Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Friday, September 21, 2012

IT'S OVER: The Left's Information Warfare Campaign Has Failed -- and Mitt Romney is Going to Win This Election

Are you down? Are you glum, dejected, feeling like Republicans can't catch a break? Are you sick of Mitt Romney's gaffes, hyped hysterically by obsolete media with breathless "Romney Can't Win 2012" Special Reports?

Have you been overwhelmed by criticism of the GOP from so-called conservatives? Let's consider the sources: Bill Kristol is a useless coot whose predictions are unerringly off-base. Peggy Noonan is a yenta. Rich Lowery is a sellout. And David Brooks isn't worth the three seconds I just spent typing this sentence. All of them are more worried about invitations to glitterati parties than they are in saving this Republic.

In the face of liberal agitprop campaigns, they wet their Depends and run away.

I'm not down. I feel good. Let's consider where we are in this campaign cycle.

The Professional Left has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the Romney campaign. It prematurely ejaculated an October Surprise -- "the 47 percent" recording -- weeks too early. It's hysterically marketed other similar, trivial statements as campaign-ending for Romney.

But the campaign isn't over and those weren't gaffes.


Though you wouldn't know it from Sixties media, the three biggest verbal gaffes this month all were uttered by Barack Obama:

3. On Univision, Obama admitted that he "can't change Washington from the inside."

2. On the David Letterman show, Obama claimed he didn't know the amount of the national debt, a terrifyingly large burden on the young and future generations

1. On the issue of the 9/11 terror attacks in Libya, Obama and his administration have been caught in a series of lies and cover-ups.

The debates are coming. You got a "47" gaffe? I'll top you with a "57" (remember how candidate Obama said he hoped to visit all 57 states?).

Obama without TOTUS is like Joe Biden without the hair-plugs. Romney has been tempered through the fires of a dozen, hard-core, debate melees.

And Obama has had precisely zero debates and, for that matter, hasn't even entertained a serious interview in years. Without practice -- and with his increasingly questionable work ethic -- I have a prediction to make:

Obama is going to stumble in these debates. He will stumble badly. And he will reveal himself.

Furthermore, when you come right down to it, he's an easy mark. He has a record he must try to defend. And that record is downright ugly. He can blame Bush, Tsunamis, ATMs and the Euro for all of his failures, but if he tries, he'll sound even more like an unpresidential loser than usual.

The combination of being confronted with his failures -- one after the other, with no real way to spin or lie without blatantly appearing as a charlatan -- along with his documented case of Aggressive Narcissism results in my Lock o' the Week prognostication:

Obama will seriously stumble in these debates. It will be cringe-worthy.

Oh, and then there are the polls. The polls that seem to magnify each "gaffe" a thousand-fold to stifle Republican optimism. Well, polling expert John McClaughlin offers the straight scoop as to what we're seeing there:

On what a realistic partisan breakdown would look like: “The 2004 national exit polls showed an even partisan turnout and Bush won 51–48. Had it been the +4 Democratic edge of 2000, John Kerry would have been president. 2008 was a Democratic wave that gave them a +7 partisan advantage. 2010 was a Republican edge. There’s no wave right now. There are about a dozen swing states where in total millions of voters who voted in 2008 for Obama are gone or have not voted since...

...There are also hundreds of thousands of voters in each of several swing states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and others who voted from rural, exurban or suburban areas in 2004 for Bush who did not vote in 2008, because they were not excited by McCain or thought he would lose. They are currently planning to vote mainly as a vote against President Obama.”

What Obama and his allies are doing now: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ‘not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this. Then there’s the debate between calling off a random-digit dial of phone exchanges vs. a known sample of actual registered voters. Most polls favoring Obama are random and not off the actual voter list. That’s too expensive” for some pollsters.

That's not all. I think we'll see a couple of related, interesting anomalies in this election:

• The impact of a phenomenal drop in households with landlines, which badly skews polling
• The return of the Bradley Effect
• The return of the Reagan Democrats, in this case, union members who realize their jobs are at stake, but tell the pollsters they're voting with the bosses and actually pull the lever for the GOP
• A much larger percentage drop in the Black vote for Obama than anyone's anticipating (see Why Romney Is Going to Romp over Obama in November)

As much as old media tries to tell us that Obama is a sure thing, he's actually anything but.

Which is why, for example, he's in... Wisconsin this week.

Mitt Romney is going to win this election. Write it down. Take it to the bank.

