A few weeks back, Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse blog looked at U.S. GDP growth rates for the ten years 1930-1939 and the ten years 2007-2016. I didn’t verify his numbers but they seem plausible (referring to “real” or inflation-adjusted GDP). Snyder says:

1930: -8.5%
1931: -6.4%
1932: -12.9%
1933: -1.3%
1934: 10.8%
1935: 8.9%
1936: 12.9%
1937: 5.1%
1938: -3.3%
1939: 8.0%

When you average all of those years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

That is really bad, but it is the kind of number that one would expect from “the Great Depression”.

So then I looked up the numbers for the last ten years…

2007: 1.8%
2008: -0.3%
2009: -2.8%
2010: 2.5%
2011: 1.6%
2012: 2.2%
2013: 1.7%
2014: 2.4%
2015: 2.6%
2016: 1.6%

When you average these years together, you get an average rate of economic growth of 1.33 percent.

The same! But wait, averaging them isn’t quite right. For math-y reasons, it’s better to take a starting index value like 100, then apply the growth rates year by year. I did that, and

• Real GDP grew 10% from 1930-1939.
• Real GDP grew 14% from 2007-2016.

Still not much difference! The point remains that the last 10 years have been super lame. President Obama was perhaps the first in U.S. history to never have a single year of real GDP growth over 3%.

And it’s possible that Obama’s record was yet worse. Remember, in recent years they’ve been padding the GDP numbers. They directly added nonsense to GDP. They also under-estimate inflation, which artificially boosts the growth estimates.

But for now, let’s stick with official numbers (where Obama’s overall record is nearly as bad as a Great Depression), and pivot to look at unemployment.

You may wonder: if we’ve been in a depression, how could the unemployment rate be down at 5%? The difference from the 1930s is that, in our time, the Establishment (or Political-Financial Complex) has been determined to fool people – to boil the frog (us) slowly, so to speak – and to cover for President Lightworker. Thus,

• They let him jack the national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Even a monkey could make GDP seem halfway-OK for 8 years, if you gave him a $10 trillion credit card.
• They had the central bank (Federal Reserve) conjure trillions of new money from thin air and inject it into the financial markets. It’s chicanery, but people say “At least my home and 401k are up.”
• And they baked the unemployment statistics. Remember, the official 5% number hides a huge decline in Labor Force Participation, plus full-time jobs being replaced with crappy part-time jobs.
  • If you add back the people who left the labor force in despair these last ten years, real unemployment is 11-12%.
  • And if you add the extra part-timers (assuming they would rather be full-time), it’s even worse.

Depression 2.0 has been with us, all this time. It’s part of why people were so unhappy with Queen Cersei in 2016 (who ran as the Establishment’s poster child).

What does all this bode for President Trump? Probably not well.

• He’s trimmed back some of Obama’s growth-killing regulations. That will help.
• And his infrastructure spending may go to productive works (unlike Obama’s 2009 “Porkulus” package), if he can get it passed. He wants to revive American manufacturing, which would be good.
• BUT, with so much debt on the books and so many Americans expecting handouts, our underlying economic problems are worse than ever.

Trump has inherited a sinking ship. The next recession should be a roller-coaster. If the American Left is krazy and violent now, just you wait.

Then again, maybe our leadership will hit on the solution quickly (a Free Enterprise system with smaller government, Rule of Law, sound money, cutting the Welfare-Warfare State, letting Washington and Wall Street fail, letting Main Street pick up the pieces). And maybe our leadership will use the media skillfully (plus a few well-placed arrests) to transition people’s minds to all that. Don’t tell me I’m dreaming.

OK, I’m dreaming. Time to buy more ammo.

Per The Hill this morning, he has been upgraded from Serious to Fair condition.

I didn’t see this coming: Bono gives Scalise a shout-out. Meaning something positive.

“You’ve been through some troubling days here with the shooting in Alexandria,” Bono says on-stage in the video. “We are so grateful that Congressman Scalise and his comrades made it through. So grateful. We hold them up, as love holds us all up.”

