Rush Limbaugh, Confused About Conservatism, Talked Up Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED Just Last September

Here.

And also in May 2012 in "Atlas is Starting to Shrug" here, steering another caller to the book and drawing parallels to current members of the 1% abandoning the rest of us.

Committed conservatives understand the difference between conservatism and libertarianism and choose the former. Rush still thinks there's room for both under a big tent, which just shows he does not fully understand how libertarianism is inimical to conservatism.

One Reason Why America's Problems Are What They Are

I'll leave it to you to decide which is the one:

[I]n a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Read more here.

Both Political Parties Are Now Essentially Libertarian, And That's The Problem

Seen here:

John Carr, who now heads the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, thinks both parties are now essentially defined by their commitment to economic or lifestyle libertarianism. "These libertarian tendencies are reinforced by large campaign contributors and powerful interest groups on the left and right (e.g., Emily's List and the Koch Brothers, Planned Parenthood and the Club for Growth). Who died and left Arianna Huffington and Grover Norquist in charge? Is there any room left for compassionate conservatives and pro-life Democrats?"

Blame The Yankees For The Minimum Wage: A Northern Tariff On The South

Doin' right ain't got no end

Jay Cost for The Weekly Standard, here:

Obama’s [State of the Union] address inadvertently referenced the government’s proclivity to play favorites. The minimum wage is a hallowed talking point for wealthy liberals posing as hardscrabble populists, but in fact its original purpose was to serve as a sort of domestic tariff. By 1937 Northern industries had come to terms with organized labor, but the South still resisted. Fearing a flight of capital to Dixie, it was Northern businessmen who made the difference in pushing a minimum wage through Congress.

Liberal Democrats had outsized majorities during this period of the New Deal, but Southerners controlled key choke points within the legislature, notably the House Rules Committee. It was only a broad coalition that included liberals, organized labor, and, crucially, Northern industrialists that brought the Fair Labor Standards Act to a vote on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the wage floor was set so low that only the South was really affected. And even then, it only passed after it was loaded up with exemptions for all sorts of politically privileged groups.

This decidedly inegalitarian back story of the minimum wage has mostly been lost to history. One would be hardpressed to find a book about the New Deal in Barnes & Noble that discusses this at any length. This is not a coincidence; advocates of bold, activist government want to forget all the inequalities it creates. So it is with Obama. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is one of the most grossly unfair pieces of legislation to become law in modern times. Underwritten by a logroll among elite interests as varied as the drug manufacturers and the feminist left, it is an enormous redistribution of wealth from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, without due regard to socioeconomic status.

Bank Failure Friday: Boise, Idaho Bank Is Third To Fail In 2014

Syringa Bank, Boise, Idaho, failed today, the third to do so in 2014, costing the FDIC $4.5 million.

The irrelevance of real money to the global fascist banking cabal

Jeffrey Snider, here, fascist emphases added in red for your reading pleasure:

For as long as there has existed the dollar, there has existed the temptation to make it pliable enough to fit the fancy of its masters. In the context of the economic system as it has developed since the earliest stirrings of industrial transformation.

In the current age, there is no mistake about where the dollars strings attach. The Federal Reserve sets policy but does not really operate the "printing press", that is reserved for the global banking cabal including eurodollar participants. There are relatively persuasive arguments on both sides as to which end is in actual control, the banks or the Fed, but in my mind there is no degree of separation, at least not meaningfully in this setting. The banking system operates as the business end of policy. Banking interests have become fully aligned with policy directives as the banking system has been re-oriented in that direction by progression in the past six or so decades.

A full part of that changing systemic character has been the gradual reduction in the relevance of real money. Convention always marks 1971 as the end of the gold era, but it really began its demise far earlier. The Bretton Woods system was plagued almost from the start by this impulse toward dollar pliability, whether for US government purposes, US banking purposes or global trade. The formation of the London gold pool in November 1961 was a symptom of market forces attempting to re-assert authority over currency; and how far government control would be stretched to wrestle free of any competition over monetary monopoly.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, Maybe Mormons Stayed Home In 2012!

Alex Beam in "Did Mormons Want Romney To Win?" for The Boston Globe suggests Mormons weren't ready for a Mormon presidency, here:

“No one would ever come out and say it, but I suspect what you are thinking is probably true,” says Matthew Bowman, a Mormon professor of religion and author of “The Mormon People.” “The whole Romney campaign was a shock to the system for a church that generally wants to move very slowly and is used to hashing out things out [sic] internally over a long period of time.”

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Mormons in the US number about 6 million, but Kimberley Strassel has pointed out that Romney lost the election by fewer than 350,000 total votes in just four states: Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire. 

GDP Under Obama Is Nearly 42% Worse Than It Was Under George Bush

Obama's latest GDP performance report for Q4 wraps up 2013 at a measly 1.9% real GDP for the whole year, quite an achievement when the second half of the year was as good as it was.

It's possible the second and third estimates will be better than the initial report of 3.2% for Q4, but that is not likely to change the overall number for 2013 very much.

As it stands, Obama has now had an average annual real GDP report of just 1.24% vs. George Bush's 2.13%.

Obama's performance remains the worst ever since World War II.

When he said he'd transform the country, he meant it.

Q4 2013 Real GDP At 3.2% In 1st Estimate, Q3 Remains At 4.1%

The BEA reports here.

Change in private inventories added far less in Q4 than in Q3, just .42 points vs. 1.67.

As good as the second half of 2013 appears, real GDP for 2013 still clocks in at an anemic 1.9% vs. 2.8% in 2012.

