Best American Rifleman Cover Ever

Leave Them There

Rush Limbaugh Can't Even Divide 1000 by 30

33: That's how many consecutive months gasoline has been above $3/gallon, but Rush just said 20 months.

Nipplehead.

The Wall Street Journal, yesterday, here:

"A millstone has reached a milestone. On Tuesday, the national U.S. average gasoline price chalked up its 1,000th consecutive day above $3 a gallon, according to the AAA. That’s a landmark most Americans couldn’t have dreamed of a decade ago: Pump prices didn’t break above the $2 level sustainably until 2005."

American Businesses Have Saved $2.8 Trillion In Last Four Years Due To ZIRP

In the form of lower borrowing costs, according to this story from Bloomberg:

America’s companies, from Apple Inc. (AAPL) to Verizon Communications Inc., are saving about $700 billion in interest payments with the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented stimulus. ...

Savings of about $700 billion represents the difference between what companies that have sold bonds since Sept. 17, 2009, are paying annually based on an average maturity of nine years for securities in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Corporate & High Yield Index, versus what they might have paid before the crisis.

After rising as high as 11.1 percent on Oct. 28, 2008, it wasn’t until Sept. 17, 2009 that yields fell below the pre-Lehman average of 6.14 percent, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.

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Just another reason corporate profits after taxes have skyrocketed to another record seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $1.83 trillion for Q2 2013.

First Black President Brings Record High Poverty And Inequality As The New Normal

You talkin' to me?

Hm. Imagine that.

From the Associated Press story, here:

The nation's poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America's slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama's recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation's households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

"We're in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "The fact we've seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we've just flatlined." ... 

"This lack of improvement in poverty is disappointing and discouraging," said John Iceland, a former Census Bureau chief of the poverty and health statistics branch who is now a Penn State sociology professor. "This lack of progress in poverty indicates that these small improvements in the economy are not yet being equally shared by all."

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in poverty, agreed.

"Everything's on hold, but at a bad level; poverty and income did not change much in 2012," he said. "So child poverty is still too high and family income is still too low. The recession may be over, but try to tell that to these struggling families. Don't expect things to change until the American economy begins to generate more jobs."

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Way to go, Brownie!

Kook Fringe Republican Comes Out For Gun Control

David Frum, here.

Guns don't kill people, Canadians do.

Charlie Gasparino Gets It Right: America Lost Its AAA Because Of Debt, Not Debt Ceiling

Charles Gasparino for The New York Post, here:

In fact, economic growth is barely existent on [Obama's] watch; millions of Americans have stopped looking for work and the country lost its Triple-A bond rating because debt isn’t the settled matter Obama pretends it is.

5 Years Post-Lehman Bros. Bankruptcy, VTSMX Makes New All Time High

Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index Fund is up 163% since the March 2009 low of 16.43.

On the day Lehman Bros. failed in September 2008, VTSMX closed at 29.24 but proceeded to fall from there another 44% into 2009 despite the passage of TARP in early October 2008, and despite massive short-term discounted loans to just about the whole world by the US Federal Reserve Bank denominated in the trillions of dollars throughout the period.

From the 2007 high to September 15, 2008 this fund had already fallen from 37.80 or nearly 23%. The total decline of the fund from the 2007 high to the March 2009 low was nearly 57%.

A decline of that magnitude from today's new high would land the fund back at 18.81.

The Founders Didn't Believe In American Exceptionalism: They Sought To Be Equals In The World

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Rush Limbaugh: The Big Boob On The Right

It's Monday and you know what that means. If Rush Limbaugh is talking about numbers on a Monday he's going to slaughter them.

I counted two major instances today of getting it totally backwards.

