Hey Rush you lazy, mouth-flapping idiot: the French Muslim bike cop was armed and fired at the terrorists before they offed him

So says the BBC here.

Rush Limbaugh used the incident to say all French cops are unarmed because France is a sadly misguided liberal country.

Dumb shit.

nous sommes des idiots!

Charlie Hebdo's Coco, who let the terrorists in, doesn't think too highly of the proponents of traditional morality

Here Coco imagines the anti-same sex marriage activist Frigide Barjot and the conservative Christian politician Christine Boutin in France with an unholy and dirty dilemma in June 2013 when French conservatives had just marched in Paris against the recent legalization of same sex marriage.

Conservatives in the United States who say "I am Charlie Hebdo" are ignoramuses.

Charlie Hebdo's Jewish connection: Is "Hebe Dough" behind the controversial Muslim-baiting cartoons?

Have the Jews brought the terror upon France as much as the leftists did who brought in all the Muslims in the first place?

The anti-Semitic terrorist incident at the Paris kosher shop by a member of the same terrorist cell which attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ("Charlie Weekly") should have been a clue.

The whole affair, including the attack on Charlie Hebdo, was primarily an anti-Semitic affair, but no ordinary anti-Semitic affair brought to you by a good ole' 'Murican bubba wearing a white sheet. No, it appears this was strictly an internecine battle between fellow Semites. 

In the comments section to a post at Takimag here one wag mocks Charlie Hebdo for its far-left pro-Israeli support backed by "Hebe Dough".

Does that stand up to scrutiny?

At least two of the victims at Charlie Hebdo were Jewish: Elsa Cayat, 54, and Georges Wolinski, 80. (The terrorists left all the women alive, except the Jewess).

Wolinski, who goes all the way back to the very beginning of the paper in 1960, had helped resurrect the defunct publication in its current form in 1992 with the help of a strongly pro-Israel figure named Philippe Val. It was Val who had authorized the republication of the controversial Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2005 and who also fired an allegedly anti-Semitic contributor in 2008, the noteworthy cartoonist Maurice Sinet. Val also had published controversial value judgments about the Palestinians. In addition, one of Wolinski's co-workers at Hara-Kiri, the predecessor to Charlie Hebdo, was the Polish-Jewish novelist Roland Topor.

Whatever else comes out about the decidedly pro-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, atheistic, anti-religious, morally offensive and far-leftist character of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo in the coming weeks and months, one thing is for sure: CHARLIE HEBDO COULDN'T CARE LESS ABOUT FREEDOM OF SPEECH, in France or anywhere else.

Conservatives in America should take note: Philippe Val and the late editor Charb had tried unsuccessfully in 1996 to get the political party of Marine LePen, Front National, outlawed, one of the only political parties in Europe with the guts to stand consistently against the invasion of Europe by Muslim populations.

So-called conservatives in the United States standing in solidarity today or anyday with this bunch of lunatics, perverts and malcontents are as crazy as Charlie Hebdo is.

Ron Paul, delusional as ever, says global war on terror is a lie, champions free-trade and ignores the illegal immigrant invasion

Charlie Hebdo massacre scene: Just lies to Ron Paul!

At, where else?, Zero Hedge, here, in a speech long enough for Fidel Castro to give:

"With cradle-to-grave welfare protecting all citizens from any mistakes and a perpetual global war on terrorism, which a majority of Americans were convinced was absolutely necessary for our survival, our security and prosperity has been sacrificed.

"It was all based on lies and ignorance."

Libertarians will never boldly go where no man has gone before

That's because they'll be retreating underground to their inner planet "Galt".

Libertarians hate the original Star Trek on television for some reason, more than any other show (the riveting "24" also does poorly with them). Who knew?

The story is here.

Except that libertarian Justin Amash likes to imagine Thomas Massie is his X-Wing Starfighter wingman in the Rebel Alliance. He said so with a Lego toy a year ago.

Maybe it's time to raise the qualification age to run for Congress? 

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 are UP 0.5% from September

Persons taking food stamps in October 2014 number 46,674,364. This is up 0.5% from September.

But compared to October 2013 persons taking food stamps are down 1.6%.

If the economy is improving the number should be going down, shouldn't it?

Liberalism simply caved in fear at the front door to Charlie Hebdo, bringing death to its followers

A happy and especially healthy New Year!

When push comes to shove, certain things, like your own flesh and blood, become more important than the cause of liberalism. It's what they do that counts, not what they say.