…U2 performed Tuesday night in Hyattsville, Maryland, at FedExField, home of the Washington Redskins. FedExField is located about 19 miles northeast of Alexandria.

But they’re still stuck on a motive for the shooting. ABC’s article is totally silent on it. The Hill’s article touches on it in a way that disguises the truth:

The FBI said Wednesday that the shooter, who died shortly after sustaining injuries in a confrontation with police, worked alone and that the incident had “no nexus to terrorism.”

The agency also confirmed Hodgkinson had a paper list containing six lawmakers’ names, although they said they would not classify it as a “hit list.”

So, the FBI is politically correct? Yikes! Reminder:

• The “six names” were a hit list.
• They were all GOP – and specifically, the (rare) anti-Establishment, pro-liberty type of GOP known as the House Freedom Caucus.
• The failed murderer, James T. Hodgkinson, was a “Bernie bro” who wanted to kill them for political reasons and terrorize conservatives.

From the comments: James reminds us that Bono has kinda-sorta been getting sensible for awhile. Nice to see!

Just to follow up on part 1 about CNN openly staging a fake protest that they’d wanted, here’s a nifty list.

Like all such lists, it suffers from being anecdotal and agenda-driven. And (in this case) badly mis-titled. Some (hi rusty 😉 ) won’t like it that the list comes from Cernovich.

But I’m interested in what’s in it. I have seen most of these instances myself, at one time or another. I think it’s silly to trust CNN. If people ask me why, here are some of the examples I’d point to.

• The time CNN warned that it’s somehow illegal for ordinary citizens to look at the leaked DNC and Podesta emails. (It isn’t. So, look all you want.)
• The time they had a camera man pose as a random guy on the street and broadcast his pro-Hillary rant.
• The time CNN lied that Loretta Lynch had “recused herself” from any decisions on the Clinton e-mail investigation. (She didn’t. She should have.)
• The time(s) CNN spread the fake “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme. (Shot of an entire CNN panel doing it.)
• The time CNN, broadcasting from a studio with blue screen and fake wind, pretended it was on-location in the Gulf War.
• The time CNN claimed that Muslim terrorist bombings in Europe are done by “false flag” right-wingers.
• The time Jake Tapper told a Navy Seal he was interviewing, that his all buddies had died for nothing.
• The time CNN let a guest claim that “rogue cops shoot black people for sport”.
• The time a CNN anchor expressed joy at Sarah Palin’s children being assaulted.
• The times that CNN edited #BlackLivesMatter activists, who were calling for rage and violence, to make it appear as if they were somehow peaceful.
• The time a CNN anchor praised a cop-killer as “brave and courageous”.
• The time CNN had 2 reporters in the same parking lot in Phoenix and faked it, split-screen, to pretend they were in different locations.
• The time they did a voter focus group and openly stated the precise words that they wanted a certain voter to say next.
• The many times CNN cut a guest’s satellite feed if they strayed too far from CNN’s preferred narrative.
  • The guy they cut for mentioning Jesus.
  • The time they cut Bernie Sanders after he jokingly referred to CNN as Fake News.
  • The time they cut a guest for mentioning Wikileaks.
  • The time they cut a reporter who started talking about Hillary’s negatives or “vulnerabilities”.
• The way that, when CNN cuts a guest who strayed too far from their preferred narrative, they pretend it’s somehow accidental.

The list is incomplete of course. It didn’t even get around to some stuff like:

• CNN’s Fake War Propaganda, like Bana Alabed.
• Their brazen shifts in tone for partisan reasons.
• Their eagerness to report anti-Trump leaks, even when said leaks are anonymously sourced and, well, WRONG.

And more that I could probably find, if I searched GP archives.

On the one year anniversary of the Orlando Pulse Massacre, the Democrat Media Complex went out of its way to avoid the salient facts about the Massacre.

America is in mourning, as we should be, on the year anniversary of the attack, but many in the media are purposely excluding the fact they were killed by a jihadist committed to the Islamic State. Instead, the media prefer calling it a “mass shooting” and “gun violence.” The MSM also prefers listing the victims as “those who died” or “lost their lives,” not those murdered by a terrorist.

