America - The Hope and The Change promised by crazy leftists has arrived.

You can almost imagine Eichman relaxing at lunch, describing the best way to kill Jews.

//In America, it’s illegal to donate money to a candidate without first reporting it to the government. Even then, if you give more than is permissible you might end up in jail.  In this country, you can’t add trans fats to your foods or smoke cigarettes in your own bar. Here, Little Sisters of the Poor can’t tell the state they’d rather not buy condoms and bakers can’t tell a couple they’d rather not participate in their wedding.

But it’s completely legal to kill an unborn baby for convenience and then sell its parts for cash.

Let’s forget the legality of the issue for a moment. And let’s forget religion and politics, if that’s possible. Let’s forget the disconcerting economic incentives inherent in these types of transactions and ask: what kind of person nonchalantly describes “crushing” the life from another living being—a being that might have already been named and loved; a loss that might have a tremendous negative impact on a person or family or community—over a glass of wine and some giggles?//

Let's hear it for the Obama Recovery That Never Happened!

Hey, let's support Immigration Reform so that fewer Americans will have jobs!

//Fewer Americans born in the U.S. have jobs now than were employed to November 2007, despite a working-age population growth of 11 million.

The amazing drop in employment highlights President Barack Obama’s slow recovery from the deep 2008 shock, but also spotlights many companies’ growing reliance on foreign migrant labor.

In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one-in-six jobs in January 2010, according to federal data highlighted by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Since November 2007, the number of working legal and illegal migrants has risen by two million, from 23.1 million in November 2007 to 25.1 million in November 2014.

But the number of Americans with jobs has fallen by 1.5 million, from 124 million in November 2007 to 122.6 million November 2014.

“All of the net gain in employment since 2007 has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). … Native employment has still not returned to pre-recession levels, while immigrant employment already exceeds pre-recession level,” said a Dec. 19 statement from the group.

The job transfer from Americans to immigrants has accelerated since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009.//

Carter + Nixon = Obama

Reporter retires and describes Obama's profanity laced tirades:

//LAMB: So, off of that experience, how many other presidents were that aware of what they said to you and how many just did not pay attention at all and you had no personal reaction from them?

COMPTON: I think most presidents realize – had a personal connection. I don't think they ever -- we were ever in a confrontation-type moment where they felt the need to apologize. I have seen in the last year Barack Obama really angry twice. Both were off-the-record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals. Another where he took us to task for not understanding the limits he has with foreign policy and the way he's dealing with the Middle East and Iraq, and Afghanistan. And I don't find him apologetic. But I find him willing to stand up to the press and look them in the eye, even though it was off the record and just give us hell.

LAMB: Does he have a point?

COMPTON: From his point of view, he may. But we cover what we are allowed to cover. And when policy decisions and presidents are inaccessible and don't take questions from the press on a regular basis, I think they get -- they reap what they sow.//

Americans must be racist or something...

...because it is not like Obama has us involved in an unpopular war.

He's done it all on his own.

Obama's approval rating plummets to 37%.

President Obama - making the world safe for...

...Islamic nuclear terrorism since 2009.

It was easy at first to miss anything but the string of insults directed from Obama to Netanyahu, including the casual accusation of autism. (It’s arguable whether this represented a new low for the president, who has a habit of demonstrating his grade school playground vocabulary.) But once the initial shock at the further degrading of American statecraft under Obama wore off, it was easy to see the real purpose of the story. The Obama administration wanted to brag through its stenographer that the president had protected the Iranian nuclear program from Israel:

I ran this notion by another senior official who deals with the Israel file regularly. This official agreed that Netanyahu is a “chickenshit” on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a “coward” on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat. The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

If Iran goes nuclear, those words will be the perfect description of the Obama administration’s fecklessness: “Now it’s too late.” Too late, that is, for our allies like Israel and the Gulf states to protect themselves from the consequences of the Obama administration’s Mideast policies–which principally affect Israel and the Gulf states. //

Smart diplomacy.

Welcome to the Desert of ...

...Hope and Change.

Vacations, savings, medical care....all things of the past.

That O'Reilly interview was eye-opening.

When you discount the necessary flacking that Panetta has to do for Obama, you realize how much danger this country is in. 

