NRA

Love guns or hate guns, one thing is becoming perfectly clear. The American public’s perception of guns and the NRA is moving in the exact opposite direction of Barack Obama’s message and agenda.

• U.S. jobs market seen fairly healthy despite slowing economy (Reuters)
• China State Funds Said to Buy More Shares After Market Rout (BBG)
• Global Stocks Gain Some Respite (WSJ)
• U.S. Jobs Data Take on Added Importance With Markets in Turmoil (BBG)
• GOP Health Plans Are Works in Progress (WSJ)
• For economy czar of crisis-hit Venezuela, inflation 'does not exist' (Reuters)

In what is possibly the most inane political statement ever, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a push to prevent known or suspected terrorists from purchasing guns in New York State. Schumer and Cuomo areasking the federal government to officially add the U.S. Terror Watch List to the criteria it uses for federal background checks in New York State, exclaiming "we need to move to close the Terror Gap once and for all."

Everyone Agrees that We Need to Stop Mass Shootings ... But This ISN'T the Way to Do It

Focus on policies promoting economic growth, lower taxes, and spending tax receipts more efficiently and not on one`s sexual orientation in the bedroom.

1.3 million transactions were scrutinized, 3,000 accounts were frozen, and according to Jinhua City Public Security Bureau of Economic Investigation Detachment Vice Captain Zhang Hui, it took 35,000 sheets of paper to print out all of the evidence.

Just days after talk of President Obama's gun control executive orders, and following a disappointing showing at the Democrat Debate, Hillary Clinton has jumped back on the populist bandwagon suggesting that, as Fox reports, it is "worth looking into" mandatory gun buy-back programs like ones in Australia.  "This validates what the NRA has said all along," said Chris Cox, executive director of The NRA, with Clinton's comments making “very clear” that the underlying goal of gun-control advocates is confiscation.

• China economic growth seen slowing despite policy easing (Reuters)
• FBI, Justice Department Investigating Daily Fantasy Sports Business Model (WSJ)
• Obama to slow pace of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan (Reuters)
• Corporate America's Epic Debt Binge Leaves $119 Billion Hangover (BBG)
• Islamic State battles insurgents as Syria army prepares assault (Reuters)
• Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Win by Going After the NRA (BBG)

Land of the Fleeced ... Home of the Slave

When the words "mothballed", "nuclear", and "never been done before" are seen together with Japan in a sentence, the world should be paying attention...

Obama failed: in the aftermath of the 2012 Newtown, CT school massacre which left 26 unarmed, defenseless people dead, the president pushed as hard as he could to pass legislation that would enact strict gun control and further limit the applicability of the Second Amendment. Not only did he not succeed, but according to a 2014 Pew Research Poll there has been a 9% rise in the number of Americans who think gun ownership could "protect people from becoming victims of crime."

Here we now call market deflation by the sobriquet “volatility”, as in “major market indices suffered from volatility today, down almost one-half of one percent”, where a down day is treated as something akin to the common cold, a temporary illness with symptoms that we can shrug off with an aspirin or two. You can’t be in favor of volatility, surely. It’s a bad thing, almost on a par with littering. No, we want good things and good words, like “wealth effect” and “accommodation” and “stability” and “price appreciation”. As President Snow says in reference to The Hunger Games version of a political utility, “may the odds be always in your favor”. Who doesn’t want that?

Ronald Reagan is surely rolling in his grave. He is credited for much that he didn’t actually accomplish on the economic front, but his most singular real victory - decisive repudiation of the Keynesian macro-economic policy model that had produced stagflationary havoc for more than a decade - overshadows all his fiscal failures and the urban legend that he actually tamed Big Government. Needless to say, however, that 35-years ago repudiation has now been itself completely repudiated by the keynesian apparatchiks who presently rule the Eccles Building. This week Janet Yellen was at it again, displaying outright contempt for the Gipper’s crowning achievement.

Containers holding contaminated water at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are at risk of hydrogen explosions, The Telegraph reports, with 10% of them found to be leaking. The discovery was reported to the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), which raised concerns surrounding the potential hazards of accumulated hydrogen building up in the containers warning that "a spark caused by static electricity could cause a container to explode." TEPCO officials reassuringly note that they "think the possibility of an occurrence of hydrogen explosion from these storage facilities is extremely low, since there is no fire origin, or anything that generates static electricity nearby," but this is the same company that a recent IAEA report blasted for "failing to implement adequate safeguards at Fukushima – despite being aware of the tsunami risk."

After Spate of Mass Shootings, Americans Turn Pro-Gun