Corinne "CoCo" Rey, quoted here:

Eleven-thirty am, in Paris. Corinne Rey, known as Coco, a cartoonist who works for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, had just picked up her daughter from a nearby creche. “When I got to the front door of the magazine’s building with her, two masked and armed men threatened us – violently,” she said. “They wanted to get inside, go upstairs. I tapped in the entrance code … They spoke perfect French. They said they were from al-Qaida.”

Surviving "innocents" at Charlie Hebdo say they vomit on all their new supporters!

Liberalism believes in nothing!

Quoted here:

“We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh,” Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published today.

France’s far-right National Front leader “Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place,” said Willem, 73, a long-time Paris resident who also draws for the French leftist daily Liberation.

He added: “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Free ice cream for everyone, too!

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

What do liberals and libertarians have most in common this week?

The almost giddy pleasure they take in ridicule of religious founders and their followers.

That this ridicule of religion has animated liberalism for a long time in America is a given. Just ask any devout Christian, if you can still find one, how Serrano's Piss Christ made him feel.

But conservatives, on the other hand, have always believed above all in self-restraint, without which there cannot be any such thing called limited government. As Oswald Spengler reminded us in the 1930s but everyone seems to have long since forgotten, Christianity is renunciation and nothing else. The exploding ignorance of this knowledge had already gone hand in hand with the development of totalitarian forms of government in Spengler's own time, and has only gotten worse since. The world is now dominated as a consequence by two forms of fascism which ended up winning against communism, one of the left and one of the right: the one is in China and the other in the United States. The reason? Fascism is more successful at production and consumption than communism, which is all there is to materialist philosophers. To them self-restraint is as much of an enemy as it was an opiate to Marx. 

The most uncomfortable example of self-restraint for our own time has been self-censorship, which is nothing more than the recognition of the existence of the evil inclination inside of every human being, a recognition only made possible by an openness to a moral vision of the universe. That moral vision says that that evil inclination must be restrained by the free choice of the self if civilized society is to survive. But our supposed political allies today in conservatism and libertarianism want nothing to do with that. They have together more in common with liberalism than with the transcendent world of which I am writing. 

Self-censorship in fact used to be seen as a virtue in America, when it was a more religiously informed country. "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil", said the founder of our religion. The idea was to live and let live because the evil and the good had to grow up together until the harvest. Otherwise the wheat would be lost with the tares. Accordingly, to be wise meant often to hold your tongue and keep your peace, even when you knew you were right, and to forgo arguments especially over religion because you were free to go to your church or to no church at all, and I was free to go to mine. "Strive for peace with all men", said another of our authorities. If Christians have been given their own form of jihad, that has been it, but they have failed miserably at it.

It must be stated plainly, nothing distinguishes what is different about Islam from us more than its opposition to peaceful coexistence, however poorly we have lived up to our own ideals. Islam means submission to its law, its prophet and its God. A Muslim is "one who submits". Peace only exists between the two of us when we submit to them. Which is why it follows that inviting Muslims into Christian countries is a recipe for conflict.

All around us this week so-called conservatives are urging us to join them in unloading a barrage of invective against Islam's founder, Muhammad. They do not want to live in peace. They want a war, which threatens to destroy us all.

Here's Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media:

"Were I (per impossible) editor of The New York Times, I would run those cartoons of Mohammed on the front page of the paper every day for a month." 

Here's Ralph Peters at Fox News:

"Even if those terrorists are tracked down and killed - and I hope they are killed and die miserably - the end result of this is going to be we're going to continue to self-censor."

"The correct response to this attack, by all of us in journalism ... if we had guts, those cartoons would be reprinted on the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times tomorrow. They won't be."

And here's a local libertarian in Michigan, one Steve Gruber:

It was blood thirsty little pieces of crap-spawned from the repugnant womb of modern Islam that murdered a dozen innocents inside an office for a French satirical magazine. Screaming glory be to Allah while executing 10 staff members and two police officers the vile nature of modern Islam was on display for all to see once again. Why did they attack the magazine? Because the magazine routinely skewered just about anyone and everyone and had the courage to publish cartoons making fun of Mohammed. Well too damn bad. ... In the spirit of America let me say to hell with Mohammed and any of his followers if they think it proper to murder cartoonists or anyone else in the name of Allah.

