Sheriff's Office To "Punish" Free Speech

The KKK is clearly a sick organization. There's no justifying the Klan's ideology. However, in the "Land of the Free", ignorant, hateful organizations are protected by the Constitution. But, apparently, the 1st Amendment means little to the Charleston County Sheriff's Office (SC), which is currently investigating the local KKK chapter because someone has been distributing organizational literature around town.

The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the distribution of Klu Klux Klan literature in the Forest Lakes Area of West Ashley.

Deputies have collected numerous pieces of literature as evidence, and they are now encouraging residents who discover this literature on or around their property to discard it, Sheriff’s Capt. Mike Stanley said.

The fliers were from the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The faction’s literature also has been seen recently in other tri-county cities and it showed up this spring in West Ashley’s racially diverse Pierpont neighborhood.

It is unclear what authorities can do to prevent such mail drops or punish the people responsible. Stanley said that the Sheriff’s Office isn’t pursuing charges against the distributors but that the agency’s investigation is still in its infancy.

Nice choice of words, Post and Courier. Punish the people responsible? Punish them for what? Having a controversial ideology? It's one thing if they were trespassing. But is having a controversial ideology a crime now? This is a slippery slope, folks. If the student loan bubble bursts while the "explosive" inflationary effects of QE and ZIRP are realized and the economy gets really bad--and it might--and people start standing up to the state, will the state "punish" us because we share an ideology it finds controversial? Will we not enjoy 1st Amendment protection?

Obama Campaign Gets Sweetheart Loan From BoA

The conservative media (talk radio and a few online publications) have been spinning this story as the Obama campaign in financial trouble, but they're missing the point. The point of the story of the campaign borrowing $15 million at 2.5% from Bank of America is that it got a sweetheart loan from Warren Buffett's bank with an interest rate far below the rate of inflation. If I could borrow millions of dollars at 2.5%, I'd borrow as much as I could because, as 2.5% is lower than the CPI of around 3.0% (and far below the real inflation rate of around 6.0%), the loan is effectively free money with an interest rate paying the borrower .5-3.5%. Big banks are notoriously stingy with loans these days, and for the campaign to receive a once-in-a-lifetime deal like this, some backdoor shenanigans had to have taken place. This is a fine example of crony capitalism, isn't it, Mr. "Raise My Taxes" Buffett?

40% Of Americans Have Less Than $500 Savings

For excellent evidence that we're in an economic depression and the Fed, with its incessant money printing and ridiculously low interest rates, is hurting the average American, one need look no further than a recent survey conducted by CreditDonkey.com. (What's with legitimate, informative websites with silly names?) At any rate, the survey, which compiled financial data on 1,100 respondents of various socio-economic levels, found that 40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings. Here's the kicker: the low savings number was irrespective of income group; many respondents with millions of dollars in net worth had little tucked away in the bank. From CBS News:

A survey of about 1,100 Americans finds that more than 4-in-10 respondents admit they don’t have more than $500 in readily accessible savings.

The survey is a kind of departure for CreditDonkey.com, a website that compares credit card deals. Not respondents all were poor. Some had big houses, big mortgages or 401(k)s, but still no more than five Benjamins to rub together right now.

With most savings plans yielding interest significantly lower than the rate of inflation, a record number of seniors remaining in the workforce because their retirements are being threatened, and median household incomes down 24% since Obama took office, it's no wonder why many Americans don't have much in savings. You can't put away money you don't have, and, even if you had the cash, it would lose value in the bank.

Oh, also from the survey: 45% of respondents are afraid they’ll never be able to save. I happen to share that sentiment.

ECOMINOES Radio With Emily Goff Of The Heritage Foundation

Every episode is a special treat with this show. This week, we'll have Emily Goff of the Heritage Foundation on the phone with us from DC. Emily is a policy expert specializing in profligate federal spending, and oh my has Uncle Sam been the profligate spender over the last 4 years! It's going to be a great conversation. Don't miss it: 4-6 PM EST on KineticHifi.com.

