"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Sunday, June 9, 2013
To Republicans Like Mike Rogers, These Are Just Words
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Republican Mike Rogers Doesn't Have A Clue How We Feel About The 4th Amendment
Republican Mike Rogers is completely alienated from the original spirit of the Fourth Amendment animating the Tea Party in Michigan and across the country, here this morning:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for the still-unnamed leaker and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; ne[i]ther did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”
Nolan Finley Of The Detroit News Wants To Junk The IRS, And The Income Tax
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| THIS IS NOT NOLAN FINLEY |
Here:
"[R]eplace the income tax with a national sales tax. You’d pay tax on the money you spend instead of the money you earn. That would eliminate the need for an IRS that audits tax returns, hands out non-profit status and enforces a tax code that is egregiously complex and unfair. If the national sales tax isn’t the answer, then a similar outcome might be achieved by drastically lowering current income tax rates in exchange for eliminating all deductions and credits. With no reason to examine returns, the IRS could be much smaller. Without auditing power, it’d be less intimidating."
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Why not do both? A low flat sales tax and a low flat income tax? We already have one flat tax, called Social Security. And we already pay an average state sales tax of 5+% everywhere. Just abolish the income tax and augment the current flat Payroll Tax with the new one. Business everywhere is already set up to collect that and withhold, so dovetailing that with a corporate flat tax should also be easy to do. Presto. No IRS needed for America's 151 million wage earners and the millions of businesses who employ them.
Herman Cain's more or less revenue neutral 999 plan looks better and better with every passing day of the IRS scandal targeting Obama's political enemies: a flat 9% federal sales tax, a flat 9% tax on all income, and a flat 9% corporate income tax.
A man before his time.
Food Stamp Households Up, Not Persons, Can Only Mean One Thing
Smaller households.
Food stamp recipient numbers surged up again in March 2013 to 47.727 million Americans, but this did not break the record as claimed by Drudge and Zero Hedge headlines.
The record was reached in December 2012 at 47.792 million.
Zero Hedge is making the claim based on the number of households, not the number of persons. The only thing the former statistic might prove is that as the country becomes more single it becomes more poor. Marriage and family is the economic engine of capitalism, and Obama aims to destroy them both. He's succeeding, which is why Rush Limbaugh famously hoped Obama would fail.
Persons on SNAP have been at the 47 million level since August 2012.
Data here.
Obama Biographies Deliberately Omitted That His Mentor Was A Flaming Communist
Including for the Associated Press, and both biographies by John Meacham and David Remnick.
Herbert Meyer, here:
For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Associated Press ran two articles about Obama's life in Hawaii, one specifically about Frank [Marshall Davis]. The AP described him to voters desperate for insight about the Democratic candidate merely as an advocate of "civil rights amid segregation" and a crusader for the U.S. Constitution. The only Frank quote the AP offered its readers -- chosen from decades of vicious, anti-American newspaper columns Frank wrote in Hawaii -- was this: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution."
Newsweek's John Meacham told readers only that Frank wrote about "civil rights and labor issues." David Remnick, who wrote for The Washington Post, who now is editor of The New Yorker, and who authored The Bridge, which to date is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of our president, managed to completely ignore Frank's communist ideology and told readers only that Frank "wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantation, the power of oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations." Somehow, this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist failed to notice -- or chose to ignore -- Frank's incendiary, near-treasonous columns blasting Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, accusing the U.S. of trying to re-Nazify Germany, and defending the Soviet Union at every turn.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Top Secret FISA Order Revealed By Glenn Greenwald Was 80th THIS YEAR
According to William Binney, quoted here:
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens. ...
Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.
Mr. Binney noted the order’s serial number, which indicates it is the 80th issued by the FISA court so far this year. The court likely has approved similar orders for the other major U.S. telecom providers, he said, “and they have to be renewed every 90 days.”
NSA Copies Everything Off AT&T Fiberoptic Network In Switching Centers Nationwide
In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.
Glenn Greenwald Channels The Utopian Edward Bellamy
From his latest in the UK Guardian, here:
"We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come."
The US Dollar Has Tanked Since Bernanke Spoke Before Congress On May 22nd
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| THE US DOLLAR BREAKOUT ABOVE 84 HAS FAILED FOR NOW. |
The dollar has fallen 3.15% since May 22nd when Bernanke opened his big yap and went off-script in front of Congress, hinting at a tapering off of QE in the near future.
The dollar closed at 84.35 on May 22nd and closed yesterday at 81.69.
When just words can tank fiat bonds and fiat dollars, isn't it time to pay our respects once again to Article 1, Section 10?
Still Think You Can Predict Bond Market Sell-Off? You're Already A Month Late.
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| NAV of total bond market is already down almost 2% in a month. |
So says James B. Stewart here in The New York Times, who notes Bill Gross of PIMCO fame manages a corporate bond/MBS fund which is already down well over 10%:
The sell-off in fixed income began slowly on May 10, an otherwise uneventful day with no obvious catalyst for any change in sentiment. It picked up steam when Fed sources didn’t step forward to calm markets. Then, in comments to Congress on May 22, Mr. Bernanke said, “We could in the next few meetings take a step down in our pace of purchases.”
