Say Anything Blog

Which means they’ve been understating unemployment.

Why Job Losses are Higher Than Reported
Comstock Partners
Market Commentary Views of Comstock Partners, Inc.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently announced that they will be making downward benchmark revisions to past monthly nonfarm employment data that casts doubt on the validity of the recent figures as well. As we will explain, it is highly likely that substantially more jobs are now being lost than is currently reported.

The BLS makes annual revisions to the previously announced payroll reports to account for job increases or decreases that were not picked up in the initial data.  The main reason for the differences in the preliminary and final reports is the difficulty in getting numbers from the many small and medium sized business and accounting for new startups and firms going out of business.  To make an educated guess at the data that they are missing, the BLS uses something called the ARIMA time series model (commonly called the birth/death model) to estimate employment changes resulting from business births and deaths that are not accounted for by other methods.  The model is based on the actual births and deaths over the five prior years.

As you can imagine, when the prior five years encompassed a period of economic expansion, the application of these numbers to a period of recession can result in a substantial overestimation of job changes, and that is evidently what happened recently.  The BLS candidly acknowledges this and states that it is “likely to have some difficulty producing reliable estimates at economic turning points or during periods when there are sudden changes in trend.”

In the current instance the BLS announced that preliminary tabulations indicated they would have to reduce the estimate of total nonfarm employment by about 824,000 for the year ended March 31, 2009.  On average, therefore, the net change in payrolls for the period was overstated by about 68,000 per month.  Interestingly enough, the birth/death adjustment had added about 717,000 jobs during the same period.  So it’s apparent that the benchmark revision will more than wipe out the entire amount added by the model.

What does this mean for the period following March 31, 2009, which will not be revised until next October?  For the six months since March 31st the birth/death adjustment has added 815,000 jobs, an average of 135,000 per month.  Since small and medium sized firms are suffering from severe credit restrictions, they are much more likely to have reduced employment significantly rather to have added that many jobs.  That means current monthly job losses may be running as much as 135,000 higher than is currently being reported.  While we won’t know the true number for another year, those being laid off will know, and they will be reducing their spending accordingly.  The Fed certainly knows what’s happening and that’s one reason they are promising near-zero interest rates indefinitely.

Claims that the worst is over would appear to be ill founded.

Hat Tip:  Seeking Alpha by way of Glenn Instapundit Reynolds.

Invoke Budget Reconciliation Rule to ram “Health Care Reform” Through Both Chambers.

Let’s hear it for Democratic Bi-partisanship and open government.

BREAKING: Dems Go Nuclear on Obamacare
by Connie Hair
Human Events.com

House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) held a hearing this morning to certify that H.R. 3200—the main House Obamacare bill which was the subject of all the town hall rage in August—has met all requirements to pass as a “budget reconciliation” measure.

Under reconciliation, the bill can be passed by a simple majority vote in the Senate—just 51 votes—and will be given preferential treatment on the House floor as well. The Dems have apparently invoked the “nuclear option” to shut out Republicans and ensure the bill is passed before the end of the year.

The bill certified for “reconciliation” is the Ways & Means version of H.R. 3200 that was passed out of committee before the August break, and before it was read aloud at town hall meetings across the country and blasted by voters across the country.

Time, and past time, for the Republicans or at least one brave Representative and Senator to reply with the Neutron Bomb of Congressional Proceedure: No Unanimous Consent.  Force this bill, and every bill, to be read in it’s entirety when it comes to the floor for any reason.

Here are just a few reasons to do so:

It contains all of the horrors previously exposed:  federal funding of abortion, coverage for illegal aliens, comparative effectiveness, healthcare rationing, deep cuts to Medicare.  Everything the American people overwhelmingly reject.
No amendments were allowed at the hearing and no debate.  Rangel told Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the committee, that he would not have preferred to do it this way, but leadership—i.e., Speaker Pelosi—forced his hand.

We’re about to find our what our Congress is made of.

Hat Tips: Red State by way of Ace of Spades

Backstabbing the troops by diverting money from funds for operations, training, fuel, and AMMUNITION. 

And yes, I do question their patriotism.

U.S. troop funds diverted to pet projects
Study finds $2.6 billion taken from guns and ammunition
By Shaun Waterman
The Washington Times

Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.

Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, “in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, called the transfer of funds from Pentagon operations and maintenance “a disgrace.”

Leadership as practiced by Democrats; beggaring the troops for their own pet projects.

Apartment residents told to take down U.S. flags
By Melica Johnson and KATU.com Staff
KATU.com

ALBANY, Ore. - At the Oaks Apartments in Albany, the management can fly their own flag advertising one and two bedroom apartments - but residents have been told they can’t fly any flags at all.

Jim Clausen flies the American flag from the back of his motorcycle. He has a son in the military heading back to Iraq, and the flag - he said - is his way of showing support.

“This flag stands for all those people,” said Clausen, an Oaks Apartment resident. “It stands for the people that can no longer stand - who died in wars. That’s why I fly this flag.”

But to Oaks Apartment management, Clausen said, the American flag symbolizes problems.

