Laugh of the Day: Harvey Weinstein's so stupid he forgot HE'S supposed to watch the ACTRESS shower

Don't look now but full-time job growth has slowed by 29% since 2015

(all data not-seasonally-adjusted)

In September 2017, full-time jobs grew barely by 2% year over year. The only other month in 2017 at 2% or higher was in April, at 2.3%, the dreaded spring of the year when the BLS' Birth/Death model adds phantom jobs to the economic data out of thin air based on business formation assumptions. All other months in 2017 so far have seen full-time jobs grow year over year by less than 2%, yielding the average shown of 1.7%. By contrast, 2016 had only three months out of the first nine below 2% growth year over year, and 2015 had none. Welcome to the slowdown, and maybe a . . ..

Illegal Treasury Dept. financial spying on Americans began under Obama and Jack Lew

From the story here:

Sources said the spying had been going on under President Barack Obama . . .. In October of 2016, Rep. Sean Duffy, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, sent a letter to then-Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew asking for OIA’s legal authority to collect and retain domestic information.

Nearly one year later, the Congressman has yet to receive an answer, according to a committee staffer.

Britain voted for Brexit but the Tories can't deliver it because too many of them are against it

From the story here:

But it was not at all clear that a change of leadership could help resolve the arguments over Brexit, as the withdrawal is known, that are tearing apart the Conservatives, or that it would leave the government any more prepared to negotiate with the European Union. ... The cabinet is divided between those who want a clean break with the European Union — so-called hard Brexit — and those who hope for a softer departure to cushion the economy. When a consensus started to emerge from the cabinet, ahead of a speech last month by Mrs. May in Florence, Mr. Johnson, the foreign secretary, undermined it by outlining his own, more hard-line and upbeat vision of Brexit in a 4,000-word article.

Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement targets statues nationwide for Columbus Day on Monday

Let's see how many monuments are protected on Monday, seeing that authorities have had over two weeks to prepare for this.

From the story here:

The NYC-based antifa group Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) made the announcement on Thursday, September 21, calling on antifa groups nationwide to “decorate” their neighborhoods.

According to Far Left Watch, RAM is "an extremely militant group that advocates for the violent redistribution of property" and for "the abolition of gender."

Camille Paglia has come a long way, but still transgresses with her own utopian good old days

From her remarks here:

We have to return to the authentic 1960s vision, which is about identity coming from consciousness, which transcends gender, which transcends all these divisions of race. Consciousness itself! Okay? In the 60s, we had this idea that there was a human sensibility that transcended individual and nation, and there was this cosmic consciousness. This sense of the universe as a whole. To see the human being in relationship to great eternal principles of life and death, mortality, and so on.

She doesn't get that the 1960s liberal vision was the unique and irreproducible product of late Christian civilization.

Asinine is right: Marketwatch story blames James Madison for bloated tax code

There wasn't an income tax until 1913, for crying out loud, and never was intended to be.

James Madison, of all people, believed in neither an income tax nor a feckless giving to the voters whatever it is they may want. In fact, Madison feared the tyranny of the legislative the most, because the constitution gives it direct access to the pocketbooks of the people.

The story at Marketwatch here is beneath the dignity of any thinking person. It is a laughable farce of a story.

Caroline Baum should be ashamed of it.

How to prevent mass shootings

Don't mass in the first place.

Las Vegas shooter's girlfriend feared wired money to Philippines was his way of breaking up with her

From the story here:

“I was grateful, but honestly I was worried that first, the unexpected trip home and then the money, was a way of breaking up with me".

Las Vegas shooter shot at jet fuel tanks, explaining why he broke two windows at Mandalay Bay Hotel

So reports The Las Vegas Review-Journal here.

If more debt doesn't really matter, then why bother collecting any more taxes?

From "Debt Keeps Rising and Nothing Bad Happens":

Like so many things in macroeconomics, there is no reliable, well-confirmed theory that tells us the effect of government deficits or debt.

A rare contribution to National Review suggests that the Congress is an idea whose time has passed

From the story by Jay Cost here:

To put it bluntly, Congress is not well suited for national economic planning, which is basically what pro-growth tax policies boil down to. As a matter of fact, Congress outsources a lot of economic planning — like environmental regulation — to the bureaucracy, because it knows it is not capable of handling such matters for itself. It keeps tax policy within the legislature primarily because that doubles as a way to distribute political benefits to key constituencies.

