It’s Monday, July 30th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the last week of July, two takes on the latest economic news; first, the WSJ reports bad news means no comment from The Dear Misleader:

The 1.5% Presidency

Growth stumbles for the third time in this Less Than Great Recovery.

 

That’s close enough to 1.5% GDP growth for government work!

President Obama didn’t comment on Friday’s report of declining growth in the second quarter, and that’s no surprise. The economic story of his Presidency is by now familiar: a plodding recovery that has taken its third dip in three years and is barely raising incomes for most Americans.

“We’re still in a position where we are pulling ourselves out of the very deep hole caused by the Great Recession, and there is still—of course—a great deal of anxiety in the country about the economy,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney. He’s right about the anxiety, but if only we were “pulling ourselves out.”

The reality is that the Great Recession ended three long years ago. In this Less Than Great Recovery, the economy shows promise for one good quarter then slows back down. As the nearby chart shows, this is the third straight year of sputtering recovery. Growth of 4.1% in the fourth quarter declined to 2% in the first and now 1.5% in the second. The stock market rose as investors bet that the lousy growth will inspire more Federal Reserve easing.

The sliver of good news is that private growth, which is what really matters, was up a slightly less anemic 1.8%, and government spending fell by a minus-1.4% from the first quarter. Housing is also now less of a drag on GDP. But this makes the paltry 1.5% growth more disconcerting, because it means that other parts of the economy are growing less rapidly than they ought to be.

Consumption ticked up only 1.5%, for example, down from 2.4% in the first quarter. This may reflect that wages and salaries are barely keeping pace with inflation. Another negative is that business inventories climbed unexpectedly in the second quarter, which often presages a decline in business spending in the next quarter to clear the shelves.

It’s important to understand how unusual this kind of weak recovery is. Deep recessions like the one from December 2007 to June 2009 are typically followed by stronger recoveries, as there is more lost ground to make up.

The most recent comparable recession occurred in 1981-1982. Yet as the nearby chart shows, the Reagan expansion exploded with a 9.3% quarter and kept up a robust pace for years. By the 12th quarter of expansion, growth popped up to 6.4.%. At this stage of the Reagan expansion, overall GDP was 18.5% higher versus 6.7% for the Obama recovery, according to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.

Even comparing this recovery with the average since the end of World War II, the Obama growth rate is well below the norm of 15.2%. The U.S. is running about $1.5 trillion of economic output behind where it should be.

This may sound like an abstraction, but it is the difference between a robust job market and lost opportunity for millions of Americans. It is the difference between a small federal budget deficit and more than $1 trillion for four straight years. It is the difference between a rising or falling poverty rate.

Mr. Obama is running for re-election as a tribune of the middle-class against “millionaires and billionaires,” but his Presidency has been the worst for the middle class and the poor in decades.

By the way, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis chose this quarter to revise the post-2008 GDP numbers based on more detailed data, and it shows that the recovery was even weaker in 2010 than previously estimated. The growth rate for the first two quarters of 2010 were revised sharply downward, and for the year to 2.4% from 3%. The revisions also show the trough in 2009 was not as deep as originally thought.

This further discredits the value of the government’s 2009-2010 stimulus spending bonanza. Business investment and inventory buildup were both revised downward for 2010, which suggests that the stimulus did very little to boost business confidence.

The Keynesian theory is that government spending will boost consumer demand in a way that spurs more business spending to meet it. But instead the $830 billion stimulus seems to have created a short-term GDP blip based on government expenditures, but no growth takeoff. In return for blowing out the federal balance sheet, Americans got more debt but not more growth. And Mr. Obama says he wants $100 billion in more stimulus now?

The tragedy of the Obama Presidency is that it ignored the supply side: the producers, the risk-takers, the salary earners who put in 50 and 60 hours a week to get ahead. They have been battered by Washington, and no matter how much government tries to conjure growth with more spending and easier monetary policy, businesses won’t produce and workers won’t work if government threatens to confiscate returns.

Banks aren’t lending as much as they might in no small part because of Dodd-Frank’s penalties and regulations. Investors aren’t investing or are sending their money abroad because the President is promising to wallop them with huge tax increases on January 1. Businesses aren’t purchasing as much new equipment, or hiring as many workers, because they don’t know what the real costs will be from new regulation and ObamaCare.

