Total crap: CNBC/Reuters blaming the weather for another GDP miss

The story is here.

Just how bad was the winter? Out of 69 winters in the post-war 2015 ranked 22nd worst for heating degree days, and all Obama could manage is 0.1% nominal growth over the prior quarter, $6.3 billion. But 1959 came in 21st and somehow America under Eisenhower could manage 2.0% nominal growth q/q in winter. And 1964 ranked 23rd and somehow America managed 3.1% nominal growth under JFK in winter.

The winter of 2014 ranked 10th worst, and Obama gave us a pathetic nominal growth of -0.2%, yet in 1977 which ranked 9th worst winter in the post-war Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter!, gave us +2.6% nominal growth. The 12th worst winter was in 1962 and again JFK gave us 3.4% nominal growth.

The story is the same for 2010 and 2011, 33rd and 35th worst winters, which is to say, not very bad. These winters appear in the warmer half of the record. Obama gave us just 0.8% and 0.1% respectively, flanked by winters of like severity in 1972, 1951 and 1957 posting nominal growth of 3.4%, 6.3% and 2.2% respectively.

2013? Only the 42nd worst winter. But 1967 was worse and we got 2.4% nominal then, thanks to LBJ. Obama gave us 1.0%. And 1950? 43rd worst, but it clocked in with 3.7% nominal growth.

2012? The warmest winter in the record at 69th. So the weather argument should have meant economic growth had been absolutely stellar by comparison with everything going before it, right? Instead Obama gave us 1.1% nominal. Well, that IS Obama's best performance in winter, so maybe the heat helped a little. But 1990, which ranked 68th, witnessed 2.3% nominal growth under George H. W. Bush.

You see the pattern here? Obama "underperforms" everybody around him in similarly situated weather. But actually his numbers are so bad in winter it's like he's not even in the game.

Average Obama score in winter outside of recession: +0.5%.

Everybody else in the same boat: +3.1%.    

Without the Protestant reformers, the USA had never existed

“I love and revere the memories of Huss Wickliff Luther Calvin Zwinglius Melancton and all the other reformers how muchsoever I may differ from them all in many theological metaphysical & philosophical points. As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”

-- John Adams

What do you mean try finding one? Congress is full of the one type, and most of them are Republicans.

Nicholas Kristof, here:

'After all, American adults have, on average, one ovary and one testicle. But try finding such an “average person.”'

We don't have free trade WITHIN the United States: Companies in just 13 states get over 90% of $110 billion in government subsidies since the 1970s

We're talking over $100 billion of taxpayer money favoring companies, in descending order, in New York way ahead in first, then Washington, Louisiana, and Michigan rounding out the top four, Kentucky, Oregon, Indiana, Texas, New Jersey, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Mexico over every other company in those states and throughout the states.

View the report here, and the state by state map here. For a shorter period involving additional federal subsidies adding another $68 billion to the above total see this report at the same site.

Forbes Magazine is not amused, here:

According to Good Jobs First, there are 514 economic development programs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. More than 245,000 awards have been granted under those programs. I ask again, where is the outrage? The system is antithetical to the idea of free markets. A quarter of a million times, state governments decided what is best for producers and consumers. That should make us cringe. First, the government is inefficient at providing public goods, and it is terrible at manipulating the markets for private goods. But more importantly, those 514 economic development programs are almost all the result of insidious cronyism. Narrow business interests manipulate government policymakers, and those interests prosper to the detriment of everyone else. Free markets be damned.

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For the top four, think Wall Street, aircraft, oil and autos.

Highly secretive trade deal negotiations with Pacific "partners" no doubt reproduce sweeteners all around no different from what has been going on within our own country for a long time right underneath our noses.

The first step to curtailing this cronyism is to stop calling the one free trade and the other free-market capitalism. We have neither.

They ought to know: Most WOMEN think Hillary Clinton is dishonest and can't be trusted

"American voters say 54 - 38 percent that Hillary Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a lower score than top Republicans."

So says a recent poll taken by Quinnipiac University, reported here. 

