Rush Limbaugh Continues To Blame The Republican Base

Since the end of the first half of the second hour of the broadcast today, Rush Limbaugh again repeatedly blamed the Republican base for Romney's loss, instead of blaming the Republican Party for nominating the wrong candidate, and Romney for being the wrong candidate.

So not only did Romney blame the 47 percent who wouldn't vote for him, Rush Limbaugh continues to blame Republican conservatives for not voting for Romney. If you want to know what's wrong with the Republican Party, that's it. 

Romney was the wrong candidate, because he wasn't a conservative, and had no fire in the belly for anything, including holding Obama's feet to the fire. 

So what do Rush and Republican liberals like Colin Powell have in common? Criticism of conservatives. And Rush starts the show bemoaning the growing isolation of conservatives, and then proceeds to contribute to that isolation.

Gee whiz. Rush had a nice long weekend to rest up, and this is the best he can do? I swear he got more than a cortisone shot from that doctor he just met.

The time has long since passed that Rush should have retired.

205 Million To Be Unemployed Worldwide By 2014

So says the ILO, the International Labour Organization, noting that 205 million unemployed worldwide will break the 2009 record of 198 million. Unfortunately on the way to that, we'll exceed the record already in 2013 with 202 million unemployed worldwide.

Call it trickle down unemployment:

"Unemployment remains as dire as it was during the crisis in 2009," Ekkehard Ernst, chief of the employment trends unit at the ILO, which wrote the report, told CNBC.

While the crisis may have originated in the developed world, the report noted that 75 percent of 2012's newly unemployed came from outside it, with East Asia, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa being the worst affected.

Ernst attributed this to the "spillover effect" of weak growth in advanced economies, and in particular, the recession in Europe.

Read the rest here at CNBC.com.

A Busted Inaugural JumboTron For A Busted ObamaNation

Video here. People simply gave up and left.

The rest of us have been  experiencing broken down conditions like we're suddenly living in a third world country, so why not at the inauguration, too?

I guess The Washington Post has decided it's safe to do journalism again.

5 Years Of Uncommon Snows Give London Mayor Boris Johnson An Open Mind

Lord I wish Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, England, were my mayor, my governor, hell, my president for crying out loud.

This guy, trained in the study of classical antiquity, utters more civilization and common sense in one brief column than I've heard in four years from Barack Obama on any subject, let alone from nearly anyone else in this increasingly barbarous republic of ours, if it can still be called a republic. And that's saying a lot because President Obama has been talking non-stop now for four years and hasn't said one damn thing yet, even when the teleprompter is working properly. Where else can you learn about the Maunder minimum, Martinis, the Dalton minimum, William Shakespeare and solar science all wrapped up in a delightful bow about winter snow? I know not where.

Notably, the mayor ends his column with the humility characteristic of a man who one day will doubtless be the leader of many more in England than just the happy inhabitants of London, or at least it can be hoped:

I am speaking only as a layman who observes that there is plenty of snow in our winters these days, and who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility — however remote — that [astrophysicist Piers] Corbyn is right. If he is, that will have big implications for agriculture, tourism, transport, aviation policy and the economy as a whole. Of course it still seems a bit nuts to talk of the encroachment of a mini ice age.

But it doesn’t seem as nuts as it did five years ago. I look at the snowy waste outside, and I have an open mind.

And on this quotation, "Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines", which he makes from Shakespeare's sonnett, in the bleak mid-winter I can live for days as I remind myself that not everything dies forever, least of all the good, the true, and the beautiful:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Moochelle Shovels It In At Inaugural Lunch Like She Hasn't Eaten In Days

Mabel, Mabel, strong and able, get your elbows off the table. This is not a horse's stable, but a first class dining table.

And shouldn't the First Lady finish chewing and swallowing before shoveling in the next fork full?

Meanwhile everybody else is talking about the eye-rolling, while the president seems genuinely affable toward his nemesis.

Video here.

Obama Promises To Faithfully Execute The Constitution . . .

. . . it'll be a drive-by shooting.