Abenomics is a fart in a windstorm

Good Help Is Hard To Find: Drudge Leads With A Typo For Five Hours And Counting

You know the "artic", up north where the artists live, in "artica", as opposed to their southern home in antartica.

Yikes, Now Laura Ingraham Repeats Stupid

Just now Laura Ingraham said on her radio program that 3 million Republicans stayed home on election day in 2012.

The story was debunked in late November 2012 already, by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal.

She's starting to sound as dumb as Rush.

Get up to speed people!

Hey Obama! Job Change Is A Fact!

Americans in October 2013 are driving like it's still 2005!

Maybe all that reduced carbon pollution Obama is so proud of came on the backs of workers who have millions fewer jobs to drive to: miles-traveled has been stuck at 2004/5 levels for Obama's entire presidency, reducing carbon emissions. Only a blind communist would boast of increased food supplies because he starved his people to death.

Mark Levin Is Smokin' Something, Too

Tonight Mark Levin's calling on the US House to pass a resolution declaring our lawless president's executive orders null and void.

You know, the same House which is about to betray the people who put them in charge up there by passing another illegal alien amnesty.

The same House which just screwed veterans out of their retirements.

The same House which completely botched the so-called government so-called shutdown.

The same House which capitulated on the sequester and raised spending.

And that's the litany of woe for just the last couple of months.

Let's face it. This House isn't worthy of conservatives' support. And we aren't worthy to be called Americans if we support it.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Minimum temps in the US for 1/28/14

Self-Identifying As Middle Class Is Down 17% After 5 Years Of Obama, As Lower Class Up 60%!

Self-identifying as middle class is down 9 points since 2008, which is a 17% decline.

Self-identifying as lower class is up a whopping 15 points, or 60%.

Identifying as upper class is down almost 29% under the regime.

Graph seen here at Time.com.

Balance Sheet Recession Continues To Restrain Aggregate Demand: US Halfway Through Its First Lost Decade

So says Stephen Roach for Project Syndicate, here:

As research by the economists Richard Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil Kashyap has shown, Japan’s corporate “zombies” – rendered essentially lifeless by their balance-sheet problems – ended up damaging the healthier parts of the economy. Until balance sheets are repaired, such “zombie congestion” restrains aggregate demand. Japan’s lost decades are an outgrowth of this phenomenon; the US is now halfway through the first lost decade of its own.

Mish: Credit Dwarfs Money Supply

Just as the Fed's overnight window dwarfed TARP in the 2008 panic.

Mish hits a homer, here:

I have little doubt the Fed (central bankers in general) will step on the money supply spigot in response to another slowdown. But credit dwarfs money supply. Once again, those who view inflation and deflation in the myopic eyes of money supply alone will come to the wrong conclusions about prices of goods, services and assets, just as they did in 2008 when they thought hyperinflation was just around the corner. Those who understand credit and credit market to market will get the picture right. I repeat my claim that I made in 2007. The US will go in and out of deflation over the course of a number of years. Deflation is once again nearly at hand, but Europe will be first.

US Electricity Consumption Remains 3.35% Off The 2005 Peak Through 2011

click image to enlarge

2011 consumption per capita was 13,246 kWh.

Rush Limbaugh Must Be High Again: Now Blames Tea Party For Staying Home In 2012

Up until now I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh blame the Tea Party specifically for staying home in 2012. It's always been the Republican "base" which he's been blaming for staying home, first 3 million of them, then 4 million. 

But now he's saying specifically that it's the Tea Party which stayed home in 2012, here on Friday:

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thanks for taking my call. Hey, I was just wondering if the Tea Party is so strong, what the hell happened to us in 2012?

RUSH: Stayed home.

CALLER: I would have walked over broken glass to vote against Obama.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Nothing could have kept me from it.

RUSH: Yeah, but four million of you didn't.

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Rush got this "stay home" meme in his head from some uncritical knee-jerk repetition of provisional reporting right after the election suggesting whites stayed home, based on admittedly incomplete exit polling data, which is kind of an irony since Rush used the same airtime on Friday to highlight how a false story about a country singer couldn't be erased no matter how hard she tried. Well this false story is well nigh impossible to erase from Rush's hard drive, and it's just getting worse now that he's singling out the Tea Party, which is probably more responsible for Romney's actual better performance than McCain's than people realize.

Within weeks of the election the whole idea that McCain got more Republican votes than Romney was decisively trashed by Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal here and by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air here. Strassel points out the only losing state where McCain bested Romney was Ohio.

In point of fact, Strassel's numbers show Romney could have won the election but for 334,000 votes in just four states:

In the end, it was 334,000 votes—in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire—that separated Mr. Romney from the presidency.

In McCain's loss to Obama in 2008, the election similarly turned on just 1.4 million votes in the swing states. And for all the close states Romney lost to Obama in 2012, not just those four, the election turned on half that many in total.

So actually Romney did much better than McCain, it's just that Obama deployed his resources on the ground very effectively in a targeted manner, especially in Ohio, while Romney can't be said to have deployed much at all. Turning out your peeps in contested territories is key even if you lose those. Peeling off votes even in small numbers can increase the value of your turnout elsewhere in the same state, which is the point of campaigning on the ground in Hispanic and other minority strongholds, as Strassel points out. You don't have to win them, just weaken them.

Why Rush Limbaugh just keeps phoning it in on this issue is anyone's guess. But it is clear from much of what he says on the show that he increasingly relies on others to do his show prep for him.

Sympathetic critics of Rush Limbaugh are embarrassed for him, and Tea Partiers in particular can't be too happy.