 2009 got charged to George Bush's account, not Obama's, making Bush's spending record look worse than it was. Two, the added spending became the new baseline for spending in every year since, keeping government big, its most insidious affect. Three, because Republicans retook the House in 2010, spending in 2011 and 2012 has had to hew more closely to what it was in 2009 because of Tea Party demands to put the brakes on spending, allowing Obama to brag that he's kept government spending increases low for a longer period of time than has been usual. This is sort of like how Obama takes credit for our oil production boom, which happens in spite of him on private lands, not because of him.

What's so disturbing about the increase to baseline spending is that over 75% of the GDP gains for 2009 through 2012 can be attributed to that, not to anything real in the US economy. In other words, GDP growth from government spending has been propping up reported GDP and masking the severity of the current economic depression in which millions of homeowners remain underwater, similar millions remain without work after five years, and those still working suffer under a real multi-year decline in their earnings because of stagnant wages and increased costs for food, energy, clothing, healthcare and taxes. The middle class is being pushed inexorably downward. Like the infamous Climategate emails which showed an effort by scientists to hide the decline in global temperatures over the last decade, US government spending has been doing the same for the decline of GDP.

The figures are startling.

Using 2008 as the baseline from Table 3A of the Bureau of Economic Analysis's summer 2013 comprehensive revision of GDP ($14,720.3 billion), the net increase to GDP in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012 relative to 2008 was $2.8782 trillion:

2009    -302.4 billion dollars

2010   +238.0

2011   +813.5

2012 +1524.3.

Similarly, using 2008 as the baseline for federal outlays as tracked by the Tax Policy Center using figures from the OMB ($2,982.5 billion), the net increase to federal spending in nominal dollars for each year 2009 through 2012, again, relative to 2008, was $2.1841 trillion:

2009 +535.2 billion dollars

2010 +473.7

2011 +620.6

2012 +554.6.

Thus the nominal gain in GDP relative to 2008 for all four years apart from nominal increases to government spending has been all of $694.1 billion, for a gain overall of 4.71% since 2008, 1.17% per annum on average, one of the most appalling records in all of American history because that figure is not adjusted for inflation. The all items CPI has risen 19.388 seasonally adjusted between January 1, 2009 and January 1, 2013, an increase of 9.1% which completely wipes out the nominal GDP gain of 4.71%.

So GDP has actually been negative for the whole of Obama's first term, but completely hidden from view by the increase to baseline spending caused by the 2009 stimulus. If it has felt like a depression, it's because it is one.

59% Of American Adults Sympathize With The Main Goal Of Communism, And 83% Of Democrats Do

The goal? Wealth redistribution.

Gallup. April 2013. Here.

Garbage in, K-12 . . . garbage out forevermore.

No wonder upper class self-identification is down a whopping 29% under the leader. 

Social Conservatives Save, Liberals Just Go Into Debt

Social conservatives tax themselves (it's called saving for retirement, now $21.9 trillion saved), liberals tax everyone but never save anything (it's called the Total Public Debt, now $17.3 trillion owed).

Gold Stats For 2013

The gold stats for 2013 are out, reported here:

• Chinese consumer demand: a record 1,066 tonnes.
• Indian consumer demand: 975 tonnes.
• Global consumer demand: 3,864 tonnes.
• Average price: $1,411/ounce, down 15% from 2012.
• Overall demand: 3,756 tonnes, down 15% from 2012.
• Net outflows from ETFs: 881 tonnes.
• Central bank purchases: 369 tonnes, down 32% from 2012 when demand was at its highest in half a century.

Michigan Spends 53% More Per Mile On Roads Than The National Average

The news is full of doom and gloom about Michigan spending on roads based on per capita measures. You can get that news here from the Detroit News, where you will learn Michigan is in dead last for spending per capita and that road industry lobbyists think this is terrible and advocate more spending to solve Michigan's road problems.

What a shock. Industry wants us to spend more money on roads.

From all that you wouldn't know that Michigan spent 53% more per mile than the national average, as reported here in 2013 (overall story here).

Michigan actually ranks 37th in total disbursements per mile.

That's quite a different picture than being dead last per capita.

Think about it. If Michigan roads are so bad, maybe spending per mile has been spent on the wrong people, namely the unions in control of the industry. If we're not getting what we're paying for, maybe we should hire someone else instead of throwing more money at the problem.