//Perhaps I hope for too much.  Perhaps Leon Panetta’s being half-moral is better than nothing at all.  And in defense of Panetta, he did go on O’Reilly.  He knew that wouldn’t be fun. And you can’t expect the likes of Valerie Jarrett or Susan Rice to step forward.  At least Panetta is out there — and before the election.  I am grateful to him for that.

But like many people, I am fearful, fearful that our great country has been mortally wounded during the last six years.  We need Panetta, and others, to say more, much more.  We need them to hold their collective noses, expose all the nauseating details of this administration and speak in defense of America because it is America itself  that has been under assault by its own executive branch.  What could be worse than that?//

America - Now with more Hope and Change...

...China v. Japan inevitable with America weakened.

/

Well, then, how do you say...

..."Screw them" in Stupid?

//LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Army officer is told not to enter his daughter’s high school because he’s wearing his uniform. “Before he was allowed in, the security guard stopped him and said sorry you’re not allowed in the school. Security told him men and women in uniform weren’t allowed because it may offend another student.”//

America - Now with even more hope and change - 

Thank you, President Obama!

// More relevant is the fact that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is significantly greater than our own and that, within six years, China will have more ships in its navy than we do. China already has more service members.//

America - Now with even more hope and change....

....and how is that working out?


Back in 2007, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

//Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.//

Prompting this 2014 reflection:

//That’s a solid statement of Obama’s own view of the significance of his presidency going in, I think. Only he knows what he thought his election and the big Cairo speech in 2009 would accomplish, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he honestly believed it’d be a death knell for jihadism going forward. The death wouldn’t be quick or painless, but having now been deprived of the anti-Americanism that supposedly — supposedly — sustains it, it could only wither and die. That would also explain his fascination with dopey “wrong side of history”/”no place in the 21st century” rhetoric whenever ISIS decapitates someone or Putin invades a neighbor. It could be that O really did believe his election marked a historical turning point in which the diminution of retrograde forces abroad was inevitable. And maybe that’s why a year’s worth of briefings on ISIS didn’t penetrate. Don’t they know they’re going to lose? Haven’t they seen his face?//

But, at least, he has a plan...

...or if not a plan, at least a Nobel Prize!!!

Washington Post gives Obama 4 Pinocchios for ISIS spin.

From the Hot Air article:

//Obama is in over his head. All the spin in the world can’t cover it up, and even the President’s usual defenders can’t deny it any longer.//

The country is in the best of hands.

Obama's top advisors are the people who drove him during his 2008 campaign.

You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't take the mask off the Lone Ranger and you don't....

...question the Lightworker!

Comity and civility are very important in politics. Except, of course, when people make you angry by disagreeing with you.

Josh Rogin, Daily Beast:

Just before the congressional recess, President Obama invited over a dozen Senate and House leaders from both parties to the White House to talk about foreign policy. According to two lawmakers inside the meeting, Obama became visibly agitated when confronted by bipartisan criticism of the White House’s policy of slow-rolling moderate Syrian rebels’ repeated requests for arms to fight the Assad regime and ISIS.

According to one of the lawmakers, Sen. Bob Corker asked the president a long question that included sharp criticisms of President Obama’s handling of a number of foreign policy issues—including Syria, ISIS, Russia, and Ukraine. Obama answered Corker at length. Then, the president defended his administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better outcomes in Syria was “horseshit.”

It’s bad enough that Bob Corker is a Republican. From Tennessee. Then he has to go and criticize the President of the United States on a foreign policy issue? He’s lucky to get off with a “horseshit.”

It’s good that Obama is treating his opponents like this, and the way he’s treated them for the past five years, because he’s a Democrat. Losing his temper and swearing at people for questioning his infallibility is awesome, because they’re scum anyway.

Bipartisanship is all well and good until the other guy doesn’t fall in line.//

Strange.  Because Obama has always been so courteous and concerned with being fair and civil to Republicans.

Another day in the place that used to be America...

...another example of how atheists are better at not being offended by religious symbols/texts in the public square than everyone else.

When did free-thinkers begin to favor the suppression of books?

//The order was hailed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The FFRF had filed a complaint with the military—claiming the presence of the Bible "amounts to a government endorsement of that religious text."