Also, make sure to check out show archives. Past guests have included Robert Wenzel, Karl Denninger, and Tom DiLorenzo.

Congress Most Important For Fiscal Future

The hyper-polarized Coke/Pepsi nation has worked itself into a frenzy about the upcoming presidential election. But Julie Borowski of FreedomWorks reminds us today on townhall.com that Congress, not the president, will ultimately decide the nation's fiscal future:

Congress, not the president, writes the laws and controls the purse strings in the federal government. No matter how much the president wants to spend, he or she cannot spend a penny that the Congress has not first appropriated.

And Julie reminds us that it was the GOP Congress, not Bill Clinton, who reigned in the federal deficit in the late '90's:

The Clinton Administration serves as a reminder that Congress controls the fiscal agenda on Capitol Hill. At the recent 2012 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton had the nerve to take credit for policy that he had virtually no part of whatsoever.

“Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row,” Clinton said. “What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic.”
Clinton wants voters to believe that he balanced the federal budget in his second term, but the GOP-controlled Congress deserves the highest recognition. When Republicans controlled the House and Senate from 1995 to 2001, they stopped Clinton from spending the outrageous amount that he wanted to spend.

In 1995, when the GOP took control of Congress, Clinton’s budget projected continued federal deficits of $200 billion or more indefinitely into the future. 

The Republican Congress acted immediately to cut taxes and reduce spending—the recipe for balancing the budget. The capital gains tax was cut from 28 percent to 20 percent and federal discretionary spending was slashed by 17.5 percent, as a percent of GDP, over the next 4 years. 

Indeed. And you'd think that, with recent polls showing the GOP maintaining the House and picking up some seats in the Senate, the probability of some fiscal sanity would high. However, the Karl Rove-inspired GOP of the 2000's, unfortunately, shunned the party's fiscal conservatism of the 1990's in favor of social conservatism, joining its Democrat brethren in a spending orgy only surpassed by Obama's "2nd New Deal". The public outcry over limitless bailouts and massive new bureaucracies (hello, Obamacare) may convince this batch of congressional Republicans to return to fiscal conservatism. But I wouldn't count on it: The movement that helped the GOP regain the House in '10 (the Tea Party) was instantly corrupted by the Rovian "God, guns, and gays" wing of the Republican party. The word "evangelical" was frequently thrown around during the GOP primaries, and idiot social conservative Republicans such as Todd Akin and Scott DesJarlais continue to thump their Bibles on Capitol Hill.

TSA Inspections With K-9s At DC Metro Stations

Julie Borowski pointed out yesterday that the TSA has begun to perform bag checks using K-9s at metro stations in DC. Today, Matthew Taylor of the American Spectator gives us a little background about the federal government's latest pursuit of rights infringement:

The random bag searches on WMATA, focused on explosives, but embracing drug searches, started in December 2010. The proximate rationale for the security measure was the failed bomb plot of one Farooque Ahmed. But it turns out Mr. Ahmed's plot was conjured by the FBI, who designed a sting operation and encouraged him the whole way, after learning that he was planning to travel to Afghanistan or Pakistan to fight US forces there. To catch him, FBI agents posed as al-Qaeda operatives and redirected his efforts towards a metro bombing, asking him for help gathering information on possible Metro station targets. The eventual charges successfully brought against Mr. Ahmed were attempting to provide materials to a foreign terrorist organization, and collecting information to assist in planning an attack, for which he got 23 years.

This 2010 post from greatergreaterwashington.org, published at the time of the beginning of the random bag searches, makes all the right arguments about the foolishness, inconvenience, wastefulness, rights-infringment, and ineffectiveness of these searches.

So here we have the worst kind of government waste and invasiveness offered as a solution to a threat invented by government agents, a threat paraded as an example of successful government counter-intelligence.

