Food stamp recipient level declines again in September 2014

Those receiving food stamps in September 2014 declined to 46,459,998 according to Friday's report.

The decline is a statistically insignificant 17,000, but year over year the level is 1.8% lower than the 47.3 million who then received food assistance.

The peak month for food stamp recipients was December 2012 when 47,792,056 received assistance. The level has since declined from there by 2.8%.

Carnage in Commodities: Gold/Oil Ratio soars to 18.08

Gold continues to lose ground to plunging oil prices, making oil the preferred investment of the two, if you had to chose between them. Gold would have to plunge to 987.60 to restore the ratio to parity of 15 at the current price of oil, 65.84, or 17%.

Gold is presently about 200 off its 2014 high of 1385 (London fix), about 14%, while West Texas Intermediate Crude is down over 35% from its June close at 102.07.

The surging dollar in 2014 has been deflationary for commodities. Closing as low as 79.09 in early May, .DXY closed yesterday at 89.36, up almost 13% in just seven months.

Behind that no doubt has been the Yellen Federal Reserve's commitment to end QE, which it did in October, and the continued Republican stranglehold on spendthrift liberalism, creating positive fiscal conditions liked by markets. Federal revenues are at an all time high of $2.775 trillion in fiscal 2013 while outlays remain stabilized at about $3.5 trillion for each of the last five fiscal years in a row. At $3.4 trillion in fiscal 2013, the often ugly dance between a Republican House and a Democrat Senate and Executive has meant that federal spending has risen only 2.75% in nominal terms for each fiscal year since the 2008 baseline. The S&P500 is up over 12% year-to-date on top of last year's stellar 32% gain.

The permanency of the Bush tax cuts and the AMT fix which heralded in the new year in 2013 continue to work their magic in combination with the stronger dollar and Washington gridlock, for which neither John Boehner nor Barack Obama will ever get their due.

What a country.

The New Republic fired Tim Noah over a year and a half ago: the canary in the coal mine?

Tim Noah, as true a liberal as you'll ever find, has since landed at Politico, which tells you a lot about one Chris Hughes, the new owner of TNR since 2012. Evidently Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, couldn't abide the likes of Tim Noah.

Noah was fired under the new Hughes ownership already in early 2013. And now in late 2014 it appears the top editor and the veteran literary editor also have been forced out, and in protest more than two dozen additional editors and staffers have quit the magazine, which celebrates its centenary this year. The former employees have met instead to conduct the magazine's funeral.

The damn thing has literally blown up. Leave it to a 31-year old rich kid to wreck something so storied.

Politico reports here.

Leftist UK Guardian means to slam USA as fading empire in headline, backtracks in actual article to slam empire of NASA

Well, what would you expect from a has-been empire which still isn't over its eclipse by the USA? They should have figured out how to keep us while they still could, but their hubris got in the way. Terribly sorry, old boy.

Here:

The Empire, of course, is Nasa, a once noble but now creaky agency that has devolved from moonshots to renting rides from the Russians, all in the span of Buzz Aldren’s adulthood.
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Hey commies! Learn how to capitalize. It's called NASA. And what exactly is notable in the history of British spaceflight, anyway?

Hm. Is there something called British spaceflight?

Usually part-time vaults 465,000 in one month to new all-time high of 28.225 million

Those who work usually part-time vaulted 465,000 month over month, not-seasonally-adjusted, in today's Household Survey data in the Employment Situation Summary for November 2014. That puts the metric at an all-time high of 28,225,000, about 100,000 higher than the previous peak reached in the wake of the late economic depression.

Meanwhile, those who work usually full-time dropped 735,000 from October to November.

Full-time usually peaks in the summer and part-time usually peaks in the winter, so the data coheres with past experience, except the new high in part-time is a little worrisome.

Voluntary part-time is up big month over month (536,000) while involuntary part-time is down (74,000). Is that a sign of acquiescence to a new normal of part-time work? Admittedly, involuntary part-time is still 2.5 million higher than it was in the autumn of 2007, but it has fallen 2 million between 2011 and 2014 even as today there are 2.5 million more full-time jobs than there were a year ago.

