Tyranny Of The Legislative: The Worst Congress(es) Ever Because Of ObamaCare

Discussed here:

David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale University, pointed to the debates over ObamaCare as one cause of [Congressional] inaction.

“The subject has been dominating the domestic politics for several years and nobody can get over it. It’s really quite unusual. It’s bogging them down,” he said.

All The Republicans, Especially CPACers, Will Sell Out On Immigration

Louis Woodhill: Premature Signifi-ca-tion

not seasonally adjusted civilian labor force February 2008 to February 2014

Louis Woodhill, here, evidently referring loosely to the seasonally adjusted measure of the civilian labor force level, which is up 523,000 on January 1 and 264,000 on February 1 to 155,724,000:

It was extremely significant that labor force participation continued to move up during February, after its big surge in January. This confirmed that allowing extended unemployment benefits to expire in late December was the right thing to do.

Progressives predicted that limiting unemployment benefits would cause people to drop out of the labor force, but the exact opposite occurred. It turns out that people respond to incentives. Who knew?

Otherwise, I don't know what he's talking about.

The not seasonally adjusted figure was down January 1 and up February 1, more on which below. The seasonally adjusted participation rate was up slightly on January 1 and flat on February 1. Not seasonally adjusted the rate was down Jan. 1 and up February 1.

In the key 25-54 age group, the labor force level is up both seasonally and not seasonally adjusted two months straight: 607,000 and 402,000. That's important because this measure of the vital core of the workforce has been in freefall from the 105 million level reached before the Great Recession. But as it is, the members of this group are still struggling to pop back above 101 million. The deficit in the level of this group's participation is key to a jobs recovery: 4 million people. It's hard to tell why they are back in the labor force in the last two months. It could be their unemployment benefits ended, as Woodhill says. It could also be they've finished new degrees and certifications and have reentered the fray. It could be both of these things, and more.

Not seasonally adjusted, unfortunately, the civilian labor force level still looks troubled to me. Since the beginning of 2011 the level has made three consecutive new highs and two consecutive higher lows, until January 1, 2014 when the low at 154,381,000 fell below the March 1, 2013 nadir of 154,512,000. That broke the pattern of higher lows. At least the level went up on February 1.

The real test is if we make a new high in the summer of 2014 above 157,196,000, the last high and the all time high on July 1, 2013.

Arguably had the Great Recession not intervened, we'd be talking about levels more like 164 million by now. That's how far we still have to go.

Number Of Words Actually Contributed By Sarah Palin To Dr. Zeuss Send-Up At CPAC

                    crony

                  spying, man

               Oh

we're       we     there's

              reporters'

                      their

and we won't take

All the rest, not just a couple of lines as she said, predated her speech at CPAC by over 3.5 years. View them here.

Another New High For S&P500 On Friday, March 7, 2014

1878.04

Sarah Palin Hat Tipped The Internet For "A Couple Of Lines" Of Dr. Seuss Rewrite When 7 Were Verbatim Full Line Steals, The Other 7 Changed But 12 Words From The Original But Retained The Order

Full video here.

Politico here gave her a pass without checking the depth of the theft, which is almost 90% of the text and 100% of the structure:

Palin singled out Cruz for his marathon speech on the Senate floor last year during his push to defund Obamacare, when the freshman senator read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” to his young daughters watching at home. Palin brought her own version of the rhyme, crediting a couple lines of it to the Internet. “I do not like this Uncle Sam,” it began. “I do not like this health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks or how they lie and cook the books.” The crowd devoured it.

Martin Luther King Jr. lifts a bunch of material without attribution in his dissertation and gets ripped for it, correctly, but I dare say Sarah Palin won't get any blowback for this from the right, or the left . . . a sign she no longer matters.

Sarah Palin At CPAC Plagiarized US Submariner's August 2010 Rewrite Of Dr. Seuss, Changing Just 12% Of The Words

Sarah Palin claimed authorship of this at CPAC 3/14

Sean G. posted the original rewrite on his blog 8/10

Sarah Palin's Claim At CPAC That She Spiced Up Dr. Seuss A Little Bit Ala ObamaCare Is Plagiarism

Sarah Palin's claim at CPAC that she rewrote Dr. Seuss about ObamaCare is a lie. She didn't spice it up. She just lifted someone else's work and edited it a little bit. It's been up on the internet since August 2010, posted by one Sean G. at the toomuchliberty blog. Sarah Palin lifted whole lines, and edited a few others, and never gave the guy attribution. Pretty low.