The centralized defense to terrorism has two parts: 1) monitoring intelligence and following up on good leads, and 2) containing the damage of an attack, so that normal public life can continue. Counter-intelligence needs to be as adaptable as the threat it faces. The WMATA security measures, and so many DHS-sponsored measures like them, are a Maginot line, providing a veneer of security that may make some of us feel more comfortable, but are easily penetrated by a cunningly-devised blitz. When that happens, morale collapses.

In addition to providing a veneer of security, the increased use of TSA agents, domestic drones, and other symbols of the police state condition the American public to accept government omnipresence and omnividence, a dangerous prospect given the history of the state turning against its people in times of economic instability. Call me a doomsdayer, but if the student loan bubble bursts while the "explosive" inflationary effects of QE and ZIRP are realized and people get desperate, I would expect the increasingly omnipresent and omnivident government to use the TSA as a means to limit the mobility of those who oppose it.

The next time I'm in DC, I'm going to carry around a "suspicious" bag of dog biscuits.

Business Survey Shows High Inflation, Layoffs

Obama campaign lackeys are out in full-force spamming conservative and libertarian Facebook pages, perpetuating the falsehood that the economy is improving. In response to an encounter with such a paid operative on my own page, I presented the following rebuttal: 1) the September jobs report was statistically impossible, 2) the oft-cited improvement in retail sales is false, 3) the new orders of capital goods report suggests recession, 4) 20 states are indicating recession, and 5) the Fed itself has admitted that it's propping up the market to the tune of 50%. But it didn't matter. Liberals ignore facts.

The false narrative that the economy is improving has also been perpetuated by those generating the "official" economic data these lackeys have been tirelessly pushing. The September jobs report is obviously the best example of government drones shamelessly producing false data that benefit their master, but the October Philly Fed Business Outlook Survey (.pdf) is also a good example. The opening sentence of the survey describes a "modest improvement in business activity". However, a cursory glance at the data shows the "modest improvement" was accompanied by significantly higher prices paid for goods sold (so much so that profits have eroded-- how's that for an "improvement"?) and a steep increase in layoffs. Lies, damned lies, and government statistics that benefit the incumbent.

Obama Promised 1 Term If Economy Bad

Let's not forget the president's own words right after his inauguration. In a February 2009 interview with Matt Lauer, Obama stated that his presidency would be "one-term proposition" if the economy didn't recover in 3 years.

Despite the MSM's insistence that we've been recovering, the economy has made very little improvement since that interview. GDP has been growing at an infinitesimal 1-2% per annum (currently 1.3% with 20 states indicating a return to recession) and the U-6 unemployment rate (the real unemployment rate) is still hovering around 20%. What's more, median household incomes are down 24%. But is Obama fulfilling his promise and bowing out of the race? Of course not. The only way that his presidency will be a "one-term proposition" is if he's defeated 3 weeks from now.

Taxpayers To Recover $0 From Solyndra

The MSM is such a joke. No questions at last night's debate about the coming "fiscal cliff". One question about Libya (the only foreign policy question and the debate's shortest segment). And not a peep about Solyndra, which we've learned today will be unable to pay back taxpayers for the $500+ million in government-backed loans it blew. Highlights from the ticker:

*SOLYNDRA HAS ABOUT $71 MILLION IN NET DISTRIBUTABLE ASSETS     *SOLYNDRA LENDERS AHEAD OF GOVERNMENT OWED ABOUT $77 MILLION

So Obama's cronies' company, which is suing Chinese solar firms on the basis that they entered into a "conspiracy" to bankrupt it, will walk away from its bankruptcy without returning a dime to the American taxpayer. I guess it would have been too much for Candy Crowley to ask about Solyndra last night. Because, you know, it would have embarrassed her president.