That set off alarm bells, in contrast with his prepared text, which gave no suggestion that the Fed’s policy would change so soon. And then, the minutes of the Fed’s May meeting suggested that some Fed governors were prepared to start tapering off bond purchases as soon as the Fed’s next meeting, which will be June 18 and 19. Near-panic selling in some markets ensued.
. . . the simplest and safest approach [may be] simply to park funds in a low-volatility money market fund and accept near-zero returns.
Friday, June 7, 2013
"Americans For A Conservative Direction" Isn't Conservative: It's A Mark Zuckerberg/Jeb Bush BiPartisan Front Group Trying To Ram Immigration Reform Down Our Throats
Breitbart had the story on May 7th, here, and the radio ads from "Americans For A Conservative Direction", which run incessantly during Rush Limbaugh's program, have gone through at least one major makeover which removes the recorded voices of Sen. Rubio and Rep. Ryan.
Wake up people: "Republican" does not mean "conservative", and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame and fan of Barack Obama is the last person on earth I would think of when I'm asked to name a conservative.
You are being manipulated and lulled to sleep in order to pass a bill which will only favor Democrats and hurt Americans looking for jobs.
Republicans who are bipartisan are selling us down the river.
Unemployment Ticks Up To 7.6% In May
Average jobs added per month ticks up to 172,000 from 169,000 in last month's report.
The latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.
Unemployment in America has been above 7% since December 2008: 54 months. If Obama keeps this up he can beat the original Teflon president's string of 61 months of unemployment at 7% or above from December 1980 through December 1985.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Lying ObamaCare Lies And The Liberals Who Tell Them
ObamaCare will force you to buy more expensive coverage than you willingly do now, according to this Wall Street Journal op-ed, here:
Liberals have spent years claiming that "rate shock" under the Affordable Care Act—the 20% to 30% average spike in insurance premiums that every independent analyst projects—is merely the political imagination of Republicans and the insurance industry. So they immediately claimed victory when California reported last month that the plans that will be available on the state's new insurance exchange next year would be cheaper than they are today.
Except now it emerges that California goosed the data to make it appear as if ObamaCare won't send costs aloft as the law's regulations and mandates kick in. It will, by a lot. And now liberals have suddenly switched to arguing that, sure, insurance will be more expensive but the new costs are justified. Needless to say that was not how Democrats sold health-care reform.
California reported that the rates would range from 2% above to 29% below the current market. "This is a home run for consumers in every region of California," said Peter Lee, the director of the state exchange. "These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard."
"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."
The country's tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn't creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday. ...
Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer . . ..
"It's not a recovery," he wrote. "It's not even normal growth. It's bad." ...
Young adults are facing staggering student loan debt that will force them to put off buying homes until later in life, said senior economist David Shulman.
Outstanding student loans have tripled since 2004, according to Federal Reserve Bank figures. In 2012, public and private student loan levels reached $966 billion.
"Never before have so many young people been saddled with so much non-mortgage debt, and that burden will keep them out of the home buying market for years to come," Shulman wrote.
Honest Liberal Calls This The Worst Consumer Recession In Modern History
Stephen Roach of Yale University, here, points out that the rate of growth in personal consumption is just 25% of what it used to be:
Over the 21 quarters since the beginning of 2008, real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption has risen at an average annual rate of just 0.9%. That is by far the most protracted period of weakness in real US consumer demand since the end of World War II – and a massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007. ...
[T]he release of pent-up demand in the current cycle amounted to just 3% annualized growth in the five quarters from early 2010 to early 2011. Moreover, the strongest quarterly gain was a 4.1% increase in the fourth quarter of 2010.
This is a stunning result. The worst consumer recession in modern history, featuring a record collapse in durable-goods expenditures in 2008-2009, should have triggered an outsize surge of pent-up demand. Yet it did anything but that. Instead, the release of pent-up consumer demand was literally half that of previous business cycles.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Obama The Marxist Thinks The Middle Class Is His Greatest And Most Dangerous Enemy
"The most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat."
"The greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."
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Impose a dearth of ammo for their guns, mediocritize their healthcare, impoverish them with unemployment, make them servile with food stamps and disability payments, destroy their incentive to save with artificially low interest rates, spy on them with cameras, wire taps, drones and email intercepts, make it too expensive to travel, or too humiliating, dumb them down with inadequate public school educations, reduce them to the level of the gutter in their speech and morals through ridicule of all standards of public discourse and thinking, and destroy all traditional conceptions in institutions from the Boy Scouts to the US military. Politicize everything, but threaten the wrong politics with the power of the State. Anesthetize with drugs. Make them hate the rich so they stop trying to be so. Meanwhile, party, and spend their money like it's never been spent before.
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