MLK Jr. is an illegitimate American who opposed our economics, our middle class and our religion

"I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. ... So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. ... [R]eligion [can?] so easily become a tool of the middle class to keep the proletariant oppressed. ... It is probably true that capitalism is on its death bed, but social systems have a way of developing a long and powerful death bed breathing capacity. Remember it took feudalism more than 500 years to pass out from its death bed. Capitalism will be in America quite a few more years my dear. Yet with his basic thesis I would concur. Our economic system is going through a radical change, and certainly this change is needed. I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry." -- July 1952

Rand Paul: John Lewis isn't immune from criticism just because he's a civil rights icon

No, he's immune because he's BLACK, but Rand Paul won't say that.

Rand Paul, quoted here:

[B]eing a civil rights icon ... I would also say that that doesn't make us immune from criticism or debate. So, John Lewis isn't in a position where there can't be a healthy debate back and forth. Because he's a civil rights icon shouldn't make him immune. ...  I should be able to honestly disagree with him, and not have it all come back to, I have no appreciation for a civil rights icon because of this. And I think that's the part that I think is sometimes unfair in this.

Laugh of the Day: WaPo calls MLK Jr. a conservative

Here:

“My friends,” Dr. King said in his Detroit sermon, “all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be. . . .”

Spoken like a true conservative, and a truly great one.

Conservatives think people who think it's possible to make this world what God wants it to be are seriously mistaken.

Complete and utter rubbish from Real Clear Markets on "free market" Martin Luther King Jr. who said "capitalism has outlived its usefulness"

Here in "Martin Luther King's Free-Market Legacy":

Martin Luther King proclaimed that he had a dream that “…my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  His dream was far more powerful than it is given credit for.  It is a general call for freedom and free-market prosperity.

The real Martin Luther King Jr. was a self-confessed socialist as early as July 1952:

By the way (to turn to something more intellectual) I have just completed Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It was both stimulating and fascinating. There can be no doubt about it. Bellamy had the insight of a social prophet as well as the fact finding mind of the social scientist. I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas. I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human system it fail victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.

The CIA chief John Brennan voted Communist in 1976, which is the real reason he takes umbrage with Trump calling him Nazi

"What I do find outrageous is equating intelligence community with Nazi Germany," Brennan said. "I do take great umbrage at that."

Nebraska's Republican Senator Ben Sasse crawls out from underneath his rock to support John Lewis over Trump

First!

Liberal preening.

Here:

Sasse appears to be the only Republican publicly critical of the president-elect's attack so far.

Open borders Republicans join hands with Democrats to extend Obama's Orwellian DACA overreach

Coffman

Remember, they're not "illegal immigrants", they're "childhood arrivals".

The Republicans named in the story here, where it is claimed there are up to 60 supporters in the US House Republican Caucus, are:

Senator Lindsey Grahamnesty Graham of South Carolina

Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado

Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen of Florida

Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida.

The House would need 290 votes to override a Trump veto of a bill exempting "Dreamers" from deportation for three years. In the Senate 67 votes would be required. A coalition of 194 House Democrats and 60 Republicans yields just 254 votes, not enough. In the Senate 19 Republicans would have to join 48 Democrats to override a Trump veto.

So Coffman wants to ram the bill through now, before Obama no longer has his pen and telephone.

Nine Republicans in the US House voted against the Obamacare repeal framework today, the usual malcontents

The roll call vote is here, the framework passing 227-198, 10 not voting (five from each party).

Republicans Amash, Dent, Fitzpatrick, Jones, Katko, Labrador, MacArthur, Massie, and McClintock voted against the measure from the Senate.

Upset by Jeh Johnson election overreach, Mark Levin proposes yet another constitutional amendment

"There outta be a law", we used to say.

As if the other eleven he's already proposed stand a chance of being passed, or followed any more than are the current twenty-seven or the constitution itself. 

President Obama, unfortunately, is correct. The constitution is a mere parchment barrier. That's why he keeps burning it right up to the last minute.

In a decent country, Obama would never have been elected in the first place.

Rand Paul prefers histrionics to repeal of Obamacare, Diane Feinstein absent from vote for pacemaker surgery

The roll call vote, narrowly successful 51-48, is here.

Sen. Paul, making the good the enemy of the perfect as usual for the libertarians, views the repeal framework as a debt disaster:

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was the sole Republican to vote against the measure, citing the budget measure’s failure to meet the requirements set forth in the balanced budget amendment.

“As a physician, I cannot wait to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a health care system that relies on freedom to provide quality, comprehensive, and affordable care,” he said in a statement. “But putting nearly $10 trillion more in debt on the American people’s backs through a budget that never balances is not the way to get there. It is the exact opposite of the change Republicans promised, and I cannot support it, even as a placeholder.”

