Rhymes With Osama! Huuuuh!

Obama's Best Unemployment Number Ever: Initial Claims At 297K

Initial claims for unemployment, not-seasonally adjusted, has fallen below 300,000 for the first time ever in the Obama presidency.

Obama should be crowing this from the rooftops, but apparently his administration is too stupid to understand the significance, or it views this as bad news in the broader mission to destroy the middle class on the way to a transformed America. He has now racked up 7 weeks in a row below 320K.

Elsewhere Rick Santelli has predicted unemployment at 7.9 percent by election day. He doesn't know how right he is.

The latest weekly report is here.

Obama Bungles Mideast Worse Than Jimmy Carter In 1979, Gets Ambassador Killed

Hot Air, here, has that old weird feelin':

Once again, we had an American government encourage the “democracy” movement run by radical Islamists in chasing our ally out of power.  Once again, we seem surprised when the radical Islamists put radical Islamists in power.  And once again we have “students” assaulting our embassy in the capital, this time Cairo, without so much as an apology from the radical Islamist government now running the nation. ...

Qaddafi had at least been somewhat more cooperative since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the West’s military attack on Qaddafi that caused his fall — led by the US initially — sent a big message on the futility of cooperation with the US and the West to all of the other governments in the region.

Slum Lord Obama: Lower Class Self-Identification Grows 28 Percent Since 2008

Story here.

Is Obama intentionally impoverishing the middle class as a means to overthrow the constitutional republic? You don't have to be a Marxist to think so.

"When there is a want of a proper number of men of middling fortune, the poor extend their power too far, abuses arise, and the government is soon at an end." -- Aristotle's Politics

As McCain Failed To Seize On TARP, Romney Is Failing To Seize On ObamaCare

Conservatives all across this country were revolted by the very thought of TARP, which became the focal point of the financial crisis in September 2008. John McCain suspended his campaign to go to Washington to . . . vote for it. He was already finished, there and then.

The reaction to the passage of ObamaCare in March 2010 among those same conservatives galvanized the mid-term elections in November 2010, giving Republicans an historic victory in the US House. It should give them the White House now. But Mitt Romney hasn't just failed to ride that wave, in recent days he's decided to join the busted trumpet club and openly broadcast agreement with key elements of ObamaCare, a bill a clear majority of voters have opposed from the beginning. He is already finished, and threatens to finish conservatives who are depending on his coattails. Romney won't have any.

It's as if Republicans don't want to win.

"For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?"

   

Mitt The Mendacious Comes Out For Key Provisions Of ObamaCare

Quoted in the Tampa Bay Times, here:

"I'm not getting rid of all of health care reform," Romney said. "There are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I'm going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their family up to whatever age they might like. I also want individuals to be able to buy insurance, health insurance, on their own as opposed to only being able to get it on a tax-advantage basis through their company."

These positions represent government interference in the private and free market for health insurance, and therefore will drive up costs for everyone, not to mention making not growing up already an even bigger problem than it already is.

Mitt Romney doesn't have a limited government bone in his body.

Romney Is Blowing It On ObamaCare, And With It Blowing The Election

So should warn The Weekly Standard here, which thinks Romney still has time to fix this (hope springs eternal), but he doesn't:

[I]ndependents now oppose repeal by a margin of 9 percentage points (52 to 43 percent). By a 7-point margin they now think Obamacare is good, rather than bad, for the country. That's a 28-point swing on repeal, and a 34-point swing on whether Obamacare would be good or bad for the country, in just two months—among the voting block that will likely decide this election.

Rep. Michele Bachmann tried to warn Republicans during the primaries that repeal of ObamaCare was the sine qua non in this election, but the Republicans didn't listen. They picked the worst candidate on the issue, mostly because they didn't really have a convincing candidate on the most important issue, or on any issue.

The Republican Party is devoid of conservatives with gravitas on ObamaCare, or on anything else for that matter. In point of fact, the The Republican Party is devoid of conservatives.

Thanks Greatest Generation! Thanks Heritage Foundation! Thanks Ann Coulter! Thanks Sean Hannity! Thanks R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr! Thanks Fox! Thanks Savage Nation! Thanks RNC! Thanks Wall Street Journal! Thanks Drudge! Thanks Newt! Thanks Ronald Reagan!

Thanks to you all for whom Party comes before principle.

You've all done a wonderful job! How can we ever thank you enough for Thomas E. Dewey redivivus?

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

America's Current Asset Allocation

Approximately $37 trillion to bonds (year end 2011): 54 percent.

Approximately $21 trillion to stocks (April 2012):      31 percent.

