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Think the job situation is bad? You don’t know the half of it, according to Mort Zuckerman who perhaps won’t vote for Obama the next time around.
The Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression. In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.
The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America’s greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million. …
… Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly seven people in the labor pool compete for every job opening. Hiring announcements have plunged to 10,248 in May, down from 59,648 in April. Hiring is now 17 percent lower than the lowest level in the 2001-02 downturn. One fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up and going to work. Equally disturbing is that the number of people unemployed for six months or longer grew 361,000 to 6.2 million, increasing their share of the unemployed to 45.1 percent. We face the specter that long-term unemployment is becoming structural and not just cyclical, raising the risk that the jobless will lose their skills and become permanently unemployable. …
But, Peter Wehner says the president is proud of his record.
… Obama went on to say, “I’m extraordinarily proud of the economic record that we were able to produce over the first two and a half years.”
I wonder why. The president has presided over an economy that has lost 2.5 million jobs since he was sworn in and has created only 600,000 jobs during the two years since the recovery began (the summer of 2009). The unemployment rate is up 25 percent since Obama took office and has been above 8 percent for almost 30 months (after the Obama administration promised it would not exceed 8 percent if his stimulus package was passed in early 2009). The debt has increased 35 percent during the Obama presidency. Gas prices have more than doubled. The housing crisis has recently entered a double dip and is now worse than the Great Depression. For the nine economic quarters Obama has been in office, real annual growth in GDP has been just 1.5 percent, just barely above what it was during the decade of the Great Depression (1.3 percent). And chronic unemployment is worse than the Great Depression.
If Obama is extraordinarily proud of his economic record, he may be the only one.
OK, Pickerhead did not need to make the remark about Zuckerman voting for Obama. After all, the other choice was Yosemite Sam. To illustrate how lucky the GOP was to dodge the bullet of a President McCain, this weekend he was railing against “Republican isolationists”. David Harsanyi has the story.
There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”
In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” that hearkens back to “Pat Buchanan-style Republicanism.”
McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.
So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution. …
More from Tony Blankley.
… I supported both the Afghan and Iraq wars (as did Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Romney and most other GOP candidates) as necessary responses to the rising threat from radical Islam after Sept. 11, 2001. I continue to support the still likely winning effort in Iraq and have written on that in this space recently.
But almost two years ago, I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghan war effort had served its initial purpose, but it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we removed the Taliban government and killed as many al Qaeda and Taliban as possible.
But as the purpose of that war turned into nation-building, even GOP internationalists have a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy, such policy is likely to be effective (see about a dozen of my columns on Afghan war policy from 2009-10).
Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. …
We enjoy much of Slate. A blogger at Democracy in America takes exception to a piece on libertarians that trashed Hayek and Von Mises.
… Mr Metcalf clearly means to suggest that Mises depended on subsidies from the simpatico rich because the quality of his work failed to qualify him for a legitimate professorship. But this is ridiculous to anyone who has bothered to read any of the man’s scholarly work. To fair-minded, curious liberals I would recommend Mises’ 1929 book Liberalism (free online), which makes a powerful case for a cosmopolitan, internationalist politics of free people, free movement, free trade, and peace against the grain of its era’s calamitous trend of truculent racialist nationalism. It remains a relevant and inspiring work. You certainly don’t have to agree with everything Mises argues to see that he was one of the good guys.
As for Hayek, his post at the London School of Economics, from which he famously debated Keynes and cemented his reputation in the world of “polite discourse”, did not involve corporate sponsorship, as far as I know. Maybe Mr Metcalf is troubled by Henry Hutchinson’s £20,000 gift to the Fabian Society, which got the school off the ground, or subsequent gifts by the fledgling school’s other moderately socialist donors? In any case, if the LSE or the University of Chicago’s Committee for Social Thought survived, like art museums and symphony orchestras, by the good graces of wealthy benefactors, it’s hard to see what this has to do with the quality the work Hayek produced while in the employ of these august institutions. If Mr Metcalf knows anything about the suspicious corporate largesse supporting Hayek at the Universities of Freiburg and Salzburg in 1960s and 70s, I’m keen to hear about it. …
Now for a treat, we stop spending time on the shabby people in Washington and look at things we have been learning about humans and their lives 5,000 years ago. We allude to Iceman and the continuing discoveries about him. The story is in Science Now.
