What’s that, you say? Didn’t I see a news report somewhere today saying that new home sales rose by 24% in June?

Yes, you did – but while that was technically not a lie, it certainly wasn’t anything like the truth. You see, while new home sales rose from May of 2010 to June of 2010, they dropped from June of 2009 to June of 2010 – and that is the only important measure: year over year.

But even that doesn’t tell the whole tale – part of the reason there was a “rise” in new home sales in June is because May’s numbers were so abysmally low. Lower, indeed, than any time since 1963 – and way the heck back then, there were 110 million fewer Americans. In other words, a completely catastrophic month for new home sales.

And yet it gets even worse – the number for May was a downward revision, and April’s numbers were also revised downwards. We can fully expect further downward revisions to the numbers for May and June.

Boiled down, the way the report was presented was a clear attempt at propaganda – an essentially dishonest presentation of information designed to elicit a response desired by the purveyors of the information. In this case, it was the government putting it out and what Rush so aptly calls the State-run media which then ran with it. But the truth of the matter is that we’re in a housing Depression, and that will soon spread to the entire economy (a very large amount of our economic activity is tied to the building and purchase of homes…for instance, people tend to only buy a ‘fridge when they get a new home, etc).

Bad times coming – but mostly for the elites who got us in to this mess.

From Newsbusters:

…Stone said that his upcoming Showtime documentary series “Secret History of America,” seeks to put Hitler and Communist dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”

“Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support,” Stone told Sunday Times’ reporter Camilla Long…

…The Sunday Times interviewer then asked why there was such a focus on the Holocaust.

“The Jewish domination of the media,” responded Stone. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”…

A bit astounding to see, but not that surprising. It’ll be interesting to see if Stone can back and fill his way out of this.

Still, Stone has made a career out of spreading lies, and when you do that sort of thing, all manner of depravity comes to seem normal and, indeed, laudable. In the higher service (to Stone) of curbing America, Stone could easily descend in to the gutter of Jew-baiting. Its not so much that Stone hates Jews (its likely that he’d tell us that some of his best friends are Jews), but that he hates the United States, and has identified Israel as the locus of what is bad about America in the world.

When I speak of the rising anti-Semitism on the left, this is what I mean: the increasing willingness of those on the left to blame some formulation of a Jewish conspiracy for what is wrong with the United States and the world. It goes like this – if only those dratted Jews would go away, we could have a policy of friendship with our current enemies. Following hard upon the heels of such thinking is the willingness to see a nuclear-armed Iran and, in subtext, the lack of concern for the fate of Israel when faced with such a threat.

Evil feeds upon itself. Take lies as your means of operation and you’ll eventually fall completely down. Naturally, the left doesn’t view it that way – after all, they only start out with little lies, and those lies are designed to advance a wonderful agenda. They fail to understand that a lie, even the smallest of little, white lies inevitable leads to ever larger lies. The Truth sets you free – and free from, among many other things, the trap of lies.

Stone had better reverse course soon (or come up with a bang-up excuse for this report), or he’ll wind up making films denying the Holocaust ever happened. The larger left had better stop it, too, or they’ll soon find themselves volunteering to run the next Holocaust.

Glad we’ve got Barry and Timmy and Benny watching the financial store:

Regulators closed 7 banks in 7 different states this week, bringing the total number of bank failures in 2010 up to 103.

This marks the second straight year that the United States will have more than 100 bank failures…

Can you imagine what would have happened if Obama wasn’t there to nationalize the banking industry and if Dodd and Frank hadn’t fixed all our financial industry problems with their new law…which no one has read? Boy, are we lucky to have all of them in office!

From Big Government:

She was likened to a modern day Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela, but former the Ag official, according to the Washington Post, was not interviewed on a single major Sunday morning talk-show following a week that can only be described as a Shirley Sherrod media frenzy. Though the conversation on Sunday morning focused on race in America, noticeably absent from the discussion was the woman behind the controversy. Earlier this week a handful of people in the blogosphere began to speculate Sherrod would pull off a “full Ginsburg,” or become only the thirteenth person to appear on all major Sunday talk-shows on the same day since the feat was first accomplished by William H. Ginsburg in 1998. However, this was before a clip of Sherrod suggesting Andrew Breitbart wants blacks “stuck back in the times of slavery” went viral. Sherrod also drew extensive criticism late in the week for blasting Fox News as racist…

I watched (and posted) that Anderson Cooper bit where she accused Breitbart of wanting to restore slavery and maybe I’m over-interpreting things, but it seems to me that Cooper tried to rescue her from making that absurd statement. She didn’t take her cue, it would seem – and now the MSM doesn’t want her within a country mile of a television camera, lest she wreck the liberal racial narrative entirely.

Liberals here in 2010 are just the gang that can’t shoot straight. Even when their opponents have served them up a grand, exploitable mistake on a silver platter, they can’t get it right. Had Sherrod kept to the racial-healing talking point, she would have been invincible and would have kept the right on the defensive for a couple weeks, at least – and this is regardless of the merits of her case. Now, she’s already political kryptonite.

Just goes to show – if you don’t actually work for justice, you simply cannot get anything right, in the long run. Ms. Sherrod approached it, but then blew it right before the finish line.

