Food Stamps In September Hit New Record 47.7 Million Americans

Hm. There's that number "47" again.

Data here.

Libertarian Republican Sen. Rand Paul Recommends Going Galt On Fiscal Cliff

Gee, what a shock, a libertarian recommending "strategic withdrawal" on new taxes. Does anyone think libertarians really believe in any principles at all?

It's the one principle they do believe in which is at work here: freedom, a license to do anything.

They are no less culpable, and no less liberal, than the liberal Republicans they attack for raising taxes.

Senator Rand Paul, here:

"Why don't we let the Democrats pass whatever they want? If they are the party of higher taxes, all the Republicans vote present and let the Democrats raise taxes as high as they want to raise them, let Democrats in the Senate raise taxes, let the president sign it and then make them own the tax increase. And when the economy stalls, when the economy sputters, when people lose their jobs, they know which party to blame, the party of high taxes. Let's don't be the party of just almost as high taxes."

It's a kind of paraprosdokian like "We had to destroy the village in order to save it": We have to raise taxes in order to cut taxes.

Do House Republicans, who would have to surrender their majority and vote "present" on a Democrat tax bill, really want to be remembered for crashing the economy even more to make a political point? Haven't enough of us lost our jobs already? Hasn't the economy already sputtered for too many years?

If libertarians had their way, we'd all be smoking the dope that makes Senator Paul think this way.

How about just doing the right thing for its own sake and continuing to be the party of no new taxes in the face of economic stagnation, and let the chips fall where they may?

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend, Illustrated

Everything Hitler, including Mein Kampf, is big in India:

Hitler’s popularity in India is not the result of anti-Semitism, says Navras Jaat Aafreedi, a professor of social sciences at Gautam Buddha University in New Delhi. He says it stems from a dearth of European history classes in schools. To the extent that German history is taught, he says, it’s in the context of “the view that had Hitler not weakened the British Empire by the Second World War, the British would have never voluntarily left India.” 

Read all about it, here.

The Sign Read: "Pants 50% Off!"

But it was more like 75% off.

Why Did We Get Obama In 2008? Because A Republican Bailed.

Why did we get Obama in 2008?

Because a good conservative bailed in 2006.

Namely, conservative Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald from Illinois, who chose not to run for re-election in order to spend more time with his needy son in his formative years, according to statements he made on Tom Roeser's "Political Shoot-Out" radio program at the time on WLS, Chicago. I know. I was there. I listened in front of my fire.

One wonders, then, why he ran for the Senate in the first place.

In addition to that, Peter Fitzgerald was a real conservative in a state full of Republicans who were not. He famously rubbed them the wrong way. But I honestly don't know what he expected.

At any rate his voluntary departure after one term helped open the way for another Illinois State Senator like he had been, one Barack Obama, to run for the Senate seat in 2006, a seat by the way which Senator Carol Mostly Wrong had once held.

And the rest is history.

Now, Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina is bailing out to head up the Heritage Foundation, having brought a few so-called conservative people into the Senate.

South Carolina was the state which quoted a Tea Party member as saying during the Republican primary election that she loathed Mitt Romney to the core of her being. The state ended up going big for Speaker Newt Gingrich. So I rather doubt we'll get a similarly dramatic turn in Senate representation, but it still is upsetting that conservatives bail just when we need them the most.

Since DeMint seems happy with the idea that a Republican governor will appoint his successor, isn't that an argument for doing it all the time?

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

Gasoline Prices Up 129% After Four Years Of Obama

You deserve it!

The Gold To Oil Ratio Moves Much Higher To 19.85

Oil is on sale relative to gold. The latter has recovered its legs a little bit recently.

ObamaCare Will Separate The Wheat From The Chaff

If this story in the Washington Post is correct and big successful firms in large numbers continue to provide insurance under ObamaCare as before, despite the costs, expect the less competitive, smaller firms who are at comparative disadvantage to suffer the most and possibly disappear as they drop coverage because they must to survive.

Unemployment In November Said To Decline To 7.7%

Down from 7.9% in October.

The report is here:

"Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the Northeast coast on October 29th, causing severe damage in some states. Nevertheless, our survey response rates in the affected states were within normal ranges. Our analysis suggests that Hurricane Sandy did not substantively impact the national employment and unemployment estimates for November. BLS will release the regional and state estimates on December 21st. For additional information on how severe weather affects employment and unemployment data, see Question 8 in the Frequently Asked Questions section of this release."

The reported employment growth average for 2012 fell from 157,000 per month in last month's report to 151,000 in this month's report, putting 2012 through November behind 2011's average of 153,000 new jobs created per month.

The participation rate in the labor force declined 0.3 in the raw data, 0.2 in the seasonally adjusted data, probably the biggest reason for the headline number to decline.

