2nd Estimate of Q2 GDP Rises to 1.7 Percent from 1.5, Q1 Still at 2.0 Percent

The news release is here.

The awful number is no longer 1.5 percent, but 1.7 percent. An annualized growth of this small magnitude is about half of the historical average up until the year 2000. In the post-WW2 period GDP averaged about 3.5 percent per annum until the turn of the century.

From 2000 to now, however, GDP growth has been far less robust, with year 2004 the lone year as high as 3.5 percent. All the rest have been lower, with some negative in the little depression of 2008 and 2009.

The pdf is here.

Has it occurred to anyone we were spending too much money taking the war to the enemy, and making war on the American people in the name of security, and subsidizing too much stuff like drugs for seniors, food stamps, and healthcare? Ratcheting up these expenditures during the last decade has coincided with a streak of terrible growth numbers.

The necessity of spending cuts has never been greater, but our politicians, of both parties, seem bent on doing anything but cut spending. Which is why AAA went away.

Roman Catholics Avoid Abortion Hypocrisy Of Republicans, Slam Libertarianism Instead

Most of the commentary I'm reading from Catholic critiques of the Republicans is avoiding the manifest hypocrisy of the "life of the mother" and "cases of rape" excuses for abortion advocated by many Catholic Republicans and the Romney campaign.

Those excuses are contrary to Catholic teaching, yet there they are, so-called Catholics, so-called conservatives, hounding out of the Republican Party a man whose point was that pregnancies resulting from rape are rare, which they manifestly are, and that allowing them to come to full term and enjoy life isn't an "option" in some policy world. It's a moral imperative. In this Rep. Todd Akin, a conservative Presbyterian from Missouri, is a better Catholic than the Catholics.

Instead, the critiques are focusing on the libertarianism of Rep. Paul Ryan.

This makes excellent sense, after some reflection, for the simple reason that Catholicism sees in libertarianism a rival ideology, not unlike what Bolshevism saw in National Socialism. The point says more about Catholicism than it does about libertarianism. Catholicism fell victim to the ideological habit of mind long enough ago that Spengler in the 1930s could say:

"[A]ll Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought . . . Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism."

This observation makes the history of political economy necessarily a topic under the study of the history of religion. The concept of the church, which was totally foreign to Jesus, took the place of the failed imminent coming of the kingdom of God in his teaching, and immanentizes the eschaton he expected before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel. That false kingdom is now administered by popes, cardinals, bishops and priests. As such the church has been responsible for spinning off rival, "heretical", ideologies ever since. And if not the ideologies themselves, at a minimum the ideological habit of mind.

The conservative response to this is most certainly not to keep thinking ideologically. A dead Catholic named Russell Kirk also tried hard to tell us these things before he died.

Like Spengler's, his remains a voice crying in an impoverished wilderness of idealisms.

New Book By Navy SEAL Contradicts Regime's Account Of Getting Osama

Discussed here:

The author writes that bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to find the terrorist crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.

Bissonnette says the point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner and he and the other SEALs trained their guns’ laser sites on bin Laden’s still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless. The SEALs later found two weapons stored by the doorway, untouched, the author said.

It was a kill, not a capture, operation from the get go, and the regime's story that Osama went for a gun just proves that there is still a moral majority in America which has to be mollified, as usual, with lies.

Romney Has Just Passed Party Rules To Weaken The Power Of The Grassroots

Mark Levin is all over this like a chicken on a June Bug.

Romney obviously hates the primary process because it exposes his weaknesses as a candidate conservative. By having power over the rules between conventions and the delegate selection process, if he wins election in four years he'll be burying every Tea Partier under six feet of concrete.

The time for a national conservative third party has arrived.

I won't vote for Obama. I would never do that. But I sure as hell won't vote for Romney now.

It was "Mickey Mouse" for me before, but now it's probably Virgil Goode.

Again, Sean Hannity Repeats His Hypocritical Roman Catholicism

In teh last segment, so-called conservative Sean Hannity affirmed his position on abortion as allowing abortion in the cases of rape or the life of the mother being in danger.

This amounts to self-excommunication because abortion in all instances is prohibited under Catholic dogma. For taking this position he should be denied communion as bishops have threatened against prominent Democrat politicians who support abortion. The same goes for Rep. Paul Ryan.

When is the Roman Catholic Church going to make a public statement rebuking this man who is much more public than any politician because he has microphones to the millions and is a routine and vocal proponent of Roman Catholicism?

Can You Imagine Auto Fleets Averaging 35 MPG In 2016 And 55 MPG In 2025?

Notice the dramatic uptick in fuel economy after the oil embargo of the 1970s. Economy went from about 12 mpg to about 20 in just about 5 years, an improvement of over 60 percent in a very short time.

Then economy was flat to declining for 30 years.

