RCP Moves Missouri Back Into "Toss Up", Putting Romney At 181 EC Votes

See the history of map changes, here.

Missouri has been changeable since summer, either leaning Romney or a toss up.

On 4th Anniversary Of TARP, 12% Of Banks Are Still In Trouble

nonperforming bank loans as percentage of total

The FDIC reports as of June that it has 7,246 member banks with $14 trillion in assets. Four years ago there were 8,384 member banks with assets of $13.6 trillion. Bank failures and consolidation in the industry have reduced the total membership by over 13 percent in the interim.

Bank failures have cost the Deposit Insurance Fund, funded by member premiums, in excess of $80 billion, costs which are inevitably passed on to bank customers. TARP was deliberately morphed into a fascist capital injection scheme when it became clear that identifying and buying toxic mortgages was an unworkable solution, cooked up as it was in a panic. The capital injections effectively made taxpayers unwilling stockholders in troubled "financial" institutions, some of which were not commercial banks to begin with but were allowed to become so to obtain protection.

Meanwhile bank nonperforming loans in the US continue at a high level, over three times higher than prior to the financial crisis in 2008, despite TARP's measly billions, and despite the real action trying to circumvent free-market capitalism involving trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve liquidity interventions.

An unofficial list of problem banks tracked here currently shows 874 institutions still under some form of FDIC supervision for irregularities of one kind or another, four years after the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program signed by President Bush on October 3, 2008.

Sen. Barack Obama voted for the TARP program in the US Senate, as did Sen. John McCain, his opponent for the presidency, joining the rest in the US Congress who wanted to make it appear they were doing something about the crisis. In the wake of TARP the stock market crashed anyway in the succeeding month, preparing the way for the debacle of March 2009 five months later. The mortgage market remains effectively dead, along with housing, net worth, and employment, zombies all. 

How much better off we would be today if we had simply embraced the failure prescribed by capitalism instead of denying it. Bankruptcy courts would have been busy selling off assets to responsible actors, debts would have been adjudicated, and a few high profile bad players may have actually gone to trial, and jail, by now.

Instead it's just more of the same: government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.

Real Clear Politics Gives New Hampshire To Obama, And 269 Electoral College Votes

One vote away from a fait accompli.

Here.

Fear: The First, Second And Third Reason NOT To Invest

Once again, the purveyors of fear make an appearance, trying to scare you into investing in stocks when stocks are again near historic highs and Shiller p/e multiples are near the top of the historical range, this time at Reuters, here.

Patience is a rule of investing, too, which requires you to stick to your reasons for investing, or not investing, in the first, second, and third place. It makes no sense to purchase investments which for good reasons seem to be overvalued, especially when based upon historically novel forms of valuation which remain in vogue despite the lessons of the great debt bull since Ronald Reagan.

Appeals to "fear" from people who are already "all-in" are therefore suspect, and should be. Nothing continues to feed a fake bull like ever more greater fools.

And don't forget that permabulls need you, too, like Larry Kudlow, who confessed on his radio show last Saturday:

"God knows I'm long. I'm long . . . I have no choice."

If it's a free country and a free market, why is there so much compulsion?

The Greedy Bastards' Big Lie About Your Mortgage Interest Deduction

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Read the data for yourself, here, from the Joint Committee on Taxation's own estimate of the "cost" to the government of your mortgage interest deduction.

The JCT estimated that the government's biggest loss of revenue between 2007 and 2011 came from the exclusion of dividends and long term capital gains from higher tax rates. This does NOT include gains from selling real estate.

Tax losses from deductions for health insurance expenditures ranked second, tax losses from deductions for retirement plans third, all three of which range between $632 billion and $607 billion over 5 years.

The tax loss from deducting mortgage interest was a distant fourth, at $430 billion, yet the drumbeat from so-called conservatives to eliminate the deduction gets louder everyday.

Can you say, "Middle Class Tax Increase"?

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Blown Prediction Of Doomsday Award Goes To Republican TARP Author Sen. Judd Gregg

The blown prediction of doomsday award for 2012 goes to former Senator Judd Gregg, Republican author of TARP, who opined in July (here) that September was likely to be a month where we might again come close to total economic collapse.

Oh well. There's always Octember. After which comes Novonder.

As we all know:

MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Yah, you were gonna Blitz-Kreeg Great Mitten by the middle of August!"

FIELD MARSHAL HERRING to DICTATOR HAILSTONE:

"Then you said, Septober, then Octember, it's now in the middle of Novonder, and we ain't there yet!" -- The Three Stooges, "I'll Never Heil Again" (1941, here)

TARP averted nothing. And now nothing has averted nothing.

Aren't you glad he was in charge?