One of the worst examples is The Washington Post and its headline, “A year ago, 49 people died at Pulse nightclub. Today, Orlando remembers.” But that’s not so bad, right? Surely, in the article, terrorism will be mentioned. Think again. The words used are “massacre,” “gun violence,” and “deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.” No mention of terrorism. Zero. The article identifies Omar Mateen, but only as the “gunman” who “fired his first bullet” at 2:02 a.m.

These are facts:

• The mass murderer was an Islamic Supremacist named Omar Mateen.
• Omar Mateen was the son of an Afghan refugee who was also an Islamic Supremacist.
• Omar Mateen pledged his fidelity to ISIS shortly before the massacre.
• Omar Mateen had been on the FBI’s terror watchlist three years before the attack, but after interviewing him, the FBI decided he wasn’t a threat and removed him from the list.
• Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat.
• Omar Mateen’s father attended a Hillary for President rally a few weeks after the attack.

Once again, these are facts.

This, on the other hand, is misinformation and propaganda.

For the last 100 years – and, especially for the last 8 years under President Obama – more and more Americans have become feckless dependents of government.

They may be rich, middle class or poor. They may depend on government benefits, or on special favors written into our laws and regulations. Or they may be politicians and bureaucrats and government workers, deciding the fates of other people and taking paychecks a good deal larger than what most of them could get in the private sector. They may be journalists taking cash payments from the CIA, or billionaires with extensive government contracts.

And they are indeed feckless. They gladly believe and spread the most ridiculous things on zero evidence. For example, they choose a criminally dishonest politician (Hillary Clinton) to be president. When she doesn’t quite win the election, they gladly believe and spread rumors that the guy who did win is a Russian spy – on zero evidence, again – and chant “F*ck [him]!” at important political conventions.

On the other side are ordinary Americans who more-or-less believe in God, common sense, and supporting themselves through work. Again, they may be rich, middle class or poor. They choose 2 business people in a row to be president. The most recent one might not be a great role model in some ways, but at least he says sensible things in a forthright, unafraid manner. When he wins the election, he sets himself to the task of reviving America’s economy and manufacturing base – only to be undermined by the vast army and bureaucracy of the feckless government dependents, spreading their nonsense.

It’s a mortal conflict. And one side knows it: the feckless government dependents. Because America is fast reaching the point where it can’t afford to support them any longer. They, the cancer, are about to kill the host. They, the cancer, must be controlled and cut back – so that the rest of America can survive, and perhaps revive a little.

They, the feckless government dependents, know it deep-down. And, being out-of-control like any late-stage cancer, they are desperate to deny it and to continue a system – their own system – that promises to extract every last drop of life and treasure that can be extracted from normal Americans.

It’s Producers vs. Looters. Understand that the Producers are people of all classes and walks of life. Likewise, the Looters are people of all classes and walks of life.

And so we arrive at the political struggles of the last seven months. President Trump isn’t perfect. I did not support him. I still don’t support him, whenever and wherever I may disagree with him. But, somehow (and although I never wanted it), he became a leader for the Producers – or at least for the opponents of America’s looting, criminal Establishment. Imperfect Mr. Trump is the president we’ve got. And the vast army and bureaucracy of the feckless government dependents are determined to destroy him.

Thus the endless, utter nonsense they spew each day. I’m not sure what to do about it. I know that supporting Trump blindly will not help. But tolerating nonsense will also not help.

The only thing I know how to do, that might help in some tiny way, is to keep telling the truth as I see it unfolding around me.

Or posting links.

• Kurt Schlichter rightly calls the last several months of nonsense a ‘coup’ attempt against the People’s lawfully elected President.
• As does William A. Jacobson.
• Stephen Kruiser on the media’s new lows in the Age of Trump.

Schlichter sums it up well: “Someone came to Washington who wasn’t part of the club, and that’s intolerable. So they are desperate to expel him, and by extension, us. Every day will be a crisis, every action he takes will be the worst thing that has ever happened, and every step towards keeping his promises a crime.”