Approximately $10 trillion to cash (August 2012):     15 percent.

M2 Money In US Reaches $10.07 Trillion

This is basically the readily spendable cash, such as in checking accounts (demand money or M1, currently $2.3 trillion), plus savings in various vehicles like CDs and money market accounts.

US Bond Market Grows To Almost $37 Trillion For Year End 2011

Here:

Separate data about the US from SIFMA, puts the US bond market at just under $37 Trillion (including municipal bonds) as of the end of 2011 (a year later than the McKinsey data), and Bloomberg puts US stocks now (April 2012) at about $21.4 Trillion.

Total World Stock Market Capitalization $45.1 Trillion Year End 2011

So says the World Bank, here.

We're Still Free . . . To Disagree!

So Carl Cannon for Real Clear Politics, here:

In 1941 and 2001 – and in 1812, for that matter – the United States of America proved itself strong enough to withstand attacks on our soil while retaining our attachment to brass-knuckles domestic politics. To be puckish about it, if you can’t run a negative ad, the terrorists win.

Remember that the next time someone tells you that you can't criticize the commander in chief during a time of war. Tyranny isn't only a foreign phenomenon.

Full Employment Is A Socialist Myth: Socialism Needs Liberalism In Order To Grow

So-called conservatives who believe in full employment rightly deserve contempt. Full employment is a utopian concept. What better way to invalidate "capitalism" than to charge it with an impossible task, and then ridicule it endlessly for its failure to do what it never promised?

That the US Federal Reserve has been bullied into accepting full employment as one of its mandates is reason enough to shut it down.

Ron Radosh here:

America’s preeminent socialist leader in the 1980s was the late Michael Harrington, who carried on as the spokesman for social democracy, a post he inherited from his predecessors, Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. Harrington was well-aware that the path to socialism, in which he ardently believed, was through continued extension of the American welfare state. He became a vigorous supporter of a meaningless bill passed by Congress in 1978 called the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which stated that it was the policy of the United States to strive to attain a full employment economy.

Testifying before Congress in defense of the act, the dying Senator Humphrey asked Harrington: “Is my bill socialism?” The socialist leader responded, “It isn’t half that good.” His point was that socialism needed liberalism as a focal point from which to grow. As Harrington argued at the time, by laying out the principle that it was the duty of the state to create full employment, socialists could build upon that to move liberal supporters to advocate more extensive social-democratic programs that would challenge the hegemony of capitalist social relations, making it easier to advance real socialist measures at a future moment.

The World's Second Largest Economy Is In Turmoil: The Rats Are Jumping Ship

The Chinese Year Of The Rat

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the UK Telegraph, here:

The worry is that the transition [of power in China] could go badly awry as 70pc of top cadres and the military are replaced, the biggest changeover since the party came to power in the late 1940s. "That is what is causing capital flight. All the top officials are trying to get their money out of the country," he said.

Listen To The Hand, Listen To The Dot: Irrational Exuberance Was First Noted There, Then

Speaking Of Pot, Now We Learn It Makes Your Nuts Fall Off

Story here.

Obama Proves Again That Pot Has Made Him Stupid

Video here.

The Line of the Day Award Goes to "Hope Needs More Time"

The line of the day award goes to the ever-incisive Steve Huntley for The Chicago Sun Times, here:

Hope needs more time. That was President Barack Obama’s message in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. But a country that was forced to live on hope for four years and rewarded with dreary unemployment, falling middle class income and depressed home values may not be ready for another dose of lofty national goals based on nothing more than oratory.

Hope is the very stuff of ideology, whether political or religious.

Religious ideology makes life tolerable by offering faux rewards in the forms of community, sacraments and liturgy with hope of eternal life deferred to the next one. Forgiveness in the here and now goes with all that, a sort of foretaste of the salvation to come. Or it offers assurances of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God with the second coming of Christ, a recrudescent hope which litters the historical landscape since the time of Jesus. Such assurances are often accompanied by religious experiences of being "born again", or of so-called miracles, which require new exempla over time to validate the ideology as the second coming fails to materialize and the experience flattens. Certain Jews say year upon year "Next year, in Jerusalem." Muslims await the last imam, fourteen centuries after Muhammad.

But political ideology promises, promises and promises, with not much to show for it even in democracy, which promptly turns it out when it is still healthy enough to do so. The American record in this regard is mixed. Woodrow Wilson was not turned out. A terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. FDR was not turned out. Another terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. But LBJ was turned out, in the throes of a period when first principles were readdressed selfishly under what was decided was an existential threat to the next generation. Say what you will about the '60s generation, war in America stopped being involuntary. 