"FFRF is pleased to learn that NEXCOM has taken seriously its constitutional obligation to remain neutral toward religion as a representative of our federal government," FFRF Sam Grover told me. "By removing Bibles from Navy-run lodges, the Navy has taken a step to ensure that it is not sending the impermissible message that Christians are favored over guests with other religious beliefs or over those guests with no religion."

The Bibles had been placed in the rooms, free of charge, by Gideons International.

An active-duty service member contacted me and alerted me that the Bibles were being taken out of hotel rooms, and a lodge housekeeper told American Family Association the same thing.

"They told us to put them in boxes where they would be taken to a donation center somewhere," the housekeeper told AFA.//

The Pax Americana is dead.

The only good thing is that we get to see how effective the policies of the "Peace Movement" really are.

//Obama knows the dangers of his half measures, given his own regrets on Libya. Friedman writes: “Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.” When it now comes to salvaging the wreckage in Northern Iraq, he has stressed repeatedly that he prefers months of inconclusive air attacks to placing some boots on the ground that could rout the ISIL forces in a short fraction of that time. It is hard to know how many people will starve or be killed in the interim. But we do know that tens of thousands of people have already been forced from their homes, some of whom have already lost their lives while the President dithered because he wanted the Iraqi government to repair its own internal relations. Half measures do not a great President make.

A record as dismal as Obama’s does not happen by accident. It stems from some fundamental conceptual error, which in this instance is one that is shared by the hard-line libertarian wing of the Republican Party, led by Rand Paul, which is deeply suspicious of the use of force in international affairs. The root of the difficulty is this: a strong libertarian believes that the primary wrong is the use or threat of force. It’s clearly wrong for a powerful nation such as the United States to commit aggression against its weaker neighbors. But the intellectual slogging for libertarians gets a lot tougher when the question is how to respond to both the use and threats of force by others. In these cases, the principle of self-defense reveals how difficult it is to decide when to respond and with how much force even in simple disputes between ordinary individuals. The issues only get tougher in the international arena as the stakes get higher and the overall uncertainty increases.

Obama, like the hard-core libertarians, is skeptical about the use of force in international affairs. Imprudence is of course unwise in any area, but one cannot rule out the extensive use of force in corners of the world where the ends sought—the control of the aggression of others—is indubitably legitimate. The point is true even in cases in which nations act in defense of third parties who are incapable of defending themselves. Of course, intervention is costly and can easily backfire. But less intervention is not always less costly than more intervention.

In many cases, the only effective way to deal with aggression is with a strong and decisive response. Our overly intellectual President has failed to deliver one. He sees himself as a deep thinker who sees issues that lesser minds just miss. He would do a lot better in international affairs if he would stop his philosophical musings and start being the President of the United States and the leader of the free world.//

Hidden inflation, no recovery, collapsing gasoline consumption....

...Welcome to the era of Hope and Change.

//If you choose to measure the amount of gasoline leaving U.S. refineries and entering domestic inventories and call this “gasoline consumption”; you can hide the actual collapse in gasoline consumption – until those retail inventories are overflowing, and there is simply no more room in the storage tanks.

This is what we see today in the U.S.: a gasoline market which had been deliberately-and-dramatically over-supplied with gasoline at the wholesale end of the supply-chain (the refineries) has now practically ground to a halt. The same nation which previously amazed the world as it accumulated more automobiles and more miles of highways per capita than any nation on Earth (and by a huge margin) now has such an insane glut of gasoline that it’s massive chain of refineries have had to simply turn off the taps – until this pathetically anemic economy manages to burn-off some of that glut.

This conclusion becomes even more visible/obvious when we view the gasoline data just from the start of the mythical “U.S. economic recovery” to the present. At the start of the “U.S. recovery”; U.S. gasoline consumption was at a rate of 52 million gallons per day (already more than 20% below the 1998 all-time peak). In the five years since the start of this pretend-recovery; U.S. gasoline consumption has fallen all the way to 18 million gallons per day.

Since the beginning of “the U.S. economic recovery”; U.S. gasoline consumption has plummeted by nearly 2/3. As the pseudo-recovery began, and supposedly “strengthened”; U.S. refineries were ordered to fill up the inventories of their dealer network, in anticipation of the increased gasoline consumption which would have occurred in any real “recovery”.

