If you are offended that under Obama Care you may be considered “a unit,” you should know that under Obama employment stats you may not even exist! In fact, a lot of non-working adults who existed in October apparently no longer existed officially in November. Talk about death panels. Many of you were just vaporized. This is no problem for the academic liberal. This is all just theory, anyway. We are all just statistics to be manipulated to make them look good.
In other words, in the universe Obama took over from George W. Bush, the unemployment rate (U3) would still be over 11% and the U6 would be close to 20%. Now, the last time I checked, the planet has not gotten smaller, nor has the population of the United States. I am not sure about the sea levels.) To thinking people, there is no legitimate reason to shrink the potential labor pool.
Of course, there is an illegitimate reason to do so: To protect the governing record of Barack Obama. Anyone who follows politics even casually knows that if the general public ever really figured out that the real unemployment rate is over 11%, Obama would have zero chance of re-election.
Moreover, Obama’s leftist collectivist governing leanings would be totally discredited, as would members of Congress who believe in the same principles. Succinctly, an admitted 11% rate would destroy the American left politically. The administration and their willing accomplices in the Jurassic media simply cannot afford for that to happen.
Among those they have not fooled, of course, is de facto Tea Party father Rick Santelli of CNBC. “I don’t trust [these numbers],” said Santelli on CNBC’s Sqauwk Box the very moment the November 2011 figures were released. “I want to see the labor force participation rate because personally I don’t trust the U3 rate... and when you throw in the politics of the day—because this is such a big number that resonates with the public—there’s a lot of movement in these numbers that can alter the rate significantly.”
Let me translate: Santelli was instantly calling bullshit on the Obama Administration’s figures. He didn’t have to look. He instinctively knew what was going on.
And Santelli’s initial instincts, of course, were right on the money. The participation rate had been jiggered to make Obama look good. Or, since it’s 8.6%, make him look less bad. And yes, “the politics of the day,” as Santelli said, is the entire reason.
The ‘politics of the day’ bears closer examination. What is at stake here is not just the 2012 election. The economy of the last few years is the closest thing we have ever seen in modern America to a wide spread socialist economic experiment, with us as the lab rats. With more people paying attention to news and politics thanks to the internet, cable, and the fact that they don’t have a job to go to, this experiment’s results cannot be hidden. This is modern liberal economic ideology on trial. If a big fat 11% is pinned on the jobless figure, as it should be, then there would be no escaping the fact that many Americans would forever see liberalism and socialism as the failure it is. The results cannot be over stated.
Even Santelli’s regular antagonist on CNBC, liberal economist Steve Liesman, admitted that this was the case—albeit in gentler terms: “The workforce declined by 315,000 and that makes it easier to get to the lower unemployment rate.” So let’s analyze this stunning Freudian admission for just a minute. In the egghead noggin of the liberal Liesman, getting to the lower rate on paper is the ultimate goal. Not actual job growth. Not actually making peoples’ lives better. Just have the workforce population “decline” so that it is “easier to get to the lower unemployment rate,” so we don’t all look like fools for supporting Obama for years!
But what about the people represented by that “decline.” Just where the hell did those 315,000 people go? They have given up hope, so the administration is just pretending that they aren’t there anymore. And this is necessary, to make the administration look better.
Actually, it’s worse than that. A closer look at the figures in November of 2011 showed that some 435,000 non-working adults had been statistically vaporized, while the newly employed 125,000 folks are counted, equaling the net loss of adult workers of over 300,000.
Translation: The administration lied to us to make themselves look good. That big Obama supporter Steve Liesman was admitting this on an NBC network is significant.
Which is why I believe this cooking of the books may be reaching a critical mass of ineffectiveness. Taking the work of Pethokoukis into account, the workforce is now officially only 64% of all adults, which means that something on the order of 55% of adults are now working. Folks, America cannot exist the way it always has if only 55% of the adults are working.
And we all know this. Frankly, it makes more sense to simply report the percentage of adults that are working as the official statistic in the first place. It is simple and reflects reality very accurately and can be understood by everyone instantly. But, of course, liberals do not want anything to do with simplicity or reality, because the bureaucratic liberal lives to get a paycheck in a world where reality is ignored in a maze of complexity that is irrelevant—but which requires people like them to push the paper around.