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—Less than 2 hours before he hiked his last steps in the Tyrolean Alps 5000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman fueled up on a last meal of ibex meat. That was the conclusion of a talk here last week at the 7th World Congress on Mummy Studies, during which researchers—armed with Ötzi’s newly sequenced genome and a detailed dental analysis—also concluded that the Iceman had brown eyes and probably wasn’t much of a tooth brusher.
The Iceman, discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991 some 5200 years after his death, has been a gold mine of information about Neolithic life, as researchers have extensively studied his gear—copper ax, hide and leather clothing, and accessories—and his body. Previous research on the Iceman’s meals focused on fecal material removed from his bowels. The contents showed that he dined on red deer meat and possibly cereal some 4 hours before his death.
But a team led by microbiologist Frank Maixner of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, recently reexamined computed tomography scans taken in 2005 and spotted, for the first time, the Iceman’s stomach. As the researchers reported at the meeting, the organ had moved upward to an unusual position, and it looked full. When they took a sample of the stomach contents and sequenced the DNA of the animal fibers they found, they discovered that Ötzi, just 30 to 120 minutes before his death, had dined on the meat of an Alpine ibex, an animal that frequents high elevations and whose body parts were once thought to possess medicinal qualities. …
Perhaps one of the most interesting things about Iceman was the fact that 18 different types of wood were found with him. All of them the perfect application for the intended use.
… The axe was the first piece of the Iceman’s equipment to be discovered. The haft of the axe is make of yew wood. Almost three-quarters of the blade are embedded in the shafting fork, held in place with birch pitch. The blade is 9.3 cm long, trapeziform in shape, and made of almost pure copper.
A completely preserved 1.82 m long bow-stave made of yew wood is the largest piece of equipment discovered. The Iceman’s bow is clearly an unfinished piece and not yet functional, showing signs of his work in progress.
The Iceman’s completely preserved quiver was discovered on a stone slab about 15 feet from the corpse. It was composed of a rectangular chamois hide bag. The piece of hide was seamed together lengthways and along the lower narrow side.
The quiver contained two arrows that were ready to shoot and twelve rough shafts make of shoots of hard viburnum sapwood. The heads of the arrows are made of sharpened flint, and had been glued with birch tar and bound on using string. The quiver also contained tips of four stag antlers that were tied together with strips of bast. A bent antler point was probably used by the Iceman to skin and gut animals.
The flint dagger, measuring approximately 13.2 cm, was discovered near the mummy. The dagger has a small triangular flint blade, the handle was made of ash, and a string was attached to a notch at the end of the handle. The sheath-like scabbard is made of knotted lime wood bast. It is presumed that a leather eye on the side allowed the sheath to be attached to the Iceman’s belt. …
Adding to the things we are learning about our ancestors, a 13,000 year old bone was found in Vero Beach, FL on which was carved a surprising image. Science Codex has the story.
Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida have announced the discovery of a bone fragment, approximately 13,000 years old, in Florida with an incised image of a mammoth or mastodon. This engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art to depict a proboscidean (the order of animals with trunks) in the Americas. The team’s research is published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The bone was discovered in Vero Beach, Fla. by James Kennedy, an avocational fossil hunter, who collected the bone and later while cleaning the bone, discovered the engraving. Recognizing its potential importance, Kennedy contacted scientists at the University of Florida and the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute and National Museum of Natural History.
“This is an incredibly exciting discovery,” said Dennis Stanford, anthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of this research. “There are hundreds of depictions of proboscideans on cave walls and carved into bones in Europe, but none from America—until now.”
The engraving is 3 inches long from the top of the head to the tip of the tail, and 1.75 inches tall from the top of the head to the bottom of the right foreleg. The fossil bone is a fragment from a long bone of a large mammal—most likely either a mammoth or mastodon, or less likely a giant sloth. A precise identification was not possible because of the bone’s fragmented condition and lack of diagnostic features. …
And Andrew Malcolm provides the best of late-night humor.
Leno: Congratulations to the new NBA champion Dallas Mavericks. They had a huge parade there, almost as big as the one in Cleveland.
Conan: LeBron James said the Heat’s NBA finals loss feels like “a personal failure.” Then someone explained to LeBron that it is a personal failure.
Letterman: More signs that LeBron James is not taking the Heat’s loss well. Today he demanded to see Dirk Nowitzki’s birth certificate.
Leno: Yup, the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup. They said the key to their victory was not signing LeBron James.