Michigan Spends 53% More Per Mile On Roads Than The National Average

The news is full of doom and gloom about Michigan spending on roads based on per capita measures. You can get that news here from the Detroit News, where you will learn Michigan is in dead last for spending per capita and that road industry lobbyists think this is terrible and advocate more spending to solve Michigan's road problems.

What a shock. Industry wants us to spend more money on roads.

From all that you wouldn't know that Michigan spent 53% more per mile than the national average, as reported here in 2013 (overall story here).

Michigan actually ranks 37th in total disbursements per mile.

That's quite a different picture than being dead last per capita.

Think about it. If Michigan roads are so bad, maybe spending per mile has been spent on the wrong people, namely the unions in control of the industry. If we're not getting what we're paying for, maybe we should hire someone else instead of throwing more money at the problem.

I'll Believe In The Liberals' Idea Of Equal Dignity Of Work When Paul Krugman Gets Paid To Scrub Toilets

Here he is in all his liberal splendor, refusing to grant the dignity he demands:

It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?

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I'll spell it out for you: if your dignity depends on how much you make rather than on doing your job, whatever it is, well, then you will never have any dignity.

Yes, there is dignity of work, but only if work is done well. The real indignity accrues to those who do not value the work of others, however humble, and imagine that they are better because of what they do and how much they make.

Michael Mann Of Penn State Claimed He "Shared" The Nobel Peace Prize For Almost Five Years

As reported here. And the guy still won't say in the revised bio to whom the Nobel was actually awarded: "jointly" to the IPCC and Al Gore. The IPCC and Al Gore shared the prize, not the IPCC authors, the IPCC and Al Gore.

"He shared the Nobel Peace Prize"

"He contributed to the award of the prize", but to whom exactly?

Ah, to these, exactly.

These Men Shared The Nobel Prize . . .

. . . these men did not:

Al Gore

Michael Mann

VW Workers Reject UAW In Tennessee 726-612

Reported here:

The rejection is a major blow to the UAW which has never organized a foreign-brand auto plant operating in the U.S.

Penn State Alumni Newsletter In November 2007 Bragged That Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Shared In The Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To The IPCC And Al Gore

And worse, the association puts Mann on the same level as a real Nobel winner like Paul Berg who was a named winner who shared the Prize for Chemistry with two others. Michael Mann cannot be said to have shared the Peace Prize with Al Gore and the IPCC, nor can any of the other 2000 members of the IPCC or however many there were be said to have shared it, either. To say this diminishes the achievement of named winners of prizes who may have won them alone or in company with other named individuals.

Seen here:

Five Penn State scientists, all members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize when the 2,000-member IPCC and former vice president Al Gore were recognized for their work on climate change issues.

The five Penn State scientists and IPCC members are: Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences; William Easterling, dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and professor of geography and earth system science; Klaus Keller, assistant professor of geosciences, Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology; and Anne Thompson, professor of meteorology.

They join the select company of Paul Berg ’48, the only Penn State alumnus to win a Nobel Prize. Berg, the “father of genetic engineering,” shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Harvard Professor Walter Gilbert and Cambridge Professor Frederick Sanger. The Nobel committee recognized Berg for his groundbreaking construction of the first recombinant-DNA molecule—a discovery that paved the way for scientists interested in understanding the interactions between the chemical structure of DNA and resultant biological structure, or function, of an organism.

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Al Gore can claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the IPCC can claim to, but none of the individual panel members can claim to have shared in the winning of that prize. Michael Mann did not win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. Mann has had to retract his own claims to the prize as reported here:

Disgraced Penn State University (PSU) climatologist, Michael Mann, concedes defeat in his bogus claims to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mann’s employer this weekend began the shameful task of divesting itself of all inflated claims  on university websites and official documentation that Mann was ever a Peace Prize recipient with Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Thanks to a tip off from respected climate researcher, Dr. Klaus Kaiser, myself and Tom Richard (who scooped the original Nobel story) obtained “before and after” copy images from PSU websites as records of this damning retraction. (follow the link above for the screenshots)

Evidently alumni sites have not been purged.

Obama Delays Global Warming Until 2016

Seen here.

Global Warming Promoter Michael Mann Isn't Like Galileo, Trofim Lysenko Is More Like It

So says Robert Tracinski, here:

Mann is attempting to install himself as a kind of American Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet scientist who ingratiated himself to Joseph Stalin and got his crackpot theories on genetics installed as official dogma, effectively killing the study of biology in the Soviet Union. Under Lysenko, the state had an established and official scientific doctrine, and you risked persecution if you questioned it. Mann's libel suit [against Mark Steyn] is an attempt to establish that same principle here.

Mann has recently declared himself to be both a scientist and a political activist. But in attempting to intimidate his critics and suppress free debate on global warming, he is violating the fundamental rules of both science and politics. If it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science. If it is a crime to dissent, then there is no politics.

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?