Full-time remains 3.8 million under the 2007 peak.

Meanwhile multiple job holding is down 224,000 month over month, and the total employed is actually down 270,000, as is the total number unemployed, down 50,000 not-seasonally-adjusted.

It looks as if the big jump of 321,000 in total nonfarm from the Establishment Survey is a phenomenon of part-time. Whether these part-time jobs become an enduring phenomenon in the form of permanent jobs won't be clear until after the new year.

The unemployment rate at 5.8% remains where it is as those not in the labor force continues ever upward, this time 536,000 higher from October to November. The metric hovers near the all-time high of 92.5 million reached in April. People dropping out means fewer people to count as unemployed.

The civilian labor force shrank in size 319,000 from October to November.

Birth rate in 2013 reaches new all time low under Obama

The birth rate per 1000 women in 2006 and 2007 had been 14.3, but in 2011 it fell to 12.7 and then to 12.6 in 2012.

Things have gotten even worse in 2013: the birth rate per 1000 women is now barely 12.4, a new record low.

In the late 1950s the birth rate per 1000 women exceeded 25.0, and fell through the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing in the range of 15 for many years thereafter.

View the recent CDC reports here and here.

No babies, no GDP.

How bad is it?

h/t Steen Jakobsen, Chief Economist for Saxo Bank

WaPo's Robert Costa is nutty: says 2013 government shutdown damaged Republicans' reputation with voters despite historic Republican landslide in 2014

I kid you not. We always knew Costa's old home National Review was compromised in its conservatism, and Costa is proving it at WaPo.

Here:

"Boehner, who will hold a news conference Thursday to provide an update, finds himself in a familiar position one year after a 16-day shutdown damaged his party’s reputation with voters and led to fierce infighting over tactics among House GOP members. He is grappling with the many competing blocs in his caucus and is trying to build consensus in order to get the government funded, even for a short time."

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

The voters should be so upset with the Republicans all the time.

Jobless claims average 303,000 weekly in November, not-seasonally-adjusted

That rate is the annual equivalent of 15.8 million claims.

Not-seasonally-adjusted claims have now totaled 14.494 million in 2014 through the end of November, or 302,000 weekly on average.

If that average prevails through December, total claims will come in at about 15.7 million for 2014, lower than ever achieved under George Bush's best years in 2006 and 2007 when claims totaled 16.2 million and 16.7 million respectively, and the lowest so far in this century.

Obama Devotee And Vogue Editor Anna Wintour "Rehabilitates" Fag Designer John Galliano But UK Independent Never Mentions From What

Well not from homosexuality! but from Anti-Semitism, that's what:

On 8 September 2011, Galliano was found guilty of making anti-Semitic remarks and sentenced to pay a total of €6,000 in suspended fines after a French court found him guilty of giving public insults on account of race.

Anna Wintour, Editor, Vogue Magazine, is one of the top five fund raisers for Barack Obama and the Democrat Party:

Wintour is a prolific fundraiser for the president, and was rumored last year as a possible ambassador pick. According to the New York Times, she raised the fourth-most of any Obama bundler during the 2012 campaign. 

The uninformative story in the UK Independent is here.

Just 19 of 24,365 students in the Paterson, New Jersey, school district are ready for college

MY9NJ.com here doesn't tell you how many students are in that school district, only how many are ready for college.

"[T]his number is truly shocking considering how large the school district is" is all the story tells you.

The district has 24,365 students according to Wikipedia. Divide that by 13 grades for all the students in the district and you get 19 of 1,874 seniors ready for college, or barely over 1%.

Hey! The new 1%!

Feminists derailed infrastructure stimulus spending in 2009

The liberal projectionists who brought you the War on Women have been waging war on the men.

Seen here:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . suggests that the government invest heavily in infrastructure, which would create a lot of blue-collar jobs.

That was actually an original part of Barack Obama's stimulus plan, but it was derailed by feminists within the Obama coalition who thought it would produce too many jobs for men. Christina Romer, then-chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, reported: "The very first email I got ... was from a women's group saying 'We don't want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.' "

Enjoy the music here.

