Sunday Round Up
Filed under: Culture of Corruption, Media Bias, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics, When democrats attack
Here is collection of interesting items I put in my “blog about” file but didn’t get to.
Let’s lead off with some Blue on Blue media attacks. George Soros’ bought and paid for thugs at Media Matters attacked the uber-liberal reporters at NPR for committing an act of Journalism. Chana Joffe-Walt did a story on that covered the fraud and corruption in the federal disability program on Chicago’s Public Radio This American Life and National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered. Ms. Joffe-Walt apparently forgot about the memo that said that all news stories must praise our Dear Leader and blame Republicans.
Jon Stewart, a fairly reliable talking head for the extreme far hard left agenda, ripped in our Dear Leader for basic incompetence on his handling of the obscenely long backlog at the Veterans Administration. Gee, it’s almost as if Obama sees US military veterans as his enemy and is trying to kill them off.
Obamacare’s PR Problem: Not Just a Flesh Wound
Megan McCardle points out an annoying fact that leftists don’t like: The Aaron Sorkin Model of Political Discourse Doesn’t Actually Work
Democrat congressman Stephen Lynch on Benghazi Talking Points: ‘It Was Scrubbed … It Was False Information. There’s No Excuse For That.’ Yup, the Obama regime flat out lied the American people for the purpose of ”damage control” prior to the election. This really does call for hearings.
Chicago Law Prof on Obama: “The Professors Hated Him because he was Lazy, Unqualified & Never Attended any of the Faculty Meetings” Hmmm…doesn’t sound like his work habits changed much.
The Hypocrisy of the Left Knows No Bounds
Filed under: Barking Moonbats, Our Dear Leader, Politics, RKBA
I saw a leftist ranting on Facebook ranting because a firearm retailer was raffling off a semi-automatic rifle.
Now he called this popular firearm an “assault rifle.” The leftist in question is actually fairly intelligent and well educated. Calling a semi-automatic rifle an “assault rifle” is a sign of ignorance or a deliberate lie committed to create confusion in order to promote an extremist anti-civil rights political agenda. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion in this case.
The same leftist is still ranting about the murders committed in Newtown, committed by a mentally ill adult who violated multiple existing laws in order to obtain firearms he couldn’t obtain legally. When asked about the over three hundred Mexicans killed by semi-automatic rifles supplied to Mexican drug cartels by President Obama’s “Fast & Furious” illegal gun running program, he responded that he “didn’t care.” He also doesn’t care that as many children are killed in drug gang related firearm violence in Chicago every year as were slain in Newtown. Is it because the children in Newtown were mostly White, while the three hundred Mexicans were mostly had brown colored skin and the children in Chicago had mostly black colored skin? Given the left’s history of institutional racism, it would not be surprising. It could also be that his so called “outrage” is politically motivated. Over three hundred Mexicans murdered by Obama’s illegal gun running program or dozens of children killed in Obama’s home town of Chicago doesn’t promote his far left extremist agenda. So he ignores them and repeats leftist talking points instead of engaging in rational debate. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion in this case.
Quote of the Day: Noam Chomsky Edition
“I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don’t seem easy to explain.”
– Thus saith uber-leftist Noam Chomsky
Academic Chomsky is getting a lesson in RealPolitik, where the maxim “Scratch a liberal and you’ll find a fascist” is the norm, and not the exception.
Let Us Examine the Obama Economy Once Again
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
The GDP growth rate is out for Q1 2013, and at 2.5%, it is a nice improvement over Q4 2012′s 0.4% rate, which was revised up from the original estimate of -0.1%. It’s also lower than the 3% growth the Keynesian economists the Obama regime is strangely still paying attention to, predicted.
It’s not all good news for the worst recovery since the Great Depression, as this CNBC article points out.
A full percentage point of that 2.5% growth was a one time effect of the farming industry recovering from a drought. So the real growth rate was an anemic 1.5%
Household incomes also dropped at a 5.3 percent rate in the first quarter of 2013, and the saving rate – the percentage of disposable income households are socking away – fell to 2.6 percent, the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2007.