Each day, let us dedicate ourselves anew to rejecting the nonsense. And to offering truth, in its place.

Former FBI Director James Comey once served the Bush administration and is supposed to be a “registered Republican”. But some gay guys marry women and are supposed to be straight. Sometimes, the declaration doesn’t matter – or is there for cover.

I’ll provide some highlights of Comey’s career, then details. First, the highlights. Or should I say lowlights? As I realized everything that Comey has been into and how political he is, my jaw dropped.

• Comey helped the Clintons to escape justice over Bill’s pardon of Marc Rich.
• Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Valerie Plame affair. (A bizarre mess that ended in the prosecution of Scooter Libby, and the political tar-and-feathering of the Bush administration.)
• Comey prosecuted Martha Stewart. (This may be OK; but I will show that it sets up the irony/hypocrisy of his later saving Hillary from prosecution.)
• Comey helped the Clintons in the Sandy Berger investigation, by limiting its scope.
• Comey limited the government’s actions to punish a corrupt auditor, KPMG.
• Comey obstructed the Bush administration’s post-9/11 efforts to do warrantless surveillance. That could be a great thing; except that
  1. his actions were surrounded by allegations of lying and usurpation of power; and
  2. he went on to happily serve an Obama presidency that did far worse things than Bush, in terms of warrantless surveillance.
• Comey served as General Counsel of a scandal-ridden defense contractor, then a Director of a scandal-ridden bank. (I don’t have anything strong here; mentioned for completeness.)
• And then as FBI Director, of course, Comey knew Hillary was guilty but usurped authority and blocked her prosecution, turning the statutes on their head in the process.

If I missed anything, please let us know in the comments. For example, did Comey play any part in Hillary’s Uranium One fiasco? (UPDATE: Yes, indirectly. It involved Clinton Foundation corruption. Charles Ortel points out that Comey has repeatedly been on-point to investigate that corruption and has refused to do so, giving it a pass.)

Some of Comey’s actions might be defensible. But looking at the overall pattern: I personally conclude that Comey is a longtime Democrat operative, as well as a liar-when-it-suits-him.

Now for details. (more…)

On a recent episode of Law and Order: SVU (which I was amazed to learn is still in production), the storyline concerned… I am not making this up… a Christian church that encourages teenagers to rape other teenagers to keep them from turning gay.

SVU’s writers saved their coup de grace for the final minutes of the episode. In those last moments, the audience learns that Lucas himself is a closeted homosexual, and the priest told him to have sex with Ann as penance for his own homoerotic thoughts.

Yeah, because Christian ministers *always* encourage teenagers to engage in premarital sex to ward off Teh Ghey.

It’s like everything Hollywood knows about Christianity comes from The Handmaids Tale: which is nothing but a paranoid fantasy of what the world would be like if Christians acted like Muslims.

It’s last year’s news, but worth remembering. George Soros, Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid (and probably still pay) protestors, not only to turn out and carry signs or chant slogans, but also to instigate violence.

Via Rush.

It’s on people’s radar in the last day or so because The Washington Post now says, who cares if these left-wing protestors are paid shills? So, what? Which is a shift: the Controlled Media used to simply deny that these left-wing protestors were paid shills.

I meant to do this awhile back, updating previous posts in the series.

When President Obama left office on January 20, 2017, the U.S. national debt was $19.9 trillion. ($14.4 trillion held by the public; $5.5 trillion “intragovernmental”, for example, Treasury bonds held by Social Security.)

When Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the U.S. national debt was $10.6 trillion. ($6.3 trillion held by the public; $4.3 intragovernmental)

Obama more-than-doubled the part of the U.S. national debt that everyone agrees is important (what’s “held by the public”). And he nearly doubled the total.

And for what? Eight years of the weakest economy “recovery” on record.

Doing the detective work the Berkeley Police Department won’t do, a blogger may have identified one of the violent protesters at the Berkeley Anti-Free Speech riot. He brags about assaulting a Trump supporter on social media, and his accounts trace to an easily identified individual. Shockingly, it turns out to be a false-flag operative planted by the right-wing like the Young Turks and Robert Reich are claiming a university staff member.

