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.
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%.
The first of MZW’s MilFic Sniper series. The story of two US Army snipers taking on a dangerous mission in Pakistan to take out a high ranking al Qaeda member. It’s full of SNAFU, FUBAR and TARFU. In other words a good description of a military mission. An engaging and interesting read.
A tale of bloody revenge staring Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung. A group of cops get tired of a mob boss (Hung) walking despite their best legal efforts to take him down. So they step outside the law. Great fight scenes by Donnie Yen, including the final battle with Sammo Hung. Hung is still quite spry despite his age and size. The fight between him and Yen was like watching a bear battle a leopard. A really bad ass bear in this case, with really fast paws.
Bill Maher is a Hollywood leftist who has found a very successful niche attacking anyone to the right of Ann Coulter and repeating leftist talking points.
He does have a fairly well developed bullshit detector, which he will on rare occasions unleash on someone on the left. There are two recent examples of this, which is a sign of just how far the extremist loopy left is gaining traction among the useful idiots that make up the majority of our Dear Leader‘s core of low information voters.
Here is the money quote:”…there’s something wrong about the seventh richest man in the world sitting in bed at night thinking, “You know what people shouldn’t do? Drink too much Sprite. Let’s make that a law.” That makes me want to join the Tea Party and marry Ann Coulter, you know, and that’s not where I want to be.”
FYI, Maher and Coulter actually get along better than most would expect. Maher actually speaks well of Ms. Coulter in the Coulter Bio-Pic “Is It True What They Say About Ann?”
Regardless of Mr. Maher’s true feelings about Ann Coulter, he is absolutely spot on correct about Bloomberg. The fact that it’s Hollywood leftist Maher pointing this out makes it much more damning of the silence from the left of the so-called “liberals” over Bloomberg’s assault on the rights of American citizens.
Next we have Maher calling “Liberal Bullshit” on the all too common left talking point that Christianity, which Maher is no fan of, is as dangerous in the modern world as Islam. Here is where he bitch slaps Brian Levy, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, while wearing the gauntlet of reality.
BRIAN LEVIN: But could I just interject? Look, it’s not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it. We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they’re out for God and end up doing not so nice things.
MAHER: You know what? Yeah, yeah. You know what? That’s liberal bullshit right there. I mean, yes, all faiths —
LEVIN: Are there no Christian hypocrites?
MAHER: No, there are. They’re just —
LEVIN: You make a career on that.
MAHER: They’re not as dangerous. I mean, there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So, you know, I’m just saying, let’s keep it real.
Once again, it the source of the bullshit calling that drives home the insane position the extremist left is taking. Maher produced a movie attacking religion, and focused his attack mainly on Christianity! The fact that it is him pointing out that in the early 21st Century it is only Islam that wants to kill you just for drawing a cartoon with their pedophile prophet in it, and it’s utter and complete “liberal bullshit” to compare that to the Roman Catholic Church saying that they won’t marry same sex couples in their churches.
As I have said before, for the left, their political agenda always trumps the truth. These example of a Hollywood leftist like Bill Maher calling Bullshit on them just shows how far the gap is between the political agenda of the lefts that haven taken control of the American democrat party and the reality that rational human beings live in is.
In honor of Lenin’s birthday, I’m going to repeat the Monday Book Pick from May 11, 2009. An environmentalist opposed to Nuclear Energy did some honest research and came to the conclusion that only Nuclear Power can provide the base load of clean electricity needed. Actual science trumps rhetoric.
For those of you coming in late to the party, Earth Day” is on Lenin’s Birthday. Not a coincidence, given that the “founder” of Earth Day was much more a “Watermelon” than an actual environmentalist. Watermelon: Thin layer of green of the outside, red to the core.
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” — Life Magazine, January 1970
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
Ok, Ehrlich was sorta right on this, if you restrict his predictions to modern Communist China, where they are showing the typical communist/socialist contempt for the environment.
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Now we get to my personal favorite, although probably not Al Gore‘s… “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
It wouldn’t be Lenin’s Birthday with out this clip of the late George Carlin discussing “Saving the Planet.”
Terrorists set off two explosives at the Boston Marathon six days ago, on April 15, 2012, killing three people and wounding hundreds. We know that it was the work of two brothers, immigrants from Chechnya, both Muslims, with ties to radical Islam. Based on other Terrorist attacks, including the one at Fort Hood, this is not much of a surprise.
The far left extremists in the MSM/DNC had other hopes. On my ride home on Monday, April 15, I was listening to WBUR (“Boston’s NPR News Station”), and they had on a so-called “terrorism expert” from Harvard University saying that it was most likely the work of domestic “right-wing” terrorists. This was not based on any factual track record. It was their political ideology driving that particular fantasy. NPR continued to double down on their pet theory.
Yup. You heard that correctly. An NPR “analyst” claiming that Hitler’s birthday is a “motivator” for those with a political view point to the right of center. Proving once again that history is not a strong point of the left. He was the leader of the German “National Socialist Workers Party”, with gives him more in common with the late Hugo Chavez, and the staff of NPR, than any registered Republican.
To be fair, NPR was not the only “news outlet” making these kind of baseless speculations. There was usual list of suspects joining in on their bashing of their political enemies while going out of their way to avoid the possibility of this terrorist act being the work of Islam extremists. You had James Kitfield of the National Journal, CNN, and of course, MSNBC. Ed Driscoll has a partial list of examples of this faux journalism that is so typical of the left.
Perhaps the best example of this moonbat behavior is David Sirota, who wrote an article in Salon entitled, ““Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Look it up if you want, I’m not giving the a link. Mr. Driscoll points out that this is pretty consistent behavior for the left. You have easily documented cases going back almost a Century.
“[L]iberals are chock-full of conspiracy theories. They invoke weird personal obsessions like a conversational deus ex machina to trump all facts. You think you’re talking about the war in Iraq and suddenly you start getting a disquisition on Nixon, oil, the neoconservatives, Vietnam (Tom Hayden discusses gang violence in Los Angeles as it relates to Vietnam), or whether Bill O’Reilly’s former show, Inside Edition, won the Peabody or the Peanuckle Award. This is because liberals, as opposed to sentient creatures, have a finite number of memorized talking points, which they periodically try to shoehorn into unrelated events, such as when Nancy Pelosi opposed the first Gulf war in 1991 on the grounds that it would cause environmental damage in Kuwait.”