Laugh of the Day: Elizabeth Talking Bull Warren isn't qualified to grill Ben Carson's chicken

Seen here in the comments section.

Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson throws down the gauntlet in South China Sea

Hooah Rex!

From the story here:

In comments expected to enrage Beijing, Rex Tillerson told his confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China's building of islands and putting military assets on those islands was "akin to Russia's taking Crimea" from Ukraine.

Asked whether he supported a more aggressive posture toward China, he said: "We're going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed." ... 

Tillerson called China's South China Sea island-building and declaration of an air defense zone in waters of the East China Sea it contests with Japan "illegal actions."

"They're taking territory or control, or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China's," he said.

Trump fingers intelligence officials he's met with for leaking about those meetings

Prosecutable.

Story here.

Glenn Greenwald writes that the CIA was trying to defeat Trump and elect Hillary Clinton

Here:

FOR MONTHS, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.

Steve Liesman tries to be charitable to Trump on 96 million wanting a job, but comes up short 5.9m

From the story here:

Trump said that there "are 96 million wanting a job and they can't get (one). You know that story. The real number. That's the real number."

It is unfortunately very far from the real number. There are in fact 96 million Americans age 16 and older who are not in the labor force. Of this, just 5.4 million, or 91 million fewer than the number cited by Trump, say they want a job. The rest are retired, sick, disabled, running their households or going to school. (This number is 256,000 fewer than last year and 1.7 million fewer than the all-time high for the series in 2013.)

... A more charitable explanation for Trump would expand the number to include those people who are working part time because they can't find full-time work, all the unemployed and those marginally attached to the workforce. This broader measure of slack in the economy, known as the U6, is about 14.7 million. It's the lowest since May 2008, and has come down by nearly 12 million since the worst of the job market effects of the financial crisis in 2010. And remember, many of these folks have work, though it's part time.

This isn't charitable enough because Liesman never adds the 5.4 million to the 14.7 million. He must know you can't do this because that would involve double counting. The monthly Employment Situation Summary always includes the "marginally attached" in the expanded figures, people who are not in the labor force, but they are a subset of the 5.4 million.

But this can easily be remedied, and one wonders why the BLS doesn't do this.

Here's the data, with links.

Not in the labor force, not seasonally adjusted, is 95.8 million.

Not in the labor force, want a job now, not seasonally adjusted, is 5.45 million (peak was 7.2 million in May 2013).

The unemployed represent another 7.5 million from the monthly Employment Situation Summary. Those who work part-time but would rather have full-time represent 5.6 million more in the same report. But both of those groups are in the labor force, a total of 13.1 million.

To those 13.1 million simply add the 5.4 million from not in the labor force above and you get 18.5 million unemployed.

To get that expressed as a percentage you have to add the 5.4 million in to the civilian labor force because they want a job now, here, because the unemployment rate is the unemployed as a percentage of the labor force, which by the addition is now larger, 164.4 million.

So that yields a real unemployment rate of 11.3%. The U6RATE comes up quite short of this, at 9.2%. Meanwhile most people think everything's great because the headline rate is only 4.7% (7.5 million unemployed as a percentage of 159.6 million in the labor force).

There are not 96 million unemployed as Trump laughably says, but neither are there the 12.6 million Liesman ends up with, either.

18.5 million are unemployed in December 2016, at a rate of 11.3%.

The unsavory Robert Creamer was in the front row at lying Obama's farewell speech last night

Creamer had to resign from the DNC after incriminating video surfaced showing he countenanced baiting Trump supporters into violence, planting operatives at his rallies.

Creamer met with Obama 45 times in the White House during his presidency, and was there hundreds of times, but the White House denied they were friends.

The first name in fake news

Trump's first news conference since the election was highly entertaining:

"Your organization is terrible," Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.

"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.

"Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump responded, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

A very small John McCain reduced to role of courier for the Trump opposition fake news machine

From the story here:

"Late last year, I received sensitive information that has since been made public. Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI. That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue."

Just 9 more days until Mr. All Talk and No Action is out the door

Mr. All Talk and No Action is talking again one last time tonight as president . . .

. . . but as usual I'm not listening.

After all, a fella has to keep in shape not listening, because you know this guy is going to keep on talking, and talking and talking AFTER he's no longer president, and I want to be prepared not to listen whenever I have to. It's worked pretty well for me so far. He's going away, everything he's done is going away, and all I had to do was not listen.

I like to think of it as negative exercise. It's been good for me, and so easy to do.

Why quit when you can feel the burn?