Debunking Obama's 5 Million Jobs Lie

Twice during tonight's debate Obama made the false claim that 5 million jobs have been created during his presidency. I debunked 2 months ago a similar lie from the DNC (the claim was 4.5 million then):

CNN Fact Check came to the conclusion that the claim repeated at the DNC that the Obama Administration has "created 4.5 million" jobs was false. According to CNN:

The figure of 4.5 million jobs is accurate if you look at the most favorable period and category for the administration. But overall, there are still fewer people working now than when Obama took office at the height of the recession.

CNN claims that there are 1 million fewer private sector jobs than there were at the beginning of the Obama presidency, but the 4.5 million jobs lie thrown around at the DNC is much worse than CNN admits.

In reality, there are 8 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were before the Great Recession, with 4 million more competitors in the job market than there were in 2007. There are 2 million more unemployed and 2 million more underemployed than the BLS reports, and the majority of jobs created during the Obama presidency have been low-wage, part-time "McJobs". Furthermore, the displaced workers who need jobs most, aging baby boomers, have been largely passed over by employers in favor of younger candidates.

There are lies, and then there are absurdities. The 4.5 million jobs claim was clearly the latter. Oh, and presidents don't create jobs.

Libertarian Party Has It Completely Backwards

I'm going to make some people angry, but someone has to say this.

The Libertarian Party has it completely backwards. Instead of building a groundswell by pushing candidates for local and state office, it tries to accomplish the impossible by focusing on the presidency. I'm sorry to break it to my fellow libertarians (notice that I used a small "l"), but the presidency is not a realistic win for the Libertarian candidate in 2012. And the presidency won't be a realistic win in any election cycle until the Libertarian Party gets its act together and focuses on smaller races. Instead of whining about Gary Johnson not getting invited to the debates, the party should make its presidential candidates worthy contenders by actually getting Libertarians elected to office.

Despite the fact that the party has existed since 1971, few Libertarians have been elected to office of any kind. That's an absolutely pathetic track record. And the reason for the history of failure isn't because libertarians have been disenfranchised. No, there hasn't been a conspiracy. The reason is simple: in every single election cycle, the party focuses on national races. Earth to party leaders: you've tried that failed strategy for more than 40 years, longer than I've been on Earth. What's the saying about insanity? Something about trying the same failed approach over and over again?

I've been quite open about the fact that I've been severely underemployed since I earned my MBA. It pains me to see the obvious disconnect: The party needs someone to travel the country and work to actually get Libertarians elected to office, and I need another source of income. They should pay me a few bucks; I'll get some Libertarians elected. Only after the party has established a track record of emerging victorious in winnable elections should it worry about national elections.

Having said all of this, I'll probably vote for Gary Johnson anyway. But only for one reason: I live in SC, and the state's electoral votes are guaranteed to go to Romney. If I lived in a swing state or blue state, however, there's no way that I'd spend my vote protesting. And that's exactly how the Libertarian Party has positioned itself: as a protest vote.

Afterthought (10/16/12, 4PM EST): 

Likes, Libertarian Party's Facebook page: 236K
Likes, Libertarian Party of California's Facebook page: 95
  
The Libertarian party of the nation's most populous state has NINETY-FIVE likes on Facebook. Tell me there isn't a horrible disconnect between the national and state parties. Tell me that the national party isn't doing something terribly wrong.

Obamacare To Cost $114 Bil By 2015

The following chart is from "Federal Spending by the Numbers 2012", an exhaustive analysis of profligate government spending from the Heritage Foundation. (Which hasn't yet been published. Heritage's PR department sent me an advance copy. The full report will be available here on Oct. 16 at 8:00 AM EST.) As you can see from the cart, Obamacare spending will grow exponentially from day 1, immediately dwarfing the small business tax credits that are supposed to "offset" additional employee costs due to the behemoth legislation. As I said before, there are 2 primary reasons to hold your nose and vote for Romney: 1) the possibility of a new Federal Reserve president; 2) the repeal of the Obamacare monstrosity.

