Justin Amash represents DC's Club For Growth, not Michigan's Third District

Justin Amash must be worried about his reelection prospects.

Amash is blanketing Michigan's 3rd Congressional District with a barage of anti-Brian Ellis radio ads and mailings even though Amash claims an overwhelming lead against his humble opponent based on his own polling data. Why waste the money if he is so far ahead? Well, maybe it's not exactly his money.

What the voters probably don't realize is how much of Amash's anti-Ellis attack is financed by the Club For Growth, a libertarian organization founded by a former editor of The Wall Street Journal who is now employed by The Heritage Foundation, one Steve Moore (Heritage, it will be remembered, gave us ObamaCare long before Obama came along, as their answer to HillaryCare). Like Heritage, Club For Growth is based in Washington, DC, not in Michigan's Third. Amash gets the benefit of their negative attack ads while being able to claim he has nothing to do with them.

So far in the campaign, Club For Growth appears to be responsible for almost $400,000 of spending in attack ads against Brian Ellis, who by contrast is in large measure underwriting his own campaign with a remarkably similar amount of his own money. It is notable that Ellis is pledging to overturn ObamaCare, which in Michigan is causing health care workers to lose their jobs, while showcasing his endorsements by Michigan Right To Life, veterans groups and other conservatives upset with Amash's failure to walk the conservative talk.

Amash has an excuse on Facebook for every vote which he has failed to deliver on behalf of social and economic conservatives in his own district, just as Obama can always point to someone or something for why he never gets anything accomplished as president.

Republicans ought to consider the similarity and ask themselves if those two aren't really just cut from the same cloth.

h/t Detroit Free Press

Another wild week in jobless claims, this time down 78,215 not seasonally adjusted

Last week claims were up 47,079.

Not seasonally adjusted, claims in the last four weeks are averaging 323,000 per week or 16.8 million annualized. That would ordinarily be a pretty good level, except for the fact that the labor participation rate is so low, 63.4% not seasonally adjusted. It averaged 66.1% in 2007, when annual claims actually were at a similar level. When fewer people are participating as today, the level of job losses feels worse because it is experienced by a smaller work force.

Brian Wesbury is already making excuses for 2Q2014 GDP

Here:

"The 2.9% drop in real GDP during the first quarter was a fluke caused by a brutal winter and some one-off events. With much of the monthly data in for Q2, it looks like the US will see that drop almost completely reversed.

"Normally, we would expect a bigger bounce as pent-up demand (lost to the weather) returned and added to growth already in train. But, not this time. In recent years, tax rates have been hiked, regulations have increased and government spending has expanded. All of these are a burden on the economy that creates slower potential growth."

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Almost completely? Does that mean "not completely"? As in less than 2.9%?

Excuse me, but government spending boosts GDP, and with divided government spending growth remains flat to non-existent with Republicans in control of the purse strings in the US House. Brian Wesbury can't have it both ways, later acknowledging that real government purchases will add .4 to 2Q GDP. Which is it, a drag on growth or a contributor? Meanwhile Canada grew in the first quarter in real terms. We did not. Winter. My. Foot.

Funny how fxstreet has a consensus estimate already yesterday of 2.9%, same as Wesbury's.

Safe, very safe.

Mirror Mirror: Consensus for first estimate of 2Q2014 GDP, just eight days away, is +2.9%

That's a complete mirror image of 1Q2014 GDP from the third and final estimate at -2.9%.

HaHaHaHa...Ha. The average of the two is still nutin honey.

Libertarian insanity from Kevin Williamson at National Review

Here:

"The foundation of classical liberalism, and of the American order, is not the rule of law, a written constitution, freedom of speech and worship, one-man/one-vote democracy, or the Christian moral tradition — necessary as those things are. The irreplaceable basis for a prosperous, decent, liberal, stable society is property. ... But we do not have any property."

Precisely. Bang head against a wall. Repeat.