Translation: as more people aren't looking for work, they don't count! Meanwhile job creation looks like it declined quite significantly in just one month if the average for the year dropped 6,000 per month in just 30 days, which means November must have been pretty bad to have had that large of an effect.

There's somethin' funny goin' on here, Lucy.

The Rats Are Jumping Ship

"Tea Party favorite" Senator Demented Jim is resigning his Senate seat early to head up the Heritage Foundation, whose spawn was RomneyCare, and, you know, ObamaCare, and which has otherwise utterly failed to stop the leftward drift of the country.

The reason, of course, is that Heritage is the standard bearer of Reaganism, which is really a form of liberalism. As such it has furthered the leftward drift of the country as it made Republicanism home for Reagan Democrats who fled the radicalism of the Democrat Party and in their turn liberalized the Republican Party, driving out the conservatives in the process and making the Republican Party safe for the Bush family.

Meanwhile at FreedomWorks Dick Armey has controversially bailed out with a boat load of cash donated to help elect conservatives, which didn't go so well in November. After co-opting the Tea Party, the Republicans have now raped it.

It's interesting how the public face of both organizations has been the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program from noon to 3 daily, where Rush runs paid ads for them. Today, in fact, Rush had Sen. DeMint and Ed Feulner on the show to interview them about the move, no doubt to help preempt the narrative that DeMint is bailing out because of the increasingly hostile environment for conservatism in the Senate, led by squishes like Sen. Mitch McConnell. And right afterwards we got a nice little plug for FreedomWorks.

The glaring problem for the so-called conservatism of the Republican Party is that it is still trying to preserve the excrescences of the progressivism of the early 20th century when what it should be doing is challenging the originalist credentials of figures like Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. The latter did more to ruin the original constitution than any president before or since, which is why no thinking conservative can call himself a Republican.

The only people in the country who used to have the habit of mind necessary for overthrowing foreign accretions to the original faith were Protestants, but any examination of them today demonstrates few instances of the virtues which characterized their forebears, unless the followers of Westboro Baptist Church be accepted. The capitulation of Christianity in America generally to the gay mafia tells you all you need to know about the intimate (can I say that?) connection between contemporary theology and liberalism.

Just ask yourself when was the last time the Heritage Foundation or FreedomWorks got upset that Obama has presided over the sweeping away of the Hyde Amendment, the single bulwark in law erected by conservatism against the radical advances of a dictatorial, blood-thirsty, liberalism? Communion, anyone?

Or did they ever object? None of us can remember.

Glenn Beck Is Bat-Shit Crazy

I never listen to the guy, but I just happened to turn on the radio and there he is, right now, saying

"The constitution is divinely inspired."

Unlike certain lines of the New Testament which claim divine inspiration for "Scripture", the constitution notably doesn't for itself, and provides for its own amendment.

The founders were too wise to claim infallibility for what they did. Too bad Glenn Beck is in thrall to a fanaticism which keeps him from seeing that.

His microphone deceives the simple, who are many.

CNBC Shills For Obama, Ignores Big Spike In Jobless Claims

CNBC obviously wants nothing to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats solving the fiscal cliff by raising taxes on everybody.

It's amazing how the commie sympathizers blatantly rewrite the headlines in denial of reality.

Initial claims for unemployment spiked up to nearly 500,000 in the latest report, and CNBC says claims fall, focusing only on "seasonally adjusted" numbers from the Dept. of Labor.

Claims in the "not seasonally adjusted" category spiked up nearly 140,000 in the last week, and over the last four weeks have averaged 435,000, far in excess of a number in the low 300,000s consistent with an environment of job creation.

Since CNBC says the "temporary spike caused by Superstorm Sandy has faded" that can only mean the spike up which they ignore had a different cause.

Elections have consequences, and higher taxes and ObamaCare are going to cause more joblessness, as the last four weeks suggest. 

Democrats Like Howard Dean Want Taxes To Go Up On Everyone

Video here.

Dean views tax increases as a necessity to avoid having to cut spending.

Democrats see no need to keep taxes or spending low.

Democrat Senate Wants Your Taxes To Go Up, Won't Vote On Obama's Plan

Story and video here, quoting Mitch McConnell on what the Senate refused to vote on:

"[W]e didn’t just put together a bill that included [Obama's] $2 trillion tax increase – we also added the almost $400 billion in new tax stimulus measures he wanted as well. This bill contained a continuation of the payroll tax holiday, a 10 percent credit for new wages that will go to businesses big and small, and it included a fix to one of the many flawed provisions of Obamacare – an expansion of a tax credit for businesses that no one uses. This proposal reflected exactly what was in the President’s budget and his various submissions to Congress."

Flashback July 2011: Obama Didn't Need Tax Rates To Rise Then

Oh, but now he does. As he was a liar then, so is he now, and ever shall be. Amen.

