Why the economy still feels like it sucks as Obama goes out the door

Obama's GDP in current dollars has grown 28.4% through 3Q2016.

Bush's grew 39% overall and 41.7% through 3Q2008.

If Obama's performance simply matched Bush's 41.7%, we'd have an extra $1.9 trillion in current dollar GDP right now.

But we don't.

Laugh of the Day: Ann Coulter hopes Donald Trump goes on world tour . . .

. . . apologizing for 8 years of Obama.

Here.

Winter begins, and daylight in Grand Rapids Michigan is just 9 hours and 1 minute long

The lowest daylight days of the year, until Dec. 26th when we inch up to 9 hours and 2 minutes.

And you thought there was no hope.

Hillary beats Trump in the shunning department 8-2 as 10 faithless Electoral College electors vote for somebody else

Ugh!

That's the story from ABC tonight here.

It's a stain on our election from both sides that the rules we agree to live by aren't being followed as they should be.

The two defectors from Trump voted for Rand Paul and John Kasich. Five from Hillary voted for Colin Powell, Bernie Sanders and an Injun. Three others were removed and replaced by alternates who ended up voting for Hillary as the people they replaced should have.

On net Trump wins 304-227 instead of 306-232.

Sneering at the Electoral College in 2016, Obama leaves office still hating the constitution he promised to preserve, protect and defend in 2008 and 2012

Quoted here:

“The Electoral College is a vestige, it’s a carryover from an earlier vision of how our federal government was going to work that put a lot of premium on states,” President Obama said Friday during a press conference at the White House.

Obama pardons 78 and shortens sentences of 153 in one day, a record

A total of 148 have been pardoned in his presidency so far, and 1176 have received shortened sentences, including 395 serving life sentences. Expect really bad examples to emerge from among the latter.

Story here.

Revulsion Election update: Electors pledged to Hillary in MN, ME and WA today refused to vote for her

Democrats really did not like Hillary Clinton in 2016. 5.1 million former Obama voters didn't vote for her, and now her electors won "fair and square" are balking.

You can't make this stuff up.

From the MarketWatch story here:

In Washington state, three Democratic electors voted for Colin Powell and one for Faith Spotted Eagle, who has been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, instead of Clinton. ...

In Minnesota, elector Muhammad Abdurrahman didn’t vote for Clinton and was replaced by an alternate who did. According to the Los Angeles Times, Abdurrahman was a delegate for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention.

In Maine, elector David Bright tried to vote for Sanders but was rebuffed and ended up voting for Clinton, according to the Associated Press.

Bill Cunningham repeating stupid: "95 million Americans can't find work"

Last night in the first hour of the show.

"Not in the labor force" explained.

They aren't LOOKING for work. They are your retired parents. They are your kids in high school, college and graduate school. They are your stay at home mothers and fathers. They are the sick and the disabled.

Obama didn't "decimate" the Democrat Party, Democrats did that all by themselves

David M. Drucker here wants to blame Obama for all the electoral losses experienced by Democrats since 2009. 

Good luck with that.

Like it or not, the Democrat Congress under Pelosi and Reid gets the blame. They have done nothing but lose, lose and lose while Obama has remained the winner, above the fray. He leaves office popular, successfully escaping responsibility for his own administration for eight straight years while Democrats all over the country have paid the price.  

Democrat leadership rammed the awful Obamacare down the nation's throat, making the health insurance industry even worse than it was before. Democrat leadership failed to prosecute anyone for the 2008 banking panic and raked in the campaign cash from its grateful elite instead. Democrat leadership jacked up the federal spending which simply wasted money and ballooned the debt to $20 trillion in the process. Democrat leadership passed the growth-robbing Dodd-Frank legislation which has stalled the growth of credit and slowed the economy to a crawl.

The only thing you can blame Obama for is a lack of vision and leadership in preventing these developments and for not offering better alternatives. He was inexperienced, out of his depth and clueless, contenting himself to lecture everybody day and night in regal fashion while Congress shot themselves and the country in the foot with their stupid ideas. Obama's idea of compromise turned out to be signing awful Democrat legislation.

Except in one instance.

Obama agreed one time to compromise with John Boehner and make the Bush tax cuts permanent and fix the Alternative Minimum Tax. The stock market and the economy began to recover from that moment on at the dawn of 2013.

It was the only smart thing he ever did.

And there he goes into the sunset.

Trump misspells "unprecedented", CNBC goes nuts, Obama on the other hand . . .

. . . routinely slaughtered the English language, math and common sense and all we heard was crickets.

Let's see, there were Obama's "forebearers", "one of the finest secretary of states", "pray on the sick" (probably Politico, not Obama), "corpseman", "the intercontinental railroad", calling George Osborne "Jeffrey" 3x in one episode, saying he could see the Gulf of Mexico from three Atlantic ports he was visiting, saying Afghanistan when he meant Iraq, referring repeatedly to his "sons", calling Nazi camps "Polish concentration camps", saying he'll be turning 50 in a week when it was three weeks, three proud words "made in the USA", claiming "more than 100 million Americans" signed up for Obamacare in its first month, and of course in the 2008 campaign he had visited 57 states "so far" but might not get to them all.   

The Trump misspelled tweet story is here, where the sin apparently was Trump deleting the tweet and replacing it with the spelling corrected.

Did Obama ever correct himself? 

