Gasoline In Grand Rapids Is Up 25% Since Christmas

Gasoline is up about 25% in Grand Rapids, Michigan, since Christmas to date, just two short months ago. We're actually a little off the highs today. Prices have been erratic at places like Sam's Club where lines are long for what is often the cheapest gasoline in the area (members only). I waited 20 minutes to fill the day after Valentine's, with a bitter cold wind blowing which was not deterring anyone from filling at $3.689/gallon. Today it's $3.769. The price of a fill for me is basically $12 higher today than it was at Christmas.

Molly Ball Doth Espy The Flaccid Organ Called The Senate

For The Atlantic, here:

"The last time a major new piece of policy legislation passed the U.S. Senate was July 15, 2010.

"That's when the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill came through the Senate. And it was 951 days ago."

Just before the Republicans retook the House in 2010, over 400 bills passed by the then Democrat-controlled House under Speaker Pelosi languished unactioned in Sen. Harry Reid's Democrat-controlled Senate, on which, see here.

Obama Flashback 11/21/11: I Will Veto Any Effort To Stop Sequester

See him say it here, about 3 minutes 55 seconds into the statement made just four months after signing the sequester:

"I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts."

Now, of course, the sequester is no longer his idea and is going to be catastrophic:

Obama cautioned that if the $85 billion in immediate cuts - known as the sequester - occur, the full range of government would feel the effects. Among those he listed: furloughed FBI agents, reductions in spending for communities to pay police and fire personnel and teachers, and decreased ability to respond to threats around the world.

Just ask the Fed to monetize some debt and move on already, will ya buddy?

What You Get When Santa's Hearing Aid Batteries Die

You asked for a GPS unit . . .

. . . but you got a PMS unit instead.

Rush Limbaugh Nonplussed By Caller, Expunged From Record

Rush Limbaugh received a call today from an impertinent listener who suggested that the sequester hubbub about cutting spending by $85 billion a YEAR was completely meaningless since the Federal Reserve has been buying securities in similar amounts every MONTH in the various quantitative easing iterations. We could cut the spending, the caller suggested, and just turn around and recreate the money since the Fed is doing it all the time anyway and no one would ever be the wiser.

The caller was correct, but Rush was completely nonplussed and nervously dismissed the call and cut to commercial (which is why all calls are taken just before commercial breaks, in case they go Egypt). Since I can't find a record of it in the transcripts tonight, I'm guessing it really did disturb Rush enough to make sure the memory of it went straight into the circular file.

But think about it. The Democrats, especially Obama, are screaming the spending cuts are draconian and will hurt necessary jobs and the economy's growth. The Republicans are screaming that unless we cut spending, the world as we know it may come to an abrupt end because of the way a huge mountain of debt threatens to crush growth. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet from about $500 billion before the crisis to $3 trillion today by purchasing all manner of MBS and Treasury securities and what have you. Over four years that comes to a rate of about $52 billion a MONTH of funny money fed intravenously into the banking sector because it is still as good as dead in its bed.

That threatens everything Rush believes and says about the banks, how they were forced to take TARP, didn't really need it, paid it all back, are now healthy, blah blah blah. When the real story is that the losses they have taken on housing are gargantuan and have left huge holes in their balance sheets (you know, the off-balance-sheet-balance-sheets). The virtually free money from the Fed is designed to help them profit to get back on their feet. For public consumption the Fed says it is doing this to make mortgages cheaper so that housing revives, so that employment revives, neither of which is the real reason. The real reason is to throw banks a life line to allow their private trading desks to make money speculating in the stock markets et alia and restore their capital base.

It's government of the banks, by the banks and for the banks. The rest is just a sideshow.

Hey Obama! Go Sequester Yourself!

CHRIS WALLACE, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY" HOST: Bob, as the man who literally wrote the book about the budget battle, put this to rest. Whose idea was the sequester, and did you ever think that we'd actually get to this point? 

BOB WOODWARD: First, it was the White House. It was Obama and Jack Lew and Rob Nabors who went to the Democratic Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, and said, 'this is the solution.' But everyone has their fingerprints on this. (FOX News Sunday, February 17, 2013)

Watch here.

Republicans Need To Get A Grip: Obama Did Not Win By A Landslide In 2012

Republicans need to get a grip: Obama did not win in a landslide. Not in 2008, and especially in 2012.