Bush And Obama Piss Down The Backs Of Older Workers And Tell Them It's Raining

In the post-war period, the unemployment level for workers 55 and over first reached the 400,000 mark in 1948, and rattled up and down around that for five decades, briefly doubling during the recessions after 1980 and 1990. The weakness was already apparent however by July 1974, when the level last got effectively to 400,000, at 402,000. The superlative growth of GDP under Truman, Eisenhower and JFK/Johnson had propelled the country strongly forward but ran out of gas, quite literally, the summer after I graduated from high school. It was the immediate aftermath of the Arab oil embargo, and also the summer when Richard Nixon's presidency went tits up. The Vietnam denouement occurred the following year, Jimmy Carter got elected a year after that, and within four years interest rates and inflation rose to crippling levels. America had lost her way. The reforms during the Reagan/Bush years would take until the presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s to make GDP look once again like it did during the immediate post-war years. Things got so good by the late 1990s that people routinely quit their jobs, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. Finding and keeping qualified workers became very difficult for employers. But it was not to last.

It was in May 2001 that the unemployment level for America's oldest workers last saw that old normal territory, at 493,000, and it hasn't looked back since.

Since that date there has been a sustained problem of unemployment for older workers, for whom the new normal level quickly became 800,000 during the Bush administration. Now it has ramped up much higher than that under Obama, the new normal since 2008 rising five times the old normal to 2 million. The unemployment level for workers 55 and over has gone from 493,000 in 2001 to a peak of 2.233 million in 2010, an increase of nearly five fold. Today the level remains stuck just under 2 million.

Under George Bush the unemployment level for older workers never really came down, and under Obama it has hardly moved after ramping up so high. It is hard to believe that it isn't by design, since older workers tend to be the highest earners. You can save a lot of money as an employer by firing them. 2 million workers no longer making $50,000 a year comes to a savings of $100 billion annually.

Older workers no longer working aren't depreciating assets. They're expenses, written-off.

Who will be next?

Depression Of 2008-09 Doubles Move From Employees To Independent Contractors

I know the truth of this story first hand.

Obama's laser-like focus vaporizes jobs.

The income in this household shifted to income from contract work almost immediately after Barack Obama's election in 2008, just six weeks after which a long career as an employee involuntarily came to an end. For two years every nickel of such income was reported as 99ers, which reduced and/or eliminated any income received from extended unemployment insurance benefits, as is only right. When that ran out in 2010, it was strictly catch as catch can from then on. From month to month you don't know if the phone will ring with a job, or an email will arrive asking for a bid. The new reality is living on 50% of what we used to, and paying for our own benefits, and double to Social Security.

That was over four years ago, and with ObamaCare set to be implemented one year from now, the war on American jobs will only get worse as employers keep full-time employees under 50 in number if they can, make as many employees part-time as they can, and hire independent contractors as they can, all to avoid having to provide health insurance under ObamaCare.

This is what the government mandate means: compulsion, tyranny and poverty. In order to provide coverage for a few, it first has to be destroyed for the many.

The story in The Wall Street Journal, here, deserves your full attention:

Typically, independent contractors are less expensive for employers, who don't have to pay taxes on wages or supply benefits, as they would for their employees. Reliance on independent contractors has increased over the years, particularly in the recession, when employers sought less expensive labor.

In December 2012, 6.7% of payroll checks written by small employers went to 1099 workers, or those not considered employees of a company, according to SurePayroll, a Chicago-based payroll firm that caters to 40,000 small employers with an average of seven employees. That's roughly double the 3.5% of payroll checks that went to 1099 workers in December 2007.

The trend is expected to accelerate this year given the framework of the looming health-care law, employment analysts predict.

Ingenious Fascists At HHS Change Name Of Healthcare "Exchanges" To "Marketplaces"

The national socialists presiding over the failure of the healthcare "exchanges" under ObamaCare have decided, in the wake of the refusal of Republican governors to implement them, to change their name.

