If a half-truth is the same as a lie, Obama and the Media are lying about unemployment

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The half-truth is the claim by Obama and his media pals that the U-3 unemployment rate of 8.3% is good news because that number only reflects those actively looking for work and leaves out the millions of long-term unemployed who have given up looking for a job.  They may be discouraged but they’d love to have a job and they are unemployed in the worst way.  Including them in the unemployment figures gives a sharper picture of what is really going on in the labor market and the whole economy.  For an explanation of how omitting those who have left the job market misstates real unemployment see, Obama Could Lie to God and Get Away With It.

Investors’ Business Daily is on the case:

The media machine that desperately wants Barack Obama re-elected has turned its focus on what it says are good unemployment numbers. The truth, though, is the job climate in America is miserable.

While the media and the administration portray the most recent jobs number — 8.3% unemployment — as good economic news, more sober minds understand what’s really going on. The facts show a jobs slump that should not get an incumbent president re-elected.

It’s the real unemployment rate that reflects what is really going on.

It’s not 8.3%, but closer to 15%, a figure that reflects those who “would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part time but would prefer full-time work,” says the CBO.

That’s right.  This is not coming from Republicans, it’s from the CBO [Congressional Budget Office], the supposedly non-partisan numbers crunchers but increasingly becoming just another Obama lapdog.  Here’s what else the CBO says, buried deep in its report  so nobody would notice,

“The share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months — referred to as the long-term unemployed — topped 40% in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since [December, 2009].”

Gallup must be worried about the credibility of polling data because it doesn’t seem to following the narrative of the Obama media:

Gallup reports that its unemployment rate based on weekly surveys stands at 9%, while underemployment is at a hefty 19%.

Abraham Lincoln always strove to, as he called it, “get to the nub of the matter.”  Investors Business Daily gets to the nub of the matter of Obama’s dissembling:

The trouble is fixing these facts in voters’ minds. They need to know the full truth, not the half-truth the media and the White House feed them.

Read the whole thing.

Math Word Problem — Ship and Anchor

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Remember those word problems in high school or freshman college math class? Maybe you hated them. Or maybe, like me, you loved them. If you are in the latter group, here’s one for you:

A ship is twice as old as the anchor was when the ship was as old as the anchor is. The sum of their two present ages is 42 years. How old is each?

I haven’t looked but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could find the answer and the solution somewhere on the internet. But that would be cheating.

Hint: There is only one correct answer, but there may be more than one solution.

When government is big the people are small and all the details of everyday life are political

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Last week’s incident in North Carolina when a government agent told a kindergarten girl that the lunch her mother packed for her was not good enough is an example of how big government sneaks politics into the details of everyday life. The vision of the founding fathers of a limited government is the only way you can live most of your life without constant contact with the government, without any political arguments over what you or your family will eat, what type of light bulb you will use, what kind of car you will own, or what sort of political propaganda will be poured into your childrens’ heads when they go to school. Nearly everyone would prefer to have government leave them alone most of the time. Nearly everyone would prefer that public schools would teach their children to read and write, and study arithmetic, history and literature without all the political propaganda that permeates every public school in the nation. So why isn’t it so?

Unfortunately, a lot of people who would like to have the government stay out of their lives as much as possible don’t seem to be willing to extend the same rights to others. We don’t know the identity of the individual who was checking kindergartner’s lunches in North Carolina, but I’ll bet that person would not like to have that sort of intrusion into their own affairs. You have to wonder if TSA agents don’t feel embarrassed and foolish groping the crotches of airline travelers. Apparently they don’t, but you can be sure they would not like to be on the receiving end of such treatment.

The government is too big and overbearing. It’s destroying the tranquility of everyday life. Vote for politicians who vow to make it smaller. Politicians who don’t want politics to be their permanent career. Free up the bureaucrats for more productive lives in the private sector.