I get why leftists latched onto this conspiracy theory; not all of them are on board with the violence that characterizes their movement. Some of them also realize that vandalism, arson, and assault looks bad to normal people.  So, they clung to a rather desperate and delusional conspiracy theory that someone else must have been responsible. And they told themselves, even if the conspiracy theory doesn’t turn out to be true, at least at shows how much I personally abhor violence to want to believe such a thing.

But by denying the violence that infests their movement, the “peaceful protesters” are only letting it fester.

By they way, it is not a conspiracy theory, but a fact that the group that organized the violent protest is funded by George Soros, because he’s a real-life James Bond villain. But also, Vermont commies Ben and Jerry did their part to fund the violence as well.

Oh, and the peaceful environmental protesters protesting the Dakota Access pipeline left behind a literal, not figurative, landfill-sized amount of garbage.

The biggest piece of fake news currently out there is the supposed epidemic of women and minorities being beaten up by empowered alt-right Trump supporter. Almost all of these turn out to be fake.

An openly bisexual Chicago student who claimed she received anti-gay, pro-Donald Trump notes and emails after the election is found to have fabricated the entire story, North Park University said.

Taylor Volk told a local NBC News affiliate that she found one of the notes taped to her door at her off-campus residence, which read “Back to hell” and “#Trump” along with homophobic slurs.

“This is a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden,” she said on Nov. 14. “I just want them to stop.”

[…]

The university investigated the alleged harassment and determined this week that Ms. Volk had fabricated the story.

Definition of Irony: President who blames election loss on “Fake News” does interview with a magazine famous for publishing a fake rape story.

President Obama sat down for a post-election interview earlier this month with Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner, reflecting on Donald Trump‘s win and what Democrats did wrong.

The Democrats have lost the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, 33 governorships, and a vast majority of state legislatures. Given a choice of maybe stepping back and re-evaluating their agenda and strategy, the Democrats have apparently  chosen the route of violent protests, demanding pointless recounts based on conspiracy theories, and doubling down on socialism and extreme identity politics.  (“You know who we should have as the head of our party… a black radical Islamist follower of Louis Farakkhan.”)

The gist of this article is that leftist Democrats are only interested in the opinions of other leftist Democrats. Rather than understand the Greater Part of America by directly interacting with it, they will go to leftist academics and pundits (who share their same contemptuous view of ‘The Middle’) so that they can be soothed by having their prejudices reinforced.

The prescription for the ailment is the “Ideological Turing Test,” invented by Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University. It’s simple enough: If you truly understand your political adversary, then you should be able to write an essay explicating his or her point of view well enough that a neutral judge cannot tell the difference.

I am confident that any conservative here could write a competent essay explaining the leftist point of view on any subject because the Democrat-Media-Academic establishment bombards us with the left’s POV every hour of every day. But when leftists try to explain conservatism, it’s all “You hate black people, and immigrants, and gays. You hate science because your invisible magic sky god tells you too. You own guns because you’re afraid of people who don’t look like you and are insecure in your masculinity. You’re uneducated and if you understood the world better, you’d be a liberal.” Or as the article puts it…

As The New Yorker put it, “The unexpected election of Trump is suspected to owe debts to both niche extremism and rampant misinformation.” This is the effete way to call someone a brain-dead bigot.

And let me add about this ‘fake news’ thing the left has latched onto; while there are literally hundreds of thousands of articles about how Hillary lost the election due to ‘fake news,’ I don’t see examples of actual ‘fake news’ items that caused Hillary to lose. In fact, the number one perpetrator of fake news turns out to be a left-wing Democrat operative.

I don’t know a great deal about it. This is a post where I’m not presenting information, so much as asking for it.

But, to set up the question: Via Instapundit we have this from The Hill: Breitbart News planning lawsuit against ‘major media company’.