Even near the heart of Liberaldom:

Several hundred angry residents from a modest blue-collar Los Angeles suburb marched Sunday to call for the resignation of the mayor and some City Council members in a protest sparked by the sky-high salaries of three recently departed administrators.

The residents of the city of Bell marched to Oscar’s Korner Market and Carniceria, owned by Mayor Oscar Hernandez, then to his home, demanding that he reduce his own six-figure compensation or quit.

They then did the same with some members of the City Council, with many marchers wearing T-shirts that read “My city is more corrupt than your city.”…

That odd scent in the air? It is revolution – and it is building all around the nation.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Today marks the first anniversary of Congress’s decision to raise the federal minimum wage by 41% to $7.25 an hour. But hold the confetti. According to a new study, more than 100,000 fewer teens are employed today due to the wage hikes.

Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they’re especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington’s ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages…

This is another one of those “we told you so” moments. We told you liberals that if you raise the cost of employing inexperienced workers then fewer of them would be employed. You, on the other hand, kept on and on about how unfair it was to have people working for the lower minimum wage – can you please explain how fair it is for people not to be paid any wage?

We’d hope this would be a lesson you liberals would never forget – but, you will. In fact wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that there’s already pressure being applied to increase the minimum wage even more. Why would liberals do this? If its not because of clinical insanity, then we’ll have to fall back on “ignorant/stupid” for our reasons.

Obama’s Office of Management and Budget predicts the deficit to be $1.47 trillion for 2010, falling to $1.42 trillion for 2011. They are puffing this up as an indicator that things are headed in the right direction. It probably helps them to make this prediction in that Congress refused to pass a budget for FY 2011 (which starts October 1st) and thus you can paint whatever picture you like. It also helps if you just lie stupidly and hope that no one notices. Most people haven’t – but over at Zero Hedge, they have. That deficit number is based upon a number of rosy scenarios – not least of which is OMB’s predictions on the job market:

…just the natural growth of America will have added 8.6 million vacancies to the labor force from December 2007 through the end of 2015. And since the economy is already in the hole to the tune of 7.5 million jobs from the 2007 peak, the OMB is effectively stating that it can bridge the shortfall of 16 million jobs in the next 5 years. Why, sure they can – if they can somehow create 245k jobs each month for the next 66 months. Alas, as the data demonstrates, the only time during the tenure of the Obama administration where there was a positive NFP number, is when the census fudge factor added hundreds of thousand of (potentially double-counted) positions, which have now been unwound. And obviously each month that does not create a net positive add to the economy, means more and more jobs have to be back-end loaded. In a few months, the economy will need to be adding 300k a month to get to the OMB projection, then 400k… then 500k…

And if we don’t get those jobs, then deficit predictions are out the window because fewer jobs means lower tax revenue and high expenditures on unemployed people. So, unless we’re about to go gangbusters on job creation, OMB’s prediction isn’t worth the paper its printed on.

My only guess here is that they are just hoping that something turns up. That some how, some way the economy will recover and thus allow Obama to get re-elected in 2012. Because if the numbers don’t come together, then by 2012 we’ll be at record high deficits and very high unemployment. Not exactly the change we can believe in.

Until reality sets in or an economic miracle occurs, we can just expect the Administration to keep churning out stupid information such as this. It is best ignored – unless you start seeing a consistent creation of 250,000 jobs starting this month, just bank on it that OMB is merely trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

They don’t want to debate – the left never does. This is because the left cannot admit that non-left views might have validity. Debate and compromise would lead to a world which is not 100% governed by leftist ideology, and that is unacceptable to the left.

So, they engage in these tactics. In fact, of course, they have always engaged in these tactics. The difference between the past and today is that now we have the New Media to expose these fanatics, and thus generate the opposition which will destroy them.

From Gay Patriot:

The latest RealClearPolitics average has President Obama’s approval dropping to 46.4. (Gallup has the Democrat at 46.) Julie Mason reports that “Former President George W. Bush has a 45 percent favorability rating … 10 percentage points higher than last year.”

Vindication is a wonderful thing.

Clearly defined in a Rasmussen survey:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure…

…America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin…

The reasons for the Ruling Class feeling like that are quite simple:

1. Government running the economy means more power for the Ruling Class.

2. The Ruling Class is convinced they are individually and collectively smarter than the people, and thus can better decide on the allocation of resources.

It is hard to find someone who would want to go in to government to essentially force the government to do nothing or, at least, do far less than it is doing. Here in Nevada, Harry Reid is hammering Sharron Angle over her completely reasonable – for a non-Ruling Class person – opinion that as a Senator, it wouldn’t be her job to provide jobs for Nevadans. Of course it’s not – the job of a Senator, properly understood, is to ensure that just laws are passed which protect the rights of the State and people of Nevada. Do that, and plenty of jobs will be created by the hard working people of Nevada.

But that doesn’t make for as good a campaign commercial – and it doesn’t allow for a whole series of bribes and kickbacks among various factions of the Ruling Class. Angle wants to be our Senator; Reid wants to be our master.

For a very long time, such opinions as Angle’s probably would have been the kiss of death – but I don’t think they will be in 2010, and the linked poll shows this. The people are on to the scam of the Ruling Class.