67% Of Lower 48 Covered By Snow, Lake Superior With Record 92% Ice Cover

Total Nonfarm Employment Under Obama So Far Peaked Almost 1 Million Below Its Peak Under George W. Bush

Peak total nonfarm employment was achieved under George W. Bush on November 1, 2007 at 139.443 million, not seasonally adjusted, a peak which remains unmatched under Obama over six years later despite impressive jobs recovery since the depths of 2009. Peak nonfarm under Obama so far has reached as high as 138.536 million.

The peak under Bush was achieved after three years and ten months of total nonfarm job growth averaging just under 234,000 per month beginning from January 1, 2004.

Total nonfarm employment plunged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to its most recent nadir at 127.736 million on January 1, 2010. The chart above shows how deep that plunge was: The last time in the data series total nonfarm employment landed lower than that was on March 1, 1999, at 127.409 million. 

The recent peak under Obama was achieved after an eerily identical period of three years and ten months of total nonfarm job growth also averaging just over 234,000 per month to November 1, 2013, at 138.536 million.

Obama's total nonfarm employment peak at that time was 907,000 off Bush's peak.

If the current trend continues, however, it is likely total nonfarm employment will finally exceed the Bush peak sometime in late 2014 after cycling through the seasonal downturn we customarily experience at the turn of the year.

Labor force level highs, usually full-time level highs, and total nonfarm employment level highs all tend to peak together in the summers and recede in the winters when part-time levels peak as students go back to school and seasonal workers take part-time jobs for the holidays.

Obama Is The Immigration Bill's Buzz Kill

The upside to Obama's disdain for the rule of law is that without it he'd have convinced enough Republicans to help pass another disastrous immigration amnesty.

Things actually could be worse.

The NY Post reports here:

[M]any Republicans reasonably conclude that no matter what immigration law they pass, the president will simply not enforce provisions he doesn’t like — in particular those dealing with securing the border.

January Unemployment Falls To 6.6%, Employment Growth Slows Nearly 42% From 2013 Average

The BLS reports here:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 113,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment grew in construction, manufacturing, wholesale trade, and mining. Both the number of unemployed persons, at 10.2 million, and the unemployment rate, at 6.6 percent, changed little in January. Since October, the jobless rate has decreased by 0.6 percentage point. ... Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 113,000 in January. In 2013, employment growth averaged 194,000 per month.

Sorry, This Won't Work Because The Somebody Would Be A Guy

Jobless Claims Not-Seasonally-Adjusted Still Far In Excess Of Bush Era Levels

The report is here.

The current level annualized represents 18.5 million claims per year, far in excess of the best actual levels under Bush which were in the 16 million range.

Obama's best year for claims was in 2013 when actual not-seasonally-adjusted claims fell to 17.75 million. 

Propane Prices In MI Skyrocket In Part Because Supplies Were Used To Dry Late-Harvested Taxpayer-Subsidized Crops

But the story, here, never mentions the insane taxpayer-funded feedback loop of government interference in both agriculture and fuels:

Propane prices are up more than 70 percent over last year’s levels amid heavy demand caused by the abnormally cold winter and late harvest that required propane for drying grain throughout the Midwest.

So put it together: corn-growing is subsidized by the federal government which means by you the taxpayer, then the crop happens to be harvested late due to weather conditions and has to be dried with fossil fuel which impacts propane supplies, after which the corn is distilled into ethanol at taxpayer expense to put in your gas tank by government decree which you pay too much for at the pump, and then the hapless souls depending on propane get stuck with enormous bills during a cold snap and above normal snows where bad roads impact the deliveries of already stressed supply.

Brilliant! The taxpayers pay and pay and pay, and the governor, Rick Snyder, condescends to rebate just 10% of a tax surplus.

They should all be in jail!

Cheapskate MI Gov. Snyder Proposes Refunding Barely 10% Of Revenue Surplus

It's never your money in the first place to these people.

Story here:

LANSING, MI -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is calling for $103 million in refund checks for some low- and middle-income families who pay property taxes or rent. ... "Michigan has turned the corner from the economic turmoil that plagued the state for nearly a decade," reads the budget. "With nearly $1 billion in added revenue, the state is in a much stronger fiscal position, a position that affords not only making strategic investments but offering tax relief for hard-working families across Michigan."

ObamaCare Hostage Empathizes With Her Captor

Seen here:

Aliso Viejo resident Danielle Nelson said Anthem Blue Cross promised half a dozen times that her oncologists would be covered under her new policy. She was diagnosed last year with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and discovered a suspicious lump near her jaw in early January.

But when she went to her oncologist's office, she promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.

"I'm a complete fan of the Affordable Care Act, but now I can't sleep at night," Nelson said. "I can't imagine this is how President Obama wanted it to happen."

Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity, CBO, Obama used to validate it.

So says Dana Milbank for WaPo, here:

The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. ...