Joe Curl for The Washington Times, in particular, needs to take a pill and calm down, who three times in a recent op-ed (here) credits Obama with a "landslide" victory, which drives him to all manner of hand-wringing and unnecessary speculation about the need for Republicans to alter their message. Instead, what Republicans need to do is alter their candidate.

At this far remove from the November election the results are plain for everyone to see, but no one, evidently, is looking. It really doesn't come as a surprise, however, because they didn't really look at the results after 2008, either, and promptly annointed another loser in the mold of McCain, albeit a better loser.

Sen. John McCain lost to Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 by 1.4 million votes out of 131.3 million cast, barely 1.1% of the total vote.

Gov. Romney lost to Pres. Obama in 2012 by 0.77 million votes out of 129.1 million cast, barely 0.6% of the total vote.

They both lost because both failed to carry Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. Had Romney carried them all, which he failed to do by just 767,000 votes in the aggregate, he'd be the president today. McCain failed to carry the exact same states, but by 1.34 million, a performance almost twice as bad as Romney's. In addition McCain lost both North Carolina and Indiana by just 42,000 votes between the two, either of which with the other seven states would have meant a McCain presidency, not an Obama presidency.

The problem with the Republican Party isn't that it can't win elections against a supposedly landslide commanding Democrat machine. Its problem is it can't win with bad candidates like McCain and Romney. They are bad candidates because they are essentially liberal Republicans whom the voters take for Democrat-lite, and shrug.

Why vote for that at all, or why vote for that when you can vote for the real thing?

Message to Republicans: Don't alter your message. Alter your candidate. Nominate a real conservative for a change. The chances are good you'll win.

Sen. Rand Paul Forgets His Libertarian Father Was A Point-47-Percenter

There are losers like Mitt Romney, and then there are real losers like Ron Paul, who in his 1988 foray as the Libertarian Party candidate for president managed a laughable 0.47% of the popular vote.

Libertarianism doesn't stand a chance in 2016 either, except in the fictional polling world of Sen. Rand Paul's own mind, as here:

'His father, he pointed out, came out ahead of Obama in some presidential election polling: “He beat him with an interesting dynamic — loses a third of the Republican vote, gains a third of the Democratic vote and wins the independents. So it’s a sort of third way.”'

Republican primary voters didn't see it that way in 2012 in Rep. Ron Paul's last hurrah, who preferred Mitt Romney to the outgoing congressman by almost 5 to 1. And in the 2012 general election barely 1.3 million people voted for the Libertarian Party candidate for president, former Republican Gary Johnson, who eked out a paltry 0.99% compared to Mitt Romney's 47.18%.

One of the chief characteristics of the ideological mind is its disconnect from reality. Sen. Rand Paul should have his head examined.

Sen. Rand Paul Is Dreaming If He Thinks "Libertarian Republican" Can Win In 2016

Here:

"You know, points have been made and we'll continue to make points, but I think the country really is ready for the narrative coming, libertarian Republican narrative, also because we have been losing as a national party. We are doing fine in congressional seats but we're becoming less and less of a national party because we don't win on the West Coast, we don't win in New England. We really struggled all around the Great Lakes."

"Libertarian Republican" is an oxymoron, kind of like "Reagan Republican". The Libertarian Party in the United States characteristically considers itself successful when it defeats Republicans, not Democrats. Taking over the Republican Party from within is simply another version of this.

Both libertarians and Reaganites are essentially Democrats on the social issues but Republican to the extent that Republicans believe in the free market, which actually is where the rub is. They make a lot of noise protesting their social conservatism, but when the rubber hits the road they do nothing about it legislatively. Meanwhile the country continues to reset to the left on the social issues with every passing year. This is not by accident.

Since neither group gains traction in the Democrat Party on the economic front, the Democrats having sold out long ago to socialism and social license, they both naturally come to the Republican Party to play, where they are partly welcome but eventually cause trouble. The problem is both groups alienate the social conservative base of the Republican Party to one degree or another, and then can't quite convince the Republican establishment either, which is still economically liberal in its orientation and currently is based in the Bush clan. There's a reason, after all, why the Republicans continue to nominate economic liberals like Bush 43, McCain and Romney who do not naturally exude free market principles.

Reagan Democrats succeeded in the Republican Party because they made successful alliances with both Republican factions, which are otherwise so divided they cannot stand on their own. They need liberals of one kind or another to win, either libertarian social liberals or Democrats recovering from the economic radicalization of the Democrat Party, like Ronald Reagan. When Republicans do win with this help, they call it conservatism but still govern from the left, whether it takes the form of Reagan's 1986 tax reform with its hidden mandates and expansions of middle class welfare or George W. Bush's guns and butter in the Wars on Terror and Drugs for Seniors.