He was told to remove the red, white and blue from both of his rides, or face eviction.

“It floored me,” he said. “I can’t believe she was saying what she was saying.”

Even long-time residents like Sharron White, who has flown a flag on her car for eight years, has been told to take it down.

By mocking The One and his unearned prize:

Mockery…

Which Goddess surely waits in the wings.

The Power of Payback
Nemesis Everywhere
By Victor Davis Hanson
Works and Days

I have believed in the power of the goddess Nemesis (“dispenser of dues”) ever since I was introduced to the concept as a teenager studying classics, especially in the texts of Hesiod, Herodotus, and Sophocles.

Some of you know her also as a variant of eastern Karma, or the folk notion of ‘what comes around, goes around’, or the now common “ain’t payback a bitch”? We all agree on the symptoms: overweening success and surfeit (koris) lead to hubris (gratuitous arrogance), which in turn promotes destructive behavior (atê), that at last calls you to the attention of divine Nemesis—who ensures your ruin.  At Rhamnous on the Attic coast there is a beautiful temple to the goddess, proof of her ubiquity and power.

Obama as all-knowing Oedipus

As sure as sun rises, you readers knew that, as early as 2007, Obama’s fiery rhetoric about the disaster in Iraq and the good war in Afghanistan was not only disingenuous, but would come lurking back to haunt him—especially given the efforts of the talented David Petraeus, and the myriad challenges of the age-old tribalism in Afghanistan.

And so it has. He now owns the “good” and “necessary” war that, according to Obama, we supposedly wrongly “took our eye off of.” Now at last Obama is free as he wished to go into Pakistan in hot pursuit of terrorists (and as he once boasted in the debates amid the trashing of the then big-target Bush administration.)*

There is more, much more, and it is well worth the read…

Over the Summer, a Spread of Thicker Arctic Ice
By Andrew C. Revkin
Dot Earth, The New York Times blog

The National Snow and Ice Data Center released its summary of summer sea-ice conditions in the Arctic on Tuesday, noting a substantial expansion of the extent of “second-year ice” — floes thick enough to have persisted through two summers of melting. The result could be a reprieve, at least for a while, from the recent stretch of remarkable summer meltdowns.

According to the center, second-year ice this summer made up 32 percent of the total ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, compared with 21 percent in 2007 and 9 percent in 2008. The percentage of ice that was many years old, forming thick pancaked expanses, was at its lowest since satellite observations began 30 years ago. But that could change next year as the second-year ice adds mass through the long winter freeze.

Scientist: Carbon Dioxide Doesn’t Cause Global Warming
By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers
U. S. News and World Report

A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for Earth and don’t cause global warming. Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradise in a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.

“I’m trying to kill the whole thing,” he says. “We are tilting at windmills.” He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.

Much of the global warming debate has focused on reducing CO2 emissions because it is thought that the greenhouse gas produced mostly from fossil fuels is warming the planet. But Steward, who once believed CO2 caused global warming, is trying to fight that with a mountain of studies and scientific evidence that suggest CO2 is not the cause for warming. What’s more, he says CO2 levels are so low that more, not less, is needed to sustain and expand plant growth.

Trying to debunk theories that higher CO2 levels cause warming, he cites studies that show CO2 levels following temperature spikes, prompting him to back other scientists who say that global warming is caused by solar activity.

Oh

My

Hat Tip: Ace of Spades

If the remedy to bad speech is more speech, then Jonah has a solution for our current state of Congressional Representation: more Representation.

We Need a Bigger House
The remedy for an undemocratic system: more democracy.
By Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

...

Except for a brief effort to accommodate Alaska and Hawaii, the size of the House has been frozen at 435 members since 1911. A 1929 law, driven in part by a desire to keep immigrants underrepresented, has kept it that way.

But there’s nothing sacred about the 435 number. In fact, the Founders would be aghast at the idea that the “peoples’ house” is filled with pols speaking for hundreds of thousands of citizens.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison defended the proposed Constitution’s apportionment clause despite its widespread unpopularity. The chief complaints, according to Madison, were that such a small Congress would become an “unsafe depository of the public interests”; that the districts would be too large and diverse for any politician to “possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents”; and that such a tiny House would have the net result of attracting elitist types whose aim would be the “permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many.”

So how big were these liberty-threatening districts? How tiny was the potentially oligarchic House? The districts had no more than 30,000 people, yielding 65 representatives. Under today’s apportionment system, the “ideal” congressional district is 700,000 people, with some districts reaching nearly 1 million. Montana, with a population of 958,000, has just one representative, but each of Rhode Island’s two districts has about 530,000 people.

There is, of course, an important principle here, and if all of Montana’s residents were black, it would be easier for everyone to see it. Montanans’ votes don’t count as much as Rhode Islanders’ — in fact, a Montanan’s vote only counts for about three-fifths of a Rhode Islander’s. That America’s slave population was counted by the same ratio under the original Constitution is usually cited, rightly, as one of the document’s greatest sins. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Mississippi last month hopes to force Congress to remedy the status quo’s assault on the one-person, one-vote principle by increasing Congress to as many as a paltry 1,761 members.