The problem is an institutional one. It is really not accurate to say that Congress is a “national legislature,” for there is no member in either chamber who is elected by the nation at large. Instead, it is the meeting place of representatives of discrete geographical constituencies. This inclines the legislature to parochial concerns rather than national ones — a tendency that is exacerbated by the fact that senators are apportioned equally among the states, regardless of population. Moreover, our campaign-finance system, whereby those who contribute most to political campaigns are those with pressing business before the Congress, gives each member of Congress yet another incentive to view policy problems from the perspective of a very small slice of the nation. ...

In the Report on Manufactures, submitted in 1791, Alexander Hamilton argued that Congress’s power to “lay and collect taxes . . . to provide for the common defense and general Welfare of the United States” validated his ambitious plan of national development. However, his political opponents thought he was grossly misreading what was originally intended to be an anodyne statement.

But the statement quoted from the Constitution is not anodyne.

It simply points out that the founders thought the national government's main job was to provide for the common defense. The founders never imagined the managerial and welfare state, which represents today over 80% of the budget. Direct taxes were sufficient to fund the small state they did imagine, along with tariffs and excises. The contemporary megastate is only imaginable with direct access to the citizens' pocketbooks, which the income tax has provided only since 1913.

The way forward is the way back. Ideally we should aim to abolish all the federal departments except for the original five (State, Treasury, Attorney General, Defense, Post Office Communications), and tax accordingly (imagine a tax cut of 80%), along with the income tax.

And perhaps we should think about abolishing the Congress too, since we now have well developed state governments which can be tasked with the things the US House and the US Senate cannot seem to cope with effectively any longer.

The greatest fear of the founders was a tyranny of the legislative, but what we've got is more akin to a farce of the legislative. We should think about ending it and let free-market capitalism do its work.  

The nut didn't fall far from the tree: Vegas shooter's dad was a serial felon and psychopath

From The New York Post here:

The father of Las Vegas madman Stephen Paddock was a “psychopath” himself — a bank robber who escaped federal prison in the late 1960s and landed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, according to reports.

Another mass murder malapropism: Save your best wishes for Christmas and New Year please

Trump orders the flag at half staff to honor Vegas victims, you know the flag, THE ONE DISHONORED BY THE NFL

Trump keeps giving Norm Crosby, the Master of Malaprop, a run for his money

Representation as performance art: 49% of political campaign expenditures in 2016 went to media

12.1% went to fundraising, 11.2% to salaries, 9.4% to administrative costs, 6.7% to campaign expenses and 5.2% to strategy and research. $375 million of spending was uncategorizable.

A total of $5.9147 billion was spent.

Data here.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, climate update for September 2017

Max Temp: Actual 96, Mean 89

Min Temp: Actual 41, Mean 37

Av Temp:   Actual 66.5, Mean 62.7, YTD Actual 53.9, YTD Mean 51.1

Precip:       Actual 0.66, Mean 3.55, YTD Actual 24.98, YTD Mean 26.28

CDD:         Actual 136, Mean 75, YTD Actual 708, YTD Mean 685

In short year to date we are slightly warmer and dryer than the mean.

Average temperature is running 5.5% ahead of mean and cooling degree days about 3.4% ahead of mean. The rain deficit is running about 4.9% behind the mean. For average temperature year to date, compare some of the hotter years 2012 at 56.4, 1931 at 54.2 and 1921 also at 56.4, the average of which is 55.7. We are still 3.2% cooler than that in 2017.

Last season's average ONI value was -0.266, the lingering effects of the five month long Weak La Nina, indicating a very slightly cool ocean in the tropical Pacific over the last year. The preliminary read of the first value in the new season is -0.1.

Despite the heat wave we experienced in September, I still used 8% fewer kWh this September than last and stayed comfortably cool.

Chicago's resident spokesman for Big Brother, Eric Zorn, proclaims anti-Americanism is the true patriotism

In The Chicago Tribune here:

I resent that Trump has chosen to use what was a minor controversy about a few kneeling football players into a major wedge issue.

Not just because it flagrantly insults the concept of liberty that true patriotism embraces, but also because his focus threatens to turn standing for the national anthem into a partisan act. It’s the same bit of branding judo he’s trying to perform on the expression “Merry Christmas.”