The libertarians will not be able to reduplicate this achievement, however, because under their banner fly all the fruits, nuts and flakes Republicans have always identified as socially fringe characters with whom there can be no agreement, while their doctrinaire free market devotion will preclude compromise with the Republican establishment's tax and spend liberals which they will need to win.

As ever, the Republican Party is a house divided against itself, which is why Pres. Obama just loves Pres. Abraham Lincoln.

US Air Force D.U.I. Decoration

More hilarity here.

Michigan's Sales Taxes On Fuel Aren't Spent On Roads!

Oi, just when you thought everything was so simply dissected, you find out it's not. It turns out that Michigan's sales tax on gasoline, distinct from its excise tax on gasoline, is by law earmarked for something other than roads, according to this story for mlive.com by Jonathan Oosting:

[A]ccording to Lance T. Binoniemi of the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association, ... the state collects sales tax on fuel but does not earmark any of that revenue for roads.

"It's the biggest public policy problem we have," Binoniemi said today during a joint session of the Senate and House transportation committees. "The general public does not understand that the 6 percent tax does not go to funding roads and bridges. When you include that sales tax, we probably do have one of the highest (gas tax rates) in the nation." ...

Michigan is amongst a handful of states that levies a sales tax on motor fuel sales, but it does not dedicate any of that revenue to road funding. Most Michigan sales tax is constitutionally earmarked for schools and revenue sharing, while a small amount collected from fuel and automotive products is statutorily earmarked for public transportation. State law currently requires retailers to pre-pay sales tax on gasoline based on a projected per-gallon cost set quarterly (and soon, monthly) by the state Treasury. Those rates are based on the price after the federal excise tax but before the state excise tax.

Obviously one cannot simply substitute a general sales tax increase for a fuel tax increase and spend it all on roads when that increase as applied to fuel sales would sequester it and spend it on something else because the Michigan constitution requires it. Gov. Snyder doesn't really have much of a near term choice for increased road funding but to resort to an increase in the excise portion of the tax on fuel. Longer term the constitution would have to be amended, alas.

This is why one should not be amending the constitution for legislative purposes in the first place, an especially bad habit in Michigan where everyone wants to resort to that nuclear option for every pet project and crackpot idea. The result is chaos, confusion, unreason, inflexibility and disorder.

What's a legislature for if not to raise or reduce taxes and defend that at reelection time? Enshrining minutiae like what the 6% sales tax on fuel must be spent on in the constitution simply allows legislators to escape the political consequences of that allocation, which I'm guessing is why so much of Michigan politics seems to get shuffled off to the referendum process, otherwise known, at best, as direct democracy, at worst, as mob rule.

Pretty cowardly when you get down to it.

Give Us A President So Depressed He Can Hardly Get Out Of Bed

So opines Gene Healy for Reason, here:

[T]he conventional wisdom overvalues presidents who enjoy the job. In his influential 1972 book The Presidential Character, political scientist James David Barber argued that we should pick presidents by their personality type. The "active-positive" president—the ideal voters should seek—tackles the job with manic energy and zest and "gives forth the feeling that he has fun in political life." The "passive-negative" sees the office as a matter of stern duty, and his "tendency is to withdraw." Among Barber's "active-positives" were troublemakers FDR, Truman, and JFK; his "passive-negatives" included the Cincinnatus-like figures Washington, Eisenhower, and, of course, Coolidge. Maybe we should only give the job to people who are so depressed they can barely get out of bed.

Russia Violated 2010 START Agreement In June 2012

The noisiest military aircraft on earth carries long range cruise missiles.

So reports The Washington Free Beacon, here:

[I]n June ... two Bear H’s ran up against the air defense zone near Alaska as part of large-scale strategic exercises that Moscow said involved simulated attacks on U.S. missile defense bases. The Pentagon operates missile defense bases in Alaska and California.

Those flights triggered the scrambling of U.S. and Canadian interceptor jets as well.

The bomber flights near Alaska violated a provision of the 2010 New START arms treaty that requires advance notification of exercises involving strategic nuclear bombers.

The story at the link details a more recent, highly unusual, deployment of two such bombers to spook Guam.