I'll Believe In The Liberals' Idea Of Equal Dignity Of Work When Paul Krugman Gets Paid To Scrub Toilets

Here he is in all his liberal splendor, refusing to grant the dignity he demands:

It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?

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

I'll spell it out for you: if your dignity depends on how much you make rather than on doing your job, whatever it is, well, then you will never have any dignity.

Yes, there is dignity of work, but only if work is done well. The real indignity accrues to those who do not value the work of others, however humble, and imagine that they are better because of what they do and how much they make.

Michael Mann Of Penn State Claimed He "Shared" The Nobel Peace Prize For Almost Five Years

As reported here. And the guy still won't say in the revised bio to whom the Nobel was actually awarded: "jointly" to the IPCC and Al Gore. The IPCC and Al Gore shared the prize, not the IPCC authors, the IPCC and Al Gore.

"He shared the Nobel Peace Prize"

"He contributed to the award of the prize", but to whom exactly?

Ah, to these, exactly.

These Men Shared The Nobel Prize . . .

. . . these men did not:

Al Gore

Michael Mann

VW Workers Reject UAW In Tennessee 726-612

Reported here:

The rejection is a major blow to the UAW which has never organized a foreign-brand auto plant operating in the U.S.

Penn State Alumni Newsletter In November 2007 Bragged That Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Shared In The Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To The IPCC And Al Gore

And worse, the association puts Mann on the same level as a real Nobel winner like Paul Berg who was a named winner who shared the Prize for Chemistry with two others. Michael Mann cannot be said to have shared the Peace Prize with Al Gore and the IPCC, nor can any of the other 2000 members of the IPCC or however many there were be said to have shared it, either. To say this diminishes the achievement of named winners of prizes who may have won them alone or in company with other named individuals.

Seen here:

Five Penn State scientists, all members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize when the 2,000-member IPCC and former vice president Al Gore were recognized for their work on climate change issues.

The five Penn State scientists and IPCC members are: Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences; William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and professor of geography and earth system science; Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology; and Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology.

They join the select company of Paul Berg ’48, the only Penn State alumnus to win a Nobel Prize. Berg, the “father of genetic engineering,” shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Harvard Professor Walter Gilbert and Cambridge Professor Frederick Sanger. The Nobel committee recognized Berg for his groundbreaking construction of the first recombinant-DNA molecule—a discovery that paved the way for scientists interested in understanding the interactions between the chemical structure of DNA and resultant biological structure, or function, of an organism.

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

Al Gore can claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the IPCC can claim to, but none of the individual panel members can claim to have shared in the winning of that prize. Michael Mann did not win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. Mann has had to retract his own claims to the prize as reported here:

Disgraced Penn State University (PSU) climatologist, Michael Mann, concedes defeat in his bogus claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mann’s employer this weekend began the shameful task of divesting itself of all inflated claims  on university websites and official documentation that Mann was ever a Peace Prize recipient with Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Thanks to a tip off from respected climate researcher, Dr. Klaus Kaiser, myself and Tom Richard (who scooped the original Nobel story) obtained “before and after” copy images from PSU websites as records of this damning retraction. (follow the link above for the screenshots)

Evidently alumni sites have not been purged.

Obama Delays Global Warming Until 2016

Seen here.

Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Isn't Like Galileo, Trofim Lysenko Is More Like It

So says Robert Tracinski, here:

Mann is attempting to install himself as a kind of American Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet scientist who ingratiated himself to Joseph Stalin and got his crackpot theories on genetics installed as official dogma, effectively killing the study of biology in the Soviet Union. Under Lysenko, the state had an established and official scientific doctrine, and you risked persecution if you questioned it. Mann's libel suit [against Mark Steyn] is an attempt to establish that same principle here.

Mann has recently declared himself to be both a scientist and a political activist. But in attempting to intimidate his critics and suppress free debate on global warming, he is violating the fundamental rules of both science and politics. If it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science. If it is a crime to dissent, then there is no politics.

Federal Judge Appointed By Obama In Marriage Ruling Says "All Men Are Created Equal" Comes From The Constitution

Another mediocrity appointed by Obama proves the worthlessness of her degrees from Kutztown State College and the North Carolina Central University School of Law, quoted here:

"Our Constitution declares that 'all men' are created equal. Surely this means all of us," Judge Allen wrote on the first page of her opinion. That line opens the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and appears nowhere in the Constitution. The line, in which Thomas Jefferson, with signature flourish, borrowed the words of theorist John Locke: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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

Thanks Jim Webb and Mark Warner.