That's the story from TheHill.com, here:

The Health and Human Services Department suddenly stopped referring to insurance “exchanges” this week, even as it heralded ongoing efforts to prod states into setting up their own. Instead, press materials and a website for the public referred to insurance “marketplaces” in each state. The change comes amid a determined push by conservative activists to block state-based exchanges in hopes of crippling the federal implementation effort. Dean Clancy, the director of healthcare policy at FreedomWorks, said HHS’s decision to ditch the “exchanges” label shows that opponents of the healthcare law are succeeding. ... Changing the name to “marketplaces” won’t make any difference, Clancy said. “They could call them motherhood or apple pie, but it wouldn’t change our feelings about them,” Clancy said. “We're encouraged that they're showing signs of desperation. I think that it’s too late in the game to try to start calling this something different. And [we’re] not going to spend a lot of effort fighting over a word.”

Oh, but it will make a difference, mon ami. Blaming the free market is what these people are all about. Americans aren't going to be flocking to the exchanges to buy insurance because it will simply be cheaper to pay the penalty knowing that it's cheaper to do so, with the certain knowledge that guaranteed issue when they need it means they can put off getting insurance until it's absolutely necessary. The result is that more people, not fewer, will be without health insurance under ObamaCare. And that failure will be blamed on the free market's "marketplaces" when the time comes for the statists to argue openly for single payer, which has been the goal all along.

George Orwell would be impressed.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review Agrees Obama Is Essentially A Fascist

According to an editorial in Saturday's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, here, agreeing with John Mackey the CEO of Whole Foods, Obama is essentially a fascist. The editorial approvingly quotes this definition of fascism by libertarian Sheldon Richman:

“As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. For those with the hubris to think they, not free markets, could better serve society, ‘fascism‘ (or as we prefer, 'fascistic economics') was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone (classic) liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism.”

Just when you thought there's been no progress defining for the public who and what is Obama, a businessman and a newspaper provide some:

"The general parallels to Obamanomics are glaring. Throw in the specifics of ObamaCare — then consider forays into national industrial policy and state protection of organized labor cartels — and the parallels are blinding", the editorial says.

Not that America's odd mixture of socialism and capitalism is something new.

It was Herbert Hoover, as far as I know, who was the first liberal to identify the American phenomenon of a mixed economics. Hoover located it in the blended strongman presidency of FDR, which was based more on Roosevelt's admiration for Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler as leaders than it was on substantive convictions about the dismal science. The alphabet soup of government which we take for granted today is the direct descendant of Roosevelt's impulse to try something, try anything, until it worked. Well, they're still trying.

Under Roosevelt, perfectly good food was deliberately destroyed by government to keep it from reaching the market in order to support prices in a deflationary economy even as people went hungry all across the country. Today we deliberately devote half the corn crop to produce an expensive, politically correct fuel boosting the cost of food animals while the number of people on food stamps is at an all time high and consumer demand has fallen like a rock. In the immortal words of Curly, if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed.

But Hoover the loser was on to something, even if calling the man who beat him an un-American dictator lover was beyond the pale for some people. History eventually proved Hoover right when FDR broke with American tradition dating from the founding by running for a third term, and then a fourth. It took until 1951 for the American people to wake up and put a stop to that, with the ratification of the 22nd Amendment. Some dictators are assassinated, others just end up in the circular file. In many ways, Roosevelt simply out-Hoovered Hoover's own liberalism. People forget that FDR ran on what amounted to a repudiation of Republican liberal economic interventionism in the economy, and promptly ramped it up beyond anyone's imagination after he was elected.

But the blended system in America surely began much earlier. We could dial it back probably all the way to Lincoln himself, which would be fitting if only because the current occupant of The White House who practices fascism goes to such great pains to style himself after him, the president who chose to make the principle of national union over sovereign States the new definition of America. That fact of working a revolution, of remaking the country, should trouble everyone who has an ounce of independence left flowing through his veins, which is what troubles so many people who hear Obama speak of transforming the country. For half of us, one such revolution was enough.