A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute—run by Democrats—finds that if business investment had tracked the normal trend rate during this recovery, investment would be $1.4 trillion higher. The report fingers regulation on business and American investors finding better returns abroad. Yet Mr. Obama’s solution is to raise the capital gains and dividend tax rates.

In this policy environment, the miracle is that the U.S. economy is still growing as much as it is. That is a tribute to the natural desire of Americans to better themselves, to create the next Apple, or to discover the next technique for pulling natural gas out of shale rock.

Added to the record of the last four years, the 1.5% second quarter should solidify in the public mind that President Obama has failed on the economy. The challenge for Mitt Romney and the Republicans is to explain how we got to this pass—going back to the mistakes of the Bush years—why Mr. Obama’s policies failed, and why their ideas can restore a prosperity that we once took for granted.

Next, the WaPo‘s Jennifer Rubin, courtesy of George Lawlor:

GDP: 1.5 percent

 

He can blame George Bush. He can whine that he was handed a terrible economy. (Ronald Reagan inherited worse.) But there’s no spin that will make 1.5 percent growth in GDP anything but dismal. It is not a recovery we are in; this is what we need to recover from — anemic growth, endemically high unemployment and record poverty.

What is the president’s big idea? Raise taxes on small business. What is he campaigning on? Mitt Romney’s tax returns. What’s his major rhetorical thrust? Businessmen shouldn’t claim credit for their success.

You know why the media sycophants want to talk about David Cameron (the man who apologized to North Korea for a mix-up with flags and gave Obama smooches in 2008). You understand David Axelrod wants to flog a blind quote in a British newspaper. You can see why Obama isn’t asked hard questions.

The latest news only points up how irrelevant, if not absurd, is most of the media coverage of the presidential campaign. The frenzy to highlight the trivial would be bad enough in good economic times. In the current basket case of an economy, it is farcical.

Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute has two compelling charts. The first shows that we are in “nominal growth in GDP” territory. In other words, with flat economic growth, inflation and population growth mean we are essentially contracting.

The second chart compares the Reagan recovery with the Obama non-recovery.

He explains:

Earlier this year, the Obama White House predicted the economy would grow 3% in 2012. Today’s GDP report shows that ain’t going to happen. The Commerce Department said the economy grew at an anemic 1.5% annual rate from April through June, after a revised 2.0% in the first quarter. It now seems likely the economy will be lucky to grow at 2% for the entire year. And that’s after growing just 1.8% last year.

Indeed, research from the Federal Reserve finds that that since 1947, when year-over-year real GDP growth falls below 2 percent, recession follows within a year 70% of the time. The U.S. economy remains in the Recession Red Zone.

The new data also show just how weak the Obama recovery has been, expanding at an annual average pace of just 2.2% vs. 5.7% for the Reagan recovery.

In addition, the GDP report shows the Obama administration has continually and wildly overestimated the positive impact of its economic policies, including the $800 billion stimulus plan.

The unemployment numbers will be out a week from today. If they are as grizzly as the GDP report, prepare for a political thunder-clap. By the way, do you think any of those Democratic senators regret voting to raise taxes this week?

All of which means (as we’ve said many times) come November, if the Ship of State doesn’t undergo a radical course correction, we’re….

And as this next item, courtesy of FOX News and George Lawlor details, when we say Tick-Tock’s leading us to be “screwed, blued and tattooed”, we’re not just talking economically:

Russia Looking to Add Naval Base in Cuba

 

Russia is talking to Cuba about housing Russian navy ships, the nation’s navy chief said Friday, in a move seen as an attempt to challenge Washington. Russia is also talking to Vietnam and the Indian Ocean island country of Seychelles as possible naval hubs. Vice Admiral Viktor Chirkov told the state RIA Novosti news agency that Russia is in talks about setting up maintenance and supply facilities for Russian ships in those countries but wouldn’t give any further details.

Relations with Washington have deteriorated since President Vladimir Putin was re-elected to a third term in March largely in part to the violence in Syria. The announcement comes on the heels of the U.S. government’s attempt to reaffirm its willingness to “forge a new relationship” with Cuba on Thursday – as long as the country promises to end its’ oppressive regime.