Drudge Falsely Reports Charges Vs. Jesse Jackson Jr. "Dropped"

Drudge linked to the story at left. A Google search at this hour reveals no such drop of the charges. Both The New York Times and NBC report the filing of charges, not the dropping of charges.

And all of a sudden, Drudge changes the headline to correct himself. Is this race baiting, or what? 

"This Is Not A Market System, Nor Is It In Any Relation To A Capitalist System"

So says Jeffrey Snider of Alhambra Investment Partners, here.

The Best Reason To Oppose Sen. Chuck Hagel For SECDEF

It's not because he's anti-Semitic.

It's not because he flipped on the Iraq War and opposed The Surge.

It's not because of an anti-gay slur.

It's not because he made such a hash of his confirmation hearing.

It's because he'll dutifully dismantle the American military for his boss, thus enabling Democrats to claim that the weakened state of the US fighting machine is the fault of Republicans.

In short, it's because Hagel's a dupe.

Make the president nominate a Democrat to dismantle the military. Republicans shouldn't let Republicans drive drunk, especially when they're puking in the car. 

Charles Krauthammer Loves The Drone War, And So Do You

Here is Charles Krauthammer for National Review:

"[T]he case for Obama’s drone war is clear."

And The New York Times, here, says 71% of you approve of the drone war, too:

"And on several issues, the CBS News poll finds a majority of Americans are in the president’s corner. Most, 59 percent, back a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit; 53 percent say gun control laws should be made more strict; 53 percent support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants currently working in the United States; and 71 percent favor carrying out drone strikes against suspected terrorists."

It's getting pretty lonely on the extreme right when we have to look to far left people like Glenn Greenwald for friends calling for an end to this madness. One of these days a Commander in Chief will exercise a fictitious right both to declare you an insurrectionist and to snuff you out in the middle of the night as you sleep, right here in River City because, hey, the whole world's a battlefield, even Grand Rapids, Michigan. The only thing the war on terror has achieved is to reveal that most Americans already surrendered their freedoms long ago, 1861 to be precise.

Noted Lefty Calls Obama's Secrecy Orwellian and Tyrannical

Noted lefty Glenn Greenwald for the UK Guardian here calls Obama's secrecy about a CIA program to kill even Americans with drones Orwellian and tyrannical (he's right):

"[W]hat is missing from the debate is the most basic information about what the CIA does and even their claimed legal justification for doing it. The Obama administration still refuses to publicly disclose the OLC memo that purported to authorize it (they agreed two weeks ago to make it available only to certain members of Congress without staff present, thus still maintaining "secret law"). They conceal all of this - and thus prevent basic democratic accountability - based on the indescribably cynical and inane pretense that they cannot even confirm or deny the existence of the CIA program without seriously jeopardizing national security.

"This is a complete perversion of their secrecy powers. Even among the DC cliques that exist to defend US government behavior, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to defend what is being done here. The Obama administration runs around telling journalists how great and precise and devastating the CIA's assassination program is, then tells courts that no disclosure is permissible because they cannot safely confirm in court that the program even exists.

"Such flagrant abuse of secrecy power is at once Orwellian and tyrannical. It has the effect of blocking even the most minimal transparency on the most consequential question: the government's claimed authority to execute anyone it wants without charges, far from a battlefield, in total secrecy. It yet again demonstrates that excessive government secrecy is an infinitely greater threat than unauthorized disclosures. This is why we need radical transparency projects and aggressive whistle-blowers. And it's why nobody should respect the secrecy claims of the Obama administration or believe the assertions they make about national security. What else do they need to do to prove how untrustworthy those claims are?"

Levitt Capital Management Predicts Brent Oil At $80 By Year End

That's roughly a 30% drop from the current level of $117 for Brent. For West Texas Intermediate Crude such a drop would mean a price of $65. The prediction is based in part on rising contributions to supply from shale oil.

Story here.

If Rep. Justin Amash Were A Real Conservative, He Wouldn't "Run" For Senate

Real conservatives want to repeal the 17th Amendment, not perpetuate it. That Rep. Amash is "'intrigued' by the prospect of going for Levin's seat" in just his second term as a representative betrays his ambition, not his conservatism. If he cared about his constituents he'd serve them, not use them as a stepping stone for his own career. He's done nothing to represent his congressional district, and he'll do nothing to represent the State of Michigan as senator. All he'll represent is his personal conception of the libertarian ideology, and not much else. If you want a mascot for your eccentricity, by all means vote for Justin Amash.

Story here.