The first, on Janet Yellen, is totally missing from the transcripts. He had said she will completely reverse the Bernanke policy and tighten when everyone knows she'll do no such thing. Someone must have called him to correct him, and then he reversed what he had said previously, and corrected it (here) to avoid looking like the total boob that he is:

I was misinformed by a self-professed market expert.  Anyway, my bad.  I got 'em reversed.  That's why the market's doing well today. It is because the priming of the stock market pump is scheduled to continue unabated if this Yellen woman ends up being the chairman of the Fed.  Now, I'll give you the stats on all this quantitative easing. It's basically $85 billion a month.  What it is, is they're not really printing the money.

In other words, the man with the golden EIB microphone doesn't have the brains to discern the one position from the other, nor is any real knowledge about the subject he may possess anything but completely derivative. He relies on what other people whom he trusts tell him, and can't reason it out for himself, not even by checking the stock market before he goes on the air. And for that reason what he says is no good to his audience. He's just quoting an authority figure. But what is really shameful is that he simply blamed his error on someone else when the privilege of holding a microphone going straight into the ears of millions should be viewed by him as a great responsibility which rests on him, not on his sources. Instead he treats his public position, and his hearers, with contempt by blaming someone else.

The second major blunder was that Rush stated that the US created $18 trillion out of thin air during the financial crisis, when that figure is the estimate for global borrowing, and certainly is not money printing:

The overall amount of priming that the federal government and the Federal Reserve along with several other central banks all over the world have done, the amount of money that they put in to the global economy... What was it I heard? It's $18 trillion, and that's just the US number. That's what it is. It's $18 trillion all told for $1 trillion worth of growth.  So in order to get $1 trillion of economic expansion in the past five years, the Fed has spent $18 trillion.  It's been classic Keynesian economics. ...

The bottom line was, folks, that $18 trillion was created out of thin air -- $18 trillion.  I mean, this doesn't even get lopped on to the national debt because this is not money authorized by the federal budget by US Congress.  This is just the Federal Reserve just decided to print money wherever they wanted and send it wherever they wanted, all ostensibly to save the world economy.  All it did was bail out the best and the brightest from the mistakes that they had made. 

Then during a break another panicked phone call comes in from the trusted source and Rush again quickly corrects himself, putting the $18 trillion figure on the global effort, not on the US alone, and designating it as "borrowed" not "printed":

It's $18 trillion. The G7 nations borrowed $18 trillion since the financial crisis and have only $1 trillion in economic growth to show for it.  That's it.  That's what it's bought us. There was $18 trillion borrowed, and a lot of it's gonna be forgiven and not have to be paid back.  By the way, if you want to know what happens to that money, say hello to tax increases down the line.

I'm sure by this time the rubes are completely confused by their hero. There's no point in explaining any of this to Rush because he gets this stuff wrong no matter how many times it is explained to him, which just shows he has no desire to learn it or simply lacks the mental equipment.

In which case he ought to just shut up about it. Spreading falsehoods is bad for the country and bad for the cause. 

Debt To The Penny Has Been $16.738 Trillion For 74 Days Straight

View Debt to the Penny for yourself here, and count the days.

It's really remarkable, because the debt was in the $16.8 trillion range for many days in April, and backed down from there and stayed at the current level, a few hundred million dollars here and there notwithstanding.

Under Obama Identifying As "Lower Class" Reaches Highest Level Ever: 26 Million

400 homeless encampments in Marin County in 3 years

As reported here:

Roquemore is among the small but surging share of Americans who identify themselves as "lower class." Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization Norc at the University of Chicago.

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The September 11th story excerpted at left details the ongoing problems of homelessness and poverty in Marin County, California, during the last three years and concludes that there are about 630,000 Americans living like this throughout the country as we speak.

Read it, here.

The Crony Capitalist Banks: The Biggest Winners Since The Crash

And we, of course, are the biggest losers.