U.S. Prison Population

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743 out of every 100,000 citizens in America is in prison. That’s 1% of the adult population, according to Wikipedia and an article in January 30th edition of The New Yorker, “The Caging of America,” by Adam Gopnick. Another 2% of the adult population is on probation or parole.  The chart above shows how the prison population [Federal and State] grew from 1920 – 2006, with a spike upward starting about 1980 and continuing to 2006 and probably to the present. Gopnick blames the move toward more privatization of prisons. He thinks the profit motive is responsible for the extraordinary growth in the prison population:

A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men.

I think there are other factors that are more likely to account for the growth in the prison population. First and foremost is criminals. A money-hungry private prison can’t turn honest citizens into criminals. Gopnick doesn’t even attempt to explain how the profit motive of the private corrections business leads to more criminals in society, even if it is conceded that the private corrections industry spends lots of money lobbying state governments for more contracts to house prisoners.

Gopnick also seems to be saying that there is some concerted effort on the part of police to apprehend, juries to convict, and judges to sentence more people to prison in order to satisfy the demand of the private prisons for more inmates.  It’s nonsense.  Police don’t spend one second thinking about whether the criminals they apprehend will become customers for private prisons, juries surely don’t weigh such considerations in the jury room, and nobody in their right mind thinks judges give a whit what kind of prison a convicted defendant will be going to.  That’s the last thing that would influence a judge’s sentencing decision.  No, it’s not even the last.  It won’t be a factor at all, ever.

Gopnick’s metaphor of “a spigot of convicted men” reveals how he thinks.  Who has hold of the wheel on this spigot that they can turn on or off at will?  Something strange in the liberal brain — some sort of break in the synapse connectors I suppose.

The sharp rise in the prison population starting in 1980 looks to be the natural result of the crime wave ushered in by liberal-supported lenient treatment of criminals in the 1960’s. The rise after 1980 was the result of the increased crime rate and is also responsible for the great reductions in crime starting in the 1990’s. One is reminded of the story that appeared in The New York Times a few years back. The reporter stated that even though crime had dropped dramatically there were still a record number of people in prison. The reporter didn’t see the irony in his (her) statement.

The increased criminalization of drugs, the addition of more drugs to the list of controlled substances, and the increasing desire of Americans for illicit drugs is, of course, a huge factor.  It is a myth that most of those incarcerated for drug crimes are mere users and not distributors.  If all the users were let out tomorrow it would not result in a substantial reduction in the prison population. Most drug criminals that are not also drug pushers who are in prison are in there not for their drug use but for the crimes they committed to support their drug habit.  Those crimes are often violent and serious.  Not sending them to prison is not an option.

The population of the country has grown by a factor of 2.8 since 1920 and the prison population has grown 7 times faster.  In other words, the population is 2.8 times what it was in 1920 while the prison population is 20 times what it was in 1920.  Since not every crime is solved and not every criminal is sent to prison even when caught, the number of crimes committed must have grown even more.  That’s the reason for the growth in the prison population, not the profit motive of private prisons.

I assume The New Yorker and Adam Gopnick would like to see the prison population in America reduced.  If that came about by fewer Americans deciding on a life of crime the resulting reduction in flow from Gopnick’s spigot would be a wonderful thing, cheered by everyone.  But I get the feeling that’s not what they have in mind.  They probably favor just letting a lot or prisoners go free.  We already know what that would mean because a Federal judge in her wisdom ordered a substantial reduction in California’s prison population.  As a result of letting criminals go back into society before serving their full sentences [the only way to comply with the Judge’s order], California is seeing a substantial increase in crime.  Liberals never learn.

Good Intentions With Unintended Consequences or Knowingly Acting to Achieve Predictable Results?

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Mitt Romney says that Barack Obama is a good man who is in over his head. Rush Limbaugh begs to differ. There are simply too many instances of outright lying to the American people, the latest of which is the Obama excuse that his economic policies haven’t worked because nobody knew how bad the economy was that he inherited from George W. Bush. Rush played tapes yesterday of Senator Obama in 2008 telling everyone who would listen that the economy was the worst since the Great Depression. But now he says he just didn’t know how bad it was back in January, 2009 when he took office. Not only is that disingenuous at best, or more likely just a lie, what would he have done differently? Spent even more on his failed stimulus? Invested more in pie-in-the-sky Green energy which now threatens deadweight losses of $35 Billion?