But before you do, send 'em a couple of bucks. We have a country to repair.



Thursday, September 20, 2012

OH, MY: Rick Perry Just Ended the Creepy #ForAll Meme

@HarrietBaldwin nominates Governor Rick Perry for the Twitter Post of "the day, week, month"... and possibly year:


Well, I don't think we'll be seeing much more of the Obama campaign's embarrassing #ForAll photo bust.

You gonna put some ice on that, Messina -- if that is your real name?



Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Jim Geraghty and Alexis de Tocqueville on the 47 percent

Where would society's makers get the impression that a large percentage of the able-bodied population will suckle on the teat of government until they're forced to work for a living?

"In the Bronx in April of this year, “huge crowds” lined up at an “income tax business” run out of a “99 cent store” to turn over their financial information and IDs to get a “prepaid debt card” allegedly worth $1,000, claimed to be “Obama stimulus money."

...Or how about the reaction to rent vouchers in 2010?

Sixty people were taken to hospitals Wednesday in this Atlanta suburb after a lengthy wait and an angry mob scene in a sweltering shopping-center parking lot. Those treated for heat exposure and injuries from scuffles were among 30,000 people who had lined up for a waiting list for just 455 vouchers to cover part of their rent.

Some camped out for nearly three days in temperatures that neared 100 degrees, including pregnant women, elderly in wheelchairs and people who drove down from New York City and Philadelphia, hoping to get on the waiting list in East Point for Housing Choice, or Section 8, vouchers.

What’s fascinating is that people will stand on line for hours, for a 1-in-65 chance that they’ll get a voucher for part of their rent, rather than seek more reliable methods of making money to pay for that rent. --Jim Geraghty

The concept of an unchecked entitlement state is anything but new:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years." -―Alexis de Tocqueville

This is what we're fighting against: societal collapse.



Monday, September 17, 2012

Campaign that wrote off the white working class decries Romney's concerns with the culture of dependency

The latest "Romney Can't Win" meme being marketed by vintage media (number 2,280 by my count) revolves around a tape of Mitt Romney discussing campaign strategy:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney is shown saying in a video posted online by the magazine. "There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."


"Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax," Romney said... "[my role] is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

President Obama's campaign was quick to jump into the fray:

Obama's campaign called the video "shocking"... "It's hard to serve as president for all Americans when you've disdainfully written off half the nation," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a statement.

Speaking of "writing off" voters, remember this golden oldie from The New York Times?

Obama campaign abandons white working-class voters

President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign will be the first in modern political history to abandon white working-class voters, strategists claim.

For decades, Democrats have been losing more and more blue collar whites. Their alienation helped lead to the massive Republican wave in 2010, when the GOP wooed 30 percent more of them than the Democrats could. Democratic strategists say President Obama is focusing his attention, instead, on poor black and Hispanic voters and educated white professionals...

'All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment... and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic,' longtime political reporter Thomas B. Edsall wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times... 'The 2012 approach treats white voters without college degrees as an unattainable cohort,' he writes later.

Hot Air notes that this will have the same devastating effect that candidate Obama's "bitterly clinging to their guns and religion" comment had in 2008. Which is to say: none.

Like all of the media-manufactured kerfuffles, it will be all but forgotten within one week or until Iran detonates its first nuke, whichever comes first.


Cheer Up! Things Could Be Worse. It Could Be 2013 Under a Hypothetical Obama Second Term!

Ben Bernanke's latest announcement -- to print money until morale improves -- is called "Quantitative Easing 3", the third round of asset purchases designed to keep interest rates artificially low. QE3 is a tacit admission that every one of President Obama's economic policies have failed.

The long-term result is certain: hyperinflation. The short-term result can be seen today: commodity prices (gas, gold, etc.) are ratcheting up dramatically as the dollar is devalued by incessant money-printing.

For the second time in U.S. history -- for the second time under the watch of Barack Obama -- the country's credit rating has been downgraded by rating agency Egan Jones:

...the FED's QE3 will stoke the stock market and commodity prices, but in our opinion will hurt the US economy and, by extension, credit quality. Issuing additional currency and depressing interest rates via the purchasing of MBS does little to raise the real GDP of the US, but does reduce the value of the dollar (because of the increase in money supply), and in turn increase the cost of commodities (see the recent rise in the prices of energy, gold, and other commodities).