Since we've committed ourselves to the suburban lifestyle, it only makes sense to get the best fuel economy we can. And if anyone can do it, the Japs can.

Story here.

Bush Didn't Bow, But He Did Scrape

Why He Bows

Ulterior Motives In Writing: Why Does Mark Judge Hate Monica Crowley?

Did you ever get the feeling that an entire column was merely a pretext to slam someone the writer didn't like . . . with a sucker punch saved for the very end?

That's the overwhelming feeling I got from reading Mark Judge's "HL Mencken Against The Journalists" here, which ends with this:

"So let's just put an end to it. Call them analysts. Call them pundits. But to coo over people like Frank Rich and Monica Crowley as brilliant intellectuals is to denude the term of meaning."

After ridiculing liberal after liberal in the column the lazy writer realizes at the end he needs to be an equal opportunity critic and throws poor old Monica under the bus just to make himself look objective.

If Mark Judge hangs around people who coo over anyone, let alone journalists, he's clearly in special company already. They used to call them asylums.

You know, the sort of place which makes you write like this: "but as a man with whom we could speak with about any topic".

Thomas Sowell Tells A Truth Rep. Paul Ryan Remains Afraid To Tell You

Here:

Neither Social Security nor Medicare has ever had enough assets to cover its liabilities. Very simply, there has never been enough money put aside to do what the government promised to do.

These systems operate on what their advocates like to call a "pay as you go" basis. That is, the younger generation pays in money that is used to cover the cost of benefits for the older generation. This is the kind of financial pyramid scheme that got Charles Ponzi put in prison in the 1920s and got Bernie Madoff put in prison in our times.

Luigi Zingales Fingers George Bush As A Crony Capitalist

There's a great interview with Luigi Zingales in The Economist here:

Companies with a lot of money abroad sponsored a bill in 2004/5 that allowed them to repatriate their profits at a low tax rate. Thus $1 produced $220 of tax savings. The Bush-approved drug and Medicare act was a huge bonanza for the drug industry. Their market value increased by several billion dollars when this was announced. I could continue.

Inflation Adjusted Income Fell 4.75 Percent During "Recovery" And 7.2 Percent Overall

American incomes have fallen during the "recovery" according to this story:

Real median annual household income fell to $53,508 from $54,916 during the 18-month recession from December 2007 to June 2009, according to the firm’s [Sentier Research LLC] study of income data for the 36-month period ended in June 2012. Incomes kept falling during the 36-month period since then, dropping to $50,964 in June 2012.

The statistic is nearly meaningless if you haven't lost your career.

People with personal experience of having lost a good job and having had to take such work as they can get typically see household income drop much more than a few to several percentage points. Try experiencing a 40+ percentage point cut. That's what's happened to many of the long-term unemployed, whose huge losses get averaged out, and lost, over all households in these studies.

The Whopper Of The Day: We Lost AAA Because We Almost Defaulted Last August

The whopper of the day comes from Annie Lowrey in The New York Times, here:

Shortly after “taxmageddon,” perhaps sometime in February, the American government will exhaust its borrowing authority – meaning some unprecedented form of government default. It almost happened in the summer of 2011 and resulted in a credit downgrade. Neither party wants to go back there. Expect some agreement to lift the debt ceiling to come along with the deal to delay or otherwise soften the blow of the fiscal cliff.

No, we experienced a credit downgrade because we needed to cut $4 trillion in spending over the next ten years and could only agree on $1 trillion, and if we don't get busy cutting spending more than that there will be more credit downgrades to come.

Both Political Parties Are Greedy Liberals Eyeing Your Tax Credits And Tax Deductions

The partisan and liberal New York Times must think we can't read out here in fly-over country. "Tax reform" is now code for "tax increase".

The drumbeat to raise your taxes continues, here, an "absolute necessity":

Both parties agree on the absolute necessity of reforming the addled, inefficient American tax code. That means eliminating much of the underbrush of credits, loopholes and expenditures and then reducing marginal tax rates. Of course, the devil is in the details. Just about every tax expenditure has a powerful interest group behind it. That is part of the reason why neither party has gotten specific about what they would put on the chopping block, and both anticipate a drawn-out fight during the tax reform process.

Marginal tax rates are much easier to raise and frequently are raised, which is why the credits and deductions have to go: as long as the deductions and credits remain they suppress revenues when taxes are inevitably raised after a "reform". That's exactly what happened in 1993 after the broadly lower rates achieved in the 1986 tax reform were swept away by Bill Clinton. The deductions sacrificed in 1986 never returned.

Liberals in both parties intend to do this to the American people again.

There's nothing wrong with the current code that spending cuts couldn't fix: especially on defense and social welfare which both have dramatically increased under Bush and Obama.