Rush has said from the beginning of the Obama era in 2008 that he is not an incompetent boob who hasn’t a clue what to do, that he knows exactly what he is doing and what it will lead to. He wants the results that he’s getting because he wants to transform and remake America into a European-style socialist state. That is the basis for the Rush Limbaugh thesis of “I want him to fail,” that drove liberals crazy when Limbaugh first said it in January of 2009. Rush was accused of wanting America to fail when what he really meant was that he wanted Obama to fail in his mission of destroying America, the America that the founding fathers attempted to bequeath to future generations. Wanting Obama to fail equated to wanting America to succeed, wanting America to be saved the misery that Obama has in store for it.  Rush’s wish for Obama to fail is no different than wanting a burglar to fail in his attempt to break into your home and make off with your valuables.  The burglar’s failure would mean success for you, the homeowner. Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals is the Bible of the New Progressives in the Obama administration. This book is the Mein Kampf of the Obama administration because it is as much a statement of what Obama believes and what he intends for America as Mein Kampf was of Hitler’s ideology and his calculated plan for Germany in the 1930s.

It is probably not easy for most to believe we have a President who doesn’t like the country he supposedly serves.  Most won’t easily come to the realization that the destruction which has been wrought in the American economy, and the evisceration of the U.S. Constitutional idea of limited government was the specific intent of Obama and his dreamy-eyed followers. It is more palatable and psychologically comforting to give Obama credit for good intentions even f his policies are seen for the failures they are. To believe that Obama is acting with malice aforethought would be to admit that in Obama’s eyes, his policies are not failures. They are a huge success given his way of thinking and what he wants to accomplish.

Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College has a column today at the Ricochet Website, More Than A Touch of Malice, that will confirm the thoughts of many and help the doubters face the reality of the Obama presidency.

Paul Rahe says:

In 2008, when he first ran for the Presidency, Barack Obama posed as a moderate most of the time. This time, he is openly running as a radical. His aim is to win a mandate for the fundamental transformation of the United States that he promised in passing on the eve of his election four years ago and that he promised again when he called his administration The New Foundation. In the process, he intends to reshape the Democratic coalition – to bring the old hypocrisy to an end, to eliminate those who stand in the way of the final consolidation of the administrative entitlements state, to drive out the faithful Catholics once and for all, to jettison the white working class, and to build a new American regime on a coalition of highly educated upper-middle class whites, feminists, African-Americans, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, and those belonging to the public-sector unions. To Americans outside this coalition, he intends to show no mercy.

Mark my words. If Barack Obama wins in November, he will force the Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, and the bishops, priests, and nuns who fostered the steady growth of the administrative entitlements state, thinking that they were pursuing “the common good,” will reap what they have sown.

We are the Polish Jews of 1939; we are the ones Barack Obama intends to exterminate, not by burnings our bodies in the ovens of Auschwitz but by burning the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in order to exterminate the sacred liberty and hope for the future that those sacred documents have stood for and promoted over the last 235 years.

Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Chicken Nuggets by Government Food Police

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When the government takes over raising your kids what are you?  Less than chopped liver, I’d say.

A mother packs a lunch for her kindergartner consisting of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, some potato chips, and some apple juice.  That sound OK?  Would you send your pre-schooler off with that lunch?  Lovingly packed by mother?  I bet you would.  I sure would.

But an agent of Mrs. Obama’s food police was inspecting all of the children’s lunches that day, including ones brought from home.  USDA guidelines require that lunches consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.   Her lunch didn’t pass muster.  So the Food cops told this little girl that the lunch her mother made for her was bad.  They gave her three chicken nuggets.

The mother said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria.  She was billed $1.25 for the three chicken nuggets.