Neither of those last two items are a good sign for increases in consumer spending, which is going to get worse, as federal taxes go up, as well as local taxes. The tax burden will be worse in the so-called “Blue” states as their expensive social programs continue to overwhelm their budgets, and their revenue generating working classes flee for states with less oppressive taxes on anyone moderately successful.
The only bright point was that the official government inflation rate was only 0.9%. That is good for tax paying consumers, but is another missed milestone of the Obama Economic Team. They want at least 2%.
Let’s look at the numbers again…
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
The March unemployment numbers are out and the federal U3 number dropped from 7.7% in February to 7.6%. That should be good news, still over two points over what our Dear Leader promised us we would have if we passed his massive porkulus act, but still moving in the in right direction.
So why did the architect of the Obama economic plan, Austan Goolsbee, call the March unemployment numbers a “punch to the gut”?
To answer that,we need to look at some more numbers. Like the number of jobs the Federal BLS says were added in March, which is 88,000. Since you have been paying attention, you know that the US economy needs to generate at least 120,000 new jobs a month just to break even. So how did the U3 rate drop a tenth of a percent when we missed the break even point by over 33,000 jobs? The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates the U3 (and 5 other “U” rates) rate as a percentage of the labor force. While the BLS added 88,000 jobs, it dropped 630,000 workers from the labor force. That gives us a net loss of over a half million workers from the US economy in March 2013. Just what would the Federal BLS U3 number be if those 630,000 Americans were still counted in the labor force? One estimate has it at 11.7%. That is Carter era employment numbers. It shouldn’t be surprising that Obama’s Worst Recovery since the Great Depression is catching up with the Worst Recession since the Great Depression.
Not a shining moment for the Obama regime and it’s Keynesian economy policies. Not enough for them to give up on those failed policies though. For the left, their political agenda always trumps the truth.
Quote of the Day
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
“Very few people know, for example, that the gap between black and white incomes narrowed during the Reagan administration and widened during the Obama administration. This was not because of Republican policies designed specifically for blacks, but because the free market policies create an economy in which all people can improve their economic situation.”
– Thomas Sowell
Sometimes the truth will slip out of a leftist’s mouth
Filed under: Barking Moonbats, Culture of Corruption, Our Dear Leader, Politics
Bill Maher, a far left extremist, has a rare moment of honesty:
The Obama administration has been heavily targeting whistleblowers and information activists. What can we do to hold the government accountable for this harsh crackdown?” Yeah, the Democrats, [Laughs], their view on Obama seems to be “God, what he does would be awful if it was a Republican”
Leftist Tina Brown notes in the same program: “…he’d be impeached by now for drones if he was W. Bush.”
Ya, sometimes the truth will slip out of a leftist’s mouth.
Reality vs Obama: The Economy
Filed under: economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics
Let us once again refer the the chart our Dear Leader‘s economic team used to scare people into buying into the miserable failure of a porkulus package the democrats rammed down the throat of America back in 2009. Oh, but with reality also displayed.
So, using the Obama regime’s own metrics, the so-called “economic policy” has made things worse for average Americans than doing nothing would have done! They predicted an unemployment rate of 5.5% by now if nothing was done and 5.1% if the administration got to print more money and give it to democrat campaign donors.
The only reason the current U3 unemployment rate is is as low as 7.9% is that over eight million people have been removed from the labor pool that the feds use to calculate the employment rate. That includes everyone in the obscenely high long term unemployment pool that have run out of the extended unemployment benefits. The U6 rate, which includes the underemployed is still at 14.4%, which appears to be the “new normal” in Obama’s progressive dream of America.
James Pethokoukis points out that our Dear Leader‘s economic team made other really bad predictions.
…recall that back in January 2009 Team Obama economists Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer predicted the unemployment rate by 2013 would be closing in on 5%. (Of course, Obama’s economists also thought we’d be in a mini-boom of 4%-plus economic growth. That hasn’t happened either.)
In case you haven’t heard, GDP for the fourth quarter of 2012 came in at -0.1. That’s right, after three and half years of the worst recovery since the Great Depression, the US has slipped back into negative GDP growth under the stewardship of our Dear Leader. We actually could be in another recession, but we won’t know for another three months. Until then, we’re in a Schrödinger’s cat situation of recovery/recession.
Given that our Dear Leader and his democrat minions are calling for more taxes, more government spending (with $0.46 on the dollar borrowed) and more business hindering regulations, it’s looking more like that cat is a recession.