Tom Petruno for The LA Times:

In the second quarter of this year U.S. banks earned a total of $42.2 billion — the biggest industry profit in history, and double the earnings of the same period in 2010. It's no accident that the banks have prospered mightily since the crash, said Neil Barofsky, who was the watchdog over the U.S. bank bailout program launched in September 2008. "We turned the entire resources of the nation toward one goal: setting up a situation where the banks could earn their way out of this," said Barofsky, now an attorney at Jenner & Block in New York. The plan was not, he lamented, "about holding institutions accountable" for the debacle. ...

[I]n the longer run, TARP was less significant for many banks than the aid of the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. By hacking short-term interest rates to near zero and holding them there since the end of 2008, the Fed has slashed bankers' cost of money — particularly deposits — to well below what they earn on loans and investments. Hence, record profits. ...

The Fed's decision to keep short-term interest rates near rock bottom for nearly five years has devastated the income of tens of millions of Americans. In the mid-2000s, savers in banks were routinely earning 4% or more on one-year bank certificates of deposit, or $2,000 in annual interest on a $50,000 nest egg. The average rate now: 0.23%, according to Bankrate.com. The same $50,000 nest egg earns just $115 a year in interest at that rate. "And after inflation they're actually losing ground," said Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

Read the rest from Tom Petruno, here.

Larry Summers Officially Not A Candidate For Fed Chair, S&P500 Futures Soar 20

The Bernank will be replaced by a clone, according to the market players.

Another dark day for the free market, an ecstatic one for those first in line for money.

Food Stamp Recipients In June Edged Up Again To Near Record Level

The number of people receiving food assistance edged up again in June to 47,760,285, just shy of the record in December 2012 which was 47,792,056.

The reports may be viewed here.

Data is through September 6th.

15.18% of America's population of 314.69 million receives government food assistance, or 1 in 6.6 individuals, each receiving less than $133 per month or $1.47 per meal.

To Us Obama's A Dictator, To Liberals An "Executive-Power Extremist"

You won't find the traditional words "king", "tyrant", "usurper" or "dictator" in Conor Friedersdorf's Atlantic column, "Obama Acts Like He Doesn't Know He's An Executive-Power Extremist", here, because, before dictatorship disarms the population, it has to disarm the language first.

And it has:

The grammer is priceless. Who "put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president"? In Obama's telling, "a decade" put the executive power there. ... We know that Obama is an executive-power extremist in his actions. ...  [I]s he fooling himself, because he likes to think of himself as [a] more prudent and moderate man than he is? Can he not bear the truth that he's a Cheneyite extremist?

There it lies, limp as a dick. 

NSA Poses As Google To Spy

G.NSA.NSA.G.L.E.

'Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a "man in the middle attack" involving Google was apparently carried out.'

Story here.

Completed Foreclosures In July Still 133% Of Pre-2006 Averages, Starts Down To 7.25% Above Normal

Corelogic reports here at the end of August that completed foreclosures in July 2013 ran at a level of 49,000. The pre-2006 average level was 21,000. Though still highly elevated, July 2013 is a big improvement over July 2012 when completed foreclosures were at 65,000. That means conditions have improved by almost 25% in the last year.

Corelogic puts completed foreclosures since September 2008 at 4.5 million, with 949,000 homes presently in some state of foreclosure.

Separately CNBC and AP Obama here are happy to report that foreclosure starts are almost back to 2005 levels and are within 7.25% of normal at 55,775 in August:

Lenders initiated foreclosure action in August against the fewest U.S. homes for any month in nearly eight years, a trend that should help reduce the number of homes lost to foreclosure in the months ahead. Some 55,775 homes entered the foreclosure process last month, a decline of 8 percent from July and down 44 percent from August last year, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.

Muslims Submit 5 Times A Day, Americans Not Even Once

"Stand up to Islam".

Australian Conservative Victory Was Backlash Against Carbon Tax

WUWT, here:

"Many Australians are celebrating the win of Tony Abbott and his coalition government as a vote by the populace against the much hated Carbon Tax ramrodded by former prime minister Julia Gillard."