Average candidate cost to win a Senate race in 2016 was $10.4 million, $1.3 million to win a House race

At least according to the story here.

The figure nearly doubles when factoring in outside money for winning Senate seats. Apparently outside money doesn't matter much for House seats:

Outside groups are a relatively unimportant factor in most House races, unlike in the Senate.

NYT: 110 million Americans have an STD, nearly 34% of the population

Story here:

The incidence of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is increasing, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 110 million Americans now are infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Complaints about Senate gridlock aren't new, it's just the Republicans' turn

Over 200 bills are stalled awaiting action in the Republican-controlled Senate, according to a story at The Hill.

That's nothing compared to 2010 when the Democrats ran the whole show. Over 400 bills languished then unactioned in the Senate.

The problem isn't a bug, it's a feature.

The Senate is designed to slow things down. But the Senate sets its own rules, and could speed things along by changing them without doing any offense to anything except the tradition of doing as little as possible. And generally speaking, the less they do the better, since what they produce sucks most of the time.

Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg says Hillary lost in 2016 because of sexism, doesn't mention why Hillary lost in 2008

Black sexism, the hate that dare not speak its name.

Here:

CBS’s Charlie Rose asked Ginsburg at an event Tuesday night if she thought sexism contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss to President Trump in 2016. “I have no doubt that it did,” she replied. Ginsburg said that while there were many elements that led to Clinton’s loss, sexism “was a major, major factor.”

It was all Revenge Porn: Hugh Hefner, the original cuck, is dead at 91

From the story here:

"I had literally saved myself for my wife, but after we had sex she told me that she'd had an affair. That was the most devastating moment in my life."

Remember the Tim Tebow controversy from 2011, kneeling in prayer on the field?

People criticized Tebow at the time for ostentatiously injecting religion into football.

Now blacks protesting during the National Anthem by kneeling are committing not just an act of Tebow cultural appropriation, they're turning it upside down, turning it into an act of defiance.

While Tim Tebow merely defied censoriousness, blacks in the NFL are defying us. 

Black football players rape white girls on US college campuses, but in England Somalis do it in the streets

Roy Moore clobbers Trump's chosen candidate Luther Strange, giving the lie to the "cult of Trump"

Disgraceful bitch Hillary: "Hopefully Trump hasn't ordered the killing of journalists"

Quoted here:

ROSE: He’s an authoritarian?

CLINTON: He has tendencies toward authoritarianism.

ROSE: So, he’s no different than Putin?

CLINTON: Well, hopefully he hasn’t ordered the killing of people and journalists and the like.

New record number of new cases of sexually transmitted diseases set in US in 2016: 2.098 million

1.600 million chlamydia

0.470 million gonorrhea

0.028 million syphilis

Story here.

But once again these are new cases. Existing cases of chronic infection are not discussed. Those number in the many tens of millions.

We're doomed: Only 64% say stand for the National Anthem

But that 64% is treated as good news here.

It's not. 36% support for this depth of disrespect for the very symbol of the country at such a high level of the culture, if one may be forgiven for characterizing football that way, is an ominous sign of impending breakdown.

This is the consequence of unfettered immigration combined with leftward political and social drift.

Told ya: Trump to raise lowest tax bracket from 10% to 12%

Story here:

Top White House and GOP leaders have agreed to raise the lowest individual tax rate from 10 to 12 percent, paired with doubling the standard deduction, 5 senior Republicans tell us.

The standard deduction becomes the football in this scheme. If the doubling survives intact, which is hardly certain, down the line someone can say it must be reduced, without advocating a change in the bracket percentage and voila, you've got a nice little tax increase on the poorest members of society without directly raising taxes.

This ridiculous tinkering with rates and deductions just continues ad infinitum since 1913.

As with the Obamacare repeal efforts, there are no guiding principles informing the tax reform debate.

Mandating health coverage at the federal level is tyrannical, and so is the income tax, quite apart from its deliberate inequalities.

Trump kept insisting on a replacement for Obamacare as well as a system of progressive taxation during his speechifying.

There's no there there. 