Video here.

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

This 47% Explains Why Democrats Want To Go Over The Fiscal Cliff

It's funny how 47% keeps coming up.

That's supposed to be the number of people who wouldn't vote for Romney because they were "the takers". 47% also turned out to be the percentage which actually ended up voting for Romney. And now it turns out that 47% is also the percentage of all the wages earned in this country by the middle class last year, which now stands to lose the most when Democrats shove them over the fiscal cliff because Obama won. They didn't show that ad of Paul Ryan shoving that lady in the wheelchair over the cliff for nothing. When you suffer from liberal projection syndrome, every time you accuse someone else you're just telegraphing what you intend to do yourself.

Nearly $3 trillion of the $6.2 trillion of wages in America in 2011, 46.8%, was made by people making between only $20,000 and $75,000 per year, and the only thing standing in the way of their taxes going up is President Obama's insistence that his victory means everything and the Republicans' victory in the House means nothing.

Democrats and liberal Republicans both cast their greedy eyes on those eleven compensation intervals piled up all together starting near the bottom of the income ladder in blue in the chart because not coincidentally those eleven together just happen to represent all the income aggregates which are also the largest of all, each in excess of $200 billion in 2011. We're talking about 71 million wage earners in this country out of 151 million who make all that money, which, oh my gosh, is also 47% of the workers.

Hm.

You'll look in vain for any aggregates among the very rich coming anywhere close to that kind of money, quite simply because there just aren't enough rich people in America to pile up tranches of $200 billion. Oh, there's  830,000 people accounting for, say $184 billion, who make between $200,000 and $250,000. Your dentist, probably. And then there's 275,000 Americans who make between $500,000 and $1 million. They account for just $183 billion. Some of these people probably own your favorite restaurants.

No, all the big piles of dough the Democrats "need" are "down low" because that's where all the people are, and the Democrats are comin' for you!  

So get ready all you people out there who voted for Obama, your taxes are going up big time, from this:

2013 Bush tax brackets

to this:

2013 Obama tax brackets

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Peter Schiff Reminds Us That The Debt Ceiling Isn't Original To The Country

For RealClearMarkets, here:

The debt ceiling itself is both an ill-conceived compromise and a relic of past governmental integrity. For its first 128 years as a republic, the United States was able to function without a debt ceiling. This was possible for the simple reason that U.S. government had no central bank and could not borrow beyond its ability to repay through taxation. And since the ability to tax is always limited by taxpayers' assets (and their extreme hostility to those who want to take them), legal gimmicks were not needed to prevent Congress from spending too freely. But the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 gave the Federal Government a potential means to borrow indefinitely by having the new bank buy its debt. Sensing this danger, the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 prohibited the Fed from buying or holding government debt.

But just four years later the United States needed a means to raise money quickly to pay for its efforts in the First World War. The government passed an amendment to the charter to allow the Fed to purchase Treasury Bonds. Fearing (correctly) that this would create a mechanism for perpetual debt expansion, conservative lawmakers insisted that the amendment include a "debt ceiling" provision that would cap the amount that the government could borrow.

Stalin's Crimes Are Untold In Oliver Stone's Untold History Of The US

If anything is untold in Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, it's the history of Stalin's crimes while the US under FDR was still friendly with him.

Under Obama apologists for socialism from Milos Forman to Oliver Stone are crawling out from underneath their rocks.

And if they get what they want, we will all be swept away.

"According to evidence released from secret archives since the dissolution of the Soviet Union . . . [just] during 1937 and 1938, when the Great Terror was at its height, the security organs detained for alleged 'anti-Soviet activities' 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot -- an average of 1,000 executions a day. The majority of the survivors ended up in hard-labor camps. (For comparison, the tsarist regime between 1825 and 1910 executed for political crimes 3,932 persons.) In 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR, camps run by the Gulag, their main administrative body, held 2,350,000 inmates, or 1.4 percent of the country's population. The slave laborers performed important economic functions, being employed on large construction projects and forced to cut timber in the far north. No one responsible for these crimes against innocent people was tried after the Soviet Union had collapsed; indeed, they did not even suffer exposure or moral opprobrium but continued to lead normal lives.

"Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939 -- that is, after collectivization but before World War II -- the population of the Soviet Union decreased by 9 to 10 million people.

". . . existing humanity was debris, the refuse of a doomed world, and killing it off was a matter of no consequence."

-- Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York, 2001), 67ff.

Obama Milks Air Force One and Marine One To Toy Shop

Obama went to Pennsylvania to talk up his tax hike, slam Republicans, and then do a little toy shopping. Keith Koffler's bullshit detector went off, here, when he found out Marvin Nicholson, the caddy, was carrying packages on their return to the White House marked K'nex, where Obama spoke.