Russia’s only existing naval base outside the Soviet Union is located in the Syrian port of Tartus. A squadron of Russian navy ships, including several assault ships carrying marines, is currently heading to Tartus in a show of support for a longtime ally whom Moscow protected from international sanctions and continued to supply with weapons.

Chirkov’s statement marked a sharp about-face for Russia, which closed a Soviet-era naval base at Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay and a spy base in Lourdes on Cuba in the early 2000s during Putin’s first term. Along with financial reasons, that move was part of Putin’s bid to improve ties with the United States. During his election campaign, he accused the U.S. of encouraging protest against his 12-year rule in order to weaken Russia, and pledged to strengthen the nation’s military might.

Which is another way of saying what Putin and the rest of Russia….

….think of the United States.

With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter as regards the Military, never before in our nation’s history has a President so adversely impacted the economy and national defense of the United States.  One thing’s for certain: upon leaving office, The Obamao will truly be able to say….

Next up, Tales From the Darkside, courtesy today of Breitbart.com‘s John Nolte and Bill Meisen:

‘NY Mag’: Hitting Obama for ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Is Racist

 

With Rasmussen showing Romney enjoying a five-point lead (and that’s a pollster everyone in media knows is reliable, which is why they prefer juiced NBC polls), the media is now in pure panic mode. Furthermore, Obama’s Media Palace Guards know that when the full context is played of Obama’s revealing “you didn’t build that” quote, it’s absolutely devastating for Obama because the full context of those comments show the President openly ridiculing America’s small business owners.

So what’s a panicked media to do?

Well, at first the corrupt media lied about Obama being taken out of context. But that’s a desperate lie and everyone knows it, which means the Romney campaign was comfortable to keep on keeping on with its use of the President’s comments.

So NOW what’s a desperate media to do? Well, I think we all know what the media does when it’s at its most desperate to protect Obama, don’t we, boys and girls? That’s right, the corrupt media screams… RACISM!

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. Watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad[.] …

The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.

So desperate to reelect Obama he’s unafraid to embarrass himself, that’s a flailing Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine and this is the ad he’s attempting to declare racist:

Sorry, Jonathan, but the only one “blatantly lying” here is you. And your vile race-baiting is equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.

Just curious, Jonathan; considering Obama was raised primarily by a White family in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard, where and when did he pick up the “black dialect” to which you claim he reverts in anger?  Are you saying it’s genetic?!?  This is the tripe that passes for reasoned debate on the Left.

Speaking of rank Liberal double-standards, in a related item, the WashingtonExaminer.com‘s Mark Tapscott reports how the….

Fast food flap exposes politically correct hypocrisy

 

After 36 years in Washington, D.C., few things phase me. But there is one thing that still makes my blood boil — when the Nanny State’s P.C. police try to silence somebody with whom they disagree.

I plead guilty to being a First Amendment fanatic. The First Amendment guarantees that every American has the right to speak his piece without fear of being arrested or otherwise harmed as a result of his opinions or beliefs.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Nowadays, everywhere you turn, there’s the P.C. police telling us what we can and cannot think or say. That’s why Chick-fil-A chief Dan Cathy walked into P.C. Hell this week after professing his belief that marriage only includes a man and a woman.

Think what you will of Cathy’s views about marriage. I couldn’t care less whether you agree with him or think he’s from another planet. The point is, the Constitution says you get your say, and so does he.

But that’s not what we get from the P.C. police and their slavish followers, like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. Both of them threatened to invoke the power of government to prevent Chick-fil-A from locating in their jurisdictions.

Nobody should be surprised to find the mayor of Chicago sees no problem with using his office to silence those with whom he disagrees. Just to be safe, Cathy should avoid dimly lit Italian eateries if he ever again sets foot in Al Capone’s hometown.

Nor should we be surprised to hear such clap-trap from the mayor of New England’s biggest city. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that Beantown’s Puritan ancestors put dissenters in the stocks, burned witches at the stake and exiled contrary preachers like *Roger Williams to the wilds of Rhode Island.

The Founders put the First Amendment in the Constitution to protect the rest of us from people like Emanuel and Menino, within and without government, who seek to use government to enforce their preferred orthodoxies.

