Mooshell Abides by Saudi Dress Code

Now, If We Could Only Get Her To Do It Here Also....

Blue States and Mental Disorders

No surprise here....liberal blue states have higher percentage of people riding social security disability for mental disorders then red states.....

CNS

One in three, or 35.2 percent, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). 

The largest "diagnostic group" for disabled beneficiaries was a mental disorder. Of the 10,228,364 disabled people receiving federal disability benefits in December 2013, according to the report, 3,599,417, or 35.2 percent, were diagnosed with a mental disorder.   

Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government, ranked in the top-ten list of states where disabled beneficiaries were diagnosed with mental problems. At the bottom of the list were Alabama (28.8% diagnosed with a mental disorder); Georgia (29.1%), South Carolina (29.7%), and Arkansas and Louisiana (30.2% each). 

Disabled beneficiaries have increased 49.7 percent from a decade ago in 2003 when there were 6,830,714 beneficiaries; and the number is up 14.3 percent from the 8,945,376 beneficiaries in 2009, the year President Obama took office.

Texas Largely Responsible for the +1.2M net US Job Increase Since 2007

Despite the Obama Administrations tauting of a bunch of fly-by-night taxpayer cash grabbing solar energy company failures, much to their dismay, good jobs numbers have come because of employment created in the demon fossil fuel industry.

AIE

"The Texas Workforce Commission released state employment data today for the month of December, and job growth in the Lone Star State continues to lead, and in fact carry the nation’s improving labor market as the chart below shows." 

"The Texas Workforce Commission released state employment data today for the month of December, and job growth in the Lone Star State continues to lead, and in fact carry the nation’s improving labor market as the chart above shows. Here are some highlights of the December employment report for Texas:

Texas ended the year with the state’s largest ever year-over-year payroll gain with the eye-popping addition of 457,900 new jobs between December 2013 and December 2014. That’s more than 1,700 new payroll jobs that were added every business day last year in the Lone Star State, and 220 new jobs every business hour or almost 4 new jobs added every minute!

In just the last month of December, which marked the 51st consecutive month of employment growth, Texas added 45,700 new payroll jobs, which was more than 2,000 jobs every business day, almost 260 jobs every hour, and more than 4 new jobs every minute! The strong job growth in December brought the state’s jobless rate down to 4.6%, the lowest Texas unemployment rate since May 2008.

Bottom Line: Texas clearly deserves the title of America’s “economic miracle state.” It’s the most important energy-producing state in the US, and now produces so much crude oil that the state’s daily production of more than 3 million barrels represents more than 37% of the nation’s crude oil and would rank the Lone Star State as the world’s sixth largest oil producer as a separate country. Along with the gusher of shale oil and gas in Texas has come a gusher of more than 1.44 million new jobs since the start of the Great Recession......"   Read More  

Even with the gas and oil boom in the Dakotas has the the rest of the US yet to recovered all of the non-Texas job losses during the recession.   That's the Obama economy in a nutshell.

Latest Study Indicated Reducing Length of Unemployment Benefits Lead to Greater Levels of Employment in 2014.

by Robert Janicki

Something happened in 2014 that conservatives understood and pushed for, but liberals decried as draconian.  I'm talking about cutting off long term unemployment benefits in order to actually stimulate employment.  Long term unemployment benefits were reduced at the end of 2013.  2014 subsequently saw greater employment numbers.  Coincidence?  Not in my book or that of many conservatives.

Liberals decried such Republican action of reducing long term unemployment benefit periods as uncaring and typically characterized Republicans, and especially conservatives, as Neanderthals willing to see men, women and children starve to death as a result of cutting off long term unemployment benefits.  Of course that didn't happen.  

Conservatives have long said that long term unemployment benefits only contribute to long term unemployment, as the unemployed become much more comfortable in picking and choosing employment possibilities, knowing that they have a long term security blanket to fall back on.  