...The increased cost of commodities will pressure profitability of businesses, and increase the costs of consumers thereby reducing consumer purchasing power. Hence, in our opinion QE3 will be detrimental to credit quality for the US.

As if to confirm the harm QE3 will do to manufacturers, Bloomberg reports .

Industrial production in the U.S. unexpectedly fell in August by the most since March 2009, highlighting risks to the economic outlook a day after the Federal Reserve boosted record stimulus.

Recession. We've never left it.

And it's going to get deeper in 2013 as Taxmageddon and Obamacare hit small businesses with devastating force:

The International Franchise Association held a convention in Washington this week where most of the Radio Shack, Dunkin Donuts, Curves and other franchisers were grumbling about new federal regulations, especially the impact of Obamacare.

...he pulled out his powerpoint showing how funding Obamacare will cut his--and likely their--profits in half overnight. With simple math the small business folks understood, he spelled out that their only choice is to slash employee hours so they aren't eligible for company-paid health care or stop offering insurance and pay the $2,000 per employee fine.


Barr has 23 stores with 421 employees, 109 of whom are full-time. Of those, he provides 30 with health insurance. Barr said he pays 81 percent of their Blue Cross Blue Shield policy, or $4,073 of $5,028 for individuals, more for families, for a total bill of $129,000 a year. Employees pay $995.

Under Obamacare, however, he will have to provide health insurance for all 109 full-time workers, a cost of $444,000, or two and half times more than his current costs. That $315,000 increase is equal to just over half his annual profit, after expenses, or 1.5 percent of sales. As a result, he said, "I'm not paying $444,000."

Providing no insurance would result in a federal fine of $158,000, $29,000 more than he now spends but the lowest cost possible under the Obamacare law. So he now views that as his cap and he'll either cut worker hours or replace them with machines to get his costs down or dump them on the public health exchange and pay the fine. "Every business has a way to eliminate jobs," he said, "but that's not good for them or me."

If we don't crush the Democrat Party at the ballot box in November, even more people will fall into poverty -- all races, all creeds, all colors, all religions -- and more people will become dependent upon a government that is bankrupt.

Society is fraying and it is up to each and every one of us to save it in November. Marshal your family members, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors.

The Democrat Party must be smashed politically if we are to save this country.


Hat tip: Mark Levin. Cartoon: GetLiberty.org.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Must-See Proof: Corrupt Media, Corrupt Polls

We already knew that legacy media was completely and utterly corrupt, with ironclad confirmation coming in the form of the recent gang-attack conspiracy against Mitt Romney.

Now, @NumbersMuncher (via @AriFleischer) represents graphically that very same corruption. Namely, how most recent Bizarro-Polls show Barack Obama in the lead despite a disastrous economy and a Mideast in flames.


Briefly put, the polls showing the SCOAMF in the lead are oversampling Democrats to bias the results.

But what should the samples be? Rasmussen (the most accurate of the 2008 presidential pollsters) posits the following ratio:


Point 1: For 2012, the average Republican-to-Democrat sample, the correct sample should be 36 (R) to 33 (D) to 31 (I).

Point 2: Among likely voters, independents break for Romney, 51 percent to 40 percent (according to the ultra-liberal National Journal).

So let's just get this straight: more people identify as Republicans than Democrats and Independents break by a double-digit margin for the Romney-Ryan ticket.

And, in the midst of an conflagration in the Middle East, QE3, and an economy back in recession, the media is trying to save this election for the SCOAMF.

Here's a hint, Chrissie Milbank-Dionne: It. Ain't. Gonna. Work. 2010 will look like a fond memory in comparison.


Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The Obama plan: deficits "never seen before in U.S. history"

World War II was a minor perturbation in the history of deficit spending, if Barack Obama has anything to say about it. For the fourth straight year -- coincident with the Obama presidency -- the U.S. will ring up more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars) in annual budget deficits.

The CBO’s report follows Treasury’s grim confirmation last week that the national debt reached the $16 trillion mark, engulfing the size of the entire U.S. economy. That translates into $51,000 in debt per U.S. citizen, about what the average American will earn this year. Because of Washington’s overspending, the debt continues to climb upward toward the $16.394 trillion statutory limit...


Washington lacks the resolve to rein in federal spending, despite such negative report cards. Congress’ latest proposed spending bill, the FY2013 continuing resolution (CR) that will fund the government, doesn’t even freeze spending at current levels, as a typical CR would. The CBO estimates that level to be $1.039 trillion. Instead, lawmakers plan to increase discretionary spending by $8 billion, in order to reach the annual rate of $1.047 trillion provided under the BCA.