Here's Palin's stolen version, posted here with video claiming authorship:

"I do not like this Uncle Sam.

I do not like his health care scam.

I do not like -- oh, just you wait --

I do not like these dirty crooks,

or how they lie and cook the books.

I do not like when Congress steals,

I do not like their crony deals.

I do not like this spying, man,

I do not like, 'Oh, Yes we can.'

I do not like this spending spree,

we're smart, we know there's nothing free.

I do not like reporters' smug replies

when I complain about their lies.

I do not like this kind of hope,

and we won't take it, nope, nope, nope."

Here's Sean G.'s original version, posted here August 3, 2010 as "A New Dr. Seuss":

I do not like this Uncle Sam,

I do not like his health care scam.

I do not like these dirty crooks,

or how they lie and cook the books.

I do not like when Congress steals,

I do not like their secret deals.

I do not like this speaker, Nan,

I do not like this 'YES WE CAN.'

I do not like this spending spree,

I'm smart, I know that nothing's free.

I do not like your smug replies,

when I complain about your lies.

I do not like this kind of hope.

I do not like it, nope, nope, nope!

I guess that communications degree with an emphasis in journalism wasn't worth much after all, even after six different whacks to finish it. So now Sarah Palin's stooping to stealing from obscure internet personages who were way ahead of her and Ted Cruz in the brains department about ObamaCare. Not only does she talk like she comes from the gutter, she acts like it too.

"Other" Beats Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Donald Trump and Rick Santorum In Drudge Poll During CPAC

The fight is between Ted Cruz and Rand Paul among the junkies.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker did not appear this year at CPAC, wisely having something else to do, like getting reelected in Wisconsin this year.

If Harry Reid Is Protesting Unlimited Money In Politics, You Know He Must Mean His Own

Kimberley Strassel for The Wall Street Journal, here:

Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about "unlimited money," by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics' list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million). Even factoring in undisclosed personal donations by the Koch brothers, they are a rounding error in union spending. ...

[I]n addition to a system in which organized labor spends "unlimited money" to "rig the system to benefit themselves" and "buy elections," (to quote Mr. Reid)[about the opposition], Mr. Obama's IRS has made sure to shut up anyone who might compete with unions or complain about them.

Democrats: The things they are for and against are the things they are against and for.

Arguably Obama's 2008 Election Caused All The Job Losses, And We Still Have Not Recovered

total nonfarm employees n.s.a. 1/07-2/14

Arguably the response of business to the election of Obama was outright fear, leading to record job losses. And just as arguably, Obama's class warfare rhetoric has justified those fears. The number one enemy of a communist after all, is a climber. You wouldn't know that of course because the socialist fellow travelers who've taught you and your kids since the 1960s conveniently left that out of the narrative. But that is a separate story.

The fact of the matter is, the so-called Great Recession had already been long in the tooth on election day 2008, and total nonfarm had declined just 2.7 million from its zenith in November 2007 at 139,443,000. But there is really nothing out of keeping for such a large decline given that total nonfarm usually falls off at the end of calendar years. A good example which raised no alarms at the time was in December 1998 when total nonfarm fell 2.7 million . . . in one month.

December 2008 was the worst month on record for t.n.f.

But more people lost their jobs in the first full month following the 2008 election than in any other month in the data series. For a country which supposedly saw Obama as a savior, the response of business was clearly otherwise: nearly 30 million Americans went on to make first time claims for unemployment in 2009 because they lost their jobs in his wake, 13.3 million more than in George Bush's best year 2006 when such claims came in just over 16 million. You can call business a bunch of spineless cowards who took the everyman for himself approach. But isn't that what the healthcare industry did when faced with ObamaCare? Play along to get along, or face the consequences. Few are the fighters for principle who sacrifice themselves for a cause. The only people we have who even make a pretence of doing that do it safely atop places like Berkshire Hathaway (taxes), Apple (global warming), Microsoft (birth control), the Oval Office and the well of the US Senate where no man can touch them.

total nonfarm employees, n.s.a., 2/07-2/14, monthly arrows

The data show that the bottom for total nonfarm did not drop out until December 2008. Nearly 3.7 million Americans lost their jobs in December 2008 alone, the most on record. November 2008 had been only a warning of what was coming. By the end of that month, in which the general election had occurred on November 4, just over a million total nonfarm employees lost their jobs. The dust settled at 135,656,000 on December 1st. Then as December unfolded, the bottom fell out with total nonfarm dropping to 131,965,000. And one year later, despite "jobs saved or created", the February 2009 stimulus, cash for clunkers, TARP and the GM, Chrysler and AIG bailouts, scores of big bank failures and trillions of dollars of cheap loans by the Federal Reserve to all and sundry banks and businesses here and abroad, total nonfarm fell another 4.2 million to 127,736,000.