What these individuals, were they conservatives, should be calling for is separation, keeping Muslims at a distance from Christian civilization, because the two are fundamentally not reconcilable until Muslims undergo a reformation of their own which renounces the inspiration of Koranic surahs legitimating violence against infidels. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before that happens because the so-called conservatives cannot see that the so-called innocents were anything but. They were as much the enemies of what made the West the West as the Muslims are.

Instead all that these ideologues of ours offer is ridicule of Islam, but from the safe distance of an increasingly less intact West. They call this courage, but shrink from what real courage requires: The courage that doesn't need to justify itself in the face of mortal danger, but which freely and quickly acts to excise the cancer and banish it, as well as abolish the tenuous economic cords made of petroleum from which it profits. Libertarian devotion to first principles of freedom of movement, trade and the like all work together to sabotage this doctor from performing the necessary surgery. All they can do is insult, and retreat to the safety of the drone war against an implacable enemy, ala John Galt.

Having grown up in a Christian denomination which held very dim views of everyone else's religion but was convinced everyone else was worth converting to our way of thinking because Christ died for them too, I find the overt lack of charity toward a whole religion and its founder a sign of profound decadence in our own civilization, criminal acts by religious fanatics notwithstanding.

We have to live together in the same world, but it were better if we grew in separate gardens to the extent that that is possible. The only constructive policy with Islam going forward is utter disengagement with its worst elements, and repression of those when called for, such as now in Yemen. Unfortunately for the West, this means withdrawing from Muslim lands, especially Arabia, and actively choosing to promote independence in energy to the extent that whether Islam reforms or does not reform, we can live without them and prevent them from harming others.

We cannot continue to serve God and mammon. Otherwise we are no different than them.

Rate of wage growth slows by almost 44% year over year 2014 vs. 2013

Not-seasonally-adjusted, the average hourly earnings of all employees grew by 1.88% between December 2012 and December 2013, to $24.30 from $23.85.

For the latest similar period ending in December 2014, average hourly earnings grew by 1.06%, a decline in the rate of growth of almost 44%, to $24.56.

This is pretty surprising given the enormous gains made by the stocks of corporations in 2013, up nearly 30%, and in 2014, up 11%.

Obviously the gains are accruing to the stockholders, not the workers who are viewed as a cost, not an asset.

Are full-time jobs up 427,000 or down 47,000 in December?

Not-seasonally-adjusted full-time is in red.

The latest Employment Situation Report for December 2014 shows full-time jobs either up 427,000 in the seasonally-adjusted measure, or down 47,000 in the not-seasonally-adjusted measure, both from the respective November levels.

Which to believe?

Since 1968 the not-seasonally-adjusted count of full-time jobs between November and December has gone down 33 times vs. 13 times going up, with one year flat (1992). This is consistent with the historical record of cyclicality in full-time vs. part-time.

Full-time typically peaks in the summers and troughs in the winters while part-time does the opposite. Full-time tends to peak in the summers with work related to seasonal and student employment, while part-time tends to peak in the winters with holiday additions to the workforce.  Therefore it is consistent with this pattern to expect part-time jobs to be peaking right now (they already did last month) and full-time to be near its lowest point in the current cycle, which usually happens in January, for which measure we will have to wait another month.

So full-time down 47,000 is obviously more in keeping with the generally expected pattern than the seasonally-adjusted figure.

It is noteworthy, however, how low that negative full-time figure is relative to the recent past and to the historical average.

The 30-year average of the subtractions to full-time between November and December (excluding the outlier years in 2007, 2008 and 2009 when employers panicked and fired 1.4 million on average, 1.7 million on average in 2008 and 2009 alone) is a subtraction of nearly 244,000 full-time jobs.  Add to that that we haven't had this low a subtraction since the year 2000 between November and December and you get the feeling that things are indeed improving.

Unfortunately what we don't see yet is the kind of addition to the full-time rolls which occurs rarely at this time of year and typically after recessions. The last time we saw this in the November-December data was in 2005, 2004 and 2003 when we had three back to back years of full-time gains averaging 290,000, well above the average gain for the 13 up years of 145,000.

What we'd like to see right now, but don't, is a similar strong recovery of full-time after a recession like we've seen in the past.

For example, after the recession of 1970, full-time recovered between November and December of both 1971 and 1972, adding an average of 105,000 full-time jobs for those two months. Similarly after the recession of 1974, full-time jobs recovered for three straight years, averaging an addition of 195,000 full-time jobs between November and December of 1975, 1976 and 1977. And of course after the recession of 2001 we've already pointed out the three years of November-December additions to full-time averaging 290,000, double the average.