More Gov Lies: Retail Sales

The divergence between the the Fed's and the BLS's "headline" numbers and their later adjustments has gotten so great that it's not even worth paying attention to the initial reports anymore. (Not that that's going to stop the liberal media from using the flawed initial data to perpetuate the 4-year lie that the economy has been recovering.) I reported earlier that the BLS will likely add several thousand initial unemployment claims to its bogus September jobs report. Today I noticed that seasonal adjustments to the Fed's September retail sales report paint the exact opposite picture that its initial report painted: that retail sales have been increasing year-over-year since 2010. Take a look at the difference between the initial reported data and the seasonally-adjusted numbers:

Without seasonal adjustments, it appears that September retail sales have been increasing each year since 2010. But, with seasonal adjustments, we see that September sales have actually been decreasing each year--and by quite a bit! How many government-generated data sets are like this? Unbelievable.

Former Fed Prez Volcker on Bernanke: Bullsh*t

The list of Bernanke's critics from current and former economic policy leaders has been growing by leaps and bounds. David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget during Reagan's first term, recently stated the the current Fed chief should be "run out of town on a rail". Philly Fed Prez Charles Plosser recently warned that Bernanke's QE exit strategy will "end badly". And in the new biography of Paul Volcker, author William Silber writes that the former Fed president is quite critical of Bernanke's belief that "a little inflation" is good for employment:

It all sounded too easy. Push this button twice and out pops full employment. Equations do not work on people as well as they do on rockets... And all I can remember after that was a word flashing in my brain like a yellow caution sign: 'Bullshit.' I'm not sure exactly where that came from...but it's a thought that never left me.

Volcker is correct of course. While Plosser has stated that the full inflationary effects of Bernanke's monetary games won't be fully realized until 2015, anyone who has bought food or gas in the last couple of years knows that we've already begun to feel them. But have multiple rounds of QE and year after year of ZIRP resulted in an improvement in employment? Gallup's U-6 unemployment rate has been hugging 20% since QE1:

Steve Wynn: Employees Lose If Obama Reelected

Many libertarians claim that there is essentially no difference between Obama and Romney. This isn't true. For one, Romney, unlike Obama, has said that he would nominate a new Fed president to replace Helicopter Ben. (Remember, the market wants Obama to win because it believes that he would be more likely to allow Bernanke to continue to prop it up.) Secondly, Romney has said that he would work to repeal Obamacare. I don't care if Obamacare was largely modeled after Romneycare. Romneycare is a state program, not a federal program. Big difference. No, I'm not a fan of Romney. Quite the contrary, I can't stand his neoconservative foreign policy. But I won't sit idly by while fellow libertarians make a ridiculous black-and-white claim.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn, a lifelong Democrat, has been on an anti-Obama tear as of late, warning of the repercussions of reelection. In particular, Wynn has been warning of how Obamacare would negatively affect employment, the nation's greatest challenge during this economic depression. In a recent interview with Jon Ralston, host of Ralston Reports on NBC-affiliate KSNV MyNews3 in Nevada, Wynn said that he, his colleagues, and his employees are "frightened" of the prospect of an Obama 2nd term:

The president is trying to put himself between me and my employees. I have no idea what goofy idea, what crazy, anti-business program this administration will come up. I have no idea. And I have to tell you, Jon, that every business guy I know in the country is frightened of Barack Obama and the way he thinks.

For those who believe that Obama and Romney are essentially the same candidate, ask yourself the following: Since Gary Johnson has no chance of winning (let's be realistic), would you rather see the reelection of a president of whom the nation's jobs creators are afraid (if you've ever been long-term unemployed as I have, there is no way you'd allow that to happen), or would you rather have a new president who might force Bernanke to pack his bags and reduce barriers to employment? Sure, it's all talk right now. And Romney does have a history of flip-flopping. But at least he's saying some of the right things.