And where are we today? On February 1, 2014, after 5 full years of Obama, total nonfarm is 136,183,000, barely 200,000 jobs ahead of where we were at this same point in 2007. While the trend has clearly been positive for total nonfarm, with a consistent pattern of higher, if muted, highs and lower lows alternating summers and winters as is typical of the data series, the profile of total nonfarm remains terribly weak.

usually work full time 2/07-2/14, n.s.a.

Consider that those who work usually full time today are 2.7 million fewer in number than at this same point in 2007, the record year for full time jobs and for total nonfarm jobs, despite adding 15 million to the population.

part time for economic reasons 2/07-2/14, s.a.

And while those who work usually part time are up nearly 2.4 million, those working part time for economic reasons remain up almost 3 million, seasonally adjusted, February 2007 to February 2014.

For the last four full years monthly job growth has averaged barely 167,000 new jobs per month. Compare that to a Clinton or Reagan when job growth clipped along at an average of 235,000-250,000 per month for years.

I predict jobs will come back when Obama goes away, unless of course Hillary Clinton becomes president. Right now I can't think of a better candidate to complete the job of eradicating the middle class. She'll burn through them like she does through jet fuel and vodka.

FISA Court Rules Your NSA Metadata Can Only Be Kept For Five Years

The Department of Justice under Eric Holder wanted to keep your data indefinitely. You know Eric Holder, the only cabinet official in the history of the country to be held in contempt of Congress. Ronald Reagan helped advance his career in 1988 by appointing him to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

Story here.

February Unemployment Ticks Up To 6.7%, Year Over Year Job Growth Slows 2.5% Compared To All Of 2013

The BLS reports here:

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 175,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services and in wholesale trade but declined in information.

Both the number of unemployed persons (10.5 million) and the unemployment rate (6.7 percent) changed little in February. The jobless rate has shown little movement since December. Over the year, the number of unemployed persons and the unemployment rate were down by 1.6 million and 1.0 percentage point, respectively. ...

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 175,000 in February. Job growth averaged 189,000 per month over the prior 12 months. In February, job gains occurred in professional and business services and in wholesale trade, while information lost jobs.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The poor job growth in January of 113,000 was revised up a paltry amount, to 129,000. 2013 job growth averaged 194,000 per month and year over year in February is down 2.5% compared to that.

How Unemployment Ends In Obama's America

traitors heads on old London Bridge

• You get fired from your 20 year full-time job in December 2008 where you made $24/hour
• Then you search for work in vain for six+ years
• When suddenly you snag a part-time job offering less than 20 hours a week and $10/hour
• They call it fundamental transformation
• I've got a different name for it

S&P500 Rises Above 1873.91 To New High Of . . .

. . . 1877.03, today.

Sean Trende Calls For A Larger US House But Never Mentions The Actual Language Of The Constitution

In "It's Time To Increase The Size Of The US House", here, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics makes many of the same points we have made about the sorry state of representation in these United States, including the importance of the "unratified" Article the First as the real First Amendment as opposed to the mythology which has grown up around the default one.

As Trende ably shows, Article the First would have fixed representation eventually at 1 US representative for every 50,000 of population. He appears horrified, however, at the prospect of a Congress of 6,100 representatives today.

Is that why he never mentions Article I Section 1 of the actual constitution which is ratified and under which we are supposed to operate?

"The number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand . . .."

If 6,100 representatives is horrifying, the 10,533 representatives we should have according to the spirit of the actual constitution is downright heart-stopping. I can understand Trende not talking about this, but how come the Tea Party never does? After all, they carry the constitution around with them pretty much everywhere and are supposed to be the quintessential originalists these days, second only to Antonin Scalia.

This was the language Article the First was supposed to remedy. But as it stands, the constitution was ratified with this loophole specifying how many representatives we may not have, but not how many we should. As a consequence, when the light finally dawned on the dimwits in Congress in the 1920s that they could fix representation at the then current 435, they set up for themselves quite the little oligarchy of power, influence and corruption, and representation ceased to expand ever since. And along with that expanded our discontent.