Some will no doubt claim that such a large House would be unwieldy and that legislation would prove hard to pass through such a body. To which I would reply, “That’s not a bug, that’s a Feature.”

Reportedly hanging in the White House…

Now all he needs is a silver dollar…

Hat Tip: NRO by way of HotAir with commentary here.

...By publishing that which it should not have.

Is the U.S. Preparing to Bomb Iran?
Is the U.S. Stepping Up Preparations for a Possible Attack on Iran’s Nuclear Facilities?
By JONATHAN KARL
abc news

Is the U.S. stepping up preparations for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities?

The Pentagon is always making plans, but based on a little-noticed funding request recently sent to Congress, the answer to that question appears to be yes.

First, some background: Back in October 2007, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had asked Congress for $88 million in the emergency Iraq/Afghanistan war funding request to develop a gargantuan bunker-busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). It’s a 30,000-pound bomb designed to hit targets buried 200 feet below ground. Back then, the Pentagon cited an “urgent operational need” for the new weapon.

Now the Pentagon is shifting spending from other programs to fast forward the development and procurement of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The Pentagon comptroller sent a request to shift the funds to the House and Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees over the summer.

Hat Tip: Flopping Aces

Each one of them a dollar.

Breaking: Louisiana Attorney General: Rathke Embezzled $5 Million From ACORN
By Publius
BIGGOVERNMENT

From NOLA.COM:

An internal review by the board of directors of the community organization ACORN determined that the amount allegedly embezzled from the community organization was $5 million, well more than the previously reported amount of nearly $1 million, according to a new subpoena in an investigation by Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.

The subpoena, released this afternoon, says, “It is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.”

Caldwell issued subpoenas in August seeking documents related to Acorn International then-President Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke, who kept the group’s books. Those subpoenas were focused on possible Acorn violations of state employee tax law, obstructing justice and violating the Employee Retirement Security Act.

Whole blockbuster story here.

Update: According to the new subpoena issued by the Louisiana Attorney General, it seems ACORN leadership was aware of the full extent of the embezzlement. That they have covered up the true figure cast doubt on their ability to truely reform the organization. In other words, they will only admit to what they get caught at.

Still, our local leftards will distract and spin (once the comments are turned back on), rather than cleaning their own house.

That's Gotta Hurt
By Jonah Goldberg
The Corner, National Review Online

Fox’s Red Eye, which appears at 3:00 a.m. on the East Coast, is out-performing a lot of CNN and MSNBC. From Mediaite:

Last week we were forwarded this message board post on ActivityPit.com – Red Eye’s online community that feeds its dedicated base of fans. Here’s a part:

The ratings came out for September and Red Eye is up over 30% in total viewers and up 50% in the key demo (25-54) since July. They have more overall viewers than every CNBC show, every MSNBC show that is on before Hardball, most of HLN, and American Morning on CNN.

But the show is looking up year-to-year as well. Compared to September 2008, the program grew 23% in total viewers and 43% in the A25-54 demographic. But let’s look at the individual shows. Last week we wrote about the 13 shows at the top of the ratings in September – all on Fox News. Red Eye, naturally, wasn’t one of them. But let’s see where they fell. Here’s the full chart for September programs.

Red Eye averaged 432,000 total viewers and 202,000 in the demo. Let’s deal with the demo first – CNN’s 8pmET show, hosted by Campbell Brown, averaged 191,000 in the demo. Let’s just let that one sink in – Fox News had more people in the all important A25-54 demographic watching their channel at three in the morning (east coast time) than CNN had for the show that leads off their prime time. This says as much about Fox News as it does about CNN. Wow.

In total viewers (and demo), Red Eye beat the cable news competition three hours later. All three other morning shows, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN’s American Morning and HLN’s Morning Express had less viewers in September.

The election of a former Community Organizer and former lawyer for ACORN has had an unexpected benefit; it has un-masked the new generation of Limousine Liberals.

How Polanski Could Help the Right
by Ben Crair
Blogs & Stories, the Daily Beast

Hollywood’s rally around admitted rapist Roman Polanski has resurrected the limousine liberal, reminding much of middle America why they hate the left.

It figures. On the eve of the Democratic Party’s greatest triumph—when, after decades of pangs and false alarms, universal health care has finally crowned—a coterie of powerful liberals go ahead and hand a real bullet to Republicans who have otherwise been firing blanks. The limousine liberal, that Democrat who puts privilege before principle and the status in status quo, is back, with a cocktail of issues (pedophilia, Hollywood, France) so volatile that Roger Ailes could not have scripted it better himself. As the Democratic Party makes its final push for a health-care overhaul, some of its members are reminding Middle America why sometimes it’s so easy to hate the left.

I would quibble on several points.  First, I don’t think this is a matter of could, it’s more a matter of has.  The backlash in France has been sufficiently severe as to inspire the French officials who sprang to Polanski’s defense to seek cover.  Nor has “universal health care” proved to be as popular as Mr. Crair’s cocktail circuit believes it to be…  But I digress.