If the current state of the budget appears gloomy, the future could prove to be downright awful. Absent reforms to entitlement programs—especially Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—federal spending will skyrocket...

...Moody’s Investor Service today joined Standard & Poor’s in issuing a stern warning that it would likely lower the United States’ credit rating... if Congress does not stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio and address the coming fiscal cliff.

We are approaching Greece-level debt-to-GDP ratios, even discounting our numerous failed entitlement programs.

I can't state this clearly enough: a few more years like these and collapse is certain.

November looks to be the last chance we have to rescue this society.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Some good news for Romney-Ryan: the trend is your friend

Be of good cheer. The latest polls have caused a few shudders throughout the right side of the blogosphere (premature, to be sure), but there are several objective elements of which you should be aware.

First, the long-term InTrade trend-line -- generally a pretty good indicator since real money is at stake -- appears to be a positive one for the Romney-Ryan ticket.


As more people learn about the tremendous qualifications possessed by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the more comfortable they become with the pair.

In addition, there are several reasons I think the polls are fundamentally misstating support for Barack Obama's obviously failed presidency:

1. The return of "The Bradley Effect": Barack Obama, a thoroughly likable and eloquent politician, marketed himself as a centrist and post-partisan figure in 2008. Unknown and un-vetted that year, he could get away with it. Pollsters are likely not accounting for the fact that Obama is a known quantity this year -- and the well-known Bradley Effect could very well resurface.

2. The revolt of the union rank-and-file: If you're a union member aware of Obama's destructive agenda -- killing the coal industry, oil drilling, trucking, and refining (to name but a few), you're not going to respond to some random call with the truth. Union members have to be cautious and they are used to being pressured and intimidated. I can assure you that pollsters are not taking the Reagan Democrat factor into account, just as they missed it completely in 1980.

3. Incorrect sampling of the population: As HillBuzz explains, polling firms are generally using 2008 party breakdowns when the entire country has changed dramatically:


1. Look at the partisan breakdown of the poll and make sure it is the 2012 numbers. The partisan breakdown I am using for the 2012 elections is: D=33.3%, R=37.6%, I=29.2%. We are at the highest percentage of Republican registrations and the lowest percent of Democrat registrations in history. The polls you see that show Obama leading in states like Ohio are deceiving you because they are running Democrat percentages that are 44% or MORE; that’s just ridiculous because the highest Democrat registration advantage in YEARS was in 2008, where Democrats were at 41.4% to just 33.8% for Republicans and 24.7% for Independents. 2008 was the Democrats’ high water mark...

2. Look at the gender gap in the poll and see if it is realistic. The second easiest way to cook a poll is to include a much higher percentage of women than men because women tend to vote Democrat more than men...

3. Look for the racial breakdown of the poll to check if that’s being cooked for Democrats’ benefit. This is similar to the above, but is a little more complicated because on average blacks are 12% of the population but have a very low turnout in typical election years. 2008 was an anomaly because race-pride drove a lot of blacks to the polls... There’s no way that blacks or any other Democrat identity bloc will vote in 2008 percentages, though, so any poll that’s saying these numbers will be the same (or higher!) is bunk...

Clearly, all of us still have work to do.

But old media and the polls didn't predict the 2010 wipeout until the last possible minute (even then, many of them flatly understated the seachange).

Nothing's really changed since then, except more people are out of work and more people are ticked off than two years ago.


Rush: Chicago Teachers Union Strike Is a Setup, Designed to Benefit Obama Reelection Effort

Rush Limbaugh has an interesting response to news of the first Chicago teachers union strike in 25 years: It's a setup.

Rush Limbaugh said Monday a strike by the 26,000-member Chicago Teachers’ Union was nothing but a ploy to help President Barack Obama’s reelection.

...He and [Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel] will figure this out so they get credit for solving it. Because, I tell you: There is no union that is gonna go on strike right now for the express purpose of harming Barack Obama.”

The union started striking Monday for the first time in a quarter-century after rejecting a contract that offered them a four percent annual pay raise over the next four years. [Ed: 16 percent increase over four years]

...Despite apparent cracks between Emanuel and his old boss, Limbaugh insists it’s all a set-up to get the “media swooning.”