This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November. This independent arbiter, long embraced by the White House, has validated a core complaint of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) critics: that it will discourage work and become an ungainly entitlement. Disputing Republicans’ charges is much easier than refuting the federal government’s official scorekeepers. ...

But there’s only so much White House officials could do. Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it.

3,000 "Youngsters" Die Everyday From Abortion, But The NY Times Wants To Talk About 20 Daily Firearms-Related Injuries To Children

Here.

The Only Insult In This Instance Is Sotomayor's Insult To Our Intelligence

How do we put up with these morons?

“I figure I may not be the smartest judge on the court but I’m going to be a competent justice,” she said. “I’m going to try to be the best I can and each year I think my opinions have been getting better. And I’m working at finding my voice a little bit.”

Competence, it appears, is a bar, uh hum, too high for The Supreme Court.

Criminal: "a person who has committed a crime".

Story here.

What Do You Call 1000 Democrats In Jail For The ObamaCare Fiasco?

A good start.

Healthcare.gov's "not my responsibility".

Broad Market Declines 2.28% Monday, February 3, 2013

click to enlarge

Dennis Prager: Everything In Conservatism Follows From The Belief That People Are Not Basically Good

Dennis Prager, quoted here:

Prager, a practicing Jew who, in addition to hosting a radio show, is a syndicated columnist and author, responded by suggesting several ways in which "this country is changing," each of which he tied to the loss of belief in a transcendent God or moral standard. Prager specifically noted a "loss of meaning" and a loss of objective morality.

"We live in the age of feelings," Prager said, citing abortion rights as the greatest example of individual feelings guiding contemporary morality. The unborn child's worth is "entirely dictated by the feelings of the mother. It is an unbelievable statement of narcissism, which is what happens when there is no transcendent morality," he said.

Extending his theological argument, Prager pointed to assumptions about the nature of humanity as the fundamental dividing line between liberals and conservatives today.

"Everything in leftism [both religious and political liberalism] follows from the belief that people are basically good," Prager said. "And everything in conservatism follows from the belief that people are not basically good. Judaism and Christianity were united in teaching that people were not basically good. With the death of traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity, you have the unbelievably dangerous belief that people are basically good, and everything flows from there to big government to believing that your opinion is what makes things moral. And that's where we now stand."

Rush Limbaugh, Confused About Conservatism, Talked Up Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED Just Last September

Here.

And also in May 2012 in "Atlas is Starting to Shrug" here, steering another caller to the book and drawing parallels to current members of the 1% abandoning the rest of us.

Committed conservatives understand the difference between conservatism and libertarianism and choose the former. Rush still thinks there's room for both under a big tent, which just shows he does not fully understand how libertarianism is inimical to conservatism.

One Reason Why America's Problems Are What They Are

I'll leave it to you to decide which is the one:

[I]n a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Read more here.

Both Political Parties Are Now Essentially Libertarian, And That's The Problem

Seen here:

John Carr, who now heads the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, thinks both parties are now essentially defined by their commitment to economic or lifestyle libertarianism. "These libertarian tendencies are reinforced by large campaign contributors and powerful interest groups on the left and right (e.g., Emily's List and the Koch Brothers, Planned Parenthood and the Club for Growth). Who died and left Arianna Huffington and Grover Norquist in charge? Is there any room left for compassionate conservatives and pro-life Democrats?"

Blame The Yankees For The Minimum Wage: A Northern Tariff On The South

Doin' right ain't got no end

Jay Cost for The Weekly Standard, here:

Obama’s [State of the Union] address inadvertently referenced the government’s proclivity to play favorites. The minimum wage is a hallowed talking point for wealthy liberals posing as hardscrabble populists, but in fact its original purpose was to serve as a sort of domestic tariff. By 1937 Northern industries had come to terms with organized labor, but the South still resisted. Fearing a flight of capital to Dixie, it was Northern businessmen who made the difference in pushing a minimum wage through Congress.

Liberal Democrats had outsized majorities during this period of the New Deal, but Southerners controlled key choke points within the legislature, notably the House Rules Committee. It was only a broad coalition that included liberals, organized labor, and, crucially, Northern industrialists that brought the Fair Labor Standards Act to a vote on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the wage floor was set so low that only the South was really affected. And even then, it only passed after it was loaded up with exemptions for all sorts of politically privileged groups.

This decidedly inegalitarian back story of the minimum wage has mostly been lost to history. One would be hardpressed to find a book about the New Deal in Barnes & Noble that discusses this at any length. This is not a coincidence; advocates of bold, activist government want to forget all the inequalities it creates. So it is with Obama. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is one of the most grossly unfair pieces of legislation to become law in modern times. Underwritten by a logroll among elite interests as varied as the drug manufacturers and the feminist left, it is an enormous redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, without due regard to socioeconomic status.

Bank Failure Friday: Boise, Idaho Bank Is Third To Fail In 2014

Syringa Bank, Boise, Idaho, failed today, the third to do so in 2014, costing the FDIC $4.5 million.