That's why your congressmen doesn't know your name nor the name of the other 728,000 average constituents in his district. Nor does he care to. The only name in his Rolodex (sorry, I'm dating myself) is the Club for Growth or some such "org".

It's also why we have the other problems Trende mentions: malapportionment as in Montana, gerrymandering of the most unnatural sort just about everywhere, underrepresented minority enclaves and rural areas, and the expensive bought and paid for campaigns which depend on mostly outside money.

Trende mentions the British House of Commons has more representatives than we do, but the irony that they are better represented than we are never dawns on him. Nor does Trende mention New Hampshire. They have 400 in their House, a ratio of 1:3300.

America should be more like New Hampshire.  

Total Household Net Worth Rises About 3.5% In Real Terms Since April 2007 Through The Last Quarter Of 2013

I used all items CPI of about 13.17% from April 2007 to date, not seasonally adjusted, on April 2007 peak household net worth of $68.82486 trillion.

This yields $77.889 trillion to record date in Q4 2013, meaning the current dollar figure of $80.66 trillion of household net worth represents a real gain, that is an inflation adjusted gain, of about 3.5% in household net worth since April 2007, over six years ago. That's not really saying very much.

The Fed is cited here as saying the vast majority of the increase in household net worth is attributable to rising stock prices, which rose in value by a factor of 2.4 times the rise of housing values, owing to the nearly 30% rise in the stock market in 2013:

The Fed said household net worth rose 14 percent in the full year, driven by a $5.6 trillion rise in the value of shares and a $2.3 trillion increase in the value of real estate.

Using the Wilshire 5000, total stock market capitalization increased $5.65 trillion in nominal terms in 2013. But a mere 20% correction to today's market would wipe out over $4.8 trillion in an instant, and a 40% crash would annihilate over $9.5 trillion.

Housing prices overall have reached a valuation nearly 20% above the long term mean level, which means to some that we are in a reinflated housing bubble. The Case Shiller Home Price Index is up almost 10% just in the last year. The high end of normal on the index used to be 140. Today we are in excess of 150. So reversion to the mean could easily wipe out the $2.3 trillion increase from 2013, and then quite a bit more.

The real increase in net worth may be nothing more than a Fed induced mirage based on artifically cheap money and grotesquely punitive rates of return on same which encourage speculation in asset classes like stocks and real estate.

Wise men know what wicked things are written on the skies.

Among Other Things Henry Kissinger Reminds Us That The EU Shares Much Of The Blame For The Ukraine Fiasco

Here in The Washington Post, after which he admonishes the neocons that Ukraine must not become a part of NATO and posits other principles to defuse the situation:

The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities.

Say what you will about Henry Kissinger, but he was a Secretary of State of the highest caliber and remains a statesman we should listen to, unlike the Hillary Clintons of the world who go shooting off their mouths in the teeth of a crisis comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler.

If anyone should never be president it's Hillary Clinton. At least Democrats got that right in 2008. Ambassador Christopher Stevens is proof enough of that.

Jeb Bush Still Has A Flip-Flop Problem: "I Used To Be A Conservative"

Jeb Bush, quoted here in February 2012:

"I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are," said the former Florida Governor. "I think it changes when we get to the general election. I hope."

---------------------------------------------------

How can you "used to be" something but say you haven't changed?

Easy: the same way you can be for a pathway to citizenship and then be against it and claim you haven't flip-flopped:

"Where the hell was this Jeb Bush during the campaign?" the [Romney] advisor said. "He spent all this time criticizing Romney and it turns out he has basically the same position. So he wants people to go back to their country and apply for citizenship? Well, that's self deportation. We got creamed for talking about that. And now Jeb is saying the same thing."

Liberal Republicans: making suckers of conservatives since . . . well, forever!

Crimean Regional Parliament Votes Unanimously To Join The Russian Federation

So reports the BBC here (you wouldn't know it was unanimous from US news stories):

11:27: To recap:

• Members of Crimea's regional parliament have voted unanimously to make Crimea part of Russia
• The plan will be put to a referendum on 16 March, when the majority Russian-speaking population is expected to approve it
• The parliament does not officially have power to do this, but the peninsula is still in effect under Russian control
• An advisor to the Russian government has told the BBC the Kremlin is unlikely to stand in the way of a referendum