Breitbart News is preparing a lawsuit against a “major media company” over claims that it is a white nationalist website…

The website has been under intense scrutiny since President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen Bannon as a senior White House counselor and strategist. Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News…

“…Breitbart News rejects racism in all its varied and ugly forms. Always has, always will,” [said a statement.] “The diversity of the company’s news coverage and its staff continue to embody Andrew Breitbart’s colorblind, distinctly American commitment to ‘E pluribus unum’—out of many, one.”

Critics have taken aim at the site’s coverage in recent days. While Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart, the website published a story by David Horowitz referring to conservative commentator Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew,” something that has been mentioned repeatedly in media coverage calling Breitbart a white nationalist website.

So, here’s what I “think I know”, at present.

• Breitbart.com was one of the first to go all-in for Trump. They are pro-deportation of illegals, but in no way white-supremacist.
• Just as the media’s knickers are in a twist over Trump and over the Alt-Right, they’re in a twist over Trump keeping Bannon as a senior, Karl Rove-type advisor.
• But it’s ridiculous. If all that the media has is one Jew (David Horowitz) slagging another Jew (Bill Kristol) over something to do with Jewishness, on Breitbart.com while Bannon presided, let’s face it: They’ve got nothing.

Correct? Agree/disagree? What I would be most interested in here, is actual evidence – not mere assertion or opinion – that Steve Bannon and/or Breitbart are “white nationalists” or white supremacists. If any exists. (I have a gut-feeling against it.)

UPDATE – I didn’t see this coming: Trump Wants To Deport [Only] As Many Undocumented Immigrants As Obama Already Has.

UPDATE: Spengler (David P. Goldman) describes Bannon as “100% pro-Israel” – which would be unusual for a white supremacist. And the worst against Bannon that Jonah Goldberg can muster, is that Bannon is part of the alt-Right. Yawn, so is Milo. Sorry, Jonah. I do love you, most of the time.

I am open to a point suggested in the comments, that under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart.com has declined journalistically. But that’s a different matter. Being a poor journalist (arguably) doesn’t make you a racist.

Milo runs down a long list of ‘Hate Crimes’ that turned out to be fakes generated by leftists hoping to gain celebrity, money, or just advance a narrative of hate that the real world obstinately fails to live up to.

Victimhood is profitable. On the internet, it can get you thousands of dollars in crowdfunding donations. In the media, it can win you national prominence and a cooing audience of credulous sycophants. On campus, it can get you attention and plaudits from fellow grievance-mongers.

When #BlackLivesMatter apologists were saying, “Hey, they denounced the attacks in Dallas and said they’re committed to non-violence,” in order to absolve them of the carnage that was brought about, in part, by the violent rhetoric and actual violence that #BlackLivesMatter has promoted, or at a minimum, tolerated…. this was my response:

If BLM and its core principles really are peaceful, two things are going to happen.

1. BLM is going to crack down hard on elements within its groups that advocate violence.

2. BLM’s rhetoric is going to change from confrontational to cooperative

I will wait and see if these things happen.

Have #BlackLivesMatter activists toned down, much less rejected violence as a tactic?

This is what happened in Minnesota last night.

Protesters began throwing objects, including fireworks, rebar, bricks and a molotov cocktail at officers, according to the St. Paul Police Department. There were 21 police officers injured from thrown objects, including a hit to the head from a 25 pound item, later identified as a concrete block.

I would take that as a no.

By the way, issuing a statement to the press after the violence has happened denying that your group had anything to do with the violence is not a crackdown.

Frankly, I don’t get what these protests are supposed to accomplish anyway. What does marching through the street accomplish that is better than sitting down at a table with your opponents and talking with them? How does blocking traffic and preventing innocent people from getting to work or home to the hospital help advance the cause? Are these tactics even meant to achieve anything, or are they just to give violent people a space to act out and their enablers a space to bask in their smug sense of social justice?

Update: Interestingly, when a much larger number of dangerous assault-weapon-owners get together to engage in civil disobedience, there is no violence.

The size of the U.S. deficit isn’t the only thing they lie about. Unemployment is another.

Last week, The New York Times trumpeted, Jobs Roar Back With Gain of 287,000 in June, Easing Worry, with the official unemployment rate at 4.9%. Isn’t it wonderful?

