Federal Judge Appointed By Obama In Marriage Ruling Says "All Men Are Created Equal" Comes From The Constitution

Another mediocrity appointed by Obama proves the worthlessness of her degrees from Kutztown State College and the North Carolina Central University School of Law, quoted here:

"Our Constitution declares that 'all men' are created equal. Surely this means all of us," Judge Allen wrote on the first page of her opinion. That line opens the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and appears nowhere in the Constitution. The line, in which Thomas Jefferson, with signature flourish, borrowed the words of theorist John Locke: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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Thanks Jim Webb and Mark Warner.

The Odds Of Winning Lotto Are About 20% Better Than Your Congressman Knowing Your Name

In Michigan your best odds of winning a lotto jackpot are in the game named "Fantasy Five". Your odds of winning are about 1:575,757.

The likelihood your congressman knows your name on average in the United States today are 1:728,712 (316.99 million current population divided by 435 members of the US House).

So your lotto odds are about 20% better than your representation odds.

If we followed the constitution, however, and had the representation it prescribes (1:30,000), your representation odds would improve almost 96% instantly (10,566 members of the US House).

Now there's an instant game we can all play.

Jobless Claims In The Last Week Are Barely 1% Lower Than They Were This Week In 2013

The report is here.

At nearly 359,000 in the last week, first time claims for unemployment are running just 0.7% lower than they were this time last year.

Annualized the level represents 18.6 million claims, about two million higher than the best years under George Bush even as the workforce is much smaller now, population is much higher and the recession supposedly ended over four years ago.

Best Joke About The Failure Of China's Moon Rover Announced Today

That's the thing with Chinese rover, after you have one 30 minutes later you want another one.

Garden Variety Armed Lawlessness Is Now Terrorism

"The state exercises the monopoly of crime"

See how this works folks? 

Under terror laws they can basically declare you an enemy of the state, deny you all your rights, lock you up and throw away the key if they feel like it. And as we all know by now only too well, Obama is setting precedents and records for what he feels like doing and doesn't feel like doing, whether it's enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act, taking out an American citizen abroad with a drone without due process of law, or enforcing his own health insurance reform legislation.

The story is here, how an irate Pennsylvania homeowner pulled a gun on a snowplow driver who inadvertently parked some snow on the guy's lawn:

"Eckert has been charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats, disorderly conduct, and recklessly endangering another person."

It's So Cold In New York The Liberals Have Their Hands In Their Own Pockets

Seen here.

Low Wage Workers Get Reduced Hours, Probably Due To ObamaCare, The Rest Work More

So says Jed Graham for Investors.com, here, echoing our posts on part-timers who represent just 20% of the usually employed and are too few in number to ding the customary measures of hours, which are aggregate measures, when they are reduced because of ObamaCare considerations by their employers:

Low-wage workers clocked the shortest workweek on record in December — even shorter than at the depth of the recession, new Labor Department data showed Friday.

The figures underscore concerns about the ObamaCare employer insurance mandate's impact on the work hours and incomes of low-wage earners.

It's impossible to know how much of the drop relates to ObamaCare, but there's good reason to suspect a strong connection. The workweek has been getting shorter in many of the same industries where anecdotes have piled up about employers cutting hours to evade the law's penalties. ...

IBD's gauge of the low-wage workweek, now at 27.4 hours, includes the 30 million nonmanagers working in private industries where pay averages up to $14.50 an hour. ...

[T]he workweek has moved higher for non-low-wage workers. This group, including managers and those in higher-paying industries, is now clocking a longer week than prior to the recession.

That divergence explains why many economists and nonpartisan arbiters like the Congressional Budget Office have concluded that ObamaCare has had no impact on part-time employment. The effect doesn't show up in aggregate workforce data, but that is the wrong place to look.

Latest Lawless Rewrite Shows ObamaCare May Be Suspended Indefinitely, If Obama Feels Like It

So says The Wall Street Journal, here:

Under the new Treasury rule, firms with 50 to 99 full-time workers are free from the mandate until 2016. And firms with 100 or more workers now also only need cover 70% of full-time workers in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after, not the 100% specified in the law.

The new rule also relaxes the mandate for certain occupations and industries that were at particular risk for disruption, like volunteer firefighters, teachers, adjunct faculty members and seasonal employees. Oh, and the Treasury also notes that, "As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015." So the law may be suspended indefinitely if the White House feels like it.