Yet with unemployment, reality is creeping in regardless of the administration and media’s best efforts. So while most people may not realize that only 55% of adults are working, they know something is wrong. And they know a lot of those other 45%. And many are obviously in that 45%, and they know that not all are legitimately retired or legitimately disabled.
Europe is collapsing because too few people are pushing the cart and too many are on it getting a free ride. But as they are finding out, that free ride ultimately becomes unaffordable. And when it becomes “good news” to an administration that 315,000 fewer adults even consider themselves in the workforce anymore, then you have a situation here that is about to become unaffordable too.
When that happens in the same month Obama can brag about his “8.6”—you are nearing the time when many Americans will simply never believe anything their government tells them again.
Which, when you think about it, is really bad news for any politician who believes in government solutions for everything, and good news for proponents of limited government. Perhaps this blatant overplay on the part of the administration will come back to haunt them.
In fact, maybe it already has. In July of 2012, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro—clearly one of the most liberal folks to ever serve in Congress—admitted as much. When asked why food stamp rolls continued to increase despite a “lower unemployment rate,” (which was down to 8.2% at the time) DeLauro responded with a very rare moment of clarity and candor: “Let’s just say this,” DeLauro said during a CSPAN interview, when presented with a Bloomberg Government graph showing millions more people on food stamps, even as unemployment decreased from Oct. 2009-Dec. 2011. “When we talk about the unemployment numbers, unemployment is 8.2%. That’s not including the people who have stopped looking for jobs. So, we’re looking at—probably—it’s a higher number given that the number of people who have stopped looking for a job can’t find a job, people who have been unemployed for a year or two years, who are unable to find jobs.”
Let me translate again: DeLauro, albeit stumbling around a bit and trying not to, was also calling bullshit on the Obama unemployment numbers for the very same reason Santelli and Pethokoukis had been doing for months.
And chiming in a few weeks after DeLauro was liberal Mort Zuckerman, saying that “fewer Americans are working today than in the year 2000, despite the fact that our population has grown by 31 million and our labor force by 11.4 million since then.”
Translation? Yes, Obama’s UE numbers are indeed BS.
That’s what they are. Hope and Change. If your idea of hope and change is people giving up hope so we can change the very meaning of unemployment, then you are, in fact, a liberal.
YMBAL’S #17
If you’ve ever been offended by the terms the ‘Straights of Gibraltar’…
If you have been on at least one bus trip to protest the Koch Broth
ers and the Citizens United ruling, but have no idea who George Soros is…
If you are more horrified over Republican Congressman Foley’s sexually provocative emails to a young man in 2006 than you are over Democrat Congressman Gauthier’s actual oral sex rendezvous with a boy in 2012…
If you think that a woman should be able to make it on her own without the help of her husband, and yet have a Hillary For President sticker still on your car…
If you celebrated when you found out Andrew Breitbart had died…
If you were ticked off when you found out Rush Limbaugh had not…
If you have never met a single home school family…
If you have ever bragged on how aware you are about global issues and sensitivities but cannot name your congressman or Senators…
If you have ever actually found “separation of church and state” in the Constitution…
If you think that the government taking over credit ratings is purely innocent and won’t result in any sort of picking of winners and losers…
If you mentally subtract 100 points from a person’s IQ for a Southern accent and mentally add 100 points for elbow patches on a jacket…
If you believe network news is more real than what you see on the internet and cable…
If you believe in global warming today just as fervently as you believed in global cooling in the ‘70s…
If you have ever called Rush listeners “mind numbed ditto heads” while watching MSBNC or CNN…
If you think that, even though the top 20% are paying 80% of the taxes, the rich are not paying their fair share…
If you think every shooting by a white person is some kind of Tea Party plot while every act of terror by a Middle Eastern male between the ages of twenty and forty is merely the action of a “lone wolf”…
If you think that, if someone is getting richer, then someone, somewhere, must be getting poorer…
...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)
“Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
—Barack Obama in Roanoke Speech of July 13th, 2012
“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”
—anonymous
18: AS RACISTS GO, WE ARE RANK AMATEURS
If you think the Cambridge cops ‘acted stupidly’…
Eric Holder, our gun running Attorney General, has chided America for not having enough frank discussions about race. I don’t know what country he is living in, because it seems like a pretty good percentage of all pubic discussion over my lifetime has been related somehow to race. Liberals insist, however, on talking about it more and more.