Ideologues sometimes become dictators, in which case they just go on promising. FDR did this but in the extenuating circumstances of global war, flaunting the long-standing American tradition that presidents serve but two terms. A free people finally came to its senses and put a stop to that with the 22nd Amendment, but not until after the fact.

In other times and other places dictators install themselves permanently, as was the case with one Robert Mugabe. Barack Obama has made no secret of his admiration of such like, openly expressing his dissatisfaction with the constraints placed on him by our form of government at the same time he voices his admiration for the lack of such constraints in places such as China. Are Americans wrong to be disquieted by this?

Hope needs more time. But for what, exactly?    

What Obama and Granholm Have In Common: Forward To State-Capitalism

Shikha Dalmia calls what former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm did in front of God and everybody at the Democrat National Convention a "political pole dance", for Reason.com here:

But even more bizarre than Granholm’s convention appearance was that she was invited to make one in the first place. She was arguably the worst governor of her time who, during her eight-year term, took Michigan’s teetering economy into her firm hands and gave it a good, hard push off the cliff.

On her watch, the state's ranking in per capita GDP plummeted to 41st place from 24th. Michigan became the only state to suffer a net out-migration during the past decade, and its credit rating was repeatedly downgraded.

But since unemployment is the topic of the day, how was Granholm’s job-creation record? Worse than Katrina-struck Louisiana’s. Unemployment jumped from 6.8 percent when she was elected to 14.1 percent at its peak in 2009 – although some believe it reached as high as 15.2 percent. 

Granholm has never looked more marvelous, but pace Dalmia, Granholm's appearance wasn't bizarre.

There has been much commentary saying as much, as if Granholm's performance was like some sort of meltdown, something almost crazy and beyond the realm of understanding, not unlike Howard Dean's a few years ago.

But from the point of view of ideology her selection and presentation made perfect sense. Like the true believer of a religion, Granholm's emotional display was characteristic but superfluous. It was the content of her remarks which were significant because they were entirely in keeping with the blindness of the ideological mindset of the new old liberalism which calls failure success. Indeed, today's liberalism thrives on failure in order to succeed, and the more failure it has the more success it has. The rightness and success of the bailout of GM, the substance of Granholm's paean to Obama, isn't a bug of this new old ideology, it's a feature. Obama himself has said so. And he's now on a mission to spread the government control of business around, not just the wealth:

“I said, I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he said. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.

Therefore consider Jennifer Granholm as the prophet of the new religion, and indeed its forerunner.

Like Michigan's devastated GDP under Granholm, America under Obama has settled into dramatically lower GDP compared to the post-war average. It has descended to almost European proportions, which evidently was the whole point of Obama's 2009 European apology tour. It was as if he were announcing that under his leadership America was going to stop being the leader of the free world and become just like them, anemic and dependent social welfare states. At 1.7 percent currently, GDP in America has indeed been cut down to size, to less than half of the decades-long average of 3.5 percent. Meanwhile nearly one in six Americans are classified as poor, and almost half of all households receive some form of direct government assistance. Is it any wonder Europe wants Obama reelected?

Like Michigan's exodus not just of population but of businesses fleeing the dreaded "single business tax" under Granholm, the nation's only value-added tax, for the first time in living memory there has been a sudden appearance of wealthy "global" Americans actually renouncing citizenship to escape the growing worldwide reach of the Internal Revenue Service's Gestapo-like intimidation of foreign financial institutions, which no longer want the trouble of doing business with Americans. Talk of finding and going to a "back-up country" among the smart set is an alarming sign that the kind of people we need to attract the most in order to grow our economy are instead repelled by the political class' increasing repression of capital and its hatred of the rich.

Like Michigan's downgraded credit rating, America under Obama lost its gold-standard AAA rating, formerly probably the single most recognizable synonym for the country's reputation in the world as the one most likely to pay its bills.

And like Michigan's long period of unemployment under Granholm, America's 43 consecutive months of unemployment at 8.1 percent or higher under Obama speak for themselves.

One might even say that Jennifer Granholm in her eerie way prepared the way for the coming of the (slum) lord. It's only fitting that she should announce his second coming. 

All of this failure is success because it keeps Democrats in power. That's why Gov. Jennifer Granholm's appearance wasn't bizarre. Her governorship epitomized the failure of America under Obama.

And so the ideologues do rejoice, because it's all intended. Forward, to state-capitalism.

ObamaCare: So-Called Conservative Heritage Foundation Built That, In 1989