If your liberty depends on something which can be taken away by another, you didn't have any in the first place. The march of liberty throughout history is the record of the instantiation of what appears to be a fiction but whose basis is apprehended in the transcendent moral order, and for that reason is more real than the reality. Hence the slave can grow to be actually free even though he remains in the bonds of servitude. Such a man makes his master the true slave, and himself the real master. And when a community of such men decides to bind itself together by laws, constitutions and rights, they do so on a qualitatively different basis than do those who do not know liberty, for they look up to the One, not out at the many, which way lies chaos, injustice and servitude. "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Maybe Kevin Williamson should join the conservative movement and say goodbye to his sect of classical liberalism.

Stupidest thing P.J. O'Rourke ever wrote

Here:

"Imagine trying to make the Ten Commandments into laws."

Hm. I thought we already had.

Stock markets remain closed on Sundays, Good Friday, Thanksgiving and Christmas. At least five states still explicitly prohibit car sales on Sundays, and most dealers elsewhere are closed anyway. Alcohol sales remain restricted or prohibited on Sundays in many places. Massachusetts still has a one-day-of-rest-in-seven statute. Most banks are closed on Sundays, along with many other businesses. Congress rarely works on Sundays, let alone Monday through Friday.

And then we have these trifles of the law which never seem to go out of style, unless you are a feminist, a banker or a politician:

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

That's the problem with libertarianism. It has no imagination.

Eastside Commercial Bank, Conyers, Georgia, failed on Friday, July 18th, 2014

Eastside Commercial Bank, Conyers, Georgia, failed on Friday, costing the FDIC $33.9 million. 6,730 institutions remained under the FDIC through March 31, 2014.

It's bank failure number thirteen so far in 2014, and number 505 since February 2007.

Michael Savage is as lazy as Rush Limbaugh: keeps saying WWI started in 1917 with assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand

World War I started in 1914 with the assassination of the Duke, not 1917. 

Savage has started the show today saying 1917 after having said the same thing all day yesterday.

He's had plenty of time to check his facts and correct the record, but hasn't.

Measuring the pain of jobless claims 2001-2013

In 2013 jobless claims not seasonally adjusted fell to their lowest level under Obama, totaling 17.8 million, just 100,000 more than two back to back years in the Bush administration when jobless claims not seasonally adjusted fell to 17.7 million after 2003. Which felt worse, 2013 or 2004/2005, since the level was nearly the same? One way to measure that would be to compare the level to the labor force participation rate. Using the not seasonally adjusted annual averages of that, if you divide the total jobless claims by the rate you get the following: 2004=.268, 2005=.268, 2013=.281.

How would you know which was worse? During the whole period under question, jobless claims hit their lowest level in 2006 at 16.2 million, when the labor force participation rate averaged 66.2%. Dividing the claims by the rate gives you .244, the lowest result for the period. The highest result for the period, not coincidentally, was .451 in 2009 when claims soared to 29.5 million and the labor force participation rate averaged 65.4. So it seems reasonable to suggest that 2013, the best year to date for aggregate claims since 2007, still feels worse than either 2004 or 2005. About 4.9% worse. Indeed, even if you assumed you had 100,000 fewer claims in 2013 to equalize them to 2004/2005 when you also had 17.7 million instead of 17.8 million first time claims for unemployment, not seasonally adjusted, you'd still get a result higher than .268, at .279, because the civilian labor force participation rate had fallen to 63.3 from 66.0. So just because a similar number of people is losing jobs compared to some point in the past doesn't mean things have returned to normal. If they had, right now fewer people would be making jobless claims in proportion to the smaller number of people participating in the labor force, and they aren't. Not yet.

Lowest high temperature ever for July 16th yesterday in Grand Rapids

71 degrees F.

CDC finds fewer than 3% of Americans say they are gay

WaPo reports here.

Pew study shows no religious group in America rates itself more highly than Jews do

Story here, except you have to figure it out from the table. The summary artfully skirts that conclusion:

"Evangelicals also hold very positive views of Jews, with white evangelical Protestants giving Jews an average thermometer rating of 69. Only Jews themselves rate Jews more positively."

No kidding. White evangelicals win walking away for a positive evaluation of Jews, except for Jews themselves. Jews nearest competitors in self-love in the study are atheists, white evangelicals and Catholics, but none of them come close to the Jews themeselves when it comes to rating themselves positively. Meanwhile Jews rate white evangelicals the lowest of any group, lower even than Muslims.

