Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Spengler says the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers are incorrect. He gives 10 reasons that the jobless numbers are higher than the BLS is reporting.
10. As noted, nearly 300,000 people disappeared from the labor force, yet the BLS reports no increase in “discouraged workers” or workers forced to take part-time jobs for economic reasons.
9. Private sector service jobs supposedly increased by 51,000, yet the National Institute of Purchasing Managers’ (NIPM) survey shows that services employment fell during November. The unexpected drop in the NIPM report, which is a reasonably good advanced indicator of economic activity, doesn’t square with the BLS report. …
7. Goods-producing industries lost 69,000 jobs by the BLS count, about equally divided between manufacturing and construction – yet the “recovery” supposedly is led by manufacturing.
6. ADP, America’s largest processor of payroll information, publishes an independent survey of employment based on its own data. This is somewhat less comprehensive than the BLS data, but far more reliable. ADP reported a loss of 169,000 jobs, compared to only 11,000 for the BLS survey. …
From the Cato Institute, in an excellent article via Real Clear Politics, Nat Hentoff details how the “cold heart of Obamacare” means that the government decides what medical care we will receive. Mr. Hentoff, long the scourge of GOP administrations, has gone rogue.
…”If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly, federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions,” Groopman and Hartzband wrote.
If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health care “reform” measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.
Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your lifespan, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor, and, of course, haven’t the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America? …
…Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by “Change we can believe in?” Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you? …
To mark the start of the Copenhagen Summit, we have Mark Steyn on Climategate.
“The climate crisis threatens our very survival”—Herman Van Rompuy, “president” of “Europe” …
…“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children?.?.?.?this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”—Barack Obama, president of the United States.
The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. …
…The other day, a whole bunch of electronic documents most probably leaked by a disaffected insider from the prestigious Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were posted online. … They confirm what the soi-disant “skeptics” have long known …
3) The Settled Scientists have attempted to (in the words of one email) “hide the decline”—that’s to say, obscure the awkward fact that “global warming” stopped over a decade ago.
Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”Back in the summer, I wrote in a column south of the border:
“If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. …
In the Corner, Dana Perino and Bill Burck tell of a surprising turn of events. The Obama administration will not allow White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers to testify before Congress, claiming Constitutional separation of powers–an even broader interpretation than the Bush administration claimed.
… Lest there be any doubt on this front, the White House made it clear that “staff here don’t go to testify in front of Congress.” There is no qualifier of any sort in that statement. At face value, this is a breathtaking assertion that all White House staff — everyone from the chief of staff to the 22-year-old assistant just out of college — are absolutely immune from appearing before Congress to give testimony. This jaw-dropper makes the prior administration, vilified by so many Democrats in Congress as imperious and dismissive of congressional prerogatives, look positively weak-kneed and lap-doggish. Incidentally, one has to wonder whether Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice agree with the Obama White House’s expansive view of immunity. As former Bush White House officials, we are well aware of the Department of Justice’s view of the scope of immunity during Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s tenure. Perhaps this is another example of President Obama bringing change to Washington. The audacity of hope indeed!
Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Conyers must feel particularly double-crossed because they were the principal sponsors of a lawsuit filed in an effort to compel testimony and documents from Ms. Miers, Mr. Rove, and others concerning the U.S. attorney controversy. The speaker and Chairman Conyers prevailed before the federal district court in the last months of the Bush administration, and the new administration took office before there could be an appeal. The district court rejected the Bush administration’s argument that the president’s closest advisers are entitled to absolute immunity from compelled congressional testimony. As was widely reported in the spring, the Obama White House brokered a settlement that effectively ended the litigation; however, the White House agreed to Speaker Pelosi’s and Chairman Conyers’ demand that the district court’s opinion remain in effect, even though they could have sought to vacate the opinion because the case had settled and there was no appeal.
How frustrating it must be, then, for the speaker and Chairman Conyers to see the new occupants of the White House taking a position so much more aggressive than that of the prior administration, and one that is completely irreconcilable with a federal court opinion that the Obama White House itself has consented to keep on the books. …
Dana Perino and Bill Burck have a follow up on their article.
Faced with widespread skepticism about its assertion that the “separation of powers” bars Congress from requiring testimony from White House social secretary Desiree Rogers, the White House has sent out the message, through Valerie Jarrett and others, that Rogers is actually a “close adviser” to President Obama, and therefore immune from compelled testimony. There is no doubt that the social secretary performs an important role at the White House. But it strains credulity to believe that Ms. Rogers plays a role on policy matters akin to those performed by the chief of staff, the national security adviser, the vice president, the White House counsel, and senior political advisers such as David Axelrod and Ms. Jarrett herself. Does Ms. Rogers counsel the president on health-care reform, the budget deficit, job creation, the Afghanistan surge, financial regulatory reform, or the myriad other major policy issues that have consumed his first year in office? Perhaps she does, and if so, the White House may not be playing fast and loose with the term “close adviser.” However, if her job is that of a traditional social secretary, then it is quite unlikely that she provides advice to the president on these types of issues. …
Hillsdale College professor, Paul Rahe believes we are at a historic point, where citizens will resist the encroachment of government on the liberties of the people. In Forbes, Peter Robinson writes that he has doubts.
Paul Rahe, a professor at Hillsdale College, believes the country is going to hell in a hand basket. The prospect delights him. Soon enough, Prof. Rahe (pronounced “Ray”) says, the federal government will have become so gigantic, meddlesome, overweening and bankrupt that Americans will rise up, reassert their rights as freeborn citizens of this republic and put the government back in its place. “The political moment in which we live,” Rahe says, “is a moment of great, great hope.”
I wish I could be so sanguine.
Not that Prof. Rahe, author of the splendid new book Soft Despotism fails to make a case. Seven decades after Franklin Roosevelt established the welfare state, and four decades after Lyndon Johnson vastly expanded it, the federal leviathan has begun to stagger under its own bloat. …
…”Look at the tea party movement,” says Rahe. “I cannot think of [protests against government overreach] … on this scale since the eruption against [President John Quincy Adams's] ‘Tariff of Abominations’ in 1828.” The administration of Obama, Rahe insists, represents “a gift to the friends of liberty.”
..let me state my doubts as questions.
Item: In his principles, in his rhetoric and in his agenda, Ronald Reagan championed the ideals of limited government and individual responsibility as stoutly as any president in our history. Was he able to eliminate a single entitlement program of any size? He was not. Was he able to cut domestic spending? He was not, instead only reducing the growth of such spending. …
The Economist reports that the scientists in genome studies are finding their work to be more complex than they originally thought. Of course, the bias of the new Economist is on display.
Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.
About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them. …
…In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled. They hold small, discreet conferences on the “missing heritability” problem: if all these human traits are heritable, why are GWAS studies failing so often? The DNA chips should already have identified some important genes behind physical and mental health. They simply have not been delivering the goods.
Certainly, GWAS papers have reported a couple of hundred genetic variants that show statistically significant associations with a few traits. But the genes typically do not replicate across studies. Even when they do replicate, they never explain more than a tiny fraction of any interesting trait. In fact, classical Mendelian genetics based on family studies has identified far more disease-risk genes with larger effects than GWAS research has so far. …