MARK LEVIN HAS SOME COMPANY

Levin wrote a book calling for the use of the right of states under Article 5 to call a convention for amending the Constitution and this afternoon Inside Track had on a guest from the Madison Coalition who also wants to use Article 5 to greatly reduce the regulations that he said are strangling the economy.

FATS LIMBAUGH MENTIONED THIS TODAY...

and I couldn't understand the point he was trying to make:

One-Third of Bank Tellers on Public Assistance
RUSH:  Get this, folks. This is economic news from CBS.  "One-Third of Bank Tellers Rely on Public Assistance."  Bank tellers! They get Medicaid, food stamps.  This is according to the financial industry employee advocacy group, research from University of California-Berkeley.  Bank tellers!  Who would have thought, one-third...? Didn't Obama claim that the ATM was a job killer?  Well, now we know.  Didn't he do that?

There is a good liberal interpretation of this stat (h/t Susan Madrak):

So what’s their excuse this time? With fast food and Walmart, it’s that you’re too stupid to work anywhere else and not worth more money. What do they have to say about the people who run their retail operations?

THE UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBER IS GOOD...

but the Labor Force Particpation Rate stills sucks:

Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Series Id:           LNS11300000
Seasonally Adjusted
Series title:        (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate
Labor force status:  Civilian labor force participation rate
Type of data:        Percent or rate
Age:                 16 years and over

I SHOULD HAVE COMBINED THE MANDELA POSTS...

I keep coming across reports of past and present conservative extremism and just now I found this poll result from readers of (h/t TPM)  World Nut Daily:

AS I'VE NOTED BEFORE...

James Sensenbrenner is a typical GOP asshole but he is correct on this issue:

Patriot Act author: Obama’s intel czar should be prosecuted

By Brendan Sasso
December 06, 2013, 06:00 am
THE HILL

Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress.

"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill.

UNIVERSAL & TIMELESS CONSERVATIVE VALUES

(h/t Atrios & Kay)

Mark Levin often refers to conservative values in those terms and I guess he missed the time in 1986 William F. Buckley wrote that one man, one vote wasn't all that important:

“The government will not … grant political equality to everyone in South Africa. Nor should it. It is preposterous at one and the same time to remark the widespread illiteracy in South Africa and to demand the universal franchise.

“Continue our moral pressure, by all means. But … pull back on the one-man, one vote business.”

UPDATE: ThinkProgress has a nice timeline of conservatives defending apartheid.

THEIR CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTIANITY

Right-wing religious leaders should be shunned by the media because they are all too often terrible people:

At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, "I know we don't like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don't have it all that bad."

FAUX NEWS RARELY DISAPPOINTS

Bill O'Reilly went there:

O’Reilly Reflects on Mandela’s Life: ‘Great Man, But He Was a Communist’
by Josh Feldman | 9:16 pm, December 5th, 2013
MEDIAITE

UPDATE: Reagan went there long before Bill did:

For a July 1986 speech to the World Affairs Council in Washington D.C., Reagan rejected a moderate State Department draft and instead instructed his speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, to draft a version arguing that Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) employed "terrorist tactics" and "proclaims a goal of creating a communist state."

THE GOP MAKES SOME PROGRESS

First, they wanted only to repeal Obamacare, then they started taking about repeal and replace and now they are talking about fixing it.  This seems to be a "GAME OVER" moment.

I WONDER IF FATS LIMBAUGH MENTIONED THIS

The "war on Christmas" is back, at least in FAUX News World and I'd like to see someone point out that the Puritans banned Christmas celebration.  (h/t Billmon)

FINANCIAL TRIVIA POST

I came across Felix Salmon using the term "2-and-20 crowd" and I had to google to learn what or who he was referring to: hedge fund managers. It seems that Warren Buffet was the first to use this term in his 2006 investment letter:

“A flood of money went from institutional investors to the 2-and-20 crowd. For those innocent of this arrangement, let me explain: It’s a lopsided system whereby 2% of your principal is paid each year to the manager even if he accomplishes nothing or, for that matter, loses you a bundle and, additionally, 20% of your profit is paid to him if he succeeds, even if his success is due simply to a rising tide."

EVEN JUSTICE SCALIA WON'T DEFEND A CAPITALIST PIG

Well, I'm impressed that Scalia didn't try to bullshit his way to letting the Pig walk.

US Supreme Court rules Texas billionaire owes tax shelter penalty

By Patrick Temple-West
WASHINGTON Tue Dec 3, 2013 1:53pm EST

Dec 3 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously ruled that Texas billionaire Billy Joe "Red" McCombs must pay steep penalties to the Internal Revenue Service related to more than $45 million he tried to shield from taxes.

McCombs, former owner of the Minnesota Vikings football team, and his business partner Gary Woods in 1999 set up a partnership to run a tax shelter known as a "current options bring reward alternatives," or COBRA. It was designed to create financial losses to offset windfall gains McCombs was expecting.

The tax shelter itself had already been ruled a sham by lower courts. But McCombs and Woods argued that a 40 percent IRS penalty should not apply.

In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the high court said the Texans' arguments were "unpersuasive."