The Odds Of Winning Lotto Are About 20% Better Than Your Congressman Knowing Your Name

In Michigan your best odds of winning a lotto jackpot are in the game named "Fantasy Five". Your odds of winning are about 1:575,757.

The likelihood your congressman knows your name on average in the United States today are 1:728,712 (316.99 million current population divided by 435 members of the US House).

So your lotto odds are about 20% better than your representation odds.

If we followed the constitution, however, and had the representation it prescribes (1:30,000), your representation odds would improve almost 96% instantly (10,566 members of the US House).

Now there's an instant game we can all play.

Jobless Claims In The Last Week Are Barely 1% Lower Than They Were This Week In 2013

The report is here.

At nearly 359,000 in the last week, first time claims for unemployment are running just 0.7% lower than they were this time last year.

Annualized the level represents 18.6 million claims, about two million higher than the best years under George Bush even as the workforce is much smaller now, population is much higher and the recession supposedly ended over four years ago.

Best Joke About The Failure Of China's Moon Rover Announced Today

That's the thing with Chinese rover, after you have one 30 minutes later you want another one.

Garden Variety Armed Lawlessness Is Now Terrorism

"The state exercises the monopoly of crime"

See how this works folks? 

Under terror laws they can basically declare you an enemy of the state, deny you all your rights, lock you up and throw away the key if they feel like it. And as we all know by now only too well, Obama is setting precedents and records for what he feels like doing and doesn't feel like doing, whether it's enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act, taking out an American citizen abroad with a drone without due process of law, or enforcing his own health insurance reform legislation.

The story is here, how an irate Pennsylvania homeowner pulled a gun on a snowplow driver who inadvertently parked some snow on the guy's lawn:

"Eckert has been charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats, disorderly conduct, and recklessly endangering another person."

It's So Cold In New York The Liberals Have Their Hands In Their Own Pockets

Seen here.

Low Wage Workers Get Reduced Hours, Probably Due To ObamaCare, The Rest Work More

So says Jed Graham for Investors.com, here, echoing our posts on part-timers who represent just 20% of the usually employed and are too few in number to ding the customary measures of hours, which are aggregate measures, when they are reduced because of ObamaCare considerations by their employers:

Low-wage workers clocked the shortest workweek on record in December — even shorter than at the depth of the recession, new Labor Department data showed Friday.

The figures underscore concerns about the ObamaCare employer insurance mandate's impact on the work hours and incomes of low-wage earners.

It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...

IBD's gauge of the low-wage workweek, now at 27.4 hours, includes the 30 million nonmanagers working in private industries where pay averages up to $14.50 an hour. ...

[T]he workweek has moved higher for non-low-wage workers. This group, including managers and those in higher-paying industries, is now clocking a longer week than prior to the recession.

That divergence explains why many economists and nonpartisan arbiters like the Congressional Budget Office have concluded that ObamaCare has had no impact on part-time employment. The effect doesn't show up in aggregate workforce data, but that is the wrong place to look.

Latest Lawless Rewrite Shows ObamaCare May Be Suspended Indefinitely, If Obama Feels Like It

So says The Wall Street Journal, here:

Under the new Treasury rule, firms with 50 to 99 full-time workers are free from the mandate until 2016. And firms with 100 or more workers now also only need cover 70% of full-time workers in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after, not the 100% specified in the law.

The new rule also relaxes the mandate for certain occupations and industries that were at particular risk for disruption, like volunteer firefighters, teachers, adjunct faculty members and seasonal employees. Oh, and the Treasury also notes that, "As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015." So the law may be suspended indefinitely if the White House feels like it.

By now ObamaCare's proliferating delays, exemptions and administrative retrofits are too numerous to count, most of them of dubious legality. The text of the Affordable Care Act specifically says when the mandate must take effect—"after December 31, 2013"—and does not give the White House the authority to change the terms.

Changing an unambiguous statutory mandate requires the approval of Congress, but then this President has often decided the law is whatever he says it is. His Administration's cavalier notions about law enforcement are especially notable here for their bias for corporations over people. The White House has refused to suspend the individual insurance mandate, despite the harm caused to millions who are losing their previous coverage.

Here's something the president can't do:

... have dinner at my house.

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