Last Week's Employment Data

Click for full size

---

Employment-Population ratio h/t Paul Krugman

So the federal unemployment numbers came out on Friday, and employment rose by 216,000 and the unemployment rate fell to 8.8%.

This is good news, employment actually rose by more than the natural growth of the workforce, about 175K, but this still means that it would take about 13 years for the 8 million people who have lost jobs to become employed again.

When one looks at the employment population ratio (see graph Pr0n) and you can see that it  has the lowest that it has been done in a decade, so a lot of the falling unemployment numbers are people leaving the workforce, whether it is early retirement, going on disability, or just giving up.

It's still basically a jobless "recovery".

The Real History of the Boston Tea Party

I love me some good history

It appears that the Boston Tea Party, i.e the dumping of tea in Boston harbor, was not about "Taxation Without Representation," but rather about tax cuts without representation.

The issue at hand was the fact that the East India Tea Company was granted a specific exemption to the tax on tea, which allowed them to drive it's small "Yankee Trader" competitors.

So here is a note to the Teabaggers out there, it ain't about taxes, it's about sweetheart deals to big business.

In your face, Dick Armey and the Koch brothers.

H/t Crooks and Liars

A Party Without a Death Wish Would Beat Them to Death With Their Own Pancreas

But all we have is the Democratic Party, so now that the Republican Party has formally proposed abolishing Medicare and Replacing it with vouchers, so I expect that they, and Barack Obama in particular, will spend the next few months negotiating with themselves before capitulating.

E.J. Dionne asks a question:

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

They will shrink from their responsibility, even though it fighting for Medicare is an unalloyed political winner for them.

This has been another answer of simple answers to simple questions.

And He is Calling His Base C#$% Suckers

On the day that Barack Obama decides to formally announce his candidacy for President, he decided to kick his base in the teeth by dropping real trials for terrorism defendants, and going with the Guantanamo kangaroo courts:

The Obama administration, ending more than a year of indecision with a major policy reversal, will prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other people accused of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks before a military commission and not a civilian court, as it once planned.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Monday that he has cleared military prosecutors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to file war-crimes charges against the five detainees in the Sept. 11 case.

Mr. Holder had decided in November 2009 to move the case to a federal civilian courtroom in New York City, but the White House abandoned that plan amid a political backlash.

The shift was foreshadowed by stiffening Congressional resistance to bringing Guantánamo detainees into the United States, and by other recent steps clearing the way for new tribunal trials.

Expect more of this.  Barack Obama thinks that doing the wrong thing just to piss off your base and pandering to your enemies^* is somehow "grown up" behavior.

It's going to be a long f%$#ing campaign.

^*They aren't his opponents, they are his enemies, and his treatment of them as principles opposition is stupid.

He's Officially Running

Yes, leave me off your mailing list

A while ago, I demanded that my email be removed from the OFA list, so I did not get the email blast announcing the fact that Barack Obama is officially running for reelection.

I'm just glad that I live in Maryland, because if my vote counted here, I might have to vote for him again.

Thankfully, my vote does not matter, so I don't have a moral dilemma:  I can write in Howard Dean.

Brilliant!

Specifically, Jurassic Port of Brilliant at Breakfast is brilliant in his (or her) assessment of the current Republican crop of Republican Presidential candidates.

It's a rundown of the top 10 candidates in the race, and you should read it.

A pearl to get you started, about Sarah Palin, "She does to the English language what Catholic priests do to 12 year-old altar boys," but you have to read the whole thing.

Download This Before It's Scrubbed From the Net

Yeah, not funny…Right.

This video, "Conspiracy Theory Rock, was shown once on Saturday Night Live, (link is to higher quality Youtube with embedding disabled) but it is never shown on reruns, because Lorn Michaels says that it is "Not Funny."

You know, I guess if Robert Smigel cut a new one with my paymasters at GE & NBC, and detailed how they used their media power to produce propaganda for their parent firms, I might not find it funny either.