The whole CMI site and charts are an interesting, albeit frightening, read. The bit on numbers cooking of retail figures is quite revealing.

And by March 6th the Retail Index (chart on the right below) had returned to levels indicative of a greater than 6% year-over-year decrease in consumer demand. This number is substantially different from the self reported sales figures from the retail industry, which suffer from 'survivor bias' as a consequence of focusing on 'same store sales in stores open at least a year'. The closing of select stores or entire chains are simply unreported, while the traffic shifted to remaining stores generates a positive spin. Our substantially more negative numbers, however, have been matching sales tax collections, which have no survivor bias. We believe our internet based sample is a fair representation of the entire 'demand' side of the economy, and the sales tax numbers seem to confirm that conclusion...

If CMI's charts are even only somewhat accurate, the "double dip" is already here and will be reflected in undeniable ways over the next couple of months. Prepare to embrace the suck. The Federal Reserve and government quiver of economic weapons is empty, tapped out, sucking wind, pining for the fjords.

Probably the only thing keeping this contraction in retail spending from being more dramatic is the increase in the price of gasoline (we're nearing $1 increase during the past year)

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:29 PM | Comments (533)
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Hello, hello all M&Ms. Welcome to your regularly scheduled Saturday night ONT here at the AoS mansion.

A Moment in Time: Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Playboy After Dark in 1968
Back in the late 60's Hugh Hefner had a weekly TV show that was supposed to show a 'typical' party at Hugh's place with playmates, celebrities of the day and various performers showing up and chatting with Hefner. Today the shows are a gold mine of groovelicious 60's retro goodness. Here's part of an episode from 1968 where Hugh talks with Roman Polanski and his wife, Sharon Tate. Within a year Sharon would be dead at the hands of Charlie Manson's gang and less than 10 years later Polanski would rape a 13 year old girl. You can watch the rest of the interview here.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:10 PM | Comments (931)
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This past week several big companies, including Caterpillar, Verizon, and AT&T, announced that ObamaCare would cost them millions of dollars this year. To pay for it they variously suggested layoffs and benefits reductions. Analysts suggest that the total first-quarter hit to S&P 500 firms will be $4.5 billion.

Well, Democrats can't stand to have their precious economy-destroying healthcare program criticized in its very first week, so they've announced an "investigation" into the claims. Late yesterday, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation sent letters to the CEOs of AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co, and Verizon asking them to appear for a hearing on their claims. In the letters, Waxman and Stupak ask for company documents including accounting analyses and the internal emails of all "senior company officials" related to the projected costs of ObamaCare. How serious are they? The letter actually defines "senior company officials."

Power Line has a copy of one of the letters.

Not content with their victory, Democrats won't rest until they've beaten down anyone who points out the devastation caused by their anti-prosperity policies. This will be as much of an "investigation" as the Democrats' demonization of oil company CEOs last summer or Toyota execs more recently.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:31 PM | Comments (539)
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Old And Busted: "Unexpected"
The New Hotness: "Revised"

...The US economy expanded less vigorously than previously estimated in the final three months of 2009, but still showed its biggest rise in six years.

According to the US Commerce Department, the economy expanded 5.6 per cent between October and December, down from an earlier estimate of 5.9 per cent published last month.

The downward revision, slightly worse than the 5.7 per cent expected by economists, was driven by a decline in business investment and inventories. Consumer spending was also less than originally thought...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 11:28 AM | Comments (103)
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Sorry -- made a last minute decision to travel to Vegas yesterday. Am heading for the Searchlight Tea Party rally to see Palin, Breitbart, etc. Will probably hit the Vegas rally too (with Coulter).

Should have some pictures. Hope to snag some quickie interviews.

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (255)
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Yesterday afternoon I tweeted:

Friday document dump. DOJ releases terror prosecution stats: http://is.gd/b0Gco #tcot

Because I just knew that if DOJ was going public with the information late on a Friday afternoon, it would be bad for AG Holder. The Obama Administration has had a Friday document dump almost every week for a year, where they try to bury bad news. Yesterday's was no different.

But the claim that there are 403 terrorists in custody is absurd. DOJ arrives at this figure by counting what it describes as two categories of case. The first involves real terrorism charges. Sounds fair enough, but what types of "terrorism charges" are they counting? Well they include, for example, convictions under statutes barring "Animal Enterprise Terrorism," "Narco-terrorism," "crimes against internationally protected persons" (which can be terrorism-related but are not necessarily), hostage-taking (ditto), and offenses like harboring terrorists and material support to terrorism (which are surely terrorism-related, and involve assistance provided to terrorists, but are charges generally brought against facilitators, not actual terrorists).

Not exactly KSM. But these Category I cases, though they blatantly goose up DOJ's numbers, don't account for most of DOJ's claimed 403 terrorists. Over sixty percent belong to "Category II," which Justice, without a hint of apology, describes as follows:

Category II cases include defendants charged with violating a variety of other statutes where the investigation involved an identified link to international terrorism. These Category II cases include offenses such as those involving fraud, immigration, firearms, drugs, false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, as well as general conspiracy charges [i.e., cases that charge other kinds of conspiracies, not terrorism conspiracies].

So Holder's idiotic claim that the criminal justice system is suited to trying Al Qaeda terrorists, particularly the Guantanamo Bay detainees, comes crumbling down. Unless they're planning to charge KSM with perjury, they'd be better off sticking with military tribunals.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:41 AM | Comments (42)
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Two things this week caught my attention out of the Banana Republic of the Southwest.