"At the end of the day, Woods' and McCombs' $3.2 million investment generated tax losses that, if treated as valid, could have shielded more than $45 million of income from taxation," Scalia wrote.

"The penalty is applicable to tax underpayments resulting from the partners' participation in the COBRA tax shelter," Scalia wrote.

GUESS WHICH POPE THE CONSERVATIVES PREFER?

(h/t Sean Paul Kelly)

Hint: Benedict is on the left, Francis is on the right.

ANOTHER NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

This time it isn't a gasbag contradicting himself, it's the advertiser on the gasbag's radio show contradicting the gasbag.  Lear Capital ran an ad on Limbaugh's show today that mentioned a silver coin that was "government guaranteed."  The ad doesn't tell what exactly the guarantee involves but their website does:

Limbaugh spends a lot of time telling us the government is bad for us yet one of his advertisers promotes government regulation.

ANOTHER REASON CONSERVATIVE ECONOMISTS ARE IMMORAL

(h/t Matt Yglesias)

I shouldn't be surprised but this struck me as so out of touch that I have to quote this callous remark by Bryan Caplan at EconLog:

3. Treatment of foreigners. If the NYPD bombed Harlem to kill one rampaging murderer, we'd condemn the NYPD agents as murderers.  But if the USAF bombs a town in Afghanistan to kill one rampaging murderer, we forgive the bombers - or cheer them on. 

Maybe Caplan knows mostly neo-con warwhores who don't mind indiscriminate murder of civilians.

DOPE OF THE WEEK?

(h/t Raw Story)

A Bagger had a column published in World Nut Daily that contained this remarkable anachronism:

“Jesus was a capitalist, preaching personal responsibility, not a socialist.”

This guy is as bad as Fats Limbaugh.

TIME TO CHANGE THE "BLUE SLIP" RULE

Eleanor Clift reminds us that GOP senators have another way to derail a judicial nominee by not returning the blue slip:

When a president nominates a judge, the senators from the nominee’s home state are notified via a letter written on blue paper, which asks the senator to approve or disapprove of the nomination. If a senator doesn’t return a blue slip, as Republican senators have been wont to do, it sounds like a minor lapse, like returning a library book late. But in the Senate, this quaint tradition is enough to kill a judicial nomination.

Ten currently pending judicial nominees could have had a hearing by now if their home-state senators had returned their blue slips. Intended as a courtesy, it is now the equivalent of a veto. Senators don’t even have to voice a complaint; they can just fail to turn in those blue slips. Several district court nominees from Texas are being blocked by the inaction of Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Fve pending nominees call Arizona home, all of whom were designated “judicial emergencies” to serve on understaffed courts.

CLEAR CHANNEL IS IN BIG TROUBLE....

Almost one year ago, I noted that Clear Channel is having serious revenue problems and in today's RadioInfo, the problem has gotten worse:

Bloomberg: Clear Channel Burning Cash to Delay Reckoning.

In a piece published by Bloomberg, Krista Giovacco writes that Clear Channel’s recently announced desire to push the due date on $1.8 billion in borrowings from 2016 to another three to five years into the future and almost double the interest rate buys the company time, but also eats into its cash flow.  Giovacco reports, “While the proposal gives Clear Channel more time to turn around a business that’s posted losses every year after Bain Capital Partners LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP took control in 2008, it also raises the company’s risk of missing interest payments on $20.7 billion of debt, according to Moody’s Investors Service. After capital expenses, Clear Channel ran a deficit from operations in the year ended June, meaning the company had to eat into cash that’s declined more than 60% since the end of 2010 to $704.2 million.  ‘Refinancing at a higher rate is never a positive,’ Scott Van den Bosch, a New York-based senior analyst at Moody’s, said in a telephone interview. ‘It’s not a cure-all, but it buys them time to improve the balance sheet.’”  Giovacco further states, “Clear Channel is seeking to extend $1 billion of loans to 2019 from 2016 and is proposing to pay interest of as much as 7.5 percentage points more than the London interbank offered rate, compared with 3.65 percentage points more than Libor on the existing debt, according to CreditSights Inc., Clear Channel had a free cash-flow deficit of $69.4 million in the year ended June, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.  On the trailing 12-month basis, the company burned cash for the first time since 2009, the data show.”  Read the entire piece here.

UPDATE: Tom Taylor's NOW also reported this.

THIS SHOULD BE SCANDALOUS

After spending 100s of billions, killing tens of 1000s and spying on practically the entire world, we are no better off then we were on Sept. 10, 2001.

Senators Warn Americans Aren’t Safer Today
By Eric Morath

December 1, 2013, 12:03 PM
Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON–Americans shouldn’t feel safer today than they did before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the leaders of the Senate and House intelligence committees said Sunday.

UPDATE: I should have added "IF TRUE" to the title

WE AREN'T ALL THAT EXCEPTIONAL

CNN Money reports that a recent survey of "talent competiveness" has the U.S. ranked 9th behind some well-known socialist hellholes.  You can download the full survey here and this is a table for the top 25 countries...

DON'T CRY FOR THE PENTAGON

This comparison of worldwide defense spending in 2012 is making the rounds so I thought I would download the underlying data and create a different look: