I can hear it now. Barack-Dammit!

"Why won't this fucking country just go into a Barrack Damned recession so I can feed my insane hatred of this president."

Another quarter of economic growth. 1.8%, not too bad. It's still positive growth. And a recession is still defined as two quarters of negative growth, i.e., contraction. The Pelosi minimum wage hike has caused the expected drop in available job for recent entries into the job market, causing the unemployment rate to jump in May from 5.0% to 5.5%. Oh well, it's funny how when conservatives who based their opinions on actual economic ideas can be correct about predicting the effects of bad democrat ideas. Luskin links it here. I guess this means that the 52 consecutive months of job growth also has ended. Ended, you should be reminded, on Pelosi's watch, under her laws. Just as gas prices have doubled since she has started her job.

Oh yeah, what has slowed growth? That would be energy prices. I don't think the real estate correction has so much. Although, some banks may argue otherwise. But really, the loss of capital through shrinking home equity isn't as bad as the loss of capital after the Clinton-tech-bubble burst. Your house is still worth something, as opposed to nothing, like your shares of Pets.com.

So, what are we doing to save energy costs? Right, the genius Lord Odumbo has advised us to inflate our tires. Drilling? Nope none of that. Seriously though, I think that most gas is consumed, not at top speed on the highway but in traffic jams on daily commutes in stop and go traffic. If there was a way to eliminate to end congestion, then yeah, that would help. Or maybe get everyone who commutes into a hybrid (they are really efficient at stop and go).

So, anyway, if these nutbag leftists want to disturb peaceful gatherings with their Bush=McCain mantra, it's about time the RNC has put forward the Pelosi=Obama card too. Pelosi is the first female Speaker of the House and also the worst. So congrats, Nancy. Plus, she is so stupid that when she talks she has the obvious affectation that she is trying to remember whatever it is that someone told her to say.
Also, that she seems unable to think on her feet is reinforced by her inability to acknowledge when people rhetorically penetrate her talking points. (When she harranged Bush over Katrina, he asked "what didn't go right," her response was "all that stuff." Or her pathetic attempt to tap the strategic oil reserve as we are in an "emergency right now." Just painful to watch). I wish I had the energy to dig through and find that video, the audio I've heard is amazingly painful.

So, sorry, the economy continues to grow. Damn you, Bush!

Oh jesus, really?


You know, one of the things I noticed about a lot of Democrats slash liberals is how ready they are to pat themselves on their back. You know, they are so smart, so nuanced, so good basically. In another post, I will write how, for most dems, their party loyalty is based more on vanity than anything else, that being a dem for some girls is the same as Carrie from the Golden Girls (I mean, Sex and the City) buying Prada. If you buy it, then you get to live the dream. "Look at me, I blindly vote democrat, I must be hip," "or listen to me, I am going to mindlessly repeat something John Stewart said, I must be hip and smart."



Anyway, check out this photo:



Yup, the batshit crazy leftists are out parroting the party line. McCain, the pain in Bush's ass, the embarrassment to conservatives, the would-be-adopter-of-Mexico (amnesty), the apparent believer in the great pagan god of global warming (i.e., dirt worshiper) is now equal to Bush.


Get it?


You see, the left has decided, in their cocoon like arrogance, that Bush is bad (they equate his low job performance numbers with their own insane hatred of Bush) and therefore think that tying McCain to Bush is good for them. I can see how that line of reasoning would work with your garden variety moonbat and other assorted socialists. But really? Will that line of reasoning really work on one of the legendary undecideds?


First of all, there is the arrogant conclusory nature of the whole thing. You notice this when arguing with libs. A statement just is. Let's not bother to really substantiate it. McCain is Bush. Why? Oh because of tax cuts. Or the war. So, you are running on tax cuts and the war. Or are you really running on your silly assumption that your absolute hatred of the president, the hatred to which you would feed American defeat in Iraq, is shared by normal people? Which is it?


Of course, McCain isn't probably smart enough to actually defend W. I mean, 52 straight months of economic growth. a record, ya know. not enough? Low unemployment? meh? Of course not, McCain parrots the gloom and doom crowd. Fine, whatever, Bush has low approval ratings because what else is a normal person going to think: name one positive story in years. They have no basis by which to think W is doing a good job. On the other hand, they don't hate the guy like these assholes do.


At least McCain owns the war. Apparently, he helped convince W to fire some generals and listen to Petraeus. McCain owns the surge, almost as much as W. If McCain runs from that, then what is the point of even running for president.


You see? I can't even bitch about this without starting to hate on McCain. But McCain=Bush?


Aside from arrogant conclusory blindness, there is also the pathetic need for the leftists to disturb things. Fine, assume that you are a leftist and have been told that McCain=Bush and you therefore now believe that with all of your heart. The same McCain for whom the left had cried for because he was soundly beaten by Bush in 2000. The McCain that the New York Times endorsed. The Maverick! The man who stood up to mean old republicans. Fine, flip the switch, all that old stuff goes down the memory hole, leftists are good at that.


What leftists are also good at are these brownshirt exhibitions. It's not enough for a leftist to sit around their house tittering with other lefties about how Bush=McCain. Nope, you have to actually go disturb a McCain rally. Much like Code Pink feels the need to invade and interrupt a citizenship ceremony. I use the term brownshirt because, golly gee, that is how they started out too. Actual history will show that Mussolini was essentially the Che of his day. The cool socialist. And hmm, what party did the brown shirts break shit for? Oh right, the National Socialist German Party. Just because your crazy aunt decided to go all fascist on you doesn't make it any less revolting.


So, yeah, Bush=McCain. Fuck. Where is Mitt? Where is Fred? The sad thing is is that for a nose-plug McCain voter like myself, this actually motivates me. Before, I wasn't going to do dick to help McCain. Now? I may actually send him $4. This behavior just shows that not only is the Democrat party the thuggish, union and mobbed up city machine it has always been, but that nationally, it is a braindead collection of the worst sort of anti-American degenerates. So, here in DC, I get to see AMG65's with Obama and No-Blood-For-Oil stickers and only get a taste of one third of the disgusting flavor, the rich white atheist wing, of that party. At least the union thug wing can think for themselves (or whoever made up the Reagan Democrats). That picture shows all too clearly how little thinking actually goes on in the intelligentsia ass-end of the party.

Well, well, well, seven years too late, but the Bush 43 White House Staff is doing their jobs.

Apparently, in a shift of administration policy away from ignoring media bias, the Administration is actually asking news organizations to actually report the news.

Humorously enough, most other news organizations were more than happy to broadcast these embarassments. But it seems from the NBC news' website that they have only meekly included the unedited video and not the letter from the White House.

First, the White House notes a deceptively edited interview.

"NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement.""

I mean, we all expect NBC news to use edited interviews to convey the impression that the editor's desire. And I am sure that their deceptive editing had nothing to do with the point blank adoration that all members of the media has towards Obama.

The White House also had a shot at the "dammit, why aren't we losing the war faster?" sensibilities of the media.

"I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a "civil war." Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?"

Finally, something else I have touched on. Question: When is .6% quarterly growth not a recession? Answer: Only if Clinton is president.

"Lastly, when the Commerce Department on April 30 released the GDP numbers for the first quarter of 2007, Brian Williams reported it this way: "If you go by the government number, the figure that came out today stops just short of the official declaration of a recession."The GDP estimate was a positive 0.6% for the first quarter. Slow growth, but growth nonetheless.

Well, finally the White House doing something that they should have been doing since 2002.

I guess someone finally read this book. Bush's War, a study of the media bias in reporting his war efforts. Basically, reporters would report the exact opposite of what Bush had said.

UPDATE:

surprise surprise, it looks like i was right, NBC news is not going to respond:

“Our reporting accurately reflects the interview. Just as the White House does not participate in the editorial process at the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, NBC News, as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions,” the network said in a statement.

Gillespie said NBC News’ response “misses the point.”

“It’s simply absurd for people to have to log on to the Internet and stream video to get accurate information from NBC News,” he said.

Asked by FOXNews.com whether NBC News planned to respond to Gillespie’s question about the Iraq war, a spokeswoman referred to the above statement and said via e-mail, “that is our complete response.”

Dude, where is that recession? To quote people who actually know things about things about money, a recession is two quarters of the economy contracting. For the "science is a social construct crowd," that means that the economy shrinks, gets smaller, is less big, etc., and does so for half a year, about six months.

So, this gets filed under the "please, Global Warming, please make America a land of ashen faces and empty bellies, let our troops lie dying in despair at the feet of our so called enemies, just so long as I can feed my irrational hatred of the president. Damn you, Bush. Why won't this country fucking die to spite you?" file. You know I know what I am talking about. As I said earlier, one third of the Democrat party is filled with insane paranoid delusions and has an absolute hatred for our rather moderate president.

My point is this: despite the goobers in the media discussing a recession. And despite Obama pandering to his rich white base about how awful everything is, the economy has yet to actually go red, that is, go negative. It's still growing.

"But, but, but housing prices are going down!" Look, hippy, stay on target. Aren't cheaper homes a smaller barrier to homeownership? Aren't falling home prices a result of new home construction? What, were you going to sell the house you just bought? Ever hear of closing costs? A house is an investment and life is not to be lived that way. The stupid (who are usually poor) always pay. Nonetheless, low housing prices are not the economy. They are a piece of something much bigger.

Back to the main point, I see people talking about a recession. What recession? What the hell? We can talk about gas prices because high gas prices do affect infrastructure. You can take the bus, the guy who gets your milk from the farm to Safeway can't do that and he gets creamed (get it?). But, as I will go into agonizing depth later, these high gas prices are the direct result of our energy policy. Hell, Algae (al gore) has openly daydreamed about high gas prices being mother earth and global warmenating's salvation. We need supplies to keep up with demand. It's that simple. If we refuse to build new refineries and do some drilling here, then prices will go up, almost as naturally as water flows downhill. It's a law of economics, look it up. Or better yet, try to break that law, sell something for less than it's market value and see how long you can keep that up.

The point remains. What recession? Stop talking about it! Ace had one good point though, unlike the recession resulting from Clinton's Bubble, there was no rah-rah from the media, so the recent correction did not result from overvaluation like the Clinton Bubble Tech Crash.

I am trying to come up with a good title for this post. Basically, I got my car detailed today and while I was waiting, I visited the neighboring gun store. I am interested in home defense. I have a very valuable acorn collection (being featured twice on the Hobby Network) and while I am a supporter of our enumerated constitutional rights (the ones that the Constitution actually contains like my right to bear arms) I have never owned one. But I have to say, the Walther P22 was just so cute, with it's little laser sight.

The store clerk informed me that it would be useless for when the shit goes down. When faced with an onrushing hoard of zombies, it wouldn't be able to stop one. In fact, it wouldn't stop the ubiquitous chainsaw wielding maniac either.

So, fine. Whatever. The Mossberg pump action shot gun was $500. Let me tell you that beast was not cute. It is scary. The muzzle is a breaching muzzle which means that...

I don't know what, the upshot is that the end of the goddamned shotgun is serrated.
Yeah, tempting.
The clerk and I agreed that zombies don't get scared, but crackheads and ax-murderers do. So, that is a plus. And really, the shick-shick noise that shotguns make is enough to make even the toughest ax-murderer flee in fear.
What sucks is that the only really big purchase I have been dying to make is a new bed. This is the problem that economists describe as infinite desires, finite means.
So, damn you Bush, it must be true that this country is in the tank because I can't buy everything I want every time I want something new.