“I’m warning you right now,” he said. “You haven’t seen anything until you see the PR surrounding Obama solving the teacher strike, and then the video of the little kiddies going back to school. They’re gonna be singing Obama songs.”

Then White House advisor -- and now Chicago Mayor -- Rahm Emanuel is infamous for stating, "Never let a crisis go to waste."

There is no public sector union in the country that would go on strike if it would hurt Obama's reelection chances in any way.

Do the math.


Image: Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, via Michelle Malkin.

President too busy to attend daily intelligence briefings; made up for it by missing all of his daily economic briefings

Is it still a "Presidential Daily Brief" if the president doesn't bother to attend? The Washington Post relays the stunning stats from the Government Accountability Institute.

During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his [Presidential Daily Briefing] PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

...Officials tell me the former president [Bush 43] held his intelligence meeting six days a week, no exceptions... Once a week, he held an expanded Homeland Security briefing that included the Homeland Security adviser, the FBI director and other homeland security officials. Bush also did more than 100 hour-long “deep dives” in which he invited intelligence analysts into the Oval Office to get their unvarnished and sometimes differing views. Such meetings deepened the president’s understanding of the issues and helped analysts better understand the problems with which he was wrestling.

When Obama forgoes this daily intelligence meeting, he is consciously placing other priorities ahead of national security.

And the president also appears to be placing other priorities ahead of the economy and unemployment: from April 2011 through July 24, 2012, the president hasn't received a single daily economic briefing.

Something is missing. If you look at Barack Obama's calendar for 26th of April, 2011 you will see on his schedule at 10 AM "The President receives the Economic Daily Briefing," after that nothing. According to the daily schedule released by the White House, Barack Obama hasn't received his "daily" economic briefing for the past 15 months (The White House, Accessed 7/23/12).

Somehow, however, the president has managed to work in 104 rounds of golf and hundreds of games of pickup basketball.

Fortunately there are no pressing economic or national security issues for the country.


Sunday, September 09, 2012

Four Simple Charts to Share With Friends, Family Members, Neighbors and Colleagues

If you know someone disconnected from politics, unmotivated to vote, or otherwise sitting on the fence, please share with them the following four graphs. And then ask them one simple question, which I've listed below.

Household income fell more in recovery than during recession


Gas prices have more than doubled since Obama took office:


Labor Force Participation Rate Goes Backward to 1981


"The [labor force participation] rate dipped in the early part of the last decade but rose again during the Bush expansion and was 66.2% as recently as January 2008... It fell again in the recession, but the most distressing news is that it has kept falling during the last three years of recovery. This is unprecedented, and the big question is why."

The 'One-Time' Stimulus Became Part of the Federal Baseline Budget

In 2009, Democrats and President Obama pushed a "one-time" Stimulus spending package through Congress in order to jump-start job creation and keep unemployment under 8 percent. It ended up costing the American people $840 billion and unemployment has remained over 8 percent ever since...


Unfortunately, that so-called "one-time" spending spree was built into each and every year's budget -- and is driving America to a Greece-style debt crisis.

That one simple question to ask: Can we survive four more years of this?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Please considering sending this article to friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues. We can all do our part before November.

Just click the button to email:


Staring into the Economic Abyss

"A modern-day depression."

That's how Mortimer Zuckerman describes the current state of the economy, highlighting an effective 19 percent unemployment rate.

We are experiencing, in effect, a modern-day depression. Consider two indicators: First, food stamps: More than 45 million Americans are in the program! An almost incredible record. It's 15% of the population compared with the 7.9% participation from 1970-2000. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at a rate of 400,000 per month over the past four years.

Second, Social Security disability—another record. More than 11 million Americans are collecting federal disability checks. Half of these beneficiaries have signed on since President Obama took office more than three years ago.


These dependent millions are the invisible counterparts of the soup kitchens and bread lines of the 1930s, invisible because they get their checks in the mail. But it doesn't take away from the fact that millions of people who had good private-sector jobs now have to rely on welfare for life support.

There's little doubt that President Obama is responsible for much of this mess. His decisions -- from killing the Keystone XL pipeline, to funding phony "green jobs" at companies like Solyndra, to punishing the health insurance industry -- have resulted in massive private sector job destruction.

Worse, his only claimed success -- "saving GM" -- is turning out to be another disaster. Not only does GM owe American taxpayers upwards of $35 billion, but Forbes reports the company is headed for bankruptcy... again.

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday...