Where is the love, man?

Completed foreclosure activity in May 2014 still 2.2 times above pre-2007 levels

CoreLogic reports here:

According to CoreLogic, for the month of May 2014, there were 47,000 completed foreclosures nationally, down from 52,000 in May 2013, a year-over-year decrease of 9.4 percent. On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures were up by 3.8 percent from the 45,000 reported in April 2014. As a basis of comparison, before the decline in the housing market in 2007, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006. ... The five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were: New Jersey (5.8 percent), Florida (5.2 percent), New York (4.3 percent), Hawaii (3.1 percent) and Maine (2.8 percent).

Jobless claims as a percentage of the civilian labor force level 2001-2013

The following is based on data not seasonally adjusted. The civilian labor force level used was annual average.


Jobless claims as a percentage of the civilian labor force level

2001 14.5%
2002 14.4
2003 14.2
2004 12.0
2005 11.9
2006 10.7
2007 10.9
2008 14.0

2009 19.1
2010 15.4
2011 14.1
2012 12.5
2013 11.4

Media misses huge surge in jobless claims this morning which point to economic weakness

Not seasonally adjusted first time claims for unemployment surged over 47,000 in today's report above last week's 322,512,  to 369,591.

The state with the most claims? Michigan, with 9,821. The sector? If you guessed manufacturing, you would be wrong. All of it was service sector in Michigan. Perhaps only 2,000 of the layoffs elsewhere were in manufacturing. The bulk of the jobs losses everywhere were in services. In other words, in the crappy jobs Americans have reluctantly taken.

To keep pace with the rate of first time claims, not seasonally adjusted, from the first half of the year in the second half, claims need to average 326,000 a week. We're 44,000 over that today, a bad sign.

Japan: What to expect in America if interest rates are kept at 0.25% indefinitely?

Japan has kept its benchmark interest rate near 0% since 1996, nearly 18 years. Japan's stock market has not come anywhere near to recovering its 1989/1990 highs, nearly a quarter of a century ago. Real GDP in Japan is growing at a glacial pace, less than 1.0% on average annually since 1999.

Do you think the 30,000 people who live around Club for Growth HDQ would vote for Justin Amash?

Hm.

Let's reduce Nancy Pelosi's congressional district to the 2 square miles around 1 Maritime Plaza

That way the 30,000 people who live around Del Monte Corporation Headquarters will know who she really represents.

Republicans stopped growth of representation in the 1920s: Why isn't fixing that the Tea Party's job one?

From the Wikipedia article, here:

In 1921, Congress failed to reapportion the House membership as required by the United States Constitution. This failure to reapportion may have been politically motivated, as the newly elected Republican majority may have feared the effect such a reapportionment would have on their future electoral prospects. Then in 1929 Congress (Republican control of both houses of congress and the presidency) passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929 which capped the size of the House at 435 (the then current number). This cap has remained unchanged for more than eight decades. Three states – Wyoming, Vermont, and North Dakota – have populations smaller than the average for a single district.

The "ideal" number of members has been a contentious issue since the country's founding. George Washington agreed that the original representation proposed during the Constitutional Convention (one representative for every 40,000) was inadequate and supported an alteration to reduce that number to 30,000. This was the only time that Washington pronounced an opinion on any of the actual issues debated during the entire convention.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison argued that the size of the House of Representatives has to balance the ability of the body to legislate with the need for legislators to have a relationship close enough to the people to understand their local circumstances, that such representatives' social class be low enough to sympathize with the feelings of the mass of the people, and that their power be diluted enough to limit their abuse of the public trust and interests.

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All the ancient American debates about this issue argue over ratios of 1 representative for every 15,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 or 50,000 of population. But today because of what the Republicans did in the 1920s, arresting growth of representation and fixing the number at 435, the ratio has soared to 1 for every 728,000!

If you wonder why your representative doesn't represent you today, that is why. He or she doesn't know who you are, or care.

If you want to fix America, fix that. We could start by doubling the size of the House, which means halving all the districts.

That sound you're hearing right now is Congressmen everywhere shitting their pants.

Obama is maintaining a constant pressure upon the opposition (that would be you) at the border