This year we might do well to reflect on a later example, however, seeing that it is the anniversary of the abolition of private banking 100 years ago. It's strangely coincidental. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by a fanatical progressive Presbyterian named Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who hated the encumbrances placed upon government by the constitutional order and wanted to forge a new world where nations disarmed, lived in peace and cooperated toward a common goal, with the US not at its then natural place, at the head. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in thoroughly partisan fashion by Democrats who had swept to power in the election of 1912 and rammed it through the Congress without Republican support. Their dollar then is now worth 4 cents.

If Woodrow Wilson doesn't yet remind you of Obama and ObamaCare, maybe its because after 100 years of the pernicious effects of American style fascism, you're just too poor to pay attention.

The Next Thing You Know It'll Be An AR-47

The caption writer for the UK Daily Mail gets all confused and calls the AR-15 an "AK-15"in a story about yesterday's pro-gun rallies. Just a typo, I'm sure, since the previous picture got it right, but still, the next thing you know the Kalash will become the AR-47!

Gotta love the instincts of the guy with the sign. Just sending a little political message to the (national) socialists in Washington, DC. Couldn't have said it better myself.

5 Million American Homes Repossessed In The Last 7 Years

DrHousingBubbble.com has a sobering post at the end of November 2012 here looking at the big picture for American homeowners in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble.

Out of 10 million foreclosure filings since the beginning of 2006, about half have ended up in flat-out repossession by the banks. With 50 million mortgages out there, that means roughly 9% of mortgaged homes have ended belly up over the period.

With 5.3 million mortgages currently 30 days or more in arrears, a similar repo rate would mean we could expect another 2.5 million mortgages to go to the dogs.

It's still my opinion that housing in the United States is about 12% too expensive overall at the very minimum, and that federal interventions on a massive scale are prohibiting price discovery for this and other asset classes.

Probably more than anything else, however, those interventions are not designed to obscure these matters intentionally, nor to help individual Americans with their financial problems even as they protest to the contrary. Instead the interventions are primarily designed to rescue the biggest banks which have all these non-performing loans turning their books into Swiss cheese, not to mention helping their pals in Congress who need the cheapest dollars they can get to finance all the overspending which keeps them in power. 

Sen. Rob Portman Made An Excellent Point On Today's Larry Kudlow Radio Program

Sen. Rob Portman, Republican from Ohio, made an excellent point on today's Larry Kudlow Radio Program on wabcradio.com. Sen. Portman led off by gently correcting Larry Kudlow for criticizing attempts to use the debt ceiling as leverage to obtain spending cuts.

Sen. Portman pointed out, about 33 minutes into the podcast, that the technique has been used successfully since the days of Warren Rudman, and that we wouldn't have the spending sequester agreed to, admittedly very reluctantly by both political parties, in August 2011 without it, an agreement which, however inelegantly, lops $100 billion off spending annually, if only future Congresses stick to it. Unfortunately for us, the last Congress which agreed to the sequester in the first place already postponed its original implementation date by two months in the fiscal cliff deal over the New Year Holiday. That is a bad sign, preceded by a good sign.

It is heartening to see a Republican Senator wholeheartedly affirming the idea that the politics of the debt ceiling is helpful to the interests of the American people. But I would caution that Sen. Portman's feet need to be kept to the fire. His performance today on Kudlow's program looks to me like fence mending with the US House, an apology of sorts to the House after upstaging it in 2011 with his dalliance with the Gang of Twelve.

Whatever else may be said, his instincts expressed today are right. Spending must be reduced, and the debt ceiling is a weapon which the US House must use to get that, no matter how messy.

It's Gun Appreciation Day. I Appreciate This One!

In production since 1954!

It's The First National Gun Appreciation Day!

I heard my neighbor celebrating . . . he fired off a couple dozen rounds with various weapons, scaring the cats, not that it takes much!

We sleep like babies knowing all our neighbors have guns, lots of guns, big guns! Boom!

State Gasoline Taxes Today Represent Almost 10% Of The Cost

Gasoline taxes in January 2013 are averaging $.488 per gallon nationally. That's up slightly, about 1.5%, from January 2011 when taxes averaged $.481 per gallon nationally.