...In the 1960s, GM averaged a 48.3% share of the U.S. car and truck market. For the first 7 months of 2012, their market share was 18.0%, down from 20.0% for the same period in 2011...


...To help understand why GM keeps losing market share, let’s look at the saga of the Chevy Malibu... The Malibu is GM’s entry in the automobile market’s “D-Segment” [comprised of] mid-size, popularly priced, family sedans, like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord.

...At this point, it appears that the 2013 Malibu is not only inferior to the 2012 Volkswagen Passat, it’s not even as good as the car it replaces, the 2012 Chevy Malibu... In their March 2012 issue, Car and Driver published another D-Segment comparison test, pitting the 2013 Chevy Malibu Eco against five competing vehicles. This time, the Malibu came in dead last...

GM, in other words, never fixed its structural problems with the UAW. It never repaired its management team. It never made rational decisions related to the free market (Exhibit A: the Chevy Volt). And therefore it may be circling the drain again.

As GM hemorrhages more cash, a bigger issue lurks for the White House. Overlooked in the aftermath of the unemployment report is this simple truth:

Little-Noticed Fact: Average Job Creation in 2011 Falls Below 2010 Levels, Pointing To a Slowing Economy, Not a Growing One

Obama of course is now claiming he "never told you this was going to be quick or easy," or words to that effect. But he did previously offer a 3 year deadline.


Seems to me that three and a half years ago he thought it would only take three years. Now he's telling us that it'll take four, five, six, seven. Who knows. And as he says this, he says "I never told you any differently."

...I said [earlier]: In 2008, Obama was a man like no other who's ever existed who would Save Mankind.

In 2012, he's runnin' as just a regular guy, just amblin' along, tryin' to do the best he can. Win some, lose some. Needs more time.

In 2008, he was a MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!

In 2012, he's a victim of circumstance.

He's failed as thoroughly as a president can fail.

By all means, let's hire him up again, and let him fail some more.

Finally, John Hinderaker wonders -- given the unceasing bad economic news and the disastrous policy decisions by the administration both here and abroad -- how this election could even be close.

On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy. My father, the least cynical of men, used to quote a political philosopher to the effect that democracy will work until people figure out they can vote themselves money. I fear that time may have come.

...Maybe this anxiety is misplaced. President Obama has never been able to rise above 47% support in the polls, and perhaps when November comes undecided voters will break against the incumbent, as the conventional wisdom has it. Maybe the election won’t be so close after all. We’d all better hope so. Because, given the rate at which Democrats are frantically adding to the dependency state, another four years of Obama may be enough to tip the balance between the private sector and government dependence once and for all.

I'm not giving in without a fight. Marshal your family members, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors.

Because if we don't stop the the Cloward-Piven Democrats in November, this country will slide into an economic abyss the likes of which none of us have ever seen before.


Saturday, September 08, 2012

Bummer: NLRB Loses Court Challenge Over Secret Ballots

Just one unlawful act of many by President Obama this year delivered control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to his union boss backers. His intent was to stack the board with hard left radicals to make it easier for them to unionize the private sector.

He knew, however, that his extreme picks would never pass the Senate's review, which is the duty assigned it by the nation's founders in the United States Constitution.

Therefore, in an act unprecedented in all of American history, President Obama unilaterally declared the Senate in recess over a long weekend earlier this year (though it clearly was not) and named his radicals through recess appointments.

Fortunately, some of the courts have not been cowed:

A federal government agency [the NLRB] lost its court challenge of an Arizona constitutional amendment that guarantees workers in the state can vote by secret ballot on whether to join a union.


...NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce said Thursday that while he was disappointed by the judge’s dismissal, he was “very pleased that the court recognized that these choices are guaranteed to employees by federal law and cannot be taken away by the states.”

...Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said in a statement that the judge’s decision is a “stinging rebuke to an outrageous National Labor Relations Board attack” on the sanctity of the secret ballot.

That's right: the radical, hard left Obama NLRB is doing its best to eliminate secret ballot elections. Never mind that unions require photo IDs for their own election votes, as you can see in the photo above.

We all know why the secret ballot is anathema to Democrats: card-check elections allow workers to be intimidated by organizers so that more companies -- whether their workers like it or not -- will become unionized.

Because that's worked out so well for GM, Chrysler, California and Illinois.

Remember in November.