It’s no coincidence that, as the First Amendment Center’s Charles C. Haynes pointed out recently, much of the pressure for adding the First Amendment to the original Constitution came from Baptists and Presbyterians in Virginia who feared being squashed by the Episcopal Establishment in Richmond.

None of this matters to the fanatics who are determined to track down and punish anybody with contrary opinions and thereby to make sure everybody thinks and speaks only approved views. “Live and let live” simply isn’t part of the P.C. police vocabulary. Neither is the idea that nobody is forced to buy Chick-fil-A waffle fries. Go to McDonalds or Burger King — or nowhere at all, if you prefer. (Or straight to Hell if you’re a hypocritical Liberal; do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200!)

Here’s something else the P.C. police apparently never think about: What will they do when, having gutted the First Amendment for others, they find themselves being told to shut up?

Maybe then they’ll understand Thomas More’s urgent query in “A Man for All Seasons” to the young fanatic, William Roper, who would “cut down every law in England to get at the Devil.” To which More replied: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

More ultimately lost his head to the axman for speaking his mind, thanks to the P.C. police of his day goading King Henry VIII into a bloody rage. Dare we risk discovering that the only thing different with such people today is their weapon of choice?

One might almost say, the “More” things change, the “More” they….stay the same?!?

You can believe one thing; there exist today a significant number of enlightened Liberals who would have us all in “reeducation” camps….if they thought they could get away with it.  We predict, absent the dramatic change referenced above, their chance may come, and that much sooner than you think.

Moving on, in his latest commentary, Jonah Goldberg debates….

Colorado and the case for capital punishment

When a murderer is unsympathetic, death-penalty foes hold their tongues.

 

In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., slaughter, the question went forth on all of the political chatter shows: “Will this reopen the debate over gun control?”

That’s the script. When heinous monsters kill people with guns, we tend to talk about the problem of guns. Or rather, people in Washington, New York, and other big cities tend to talk about the problem of guns, because they think guns are the problem. There’s an irony there, of course, given that such cities tend to have the worst gun-related murder rates — Chicago these days has the equivalent of an Aurora every month — and they are the places where guns are hardest to come by, legally.

Regardless, the gun debate flashed for the briefest of moments, like a round of heat lightning that fails to herald a storm, and then disappeared. Instead, the conversation has moved to other familiar topics. What to do about the mentally ill? How much blame does our violent popular culture deserve? Etc.

These are good questions. But you know what debate seems conspicuously absent? Should we execute James Holmes?

Death-penalty opponents are fairly mercenary about when to express their outrage. When questions of guilt can be muddied in the media; when the facts are old and hard to look up; when the witnesses are dead; when statistics can be deployed to buttress the charge of institutional racism: These are just a few of the times when opponents loudly insist the death penalty must go.

But when the murderer is white or racist or his crimes so incomprehensibly ugly, the anti-death-penalty crowd stays silent. It’s the smart play. If your long-term goal is to abolish the death penalty, you want to pick your cases carefully.

But the simple fact is, if the death penalty is always wrong, it’s wrong in the politically inconvenient cases too.

The standards of newspaper writing and civic discourse require that we call Holmes the “alleged” culprit in this horrific slaughter. That’s fine, but if the facts are what we’ve been told they are, then we know this man is guilty and the jury will not have a hard time saying so.

We don’t know whether or not he’s mentally ill, but odds are he isn’t. Indeed, criminologists and psychiatrists will tell you that most mass murderers aren’t insane. But the public debate is already caught up in a familiar tautology. What Holmes did was an act of madness, therefore he must be a madman. And if he’s a madman, we can’t execute him because he’s not responsible for his actions. And if he’s not responsible, then “society” must be. And we can’t execute a man for society’s sins. So: Cue the debate about guns, and funding for mental health, and the popular culture.

Well, I say enough. I favor the death penalty. I don’t support killing insane or mentally disabled people who are truly not responsible for their actions, but I don’t believe that committing an “act of madness” necessarily makes you a madman. But committing an act of wanton evil makes you an evil man. Evil and madness are not synonyms. Societies that cannot distinguish between the two are destined to get more of both.

If the death penalty is always wrong, let us have an argument about James Holmes, a man many Americans are aware of, informed about, and interested in. Let us hear why the inequities of the criminal-justice system require that his life be spared. Fight the death-penalty battle on this battlefield.