Even the long drought of additions to full-time jobs at this time of year which began in 1978 and lasted through 1992 was broken for two back-to-back years in 1986 and 1987 when an average of 66,000 full-time jobs were added between November and December. This was the rather delayed recovery of full-time after the recession of 1982, which cast a long shadow over employment much like the most recent recession has done.

As things stand, the current brutal drought of full-time additions at this time of year now stands at a record nine years, one more than the previous record posted between 1978 and 1985. The average subtraction to full-time then between November and December was 202,000. Now it has soared to 586,000 on average, almost 3x worse.

That's the scale of the trouble we've been in, and so far there's been no sign of leadership out of this mess, except that the pain right now is well-below its average level for this time of the year.

The simple fact remains that full-time is still far below its 2007 peak, no matter how you measure it.

On GDP Mish sounds just like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard five years ago

Here is Mish in 2015:

"Effectively we have borrowed current growth from the future. Looking ahead, growth surprises will be predominantly on the downside for years to come."

Here is Ambrose in 2010:

"Debt draws forward prosperity, which leads to powerful overhang effects that are not properly incorporated into Fed models. That is the key reason why Ben Bernanke’s Fed was caught flat-footed when the crisis hit, and kept misjudging it until the events started to spin out of control."

Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon who just makes stuff up about the two dead policemen at Charlie Hebdo

Here, doing his very best to misinform as usual, and making a fool of himself:

"The two cops who were shot, do you know how they arrived on the scene?  They rode their bicycles.  That's right.  They came pedaling up.  After hearing about this attack, and the cops are dispatched, the two who were shot showed up on bicycles."

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One of the two dead policemen was a body guard of one of the employees of the French satirical publication targeted by two Muslim fanatics. He was already in the office when he was gunned down. He wasn't outside on a bicycle.

If there were two officers of the municipal police on bicycles dispatched to the scene, obviously only one of them was shot, and the other escaped.

The intricacies of the French police force obviously don't interest Rush Limbaugh, either. He would rather ridicule and caricature the French police as mindless victims of liberalism who must do their jobs without being able to defend themselves, when the fact is municipal police are typically unarmed but can choose to carry if they wish. Nevertheless the municipal police, which are basically the traffic division in France but enforce the local laws at the behest of mayors, represent barely 7% of the police force in France.

The national police are all armed, and the militarized units especially so.

TARP ends, but conservatives still don't realize it was just a sideshow

Existing crisis loans 1st of the month in billion$

That TARP was just a sideshow was not known at the time in 2008, but it should be known by now.

Too bad conservatives haven't paid attention.

TARP assumed the role of the main actor on the stage of the financial panic as the liberal government of George W. Bush tried to show that it was capable of doing something to bring the panic of 2008 to an end. Bush at length signed the TARP legislation on October 3, 2008, at which point the stock markets promptly rewarded him by caving over the next three weeks, setting the stage for the final denouement by March 2009. Only Securities and Exchange Commission changes to mark-to-market accounting rules at that point stopped the cratering and put a floor under stock prices. Meanwhile behind the scenes the liberal government of Woodrow Wilson in the form of the Federal Reserve had already been hard at work for months frantically doing the real rescue.

Now that TARP is over, liberal political operatives are wont to characterize TARP as a success because it supposedly made a profit accruing to the government, and hence to The People, who are ever almighty in liberalism. They also say this to keep our eyes off the ball. "Conservatives" continue to take that bait and argue there was a loss to TARP, never examining themselves to see if they are in the larger truth. National Review's Matt Palumbo is just the latest example, here, quibbling over a few measly billions of dollar based on an argument from inflation to substantiate a loss to TARP.

It doesn't get much more pathetic than that.

TARP became the sideshow it always was once and for all when Bloomberg News, using the Freedom of Information Act, forced the Fed long after the fact in late 2010 and early 2011 to reveal the true scope of its bailout of the world in 2008-2009. Behind the scenes the rest of us had groped in the dark trying to fathom TARP's $700 billion bailout, when that turned out to be just a decimal point in the real bailout, the Fed's $7.7 trillion lending authority through the discount window and other programs.

"Conservatives" still haven't grasped this.