"I'll Turn Public Schools Into Food Deserts, You Take Care Of The Rest"

Two Years From Now Unemployment Will Still Be About 9.1 Percent

So the calculator here.

That must mean 2 years from now Obama will be the president.

Romney Isn't A Flip-flopper On Taxes, He's A Snake

During the primaries Romney ran as a conservative tax cutter who would cut taxes across the board by 20 percent.

Now that he's the candidate, in Ohio he has said not to expect much of a tax cut because he would be eliminating deductions and exemptions at the same time, evidently in continuity with his pledge to maintain revenue neutrality and the progressivity of the tax code. You'll be paying the same . . . for now.

The problem with this is that the deductions and exemptions are bulwarks against the effects of rising tax rates in the future, and once removed expose taxpayers to the full force of those higher tax rates. This happened to us once before between 1986 and 1993 when deductions were eliminated by Reagan in exchange for lower tax rates, only to be raised again by Clinton. (Sorry, folks).

Conservatives should be running away from Romney. He's not just a mere flip-flopper. He's a snake, and a liberal one at that whom the Democrats will be quite happy to have succeed with his tax program because it will make it easy for them to milk the middle class the next time they come to power.

Americans Are Pretty Much OK With The Fascist Police State

Poll here.

Do The Mussolini With Cabaret Voltaire

Video here.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice Does The Mussolini For Politico

Story here.

US Embassy Cairo Decides Religious Feelings Trump Free Speech

I'm sure the Supremes are amused by the attempt to assert the priority of one clause of the First Amendment over another clause of the First Amendment.

I saved the screen shot from 9/12/12.

Speaking of not abusing the right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others, the news reports that The Piss Christ is back on display.

So let me get this straight. Muslims do not believe in the deity of Christ, nor of Muhammad for that matter, but if you insult Muhammad you must die.  But Christians in America worship Christ as a god but its government does nothing to protect them from hurt religious feelings when he is insulted.

So therefore the government of the United States thinks Islam is deserving of superior treatment, for some reason.

Gee, I wonder what that would be?

Democrats Embrace "ObamaCare" Moniker On Bumper Sticker

Seen on a car in Grand Rapids this morning.

Tea Party Support Has Dropped 20 Percent Since Summer 2010

Gallup has the numbers, here.

30 percent of respondents supported the Tea Party in August 2010.

In August 2012 support is just 24 percent.

In the interim Republican operatives have worked to co-opt local chapters, assisted by Rush Limbaugh and Freedom Works in particular.

You know Rush Limbaugh, the guy who thinks President George W. Bush used the tax code to pander to the middle class.

Would Republicans have retaken the House in 2010 with 2012's level of support?

Just sayin'.

Video Of Romney Backtracking On Tax Cuts, Threatening Your Deductions

Romney will take away your deductions and exemptions

Romney the tax simplifier, tax leveler, tax back-tracker, tax flip-flopper, uncertain tax trumpeter was on display in Ohio this week, posing himself as a clear and present danger to the tax code's many indispensable props to middle class family life, including not just the mortgage interest deduction but also for the first time "exemptions".

The last time a Republican talked this way was in 1986 when Ronald Reagan took away deductibility of credit card interest in exchange for lower overall rates.

Those rates lasted until Clinton, when they were raised. But deductibility of credit card interest? That never came back, and never will.

The same thing is going to happen to the home mortgage interest deduction, and possibly to "married filing jointly" and other such provisions of the current tax code. You'll get lower rates . . . for a while, until they have to raise them.

And then the protections of the current provisions will be absent, exposing you to the full force of increased tax rates.

The fat cats from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine to Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, the Libertarians and the Simpson-Bowles crowd all want their greedy little hands on more revenue from the middle class . . . so they don't have to pay as much. It's just that simple.

And they are betting you are so stupid that you will vote for that!

There is nothing wrong with the current code which spending cuts cannot fix.

Story and video here.

Jim DeMint And Rick Santorum Endorse Todd Akin

ABCNews reports here.

Now they support him, after the deadline passed for Akin to quit and after Akin had to go it alone for over a month against Romney and the entire Republican establishment telling him to "git out".

Spineless cowards.

8,692,638 Republicans Can't Be Wrong About Romney

Rush Limbaugh Indicts George Bush As A Panderer

I can't believe he left in the transcript, but here it is:

"But tax policy leading up to Obama... You know, politicians have pandered to the middle class forever, and there's a whole boatload of Americans not paying income tax right now. I think the numbers, depending who you talk to, is 47% or 49%. The top 5% number you're talking about, it's 59% of all tax revenue is paid by the top 5%."

Nice of you to pit your working class listeners against the middle, Rush.

Now what was that class warfare Obama engages in that you were complaining about?

"The Electorate Always Makes The Correct Decision"

Was Obama the correct decision?