Two can play this game: FAA supervisors reportedly warned employees that a vote for Mitt Romney would mean their jobs

The minor barrier of legality has never been much of a hurdle for this administration:

Senior FAA officials accused of telling workers 'job security' at risk if GOP wins


Two federal agency supervisors allegedly warned employees earlier this year that a Republican takeover in Washington could threaten their jobs -- comments that some workers apparently took as guidance on "how to vote" and that one group claims may have violated federal law.

Two can play this game.

If you own or work in a small business with two or more employees, I would tell your co-workers the truth.


Electing Barack Obama could very well cost you your job.

His naked, destructive agenda of taking from "the rich" (small business owners) and redistributing it will reach ramming speed if he is reelected.

The EPA is poised to publish new, even more onerous regulations on the air we exhale -- CO2 -- in order to control all industrial production in the U.S. If you own a dry-cleaner, a gas station, a laundromat, a convenience store, a machine shop, or virtually any other business, you are guaranteed to come under new, onerous, and expensive regulations.

Energy prices -- gasoline and electricity -- will skyrocket, just as candidate Obama promised in 2008. If you own a fleet of cars or trucks, expect significantly higher expenses.

Obamacare kicks in for real in January, conveniently just after the election, and offers an impressive set of 20 new taxes, including new fees on medical device manufacturers, new taxes and regulations on investment income (including the sale of your house), increased payroll taxes, and new taxes on insurers.

Those are just off the top of my head. If you thought the president had acted lawlessly over the past four years, you ain't seen nothin' yet if he's reelected.

Every small business owner in America should -- correctly -- warn their employees that their jobs are at serious risk if Barack Obama is reelected.


Friday, September 07, 2012

Real Unemployment is now 11.7%; Propaganda Gap Hits New Record

Tyler Durden deconstructs the Pravda-like numbers excreted earlier today by the "Bureau of Labor Statistics" (if that is its real name):

Today's reported unemployment rate: 8.1%. The reason: the labor "participation" dropped to a 31 year low 63.5% as reported earlier. Of course, this number is pure propaganda, and makes no sense for one simple reason: despite the economic collapse started in December 2007, the US civilian non-institutional population since then has grown by 186,000 people every month on average hitting an all time high of 243,566,000 in August.


These people need a job, and the traditional shorthand is that at least 100,000 jobs have the be generated every month for the unemployment rate to merely stay flat, let along improve. So what does one get when one uses the long-term average of the past 30 or so years which happens to be 65.8%? One gets an unemployment number that is 45% higher than the reported 8.1%, or 11.7%. That is what the real unemployment rate is assuming the US labor participation rate was realistic and not manipulated by the BLS cronies and the Bank of Spain assisted Arima-X-13 seasonal adjustment models. It also means that, as the [accompanying] chart... shows, the spread between the real and propaganda data hit an all time record, which was to be expected two months ahead of America's banker muppet presidential election.

Geez, Tyler, I'm sure the Obama administration would never stoop so low as to manipulate the jobs num - ERROR 3000: DHS FILTER MALFUNCTION - UNAPPROVED CONTENT.

The Heritage Foundation calls the Obama jobs record "dismal" and puts a microscope to the numbers:

Have 4.5 million new jobs been created under President Obama, as several speakers in Charlotte have claimed this week?

A fact check shows that under President Obama, the U.S. economy has created a net 415,000 private-sector jobs—less than 0.2 percent of the 155 million-member American workforce. But even that statistic does not tell the full story, since the workforce itself has shrunk dramatically in size since Obama took office. Labor force participation is at 63.5 percent, its lowest level since 1981. In other words, a large chunk of Americans have simply given up looking for work. A significant number are collecting disability insurance instead...


The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported recently that if Congress and the President do not act before the end of the year to prevent Taxmageddon, America will have another recession on its hands in the coming year. With 12.5 million Americans already out of work, imagine a fresh recession.

Taxmageddon, scheduled to hit on January 1, 2013, will be the largest tax increase in American history. It’s a one-year, nearly $500 billion tax hike that will hit businesses, families, young people—its impact will be devastating. Heritage has calculated that a middle-class family of four will see their taxes go up by more than $4,100 just next year.

I suppose this is what happens when you have a president who prefers golf to actual work -- 104 rounds at last count. Think about that for a sec. Who the hell has time for 104 rounds of golf in three-and-a-half years except for retired doctors?

But wait! There's more!