Grand Rapids, MI, 2014 total temperature anomaly through November is now -33 degrees F

That's an average monthly temperature of 3 degrees below normal for 11 months straight.

The month of November, during which we had a record 31 inches of snow, added 5.8 degrees F below normal temperature despite the warming at the end of the month which melted all the snow.

My first stop on Black Friday was . . .

. . . CLOSED! No wonder they're goin' under.

Ouch: March copper crashes through 2.88 to settle at 2.846

As recently as mid-October 2.88 had been considered support. Look out below.

ObamaCare's "wellness" mandate is under attack in the courts by the EEOC

Maybe this will wake up people to the injustice of taxing people for not buying something. Since when is a contract between buyer and seller still a valid contract when there is compulsion involved? "Hey buddy, buy this or else." That's not really buying anything. That's extortion. Similar compulsion in this case if recognized by the courts could be used as a precedent to overturn the individual mandate. Whoever thought George H. W. Bush's ADA would get us to that?

From the story here:

[R]equiring medical testing violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

That 1990 law, according to employment-law attorney Joseph Lazzarotti of Jackson Lewis P.C. in Morristown, N.J., largely prohibits requiring medical tests as part of employment.

"You can't make medical inquiries unless it's consistent with job-necessity, or part of a voluntary wellness program," he said.

The lawsuits are based on the view that it is no longer voluntary if employees face up to $4,000 in penalties for non-participation, loss of insurance or even their jobs.

Bonds still beat stocks over the last 15 years

"King Kong" 1933

Your average annual nominal return from the S&P500 with dividends fully reinvested comes to 4.61% from October 1999 through October 2014, per Ironman.

Your average annual nominal return from the Vanguard Intermediate Term Bond Index Fund (VBIIX) for the fifteen years to 11/28/14 has been 6.48%, per Morningstar.

That's a 40% better rate of return from bonds than stocks on average.

"Hey, what's this show about, anyway?

"I don't know — they say it's some big gorilla.

"Oh, geez — ain't we got enough of them in New York?"

Gold/Oil ratio vaults to 17.77

Gold just cannot fall fast enough to keep up with the decline in oil prices. As a consequence, oil remains the better investment relative to gold, but you'd be crazy to buy either in this environment, in my arrogant opinion. You might as well try to catch a falling knife, or two of them.

Oil is plunging on increased supply in tandem with flagging demand, which has been flat to barely rising in the US. Gold has been suffering price declines as the dollar ends trade close to its 52-week high of 88.44 at 88.22.

Hey Obama you dumbass: Everyone born in America is a native American!

Looks like Ferguson "eyewitnesses" lie about as much as Obama does

Reverend Astroturf

From a Breitbart story, here:

Still another witness told police he had “already told investigators from Saint Louis County Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he was not willing to formally discuss ... the incident, but he was willing to discuss his fears.” He said “threats… had been made to the residents of Canfield Green Apartment Complex. He said notes had been posted on various apartment buildings threatening people not to talk to the police, and gunshots were still being fired every night.” He said “there were at least 10 other people who were outside and saw exactly what happened. He was not willing to provide names of any of those individuals.” He said Wilson told Brown “no less than 10 times to get down” while they were both on the street. He said Brown never had hands raised. ...

At least 12 witnesses claimed that Brown was shot from behind, which was factually false. At least 16 witnesses said Brown’s hands were up when he was shot, which was factually false. One witness said Wilson used a Taser, then a gun: false. Another said she witnessed the events, but admitted she was blocks away when the events occurred. Still another witness said there were two officers involved in the shooting, and admitted she couldn’t tell what she’d seen and what she’d read about the case. One witness admitted in testimony to changing his story to “coincide with what really happened.” Another witness said that he was friends with Brown, and that Brown was shot while on his knees. When informed that such a story contradicted all physical evidence, the man admitted that he had not seen the shooting and then asked if he could leave because he was “uncomfortable.”