The 10 Idiot Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General

The 10 Republicans who think being in the majority is a sin:

Ayotte (R-NH) oh yes she votes. just. like. a. woman.

Cochran (R-MS) senile old codger

Collins (R-ME) gender before party

Flake (R-AZ) aptly named

Graham (R-SC) McCain's errand boy

Hatch (R-UT) competing with Harry Reid for Mormon infamy

Johnson (R-WI) used to be the Tea Party's Senator! Go Feingold! Go Feingold! Go Feingold!

Kirk (R-IL) soon to be replaced by another disabled person of the same political party

McConnell (R-KY) recently had unsuccessful testicle transplant surgery

Portman (R-OH) has never had any testicles according to anonymous sources 

The roll call vote is here.  

What Richard Feynman might have said to today's climate cultists

''They follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential because the planes don't land warming never arrives.''

From the obituary, here.

Oh look! A GDP deer!

Liberals are trying to hide Obama's lousy winter GDP in a broader story about historical first quarter economic weakness.

A classic red herring maneuver designed to obscure the uniqueness of GDP weakness under Obama.

First it was CNBC here with "The Mysterious Case of Weak 1Q GDP, for 30 years!", and now it's The New York Times here with "Why You Can't Put Faith in Reports of First-Quarter Economic Slumps".

Consider these new pre-emptive first strikes designed to take the confidence out of opponents' sails when expected awful 1Q2015 GDP comes out next week. The weather argument used in the past is not going to fly this year simply because overall this last winter was pretty average, so another argument is being proposed which couches Obama's repeated first quarter failures in a broader context of perennially suspect first quarter GDP reports.

Oh look! Over there! A deer!

You wouldn't know from either of these stories that economic weakness in the first quarter under Obama has been uniquely weak. It doesn't matter if there is something seasonally different about the first quarter in general. What matters is that Obama can't even hit that.

Outside of recession Obama has had five first quarters with average nominal GDP change from the fourth quarter to the first of just 0.60%.

Forget the articles' fascination with the previous 30-year record. The 50 year record outside of recession going back to the years since 1946 shows that before Obama the average nominal GDP improvement from 4Q to 1Q was 2.3%.

Obama is underperforming that by 74%. His record is a complete outlier in the series, even compared to George W. Bush, who before Obama otherwise had the worst GDP record overall in the post-war. Bush's six first quarters outside of recession averaged 1.5%, 150% better than Obama. Add in the recession years and Bush still averaged 1.2%, 100% better than Obama in winter.

To make matters worse, five of the six quarters of Bush doing 150% better than Obama occurred in the warmer half of years in the 50 year series, when GDP naturally has run behind the GDP of the colder half of years. Include all eight first quarters for Bush when he did 100% better than Obama and seven of eight were in the warmer half of years when it's harder to post higher GDP, and the one was on the borderline of those warmer years. Obama by contrast in 2014 had the tenth coldest winter on record since 1946. That was actually an advantage to him for GDP because GDP in the colder half of winters has actually run 19% ahead of the warmer half. Instead Obama blamed his poor performance in 2014 on what was really to his advantage.  

Barack Obama's poor winter GDP record sticks out like a sore thumb, and no amount of excuse-making can change that fact.

Winter GDP under Obama has underperformed everyone who came before him for 50 years by 74%

There's nothing wrong with GDP that a change of leadership at the top couldn't fix. I'll bet Caligula's favored horse Incitatus, whom the crazed Roman emperor wanted to install in the consulship, could have done better, that's how bad Obama has performed.

To date we've had five first quarters outside of recession under Obama and the average nominal GDP addition in the first quarter from the preceding fourth quarter has been just +0.60%. From coldest to warmest here the five are: 2014 (-0.20%), 2010 (+0.80%), 2011 (+0.1%), 2013 (+1.00%), 2012 (+1.1%). Incidentally, 2014 was the 10th coldest first quarter since 1946, but 2012 was the hottest, and Obama still couldn't pull out a decent performance from that advantage.

It's not the fault of the weather. It's Obama.