This was not the employment report either American workers or the Obama campaign were hoping for. A huge miss. It shows the U.S. labor market remains in a deep depression, generating few jobs and little if no income growth...


...The unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% [Ed: riiiiiight], but in this case with declines in both the labor force (-368,000) and the household-survey measure of employment (-119,000). With labor force participation falling back to a new cycle low of 63.5%, the drop in the unemployment rate should not be reported as good news.

Let's review: the chart immediately above represents where Obama projected unemployment would be without the trillion-dollar "Stimulus" package.

We literally (to quote Joe Biden) remain in a severe recession. Should Taxmageddon hit -- thanks only to the Democrats' continuous demands for class warfare -- we are destined for a real depression.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Surprise: Wisconsin sees improved revenues to state coffers while "tax the rich" California and Illinois continue to implode

Here's a question for you Democrats reading along -- albeit very slowly: when, in all of human history, has "taxing the rich" ever succeeded?

Don't worry, I'll wait here while you check.

In the mean time, please consider "Wisconsin's Economy Surging Without Tax Increases."

The day after the nation's debt surpassed $16 trillion, Wisconsin officials announced their state took in more tax revenue than expected -- without raising taxes.

According to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, tax collections increased 4.7 percent in fiscal year 2012 to $13.5 billion, beating the ... Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s February estimate by $320 million.

The MacIver Institute notes that when Gov. Scott Walker came into office in January of 2011, Wisconsin faced a $3.6 billion deficit.

After Walker’s reforms, especially those concerning public sector unions, and spending cuts, Wisconsin started going down the path toward fiscal solvency.

California and Illinois have taken an opposite tack: raise taxes on small businesses (you know, the evil "rich" who are generally small businesses that make over $200,000 in gross receipts and employ the lion's share of America's workers).

In Illinois, even the left-wing rag The Stuffington Roast admits that Barack Obama's home state has the worst budget deficit in the land, totaling a stunning $43.8 billion, despite a massive 60 percent hike in personal income taxes.

In California, the twice-failed Governor "Moonbeam" Brown is going for the trifecta. Despite massive tax hikes, the state is running a $6 billion annual deficit, its cities are declaring bankruptcy one after another, and the state pension system is in critical condition, having been raped by the malevolent, corrupt alliance of Democrats and their public sector union cronies.

So we know for a fact that raising taxes on "the rich" won't work. Yet Democrats -- without a shred of evidence -- continue to push for their destructive class warfare strategy. They know it won't work, which leads me to believe they are bound and determined to bring America to its economic knees.

The proper term for their deviant game-plan is "The Cloward-Piven Strategy". It's not a conspiracy theory. It's very real. And it's pure evil.


Instant fact-check: Bill Clinton's assertion that no one could fix the economy in only four years

Is he a liar, just ignorant, or all of the above? Hint for you drones reading along -- moving your lips, no doubt -- that's a rhetorical question.


Ronald Reagan inherited a far worse economic crisis: double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, an energy crisis, a Soviet Union on the rise and an Iranian hostage crisis.

But he actually knew what he was doing. And -- strangely -- it was the complete opposite of Obama's agenda that includes punishing small business owners, restricting access to energy, killing our manned space program, and devastating our national security posture.



Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Congratulations, Democrats! On the eve of your convention, you've hit the progressive trifecta!

1. The national debt just surpassed $16 trillion, a level some experts believe is past the point of no return.


2. The number of Americans on food-stamps just hit another record high.


3. Last month, three times more Americans entered poverty than found jobs.


Let me repeat: three times as many Americans entered poverty than found jobs last month.

By every conceivable measure, things are getting worse under this president, not better. And why anyone would vote Democrat under these circumstances is beyond me.



Monday, September 03, 2012

Absolutely Brutal Ad

"We've heard it all before":


As Jammie observes, "The best offense against Obama is... Obama."



Urgent Labor Day Notice From the White House

The Looking Spoon relays the following urgent notice:


It's really not all that funny. Consider the labor-force participation rate:


Things keep getting worse. And now we're hitting Jimmy Carter malaise territory: a 30-year low in the labor force, achieved thanks to the same failed Democrat philosophies Carter tried. Spreading wealth really means spreading poverty and misery, with the government as middleman. Progressivism -- punishing successful people in the name of arbitrary guidelines of "fairness" -- can't work, won't work and has never worked in all of human history.

Maybe every 30 years or so the American people need to be reminded of the greatness of free enterprise and capitalism.