Election 2012: One Was For The Healthcare Mandate Before He Was Against It, The Other Was Against It Before He Was For It. Some Choice!

Gas Prices Above $3.11 Nearly Three Times As Long Under Obama

The national average price of a gallon of gasoline stayed above $3.11 for about 7 months under liberal George Bush, but under catastrophe Barack Obama we're now well into our 19th month above $3.11.

The New Republic Can't Spell The Name Of The Mayor Of LA

The New Republic has trouble spelling the name of the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa:

What, then, could be the path to a Republican resurgence? The first thing would be to break the Democratic hold on the minority vote by winning back a reasonable share of the Hispanic vote—say, 40 percent or more, which Republicans once got. Success in this case depends on advancing policies on immigration that win favor among Hispanics, but it also may hinge on Republicans take the side of Hispanics in a battle over scare public resources with blacks. One could see this kind of black-Hispanic division surfacing in 2005 Los Angeles mayoral election pitting James Hahn, who enjoyed black support, against Antonio Villagarosa.

Well . . . who wouldn't?

Election 2012: CULT Follower Or CULT Object? Some Choice!

Liberal Al Hunt Projects "Ideologue" Onto Traditionalists And Free-Marketeers

Liberal Al Hunt at Bloomberg, here, bemoans the erosion of liberal Republicanism and hurls the "ideologue" epithet at conservatives:

'Movement conservatives are motivated by ideology, sometimes small-government economics, other times the religious social agenda. They range from Paul Ryan, the small-government, economic policy-savvy vice-presidential candidate, to Todd Akin, the Missouri Senate contender who last week suggested that it is rare for women to become pregnant as a result of rape, saying “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”'

To a liberal Republican, apparently, preventing murder and national bankruptcy are unrealistic and idealistic causes.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are nothing if they aren't against ideology, and for life and economic solvency.

Conservatives define ideology as visionary speculation of an idealistic and unrealistic sort. They abhor notions of the perfectibility of man, and therefore also of man's social arrangements. They are not dreamy enthusiasts like President Obama who believes that "our union can be perfected."

Conservatives are ever mindful that human nature is a mixture of good and evil, and that just as self-government, the prerequisite of freedom, requires that human nature be checked by the individual's recourse to religion and morality to prevent sin and servitude, government above the individual level must also be limited by recourse to checks on its power to prevent crime and injustice. Above all, conservatives are mindful that there are no arrangements which will guarantee 100 percent success in these matters, only that some arrangements tend to work better than others, taught by long experience and reflection. They know that just because in the long run we are all dead doesn't mean there should be no speed limit signs.

It is a characteristic of liberalism to use intellectual categories like "ideology" not just to promote its (unrealistic) goals, but to attack its political opponents, after the manner of the Marxists who attacked bourgeois ideology. Nevermind that the bourgeoisie has hardly anywhere, ever been so self-conscious as even to think in ideological terms. But Barack Obama does, and self-consciously brings it up even when nobody else has: "I mean, that's my point, is that -- I am not an ideologue. I'm not." The term is left wing in its origin and development, and its continued use by liberals as an epithet and an intellectual category shows the close relationship between liberalism and the left which endures to this day.

This is who Al Hunt is, regrettably, and what liberal Republicanism is: an inherited thinly-veiled hatred of the middle class, which in its love of life and the enjoyment of its fruits stands in the way of the crackpots and schemers.

Romney Is A Total Hypocrite On Hard-Money: To Him TARP Preserved The Dollar's Value!

Hard-money conservatives like Larry Kudlow who think Gov. Mitt Romney is actually serious about maintaining the value of the dollar ought to remember that Romney argued in October 2011 that the TARP bailout was designed to keep the currency worth something:

According to Governor Romney, the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package "was designed to keep not just a collapse of individual banking institutions, but to keep the entire currency of the country worth something."

Noting could be further from the truth and Romney knows it.

TARP was not sold as a program to prop-up the dollar; it was sold as a means of keeping credit markets liquid, to keep banks lending to business, so businesses would keep people employed.

Not surprisingly, from that perspective TARP has been a spectacular failure -- because as soon as Congress granted then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a blank check for $700 billion (along with near-dictatorial powers over the American financial services industry and de facto control over the U.S. economy), something changed.

Suddenly, instead of being a program to move illiquid mortgage-backed securities off the books of banks, TARP became a no-strings-attached cash infusion to favored financial institutions and corporations. 

Among the insiders who received the no-strings-attached cash were Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group – that’s what Romney and Cain were defending.

If borrowing money to spend on circumventing the failure necessary to the proper operation of free markets props up the value of the dollar, it hasn't worked very well.

Since the (first!) bailout of Chrysler signed into law by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 you now need $2.73 to buy what $1.00 did then.

Way to go Brownie!

a little hurricane humor there