Over five million Americans lost their homes in the wake of the panic, almost 30 million ended up filing first time claims for unemployment in 2009 (85% more than did just last year), and almost eight years after the employment peak of 2007 full-time jobs still have not recovered, the most disgraceful record in the post-war.

The Federal Reserve bailed out hundreds upon hundreds of large banks and corporations not just in the United States but all across the globe by backstopping them with promises of huge sums if needed while regular Americans were simply left to fend for themselves:

$7.77 trillion -- The amount the Fed pledged to rescue the financial industry, according to Bloomberg research that examined announced, implied or actual upper limits on lending and guarantees. This number, which represents potential commitments, not money out the door, was first published in March 2009, when it peaked.

“One of the keys to understanding why we’ve avoided another Great Depression, so far, is to see how bold the Fed was in 2008 and 2009,” said Niall Ferguson, a Harvard University history professor. “That boldness consisted of a range of contingency commitments that backstopped the banking system. Just because they weren’t used doesn’t mean they weren’t important.”

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Actual loans at rock bottom prices over time amounted to about half that, at $3.3 trillion, as can be appreciated here in just one of the lending programs of the Fed, the famous discount window. The low interest rates charged there, a sideshow in themselves, are thought to have benefited the banks at the same time by about $13 billion, according to Bloomberg, over what they would have had to pay at market rates.

That was simply the cherry on the gargantuan crony capitalism cake, an object, I am sure, of singular fascination for the likes of the Matt Palumbos of the world.

That spike in the graph is the discount window lending in the 2008 panic

John Early's model predicts 4Q2014 GDP between -1.2% and +1.4%

See John Early's "5 Reasons GDP Growth in Q4 May be 0%" at Seeking Alpha, here.

The House has a Boehner again

Top 10 investing years for subsequent 10 year returns since 1965 to date

1988: 18.80% nominal per annum average from the S&P500 12/'88-12/'98

1987: 18.15%

1989: 17.99%

1990: 17.57%

1979: 17.27%

1981: 16.53%

1982: 16.16%

1978: 16.14%

1977: 15.02%

1985: 14.98%

These years have an average total S&P500 market capitalization to GDP (in trillions) ratio of 48.

The ratio at the end of 3Q2014 was 112, which historically produces 10 year returns averaging about 3.24% nominal.

Rush Limbaugh is back for 2015 and he's dumber than ever, just like Zero Hedge

Here:

And the second thing I saw was the economy is growing at this 5% rate.  By the way, do you know how that happened, folks?  Do you know what the bulk of the economic growth -- I mean, what is the economy?  The economy is consumer spending, essentially, consumer spending and consumption, commerce.  You know what the majority of spending was in the fourth quarter was people spending money on Obamacare, mandated by law.  The vast majority of our economic growth -- this was made public by Tyler Durden at -- I forget the website.  It's off the top of my head.  Well-known business website.  Over half of the spending in this country in the fourth quarter was you and me and everybody else spending money on health care. ... Well, some economic growth, when over half of it is essentially required by the government? 

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Aside from the fact that the quarter in question is stated in error as the fourth, the idea that "the majority of spending . . . was people spending money on Obamacare" is ludicrous.

Line 17 in the snapshot above from the GDP report shows that 3Q2014 healthcare spending was $2.0089 trillion. Line 2 shows the total of all personal spending at $12.002 trillion. Healthcare spending thus represented just 16.7% of that in 3Q. And that percentage is identical to the percentage spent also on healthcare in 2013. Healthcare spending is not anywhere near "over half of the spending in this country in the fourth [sic] quarter".

ObamaCare hasn't suddenly driven up healthcare spending in 2014 at all. Maybe after the fourth quarter is over and we get the final number for that in March 2015 we will be able to say that Obamacare has driven up healthcare spending overall, but so far we cannot say that. So far such increases have been born by too small a percentage of the adult population to show up in the data.

What we can say is that so far healthcare spending is growing at a pace slightly behind the pace of the overall economy, which grew at 4.96% annualized in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew at a slightly less robust 4.6% rate.

It is likewise incorrect to say as Rush Limbaugh says that healthcare spending accounts for "the bulk of the economic growth" in 3Q. Healthcare spending grew $88.6 billion in 3Q2014 from 2013, which represents just 10.65% of the $831.7 billion overall increase in GDP over 2013 in the latest report. Over 89% of the increased growth thus came from other categories.

Conservatism is not about fighting lies with more lies.