Now comes this latest study that appears to reinforce the conservative belief that cutting the length of long term unemployment benefits actually contributes to reduced unemployment, or, conversely to increasing employment, as more people move to get serious about gaining employment.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, since human nature is to go along with the path of least resistance.  It's difficult to resist unemployment benefits, when more than half the states provide unemployment benefits equal to or greater than what the private sector pays employees on average.

It's interesting to note that the red states that had better rates of employment, concurrently had lower unemployment benefits for a shorter period of time.  There is more than a correlation here.

"A new study attributes the 2014 jobs boom to the expiration of long-term unemployment benefits in late December 2013, a controversial event that Democrats and President Obama warned would hurt workers suffering in the wake of the recession.

Roughly 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 because Congress allowed benefits for workers unemployed 27 weeks to expire, according to the paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research Monday..." Read More

My take away is that people in general will be much more willing to take advantage of unemployment benefits that are closer to what they might earn when employed.  Why work when benefits are at or above what a person could earn in the local labor market?  Of course liberals will decry this latest study as some perverse conservative plan to crush the poor and destroy the middle class.  This is a given response from liberals.  Conservatives are evil, liberals are world class philanthropists (with other people's money) and really do care about people.  That thought, along with a five dollar bill, will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. 

This latest study may not be the most definitive study to date on the negative effects of long term unemployment benefits, but conservative economists believe that subsequent studies will validate this latest finding.  Smaller studies have indicated that those dropping off long term unemployment benefits had a greater rate of reemployment than any other group of unemployed job hunters. 

Banned By The Hiltons

First, the Free Republic, then Reddit, and now the Hiltons!

On a recent trip to St. Louis, my friend and regular commenter, Grunt of Monte Cristo, decided he check in and get the latest here at  DMF. Much to his surprise.....Access Denied! He writes:

"The attached file Diog2orig.jpg is an actual cell phone photo I took last night of a walk-up computer screen at a hotel in St. Louis denying access to Diogenes Middle Finger.  Can you believe it?  Your site is too smutty for the Hilton Hotels."

I guess we here at DMF haven't reached the high level of party girl skankiness of some members of the Hilton family, and don't yet meet their criteria for high standards to display for their hotel guest. Our new Badge of Honor!

Photo experts enhanced portions of the image for clearer viewing.

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MORE NEWS ON THE ONGOING FEUD HERE

How to Get Obama to Risk a “Megyn Kelly Moment”

Image via The Peoples Cube

"For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, a Megyn moment, as I have taken to calling it, is when you, a Fox guest — maybe a regular guest or even an official contributor — are pursuing a line of argument that seems perfectly congruent with the Fox worldview, only to have Kelly seize on some part of it and call it out as nonsense, maybe even turn it back on you. 

You don’t always know when, how or even if the Megyn moment will happen; Kelly’s political sensibility and choice of subjects are generally in keeping with that of the network at large. But you always have to be ready for it, no matter who you are." - Tim Graham, NewsBusters 

Bill Nye Blames East Coast Blizzard On Climate Change…

The Science Guy

Everyones favorite caricature of their slightly mentally disturbed Middle School General Science Teacher, Bill Nye the Science Guy, appeared on the MSNBC to perpetuate the Globe Warning hoax to the low info folks.... 

Grabien

"And everybody, I just want to introduce the idea that this storm is connected to climate change. I want to introduce that idea. I know there will be certain viewers who will become unglued, they’re throwing things at their television set and so on. But is the economic effect of storms like this is huge. You cancel half of the flights out of the world’s — one of the world’s busiest airports, certainly the eastern seaboard is a very busy area economically for airplane travel and so when you start having big storms and you don’t have the infrastructure to deal with it, you are costing your society a lot of money and we’re in the developed world where we can handle this stuff. So I just want to introduce the idea that the strong winds that we had in southern California, the very strong winds that will be associated with this storm in the next couple of days, these could be connected to climate change. Now proving any one storm is connected, specially cold-weather events is difficult. But I just want to present that......”