“Wow, this one takes my breath away,” said Diane Swonk, an independent economist in Chicago.

Ooh, she’s “independent” – that makes her reaction valid! But here’s the real story.

• The same jobs report has downward-revised the previous months’ numbers (from bad to horrible).
• In the Bush years, the media would treat a jobs number in the 200k range as a crisis.
• The Obama so-called “recovery” is the Weakest. On. Record.
• Most of the jobs created in the Obama years, including the recent jobs report, are part-time and low-paying.
• In the Obama years, tens of millions of Americans have given up even hoping for a job. “Labor force participation” has plummeted to lows not seen since the 1970s.
• If we use the participation rate from early 2009 when Obama took office, the unemployment rate is 11%. (And that’s ignoring under-employment / the part-time jobs.)
• And no, the declining participation isn’t because “the Baby Boomers are retiring”. They’re not retiring. Under Obama, they can’t afford it. They’ve been coming out of retirement, to take those low-paying, part-time Obamajobs from young people.
• Young people face a crisis; many can’t get an entry-level job.

Perhaps this is why President Obama has the highest U.S. suicide rate in 30 years.

First, let’s do a National Debt update. You’ll see why, in a minute.

As of this day, the U.S. national debt is $19.3 trillion. ($13.9 trillion held by the public; $5.4 trillion “intragovernmental”, for example, Treasury bonds held by Social Security.)

When President Obama took over from President Bush, it was $10.6 trillion. ($6.3 trillion held by the public; $4.3 intragovernmental)

So, Obama has already more-than-doubled the part of the U.S. national debt that everyone agrees is important (what’s “held by the public”). And he’s on track to double the total, by the time he leaves office.

But there’s more. On this day 3 years ago, the total was $16.7 trillion. So, over the past 3 years, the U.S. operating deficit – the money that the U.S. Treasury actually had to borrow to pay for stuff – has been $2.6 trillion, or roughly $865 billion per year.

That’s funny because the three most recent U.S. budget deficits are supposed to be much smaller. 2014 – $483 billion, 2015 – $438 billion, 2016 – $616 billion; for a total of $1.5 trillion. (September-ending fiscal year means a 2-3 month shift from the dates I used above; but that does not alter the story drastically.)

What does it mean? It means they’re lying to us about the size of the U.S. budget deficit. And they’ve been lying for years, as I’ve blogged previously.

Oh, you could say “Come now, the accounting numbers are accurate, they’re just using some budget/accounting tricks to hide a big chunk of their spending-and-borrowing.” But I consider tricks to be lies. Don’t you?

According to left-wingers like MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, or even the Dear Leader Himself, His Dear Leadership has reduced the U.S. annual budget deficit by 2/3. No, pumpkins. It hasn’t. You lie.

Every grownup knows what a temper tantrum looks like. The kid didn’t get his way. It’s time to make the grownups pay – by causing obstacles, by screeching about anything and everything, by hitting, and so forth. The kid might still not win on the immediate issue X. But who knows, the grownups might just try to mollify him on another issue Y. It’s part revenge, part blackmail. We can expect a lot of tantrums now over Brexit.

Brexit doesn’t change much, “in the now”. First, it hasn’t even happened. (It will be weeks or months before Britain invokes Article 50.) Second, if and when it happens, it need not affect the existing terms of European trade, finance or hardly anything other than British border control. All that it will take to keep the existing trade going is a few new pieces of paper with a few new signatures.

No, Brexit is more of a matter for the future. Assuming it happens, it will mean that the UK’s -future course- is to avoid a full-on political merger with the rest of Europe; avoid the destruction of its borders and sovereignty; etc.

And, to the various socialist cronies of Europe, that’s unforgivable. And for years, vast problems (unrelated to Brexit) have been piling up for them. And for years, they’ve tried to not admit the full extent of their problems. Problems which they have caused and/or failed to deal with.

Guess what? Now that they didn’t get their way on Brexit, they’re going to blame everything on Brexit. Even though Brexit is mostly unrelated.