The average gallon in the last five observations of spot prices of refined product ready for shipment has an actual cost $2.614. This yields an average expected price nationally of $3.102, whereas today's current national average is $3.267, meaning the local gas station's profit per gallon cannot be any more than about $.165 per gallon because he pays out of that a mark-up to the supplier for his profit and delivery costs.

Whatever else may be said about how much profit is buried in the spot price accruing to the oil companies and the refiners, the distributors and retailers are fighting for profits from just 5% of the cost of a gallon, whereas government from top to bottom takes a 15% cut, for doing absolutely nothing.

And the roads in this country still suck.

The federal cut alone is 5.6% of the cost of gasoline today, $.184 per gallon everywhere, but the states' cut is a whopping 9.3% on average. Compare that to the current average of state sales tax rates nationwide, which is just 5.04%. On average everyone who fills up at the gas station is paying 85% more in taxes to state government for that product than would be paid on toilet paper.

That doesn't make any sense!

The Invasion Of The Body Scanners: Nude X-Ray Scanners To Be Out By June

TSA is getting rid of the invasive nude x-ray technology by June to comply with a Congressional directive.

But you're still being searched, and whether you get felt up or not is beside the point, because the generic image scanners will stay.

The Fourth Amendment means nothing in an airport, and I predict this "compromise" will speed the way for the invasion of the body scanners into every sphere of public transportation, including busses, subways, commuter trains and even tollways and interstates.

Story here.

Tendentious Headline Alert

Campus conservatives are dying? Really? The New Republic says that?! Truly shocking. But while the book, apparently, and the review don't flatter a certain type of conservative, neither the review nor the book, evidently, says that they are "dying", illustrating that headline writers often excel at expressing a prejudice. A promising future no doubt awaits at The New York Times. 

Three Dubious Firsts For Obama In Quick Succession In 2011

The dollar hit its all time low under Obama, on 5/2/11 at 67.97, but this has not been much discussed even though it is surely related to the following other firsts.

On 8/5/11 Standard and Poor's downgraded the US for the first time ever, from AAA to AA+, primarily because it was looking for $4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years and only got $1 trillion in the sequestration deal.

And then on 9/2/11 it was reported that for the month of August 2011 net zero jobs had been created, the first time since World War II that a month went by without job creation.

These are remarkable and dubious firsts, three of them in a row in the span of four months.

It is clear how much two of these still rankle Obama, who views them in purely political terms instead of as injuries to all of us. In a press conference on the debt ceiling almost a year and a half later, held this last Monday, Obama brought up both the AAA rating loss and the net zero jobs milestone, seeking to blame them both on Republicans:


"And they'd better choose quickly because time is running short. The last time Republicans in Congress even flirted with this idea [of not raising the debt ceiling], our triple-A credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history, our businesses created the fewest jobs of any month in nearly the past three years, and ironically, the whole fiasco actually added to the deficit."

The revisionist history on the jobs number is noteworthy. Who would even remember the fact now unless he brought it up?

The fact of the matter is, however, that the weak dollar, which is not even on Obama's radar screen, is the root of the problem for both our out of control debt and deficits and the dearth of jobs.

And Jeffrey Snider, coincidentally, says just as much today, here, concluding this way:


"The politics of the debt ceiling really should be concerned with monetarism rather than focused solely on spending or deficits. But that is a hard position for either party to take. Democrats won't because their interests are aligned with monetarism, while Republicans have at many times embraced monetarism with equal passion. Neither seems to want to move outside conventional economics that salutes as policy success a 64% increase in total debt without any perturbation in interest costs.


"We have not just a fiscal problem, but a persistent and massive monetary imbalance through dollar debasement that is directly related to both the debt disaster and the weak economy. Without directly facing it and working toward currency stability, we will be stuck with both the continued debt trajectory and no real growth. Neither can be adequately solved without first solving the dollar by ending capital repression."

Yea, The "Artic". You Know, Up North Where The Artists Go To Paint.