Revulsion Election update: Hillary underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states by 5.16 million votes

This updates my look at 2016 candidate underperformance relative to 2008 from almost three weeks ago. The total picture for Hillary improved by about 440,000 votes in the interim, or about 11,000 votes per state on average, but doesn't change the conclusion. Hillary was far and away more revolting to the voters in 2016 than was Trump. Hillary still lags Obama 2008 by 3.7 million votes net and Obama 2012 by 74,000 votes. For his part Donald Trump has surpassed George W. Bush 2004 by 940,000 votes with 62.98 million votes, the most for any Republican in any presidential contest.

Hillary 2016 underperformed Obama 2008 in:

MI by 603,000 votes (and lost to Trump by 11,000)

OH by 546,000 (lost by 447,000)

MO by 371,000

PA by 350,000 (lost by 45,000)

IN by 341,000

IL by 328,000

WI by 294,000 (lost by 22,000)

NY by 257,000

TN by 216,000

MN by 205,000 (won by only 45,000)

IA by 175,000 (lost by 147,000)

KY by 123,000 

WV by 115,000

CT by 100,000

*KS by 88,000

*NM by 87,000 (won by only 65,000)

AL by 83,000

*OK by 82,000

*MS by 70,000

*NJ by 67,000

ME by 64,000 (won by only 22,000)

HI by 59,000

MT by 54,000

SD by 54,000

NE by 49,000

ND by 47,000

ID by 46,000

RI by 44,000

AR by 42,000

*VT by 40,000

NH by 36,000 (won by only 3,000)

OR by 35,000

WY by 27,000

DE by 19,000

*UT by 17,000

*WA by 8,000

*AK by 8,000

SC by 7,000

LA by 3,000.

That's 5.16 million former Democrat votes alienated from Hillary Clinton in 2016 in 39 states, 57% of which came from the 8 Great Lakes states (2.924 million), according to the latest numbers this morning, almost six weeks since Election 2016.

Trump underperformed John McCain in only 12 states and DC and by just 792,000 votes, 67% of which were in California alone:

In CA by 527,000 votes

*UT by 81,000

*AK by 31,000

*KS by 29,000

*NM by 27,000

*MS by 24,000

MA by 18,000

MD by 17,000

*NJ by 12,000

*OK by 11,000

*WA by 7,000

*VT by 4,000

DC by 4,000.

*nine states where both 2016 candidates underperformed their 2008 counterparts 

Hillary called us deplorable and irredeemable . . .

. . . and today Obama built on that low view of the American people, saying we're so hapless that we inevitably fall victim to "propaganda":

[I]t's not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect. It doesn't seem that far-fetched compared to some of the other stuff folks are hearing from domestic propagandists. ... [V]oters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

You've been had: The 2009 stimulus has been repeated every year, accounting for all GDP increases under Obama and then some

The February 2009 Obama stimulus got added to Bush's 2009 fiscal year spending because Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate at the time. It was scandalous, but there was nothing Republicans could do about it.

But the same thing happened every year thereafter because the Democrat Congress and then the Republican Congress deliberately passed this prior spending in the form of continuing resolutions instead of through regular order, which meant nothing got debated and the status quo was maintained. That's the evil of CRs.

Both parties did this on purpose instead of debating individual spending bills because . . . THEY ALL LOVE HAVING THE MONEY TO SPEND.

The fiscal 2008 baseline outlays were $2.9825 trillion, to which the stimulus got added for fiscal 2009, and just kept getting added and re-added and re-added right through to the present (and then some) through the continuing resolution process:

2009: $535.2 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2010: $474.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2011: $620.6 billion ($3.6 trillion)

2012: $554.5 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2013: $472.1 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2014: $523.6 billion ($3.5 trillion)

2015: $776.1 billion ($3.8 trillion)

2016: $1.017 trillion ($4.0 trillion).

The giant joke on the American people here is that Republicans went right along with this charade the whole time Obama was president, even after they got control of both the House and the Senate in 2014. Almost $5 trillion in "stimulus" has already been spent.

And Trump wants to add another $1 trillion?

Meanwhile under Obama current dollar GDP increased . . . $4.1 trillion. All government spending. All totally phony. And overpriced at that: $1.21 spent for every dollar of that fake GDP.

Why Democrats hate Russia so much

"They've never forgiven Russia for giving up communism."

Laugh of the Day: Communists leaked Democrat e-mails to Wikileaks, not former communists

Here.

The Nation Magazine's James Carden wonders why liberals fawn over anonymous CIA claims when John Brennan is a known liar

Here:

The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had ... once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it. ... CIA Director John Brennan made false statements before Congress over the CIA’s hacking into the computers of Congressional staffers.

China's Xi Jinping is a liar, militarizes illegal possessions created on reefs in South China Sea

From the story here:                                                   ↑

A U.S. think tank says recent satellite images appear to show that China has installed anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapons on its man-made islands in the strategically vital South China Sea, upping the stakes in what many see as a potential Asian powder keg.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report late Wednesday that the anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems designed to guard against missile attack have been placed on all seven of China's newly created islands. ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping said on a visit to the U.S. last year that "China does not intend to pursue militarization" of the area, prompting some foreign experts to accuse China of going back on its word with its new deployments.

Ann Coulter repeating stupid: 95 million can't find work

39 million retired, 20 million homemakers, 17 million in college, 8 million in high school, 3 million in grad school . . ..

The Trump cabinet and administration so far as rated by Numbers USA

Jeff Sessions: A+

Mike Pompeo: B+

Ryan Zinke: B-

Rick Perry: C

Tom Price: C

Whew, Cathy McMorris Rodgers passed over for Interior Secretary, Rep. Ryan Zinke appointed instead

Story here.

Numbers USA gives Zinke a B- on immigration issues, which is certainly an improvement over Rodgers, who gets an F.