First, an excellent primer on the years-long battle over control of the county with Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas on one side and the County Supervisors on the other.

Folks ask why I'm so hard on power-abusing Arpaio and just-plain-paranoiac Thomas and not the likely corrupt County Supervisors. Look, the county supervisors are politicians. Corruption, lying, and other morally turpitudinous behaviors are second nature to them. Sure, I condemn it. Of course, replace their asses. But I'm not surprised by it.

By contrast, Arpaio and Thomas are supposed to uphold the law. In fact, they both took oaths to do just that. I expect ethical behavior from the police and from prosecutors because they are the primary point of contact between the public and the criminal law. And while our constitutions have provisions for removing bad civil servants, they spend a lot more time on restraining the police and protecting folks from unjust prosecutions. The jack-booted adventures of Arpaio and his sidekick, Thomas, cross a line from ordinary political overreach and corruption to anti-American tyranny. The lawsuits against judges who rule against them should have been a major warning sign.

Anyway, the primer caught my eye and I recommend it because it manages to break down the convoluted doings in Maricopa County into understandable bits.

Second, in the latest shot in the county's civil war, the County Supervisors are planning to sue a bus company for selling Sheriff Arpaio a bus. The county is vague about what the bus company did wrong:

Maricopa County officials can't sue the Sheriff's Office for buying a $465,000 bus without their approval, so now they want to sue the bus company.

Precisely why Motor Coach Industries would be sued over the internal squabble remains unclear.

The county has maintained in this months-long bus battle that Sheriff Arpaio's office bought the vehicle with Jail Enhancement funds, when it should have used a typical county procurement process.

From the bus company's point of view, though, the Sheriff's Office was a customer with cash. For the county to demand a full refund, without so much as a deduction for the depreciation, seems like a raw deal for MCI.

Clearly, there's something bad in the water in Maricopa County. Sorry, dear citizens of Maricopa. Given the actions of your leaders, there's a strong case for glassing your small section of the Southwest so we can be sure that the infection does not spread. Hot zones don't contain themselves.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:23 AM | Comments (270)
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I direct your attention to the following passage in my incredibly funny, sublimely intelligent, universally beloved and now eerily precognitive entry: "A Night of Terror In DC". In this entry, you may remember, Democratic house members whined about the Tea-Parties.

Here is "Clyburn" on their origins:

Clyburn: I haven't seen professional spitting like that since I marched on Selma in 1965! The Alabama River was so swollen with spittle that it threatened to overrun it's banks and drown the city of Montgomery.

Which would have been OK, actually. Would've taught that racist, segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace a lesson.

Jack: But Wallace was a Democrat, wasn't he?

Clyburn: And a damn fine Democrat! Even ran for President he was so popular.

Jack: But you just wished that he would have been drowned in a flood of spit...

Pelosi: Don't mind him...he's really only here so we can compare everything to Selma, '65. And because I told him we would mandate that you buy all of us coffee.

See....in my critically acclaimed and pulitzer-prize winning entry, I had Democratic House Members comparing the protesters in Selma to the Teapartiers. In fact, in my compelling and excessively Swiftian (but better!) satirical piece, I even had James Clyburn say:

Jack: Then why do the vast majority of Americans want the bill repealed?

Clyburn: Because the vast majority of Americans were at Selma in 1965!

Enter today's trenchant analysis, (which, unlike my piece, I believe is meant to be taken seriously) provided by one Colbert King (safe link to NRO):

The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class.

Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.

"They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, 'Lynch her! Lynch her!' I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd — someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."

He throws in a gratuitous mention of David Duke too. Also, teapartiers are directly responsible for Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and Pat Buchanan. Just for good measure.

His thesis concludes:

Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.

And some of you thought I was exaggerating when my "Clyburn" character compared everything to Selma, 65. Or said that "the majority of Americans were at Selma, '65."

If I ever write another one, I'll do better. I'll change the references to Tuscaloosa, 1956 in the name of accuracy.

I blame the current discrepancy in my creative tour-de-force on a misinterpretation of the oftentimes cloudy visions of liberal future-thought. Other than that, though, I think my insanely brilliant and ground-breaking piece is pretty spot-on with current realities.

So I ask you...should I send Colbert King a bill?

Posted by: Jack M. at 07:17 AM | Comments (135)
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Rough weekend for the Cinderella teams. Kind of feel badly about St. Marys, you know those Baptists had steak yesterday.

1 connertown Kansas 67 107
2 Seattle Steve West Virginia 66 130
2 kujayhawk12 Kansas 66 106
4 33°50'35.00N 7°46'44.00E Kansas 65 105
5 TXMarko's Bracket Tennessee 64 152
5 Terminal Count Kansas 64 104
7 WunderKraut Duke 63 135
7 Lee's Money Bracket West Virginia 63 135
7 Bucks Brackett Kansas 63 71
10 NodakDrunkhobos Kansas 62 102

K State and Butler this afternoon at 3:30, Kentucky and W Virginia tonight at 6.

Tomorrow Michigan St. vs. Tennessee, and the Baylor Baptist Bears confront pure concentrated evil.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:42 AM | Comments (67)
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Anthony Bourdain out at Ted Nugent's Ranch near Waco, cooking meat with fire and shooting automatic weapons.

Total awesomeness.

Ted Nugent's place is about 30 miles away from Casa DinT. He rolled through here a few years ago, pulled up to a coffee joint where my oldest kid was working at the time. I never imagined she'd have any idea who he was, but she did and she was totally floored.

She said he was gracious and funny.

video tip via Adam Baldwin on Twitter.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:50 PM | Comments (142)
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