That won’t happen. It won’t happen in part because nobody on the Sunday talk shows wants to debate the death penalty when the case for it is strong. They like cases that “raise troubling questions about the legitimacy of the death penalty,” not cases that affirm the legitimacy of the death penalty.

But it also won’t happen because death-penalty opponents understand that when the murderer is unsympathetic, the wise course is to hold your tongue until the climate improves.

It remains an open question whether Colorado will seek the death penalty. Prosecutors know that doing so would add years and millions of dollars in extra costs because opponents have so gummed up the legal works. That way they can complain about the outrageous costs of a mechanism they themselves have worked to make prohibitively expensive.

I say, let us give Holmes a fair trial. If convicted, execute him swiftly. If you disagree, explain why this man deserves to live.

In a related item, another example of The Old Line State’s finest taking swift, decisive action:

Maryland Police May Have Thwarted Aurora-like Threat

 

How many different Maryland law enforcement departments does it take to announce one simple arrest?

Authorities have arrested a Maryland man they say referred to himself as “a joker” and threatened to carry out a shooting at his workplace. Police arrested 28-year-old Neil Prescott of Crofton, Md., after he allegedly called his employer and threatened to “shoot the place up,” a source close to the investigation told Fox News.

Authorities say the suspect called himself “a joker” before his arrest Thursday. Officials say they believe the threat could have been carried out as a copycat of the shooting massacre one week ago in Aurora, Colo., in which 12 people were killed and 58 injured during a midnight viewing of the new Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“I am a joker. I’m gonna load my guns and blow everybody up,” the man told his supervisor in a phone conversation earlier this week, officials said. The suspect was also wearing a T-shirt that said, “Guns don’t kill people. I do,” when taken into custody, according to authorities. (Wow!  THAT‘s conclusive evidence.)

During a press conference Friday afternoon, authorities referred to the case as a “thwarted terror threat” and called it “significant.” “We can’t measure what we prevented here,” Prince George’s County Police Chief Mark Magaw told reporters Friday. “We averted a significant…and violent episode.”

Frankly, we don’t know what, if anything, Chief Magaw and his intrepid troopers averted….and neither do they.  Assuming….and you know what assuming does….Prescott legally acquired all his arms, we’re not certain under what Maryland statute he’s broken.  We’ve contacted experienced criminal legal minds for their input, but at press time received no response.

We know it’s a crime to threaten the President, but it’s unclear whether the statements attributed to Prescott are punishable under the law.  Much depends on the circumstances under which he made them and his intent at the time.  What’s clear to us is as of early Saturday, the morning after the story broke, references to the incident were removed from the FOX News website, and we’ve heard nothing of it since.

Prescott may well have been itching to join the pitiful pantheon of mass-murderers.  Then again, Maryland’s finest, who have always been better at collecting traffic fines than solving significant crimes, might simply have been taking advantage of a stupid, angry, maladjusted man to enjoy a brief moment in the sun.

Given the morals of Governor O’Malley, it would come as no surprise.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this rather accurate depiction of Tick-Tock’s true intent, courtesy of Carl Polizzi:

Put another way….

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and this just in from the Sunshine State:

Florida man who lost hand charged with feeding gator

 

A Florida airboat captain whose hand was bitten off by a 9-foot alligator faces charges of feeding of the animal. Collier County Jail records show 63-year-old Wallace Weatherholt was charged Friday with unlawful feeding of an alligator and later posted $1,000 bond. His next court date is Aug. 22. The arrest was first reported by the Fort Myers News-Press.

Weatherholt was attacked on June 12th as he was giving an Indiana family a tour of the Everglades. The family said Weatherholt hung a fish over the side of the boat and had his hand at the water’s surface when the alligator attacked.

Wildlife officers tracked and euthanized the gator. Weatherholt’s hand was found but could not be reattached. A criminal investigation followed. Feeding alligators is a second-degree misdemeanor.

Yeah….as if a 2nd-degree misdemeanor conviction will prove a greater punishment than Mr. Weatherholt having to clap with one hand….not to mention Florida law enforcement having have bigger fish….er,….reptiles to fry!

Magoo