But there never was an increase in U.S. gasoline consumption, because there never was a U.S. economic recovery. Rather, the Greater Depression has simply (and relentlessly) continued to pulverize the U.S. economy like a meat-grinder. To hide this devastation (as well as is possible), the government produces a wide array of its pseudo-statistics, that all contain myriad “adjustments” – which make it possible for these liars-with-numbers to distort the statistical picture of the U.S. economy beyond recognition.

Meanwhile, any/all statistics which measure raw data (and thus cannot be perverted with “adjustments”) are either suppressed (like the civilian participation rate), or not even measured, at all – as is the case with U.S. gasoline consumption. At the retail end; none of the “sales” statistics are adjusted for inflation, not even with the absurdly-fraudulent “CPI” numbers.

By not deflating sales data (at all) the collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption “at the pump” is hidden within all this unreported inflation. As explained in previous commentaries; it is this same, unreported inflation which allows the U.S. to convert its large, negative, GDP readings (which would otherwise reveal the Greater Depression) into “economic growth”. It is this same, unreported inflation which allows the government (and employers) to hide the fact that U.S. wages have collapsed by more than 50%.

But what the liars-with-numbers cannot hide (any longer) is the collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption which has accompanied the continued, downward spiral of the Greater Depression. The storage tanks are now all full. The only way to (temporarily) hide the collapse in U.S. gasoline consumption any further would be to construct even more storage facilities. However, there is no possible economic justification for increasing storage capacity in a market of steadily/relentlessly declining demand.

Indeed, the exact opposite is true. The U.S. economy of the 21st century (a mere hollowed-out husk of what it was only 20 years earlier) will require less and less gasoline storage facilities over time, reflecting a supply network for a steadily shrinking market. As the One Bank completes its plundering of the U.S. economy, and completes its transformation of the U.S. Middle Class into the Working Poor, it is also simply using up more and more of its economic lies.

The Great Inflation Lie will continue to allow the U.S. government (and other Western governments) to crank-out absurd/imaginary positive numbers for GDP. It will continue to allow the U.S. government to crank-out absurd/imaginary numbers for retail sales (and hide the ongoing collapse of the entire U.S. retail sector).

A nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news..

...More non-news.  

Let's talk about inequality and racism!

//Last month, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that gross domestic product had grown at a lead-footed rate of 0.1 percent in the first quarter, economic analysts could focus on two pillars of hope. The first was that the winter weather was unusually awful, and first-quarter growth probably reflected that. And the second? This was a very preliminary number, and it seemed reasonable to think that it might be revised upward.

The operative word is "seemed." Now the BEA has provided its first revision, and things only get more dismal: The economy actually contracted in the first quarter instead of just lying down on the sofa and feeling all mopey and sad. Key areas of decline were exports, inventories and nonresidential fixed investment. In other words, whatever happened was happening on the business side.

This doesn't necessarily signal a slide into another recession, so don't rush out to change your money into gold certificates and canned goods. The lousy weather could easily have depressed all three categories, after all. The markets aren't freaking out; they were expecting this downward revision.

That said, as I wrote last month, this is a sign of an economy that is still very weak. It has been six years since the financial crisis. Federal government spending is still around 21 percent of GDP, up from 19 percent in 2007, and the Federal Reserve still has a very expansive monetary policy. Under those circumstances, a quarter of negative growth is pretty unsettling.

Of course, if Michelle had been Republican, this would have led to a round of concerned discussion about how "out of touch" Republicans are to the concerns of the average American and how after 5 years unemployment was to high.

10 year old hands Michelle Obama her unemployed father's resume.

America - Now with even more Hope and Change - 2014

Ace of Spades writes:

Coincidence: Hollywood's only conservative group is getting close IRS nonprofit scrutiny

Another Coincidence: James O'Keefe Group Being Audited by NY. Again.

Yet Another Coincidence: Dinesh D'Souza Indicted For Election Fraud

Still Another Coincidence: IRS Proposes New 501(c)(4) Rules That Just Happen to Cover Most Tea Party Groups

Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin's 'John Doe' Subpoenas

Secret investigations targeted coincidently at most prominent conservative groups in WI who can only now legally talk about their harassment. If you want to see what American fascism would look like, well this is it.