Recovery Bummer.

In a report entitled "Unchartered Depths," the Committee finds that "employment is now 5.0% below what it was at the start of the recession, 38 months ago. This compares to an average rise in employment of 3.7% over the same period in prior post-WWII recessions." [Emphasis added and do note he's not talking about the unemployment rate but total employment, that is, workforce as a fraction of total population -- ace]

On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions. [I do not know the exact definition of "real GDP" he means but I would guess it's the standard figure, less inflationary growth and probably less population growth, too. In any event, you can see the wide disparity between Obama's real GDP growth figure and the average real GDP growth in actual recoveries -- ace.]

The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, "this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from." In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground.

That was what Ronald Reagan's critics said when the U.S. economy soared during 1983 and 1984 with quarterly growth numbers exceeding 7%. At the time, liberal Keynesians yawned and declared the good times nothing more than a normal snapback from the deep recession.

On the plus side, Obama reads the shit out of a TelePrompTer at 8.8% increase over most presidents in a post-recession economy.

Dean Vernon Wormer Comments:

Zero point eight. It's more than a little below par, Mr. Obama. IT STINKS! It's the lowest on campus. It's the lowest in Faber history!

Boy, I am not feeling well, to keep missing these references that are just there for the plucking.

I Was Told There Would Be No Math In This Presidency: Crossroads PAC, a Karl Rove joint, starts a big-money tv ad campaign on... the economy, stupid.

Posted by: Ace at 01:55 PM | Comments (238)
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If you need a refresher, Hamas conducted a raid (probably illegal, as terrorists never wear uniforms) and snuck across the border, attacked an Israeli outpost, and kidnapped Gilad Shalit.

Wikipedia uses the word "capture." Um, yeah. Like Bruno Hauptman "captured" the Lindbergh Baby.

He has been held illegally for five years.

Those who "captured" him are making threats and demands, like legal armies always do.

Shalit's captors issued another demand to the Israelis, demanding that Israel release an additional 1,000 Palestinian prisoners (in addition to all female and young prisoners, as previously demanded) and end Israel's incursions into Gaza.[38] Two days later, the captors issued a 24-hour ultimatum for meeting their demands, threatening unspecified consequences if Israel refused.[39] Hours after the ultimatum was issued, Israel officially rejected the demands, stating that: "there will be no negotiations to release prisoners"

So, of course Amnesty International must protest this and demand his release, right?

Wrong.

If a better example of the utter moral collapse of the human rights community exists, it would be hard to find. The statement is one of passionless brevity — just a few sentences long — and expresses no opinion on the standing of Hamas, or on its 2006 raid into Israel, or on the legitimacy of its goals and methods. Remarkably, it doesn’t even demand the release of Gilad Shalit. The most that this allegedly courageous and principled human rights community could bring itself to say to the terrorists of Hamas is that they should improve the conditions of Shalit’s imprisonment.

I have noted this before -- numerous times before -- but when I was young and less wise, I read the James Bond books and thought parts of them were pretty silly.

Oh I don't mean the superhero stuff; obviously that's silly (though Bond is not a superhero in the books). But you expect that silliness; that's the whole point.

The parts I objected to as too silly were the background/setting bits that just struck me as implausible.

S.P.E.C.T.R.E., for example, disguised itself as an... international relief agency which provided charitable assistance and legal aid to "stateless persons" and political refugees.

How absurd, I thought, that a major criminal enterprise could hide in plain sight, and not only hide in plain sight, but receive contributions from well-intentioned dupes from around the world! How ridiculous that agents of international terrorism (that's what the "T" stands for in SPECTRE) could pose as bleeding-hearts agents of compassionate relief! That a major international charitable institution could be captured wholly by terrorists, thugs, and criminals!

Yes. How supremely ridiculous. What a hack that Ian Fleming was.

An American Continues Being Held By Terrorists: Sgt Bowe Bergdahl has been held by an Al Qaeda linked network for two years now.

While it's unclear where the 25-year-old soldier is being held, a video released on the Internet last month shows him standing next to a senior official in the al-Qaida-linked Haqqani network in Paktika province in Afghanistan.

I had forgotten this, and feel shame that I did. Thanks to GnuBreed for reminding me.

Amnesty International

If donating directly to Al Qaeda and Hamas feels too risky and too dirty to you, try us! We have Bono.

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (165)
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Win YOUR CHANCE to have dinner with Obama, just by donating!!!

No purchase necessary! No, it really says that. You have to say that when you have a contest, because of some federal law that says there must be some alternate method of entry besides a purchase.

But it's always easier if you purchase. If you donate $5 or more, you're automatically entered in the most awesome sweepstakes of all time!

But there's still more! No, there really is, I'm not making this up.

Now -- Joe Biden will attend the dinner as well!!!

Now how much would you pay?!

You Know... Since no purchase is necessary, every righty in the world could sign up for this and have a shot at an... interesting (and uncomfortable) dinner.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (195)
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A jury decision is a valuable f'n' thing.

Blogojevich showed no reaction as the jury found him guilty on 17 of 20 counts against him. He then sat back in his chair with his lips pursed and looked toward his wife Patti and whispered, "I love you."

Ah. No verdict reached on two other counts. Ergo: 17 guilty, 1 innocent, 2 no verdict and theoretically result in a mistrial on those charges only and theoretically he can be retried on those but I imagine 17 is enough for the prosecutors.

Alas, he never did call all those Obama agents he threatened to call.

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (158)
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Well, that's just terrific.