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee joins the Kneegrow Football League

The Negro Football League is even dumber than you thought

In America we don't need a cleric to tell us what we already know

The top 10 refugee-sending countries according to Amnesty International

Amnesty International, here:

Syria

Afghanistan

Somalia

Sudan

South Sudan

Democratic Republic of Congo

Myanmar

Central African Republic

Iraq

Eritrea

Average country IQ:

83

84

68

71

71

78

87

71

87

85

___________

Average: 78.5

US Average IQ: 98
Germany Av.: 99

German AfD comes in a strong third, Social Democrats crash, Merkel forced to form coalition with FDP and Greens

The UK Telegraph reports here:

The SPD’s decision to return to opposition has limited her options, with a three-way coalition with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens the only obvious option.

However, the FDP is unlikely to countenance the EU reform objectives of France's Macron, and the Greens want to shut down the coal plants Merkel relies on after she shut down the nuclear plants in the wake of Fukushima, which the FDP opposes, making life very difficult indeed for Frau Merkel.

Meanwhile the anti-Islamist AfD is set to take seats in the parliament, the first time the right has been represented there since 1961.

Laugh of the Day: Trump's chief of staff patrols White House perimeter to keep Trump IN

Jack Lew, who presided over an 87% increase in the national debt as Treasury Secretary, is suddenly worried about the debt implications of tax reform

From the election of Obama in 2008 until the election of Trump in 2016, $9.2 trillion were added to the total public debt. We've gone from $10.6 trillion in the hole to $19.8 trillion over the period.

Yet now we hear from Jack Lew in The New York Times here that

"digging a deep hole of debt by cutting taxes will make it harder to pay for other priorities. And when that debt makes deficits skyrocket in the future, policy makers would have to choose between raising taxes and cutting investments and vital benefits. ... Some Republican policy makers suggest they may reject mainstream approaches and assume positive economic effects that go far beyond those normally projected by the budget office and the tax committee. ... Such a reckless move would almost surely produce an explosion of debt."

Actually, the Obama Administration dug a deep hole of debt right off the bat by spending money it didn't have, tacking on $600 billion of spending to Bush's last fiscal year, and then regularizing the increase by avoiding the budget process in favor of continuing resolutions, the Congress' new bipartisan method of fleecing the American people. Deficits skyrocketed contemporaneously, and then Democrat policy makers recklessly passed Obamacare with its spendthrift Medicaid expansion. They didn't have to choose between anything.

The only people more full of horseshit than the Republicans are the Democrat engineers of the Obama economic catastrophe.

Back on the 10th or so we were being told Trump was brillantly clearing the deck for tax reform

Unfortunately the empty deck got filled right back up by DACA blowback and the Graham-Cassidy Senate healthcare reform bill which is now already in trouble.

Raising the debt ceiling and signing a continuing spending resolution were mistakes. You only get just so many opportunities in four years to shape affairs as president.

Trump still doesn't understand how this works.

Come on Germany, do the right thing

Real earnings of men are still lower than in 1973: Was feminism worth it, darling, seeing that you are up ten grand but spend it on daycare?

The average cost of daycare is $11,666.

Progress: Obama's enthusiasm for community organizing is flagging

Here:

And it’s certainly frustrating to have to mobilize every couple months to keep our leaders from inflicting real human suffering on our constituents.

International Howler of the Day: Britain voted for Brexit yet Theresa May criticizes those who fail to respect international agreements

Having it every which way to Sunday she was.

From the story here:

Leaders who fail to respect international agreements risk jeopardising faith in institutions, she warned. Delivering a thinly-veiled rebuke to the US President, she said climate change “is depleting and degrading the planet we leave to our children”. And the PM hit out at countries which try to stifle global trade, after Mr Trump's “America first” inauguration speech in January. She warned against moves which “undermine support for the forces of liberalism and free trade that have done so much to propel global growth”. ... But Mrs May threatened to split cash from UN programmes that fail to produce results.

Laugh of the Day: Ann Coulter don't need no more stinkin' vowels

Ann Coulter: The GOP's new official motto is "NEXT TIME!"

Since Luther Strange supports DACA, ya'll in Alabama know you need to vote for Judge Moore

Two kinds of Trump supporters

CNN: US investigators "wiretapped" Paul Manafort from 2014, pausing and restarting in 2016

Story here.

The libertarian Charles Murray is in the news advocating the crackpot idea of handing out free money

Here.

Antifa plans for Nov. 4 will fizzle because the goals are wildly unrealistic

The plan is to demonstrate 24/7 starting on November 4 until Trump is removed from office. No one is able to protest 24/7, and Trump isn't going anywhere.