GDP measured in exactly the same way before Obama and going back to 1947 has averaged +2.3% in the first quarter, which means that under Obama GDP has lagged the average by 73.9%. In fact, Obama's record in winter is so bad that he's pulled down the long-term average by 0.2 from 2.3% to 2.1%.

But wait, it gets worse.

America actually posts better GDP when winters are colder, and poorer GDP when they are warmer.

The twelve warmest winters since 1946 have added just 1.5% to nominal GDP on average, but the twelve coldest added an average 2.7%.

For a president, and economists, to blame cold weather for poor economic performance shows a level of ignorance and intellectual laziness which is shameful.

America can do much better than Obama, and it will. 

Scott Walker receives the kiss of death . . .

. . . the endorsement of the Koch brothers.

That conservatism stuff is just for show. The real Scott Walker is a libertarian.

Story here.

Hey global warming frauds: FBI admits bogus science reigned supreme for decades at hair comparison unit and in courts

And you climate fraudsters will be the next to be exposed.

From the story here:

"The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989."

Kathy Shaidle: You can't bomb people back to the Stone Age who never left it

Here:

So after we bombed the crap out of them (although not enough in Germany’s case to suit me), at least some survivors retained memories of their culture’s rational past, all the better to reconstruct or even surpass it. (With an infusion of American billions, that is.)

Today’s Muslim belligerents either have no such past, or are busily trying to eradicate any trace of it. When we bother destroying their strongholds, who can even tell? You can’t bomb people back to the Stone Age if they never left. And in any case, this time we reinstituted the Marshall Plan before we half wiped them out—a fatally ass-backwards move.

Hey Obama! You're embarrassed by the process? You're an embarrassment to the constitution!

Video here:

"And I have to say that there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it. It's gone too far. Enough. Enough. Call Loretta Lynch for a vote. Get her confirmed. Put her in place, let her do her job. This is embarrassing, a process like this. Thank you."

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[The President] shall nominate, and, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. -- Article II, Section 2

Are bankrupt people who commit crimes absolved of them because they were bankrupt?

Then why should GM get off for killing over 80 people?

If corporations are people who have free speech rights just like everyone else, they have personal liability when they break the law, bankrupt or not.

Poor people go to jail all the time, but rich, well-connected corporations do not. How convenient.

Hillary the cheapskate: stiffs on the tip at Chipotle

"Well, that's what you get when you don't recognize me you morons!" (note: this is not a real quote)

Bankruptcy judge lets GM off the hook for 80 deaths

Here's the lede from the story:

A federal judge handed General Motors a multi-billion-dollar reprieve Wednesday, ruling that the company could not be sued in hundreds of death and injury claims related to the defective ignition switches that are estimated to have killed more than 80 people.

According to [retiring] Judge Robert Gerber, GM’s government-overseen bankruptcy and reorganization in 2009 shields it from liability for actions the company had made previously, despite claims by the families of people injured or killed by the ignitions that GM had been misleading the court at that time about the ignition-switch woes in older, smaller cars.

Read the rest here.

Marco Rubio joins the gay normalization crowd

Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood

So says Camille Paglia, here.

Hillary and State both stonewalled the House Committee on Oversight about her private email already in December 2012

Hillary Clinton knew well in advance that what she was doing in shielding her email was wrong and likely to get her into trouble, which is why she subsequently destroyed the evidence, obstructing justice. Hillary makes Richard Nixon look like a piker in comparison to the scope of her crimes.

The New York Times reports here that she and the State Dept. deliberately did not respond to the House's inquiries about whether she used private email for government business while she was still Secretary of State in December 2012:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”

Marco Rubio is just another liberal

Marco Rubio, quoted here, wouldn't recognize conservatism if it bit him in the ass:

"[O]ur country has always been about the future and before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. But we can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them.”

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How about going back to the American founders for inspiration? Can't do that.

How about going back to the constitution? Can't do that.

How about the anti-Federalists? or the Bible? or Shakespeare? Can't do that.

Did changing the people in charge make a difference between 2000 and 2008? How about after 2008?

Change is the mantra of liberalism, and belief in the essential superiority of a certain kind of person its fatal conceit.