Putting aside how outrageous the nanny state is becoming, why are three chicken nuggets better than a turkey and cheese sandwich?  Again, putting aside the issue of the loathsome creature who would interfere with a mother’s right to pack a lunch for her daughter.

One could say a lot about this bit of nonsense.  Liberal overreach going into wickedness?  Liberal fascism?

Here’s the take of two bloggers that I found interesting and amusing:

An Immodest Proposal

A Valentine For Mrs. Obama and Her Lunch Police

The Catholic Church’s Pact With The Devil

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Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College traces Catholicism’s flirtation with liberal politics from its pact with FDR and the New Deal to today:

You have to hand it to Barack Obama. He has unmasked in the most thoroughgoing way the despotic propensities of the administrative entitlements state and of the Democratic Party. And now he has done something similar to the hierarchy of the American Catholic Church. At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder. But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same. The freedom of the church as an institution to distance itself from that which its doctrines decry as morally wrong is considered sacrosanct. The liberty of its members – not to mention the liberty belonging to the adherents of other Christian sects, to Jews, Muslims, and non-believers – to do the same they are perfectly willing to sacrifice.

This inattention to the liberties of others is doubly scandalous (and I use this poignant term in full knowledge of its meaning within the Catholic tradition) – for there was a time when the Catholic hierarchy knew better. There was a time when Roman Catholicism was the great defender not only of its own liberty but of that of others. There was a time when the prelates recognized that the liberty of the church to govern itself in light of its guiding principles was inseparable from the liberty of other corporate bodies and institutions to do the same.

Read the whole thing, it is really very good, especially if you’re Catholic and are concerned about the direction your Archbishops have allowed your church to drift.

It’s an indictment of the Church leadership over the last 80 years, and a call for the Catholic Church and its Archbishops to take stock of themselves.  There was a time when wiser Archbishops understood the dangers of getting their Church entangled with government, and it’s time to regain that wisdom.  Most of all it is time to return to the traditional definition of charity and to understand that charity involves people giving of their own free will to those they deem to be deserving.  When government takes from those who produce to redistribute to those who it deems to be worthy, it is tyranny and not charity.  It is tyranny to those who have the fruits of their labors stolen from them and it is tyranny to the those who receive it and are thus made dependent, second class citizens. The Church should never have become complicit and involved with these evil schemes, and is paying the price for that now.

Rasmussen: Santorum Up by Three In Michigan

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The PPP Poll had Santorum up 6 points a day ago but I was waiting for Rasmussen to weigh in because PPP is a Democrat polling group and I assume they have no desire to help Republicans. But now Rasmussen has posted these results of its current polling for the upcoming Michigan primary on February 28th. This is more impressive that a 3-point lead would ordinarily be because just 2 weeks ago Romney was leading by 15 points. There’s still 2 weeks to go before the votes are cast in Michigan and that’s a couple of lifetimes in politics so it’s too early to get giddy. Romney, or his SuperPac, will no doubt spend several million dollars trashing Santorum in the next 2 weeks. He will no doubt accuse Santorum of wanting to end social security and medicare and whatever other list of horribles he can conjure. Who’s know what dirt he will find, or claim to find, in Santorum’s past. Would anyone no matter how pure want Romney’s dirt diggers with millions of dollars at their disposal, sifting through their past?

What Mitt Romney needs to do is tell Michigan GOP primary voters why they should vote for him instead of why they should not vote for Santorum.

If Santorum were to win in Michigan, or even to come close to Romney, it would be something on the order of an earthquake because Michigan is Romney’s home state and he’s generally popular there. His father George Romney (1907-1995) was the chairman and president of American Motors Corporation from 1954-1962 and was Governor of Michigan from 1963-1969.

Here are Rasmussen’s latest polling results in Michigan:

Santorum — 35%
Romney — 32%
Ron Paul — 13%
Gingrich — 11%

The current TPM Poll Average [TPM = “Talking Points Memo] of the Michigan Republican primary shows Santorum with a lead of 6 points.