By now ObamaCare's proliferating delays, exemptions and administrative retrofits are too numerous to count, most of them of dubious legality. The text of the Affordable Care Act specifically says when the mandate must take effect—"after December 31, 2013"—and does not give the White House the authority to change the terms.

Changing an unambiguous statutory mandate requires the approval of Congress, but then this President has often decided the law is whatever he says it is. His Administration's cavalier notions about law enforcement are especially notable here for their bias for corporations over people. The White House has refused to suspend the individual insurance mandate, despite the harm caused to millions who are losing their previous coverage.

Here's something the president can't do:

... have dinner at my house.

Yves Smith, Stalinist Heroine Of Naked Capitalism, Comes Out For Michael Mann Never Once Mentioning His Nemesis Mark Steyn And National Review

The opponents of what is "right" do not exist, you see: If they were in the picture they'd remove them, but it is better to never have them in the picture in the first place.

She's got an Occupy Wall Street Movement sash on the right of her page, might as well put up a Joe Stalin sash on the left.

Here.

Thank John Boehner: Stock Markets Loved The Fiscal Cliff Deal And Proved It All Year Long In 2013

On January 2, 2013 here we noted how the stock market voted for the fiscal cliff deal by rising 2.5% to start the year. From 1426 on January 2nd the S&P500 rose all the way to 1848 by the last day of 2013, an astounding gain of 29.59%.

The broad market posted so many new highs in 2013 it was difficult to keep count. In point of fact the market averaged one new record high per week in 2013 (actually there were 53, and 54 if you count revisiting).

The fiscal cliff deal's main achievement was that it made George Bush's much maligned tax rates permanent except for the very top earners, for whom rates went up modestly but also permanently. And those same top earners went on to benefit the most from the deal's permanent fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax, a long hoped for resolution as improbable as Democrats surrendering to George Bush. The deal also restored revenues to the Social Security system to the status quo ante after two years of cuts which may have helped consumers but seriously hurt the nation's fiscal health. Deficits fell as a result of that and Republican efforts to hold the line on spending.

John Boehner deserves a great deal of credit for achieving these remarkable results with the Democrats in control of everything else, but I still haven't heard anyone on our side give him his due, except for Ralph Benko at Forbes.

Cough up you ingrates. 

The Atlantic Finally Catches On To The ObamaCare Part-Timing Myth

Derek Thompson, here, in "The Spectacular Myth of Obama's Part-Time America":

If you've been paying attention to a certain slice of the financial media—see: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Fox News—you know for a fact that Obama and his health care law have tag-teamed with global economic trends to drive America inexorably toward a part-time economy.

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Beat ya.

We first expressed doubt in the part-time-due-to-Obamacare meme in July 2013, here, because the category "usually work part-time" showed no new highs since passage of the law three years prior.

We began calling the meme a myth in August 2013, here, because average hours worked were not declining, but rising modestly.

In September 2013, here, we pointed out that government statistics will NEVER capture the reduction of part-time worker schedules to 29 hours per week because everyone working 34 hours or fewer is already part-time as far as the government is concerned and those are the people most likely to have their hours reduced. But those workers in the aggregate are too few in comparison to all the full-time workers to reduce average hours worked overall enough to impact that measure. The real scandal is that ObamaCare may be reducing hours for a small segment of the population which is already part-time, but especially retail, restaurant and food service workers. Unfortunately most of the evidence is anecdotal and no one really gives a crap about them anyway, least of all Obama.

And in October 2013, here, we pointed out that part-time for economic reasons was slowly declining despite passage of ObamaCare and had been high in the first place because of the crisis of 2008, something Derek Thompson seems really proud of pointing out now to his middlebrow audience.

So where's my Pulitzer Prize already, huh? 

Total Nonfarm Employment Growth Under Reagan Is Still The Most Remarkable

total nonfarm under Ronald Reagan

Both George Bush and Barack Obama have had periods just under four years long with growth in total nonfarm employment averaging just under and just over 234,000 jobs per month, as we discussed yesterday here (all figures not-seasonally-adjusted).

But for impressive records of job growth you have to look back to Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

Total nonfarm under Clinton expanded by an average of just over 235,000 per month for all eight years of his two terms, with almost 22.6 million jobs added in total. 

Under Reagan the average was just under 166,000 per month for the full eight years, but measured from his post-recession nadir on January 1, 1983 total nonfarm expanded for the next six years at just over 250,000 per month, adding just over 18 million jobs in that time. The net total added under Reagan was 15.9 million.

When reports come out as one did yesterday that total nonfarm increased only 113,000 in the last month, you can understand why people are worried.

We can do a lot better.

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!