Good to know this now.

Wait, we already knew this for a long, long time. I guess Obama was the last to know.

In the first two years of Obama’s presidency, his top aides had grown accustomed to a process in which Obama drew out and explored the views of his full team and searched for a consensus — decision by ballot, some called it.

Increasingly, however, that process has changed, according to a wide group of ObamaÂ’s personal friends, informal advisors and top aides interviewed during the spring. In recent months, they say, the president has been relying more heavily on his own instincts and feeling less impelled to seek accord among advisors. Â…

“I think he reached a point where he had to trust his instincts, and there was nothing left to inform his decision except to do that,” said one advisor who is intimately familiar with the president’s thinking on foreign policy matters and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Ed digests a little more:

The catalyst for this was supposedly the Osama bin Laden raid. However, according to all reports at the time, that was a consensus decision.

So what is this?

Well, it's two things. First, it's a recognition by Obama that the Obama Reign is, what's that phrase?, a miserable failure. Having finally recognized the fact of failure, he now casts about for a reason for it. And, as people do, such as during job interviews when asked to name their worst flaw, Obama discovers, shockingly, that his worst flaw is actually something that's not very bad at all.

See, he was a little too concerned with consensus, a little too focused on other people's beliefs, a little too determined to come to decisions through a rational process by consultation with High Experts.

Another way to say this is: Obama's greatest flaw for the last two and a half years is that he was too modest. He was too modest for not realizing that his own instincts and his own intellect were of such a remarkable caliber that any adulteration of these finely-honed mechanisms of truth-discovery by intermixing with the instincts and intellects of others would yield worse results than strict reliance on the power of his own faculties would achieve.

I don't know how you guys see it, but this is exactly what I've been thinking for 28 dismal months. Over and over again I've wondered, "Gee, why doesn't this Prometheus of the Mind just trust himself more?"

I'm guessing you have too, and I'm guessing further that you will credit Obama for nailing it so exquisitely in his mid-term post-mortem.

Here's the second thing. The Act Two moment of truth.

Obama's campaign was essentially a Hollywood production. It had a simple narrative, a Hero for whom we were supposed to root despite not having any strong reason to do so, except he sort of looked like a Leading Man and his opponent sort of looked like a Character Actor playing the Villain, and terrific set design and punchy visuals and a script which, if a little shallow, nevertheless achieved the only things that are truly crucial in a script, emotional investment and narrative (dramatic) momentum.

Hell, they even had an MTV-ready tie-in single and plenty of surprise cameos and an international promotional campaign to make sure they got plenty of overseas Box Office.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (261)
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H.L. Mencken quipped that the New Deal divided America into "those who work for a living and those who vote for a living."

The TSA has divided America into "those who grope for a living and those who are groped for living."

Especially germane: Ace's classic, "The New Feudalism".

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:48 AM | Comments (181)
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The whole editorial reads like a Bill Maher joke...obnoxious, badly misses the point and of course, is not funny (at least not intentionally).

THE GUN RIGHTS lobby has spent considerable time and energy in pursuit of one goal: crippling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). It has largely succeeded — and with dire consequences.

Concerned to the point of paranoia about the erosion of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, the National Rifle Association and far too many lawmakers have fought against virtually every proposal to empower the bureau to better track and crack down on illegal firearms. They have won reductions in the ATFÂ’s already meager budget. They have restricted the bureauÂ’s ability to share information with other law enforcement agencies. They have kept the bureau rudderless for the past six years by blocking confirmation of new directors. And they continue to fight new rules that would allow the bureau to track bulk sales of long guns that have played a major role in the drug-fueled violence in Mexico.

Now, the very critics who have tied the bureauÂ’s hands are expressing outrage over a novel, and we would agree questionable, ATF operation intended to curb gun smuggling into Mexico.

It's funny how the answer to every problem is always more and strong government. Assume for a moment the premiss of the editorial is correct, gun rights advocates (isn't interesting there are people who advocate against a recognized constitutional right?) have weakened the ATF to this point, how does it follow that that's the cause of this idiotically run operation? More importantly, if they acted so incompetently and with such disregard for existing rules (one agent charged, "It's like they grabbed the ATF rulebook and threw it out the window."), why in the world would you give this gang more power?

We gave the government more power after 9/11 to conduct airline screenings. Do you feel safer now that unionized government workers are in charge? Clearly expanding government power has led to such improvements as...forcing elderly women to remove their adult diapers prior to boarding a flight.

Jean Weber of Destin filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.

Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.

“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said Friday. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”

Yeah, what could go wrong if we gave the ATF and every federal security bureaucracy even more power? Only a big government liberal would think that, or a Bill Maher joke, is a recipe for success.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:38 AM | Comments (294)
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It's time again for one of our state-of-the-blog straw polls. Last month's poll, like all straw polls we've had except for the one I stupidly listed Ron Paul, had Sarah Palin as the Moron Choice by a landslide with Herman Cain a strong second. Despite my firm conviction that she isn't going to run, I've included Palin again. Fair warning, Palinistas, if she doesn't make her move soon, I'm going to take her off the list.

I've also added Rick Perry this month. Coincidentally, the poll is now skull-flavored:

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:19 AM | Comments (356)
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Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:54 AM | Comments (90)
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The Ustream window is below the fold. If everything goes as planned, at midnight EDT, CAC will be running equipment and acting as the resident skeptic on a genuine ghost hunt.

He says he'll be the one in plaid shorts. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 07:45 PM | Comments (92)
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