He’s not bluffing
Filed under: Barking Moonbats, Culture of Corruption, Our Dear Leader, Politics, Video
He’s not bluffing people. Remember what he said October 30, 2008: “…we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
This may not be the change you were hoping for, but it is the change a bunch of moonbats and the woefully ignorant voted for.
Let’s not forget this quote from Valerie Jarrett, the woman who tells Obama how many times he can shake his dick after he pees.
In case you missed it, what she said was, “”It is important that President-elect Obama is prepared to really take power and be ready to rule day one.”
Not govern, not lead, but rule. Welcome to the “enlightened” second term of our Dear Leader, where he will continue to avoid dealing with the economy, or congress, and implement his vision through executive orders and oppressive regulations.
A tale of two recoveries
Filed under: American History, economy, Obama Economy, Our Dear Leader, Politics, Taxes
First let us review some history and economic theory. Now you have heard often enough that the recent recession was the “worst since the Great Depression.” This bit of disinformation is repeated by those with a poor grasp or history and/or really don’t care if their information is accurate as long as it furthers their political agenda.
The worst recession “since the Great Depression” was clearly the recession American suffered through in the late 1970s. Double digit unemployment, double digit inflation and double digit interest rates! The prime rate actually hit 21%! So even if you had a job, the cost of living was rising faster and higher than you could possible get a raise and forget about buying a house with interest rates around 20%.
So we have that lie out of the way, let us get to some actual facts. The last recession end way back in mid 2009. That is when economy when from negative GDP growth to positive GDP growth. You may ask what growth? In most of America, there are still far too many empty store fronts as small business are shutting down faster than they are opening. What growth we have had has been anemic at best. GDP growth has not been over 2% in the three and half years since the last recession ended and employment has been over 7.5% and has even hit 10% during that time as well. What you are experiencing is clearly the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
Let’s review, worst recession followed by a roaring recovering in four years. Not the worst recession, worst recovery on record with no signs of getting better. Why such a glaring difference? Well the nice folks at Forbes covered this nicely. Let us review the facts about Reaganomics vs Obamanomics.
Reaganomics had four key points.
1. Cut tax rates to restore incentives for economic growth (just like JFK)
2. Real spending reductions, nearly 5% of the federal budget
3. Anti-inflation monetary policy
4. Deregulation, which saved American consumers an estimated $100 billion per year!
This simple plan resulted in the longest peacetime expansion in American history. The American standard of living increased by close to 20% and the poverty rate declined every year.
Now let’s look at Obama’s economic, and we are being generous here, plan. It is the exact opposite of President Reagan’s plan, which was clearly very successful. In addition to the new Obamacare taxes, he is calling for a sharp increase in the federal tax rate on the Americans who already pay the majority of the federal income tax. In additions, Obama is calling for increases in:
1. The capital gains tax
2. Corporate dividends tax
3. The Medicare tax
4. The death tax
Instead of spending cuts, Obama and the democrat controlled congress opened with nearly a trillion dollars in new federal spending, most of which was borrowed money, further increasing an already high federal debt.
Then we have the double-whammy of an inflationary monetary policy (the Quantative Easing non-stimulus acts) and massive re-regulation in health care, finance, energy and pretty much anything else Obama thinks he can get away with.
Mr. Ferrara sums up the results of the two policies nicely:
As a result, while the Reagan recovery averaged 7.1% economic growth over the first seven quarters, the Obama recovery has produced less than half that at 2.8%, with the last quarter at a dismal 1.8%. After seven quarters of the Reagan recovery, unemployment had fallen 3.3 percentage points from its peak to 7.5%, with only 18% unemployed long-term for 27 weeks or more. After seven quarters of the Obama recovery, unemployment has fallen only 1.3 percentage points from its peak, with a postwar record 45% long-term unemployed.
Previously the average recession since World War II lasted 10 months, with the longest at 16 months. Yet today, 40 months after the last recession started, unemployment is still 8.8%, with America suffering the longest period of unemployment that high since the Great Depression.
This is the Obama Economy. The worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. To make it worse, Obama’s policies are likely to cause that record to be broken, rather than produce real, sustainable economic growth.