It’s as if termites have eaten away at your home for years. Your home is ready to crash. You have failed to deal with it. Now your partner insists that you stay home on Saturday night and don’t go to that casino. Guess what? Your plan is to light a little fire to help your termite-eaten home crash faster; and when the cops arrive, you’ll blame your partner for everything. Now that’s a tantrum.

It’s already begun. Earlier we had the credit downgrades on the UK. It’s pure payback, of course. Nothing fundamental has changed about the UK’s finances. The ratings companies became political, some years ago. Governments can and will torture the ratings companies; therefore, they do the bidding of governments. The downgrades then add to market turmoil. In other words: Kid throws tantrum.

Another example is, crashing Italian banks that demand massive new bailouts. European banks’ finances have been rotten for years. Their stocks were inevitably going to crash at some point, when the world admitted the reality. But guess what? Brexit! So give us new bailouts!

It’s the new Climate Change, or maybe the new Salted Caramel. Everything this year is going to be Brexit. Decaying art? Brexit! Venezuelan collapse? Brexit! Fukushima radiation levels? Brexit! Solar flares? Brexit! U.S. recession? Personal negativity? Brexit!

Why not? The world – or at least, the media-socialist-crony world – hates UK Independence (and border control) that much. Everyone will agree to join the fun and not be honest about the longstanding, real causes of a great many problems.

UPDATE – it continues: The European Central Bank’s leader, Mario Draghi, predicts low economic growth and currency devaluations from Brexit. Let’s be clear.

• Europe was already going to be stuck in years of low growth.
• Currency devaluation is what Draghi has already been wanting and attempting, for years.

But guess what? The new scapegoat, Brexit!

Woe be to anyone who questions the left-wing Rape Culture/Climate Change/White Supremacy Narrative.

The campus police chief has been fired at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, in Georgia, after he was quoted in the student newspaper as saying that most sexual assaults are not rape but “women waking up the next morning with a guilt complex.” The chief, Bryan Golden, was dismissed on Friday, according to The Tifton Gazette.
Chief Golden was quoted in an article in the student paper, The Stallion, about sexual assault on college campuses. The full quotation was: “I might sound insensitive, but I’m not. Most of these sexual assaults are women waking up the next morning with a guilt complex. That ain’t rape, that’s being stupid. When the dust settles, it was all consensual. It [forcible rape] doesn’t happen here. It doesn’t show up here. They’re about as much a rape as a goat roping.”

Because That’s what the left does.

According to her, I said the following: “I’m a married human being, so what does this mean for me? It’s against the way I see marriage. It’s against the way I see myself.” Shapiro scoffed, “Same-sex marriage is wrong because, well . . . because it’s wrong.”

An imaginative fabrication. Apparently I’m married? (I’m not). It was frustrating that after a twenty-minute interview in which I listed numerous reasons why government redefinition of marriage is bad for everyone, Shapiro published a (completely fictional) quote that boiled down to “it’s my personal opinion.” What do you win the “LGBT Journalist of the Year” award for? Yarn-spinning? Creative hijinks?

Yet this broach of journalistic ethics is more interesting than irritating to me. Shapiro said it herself numerous times: This issue is already decided. Public opinion has ruled: There are no good arguments for traditional marriage.

So why should Lila lie? If my arguments were stupid, why not publish them?

The answer is simple enough. It must be that the complexity of the marriage debate does not only affect traditional marriage supporters, it affects everybody. As I made my arguments to Shapiro during our interview, she seemed perplexed and unable to reply with more than stock responses: “You’re not gay. Why protest something that doesn’t affect you?” “Aren’t you worried you’ll end up on the wrong side of history?” Her article ridicules the “closed-mindedness” of traditional marriage supporters, but when faced with actual arguments on the subject, Shapiro opted to pretend I’d said something else. Even on the “cusp of victory,” same-sex marriage supporters are taking no chances by engaging these dangerous, volatile truths.

You can’t rule out the possibility that Ms. Lila Shapiro was simply too dimwitted to understand legitimate arguments against same-sex marriage and replaced them with simplistic slogans that dimwitted leftists *can* understand.