And, of course, our President, the nation’s first black President, is famous for saying that white cops from Cambridge Massachusetts “acted stupidly” in the infamous Professor Gates case. At least Holder should credit Obama with being frank. Frankly racist himself, that is. But this is really to be expected. It’s classic projection. It is one of the really adorable qualities of liberals.
It is liberal dogma that America, especially white Republican America, is racist. So much so that, to many liberals, the words ‘racist’ and ‘conservative’ are interchangeable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Frankly, history and reality teach us that, as racists go, Americans are, frankly, rank amateurs. And I am sick and tired of Ivy League elites like Obama and Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates pretending otherwise.
If you are reading this, you probably haven’t bought into the notion that we are a racist nation. Perhaps some items mentioned below can help you with your liberal family members at Thanksgiving.
Look at it this way. If we were worth a hoot as racist whites, would we have fallen all over ourselves every day to voluntarily watch, cheer for, emulate, take advice from and enrich folks named Tiger and Oprah over the past couple of decades? Yes, I know the bloom is off those two particular roses at the moment, but that has nothing to do with race and does not change the fact that white America voluntarily made these two rich, famous and well loved. Happily too, I might add.
And while white folks were doing that, Gates was, meanwhile, in charge of something at Harvard called the Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. And these are the type of people who have the nerve to call Denny’s racist?
Meanwhile, back to us racist whites.
Ok, Oprah has made some not so great business decisions and Tiger made some not so great personal decisions,but the fact remains that these are two of the top cultural icons in our nations history. And they reached that status with the anointing of supposedly white racist America. They did it all before Obama was elected also. Imagine.
Consider “the Oprah effect” or the ad campaign “I am Tiger Woods.” Let me translate for you: White Americans absolutely loved these two black folks above any white athlete, actor, singer or even American Idol contestant on the planet for many years. And big business, in search of evil profits, knew it.
And by love, I mean white people would pay to see, pay to watch, pay to read and pay to do pretty much anything these two non-white folks did, ate, watched, read or wore. To be blunt about it, this was a bigger white to black money transfer than any of Obama’s big government schemes. This is the kind of spreading the wealth around that the Joe the Plumbers of the world can love.
This was hope and change that we could believe in, because it was real and did not require a doggone thing from government or Jeremiah Wright or the nutty Professor Gates. (By the way, I lump Wright and Gates together because much of Gate’s African American “studies” is simply a secular version of Wright’s “black separatism.”)
So memo to President Obama and Professor Gates and Attorney General Holder—the nationwide love of Tiger and Oprah indicates that as racists go, we are rank amateurs. We couldn’t be worse at it if we tried.
And for the record, this is not new. Sometime before Obama’s first memoir, back when black cultural icons needed two names, whites felt the same way, and poured millions and millions of dollars, into the hands of a basketball player named Michael Jordan and a comedian named Bill Cosby. Many of us remember the “I want to be like Mike” ad campaign. It was an ad campaign aimed at white kids. You would think that Obama must have heard about it—being the athletic politician from Chicago and all.
The point is, not only are we rank amateurs as racists now, we have been that way for a few decades. The Cosbys were welcomed into more white living rooms than Sidney Poitier ever dreamt of seeing. We even now have a black guy starring in the “Wild Wild West,” for crying out loud. What’s next, a black Mayberry?
The point is, this is progress and shows that the widespread institutional racism of the past is long gone, though you won’t hear about it in Al Sharpton’s fund raising letters.
Sure, there are racists among us. I would say some are among Obama’s staff and among those in the pulpit at Trinity United Church and the Harvard faculty, for instance. That’s not the only point, though.
As a nation, we are decidedly NOT racist when compared to other nations. And if you’re talking about a nation, that’s the sole intellectually honest measure.
Consider: Would a Kurd ever reach icon status in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Has there ever been a Mayan who captured the hearts and minds of Mexico? Would Ukrainians ever buy millions of books simply because a Chechen said to do so?
Heck no, and these are people who look much more alike than black Americans and white Americans. We can’t even tell these folks apart “without a program,” so to speak. Please note that the term for separation of the races is known as “balkanization” and not “Americanization.”
And speaking of people who kind of look alike but cannot stand each other, have you noticed that even the “friends” of the Palestinians do not want them living anywhere near them? So-called
“supporters” of the Palestinians want to live with them about as much as Fred Sanford wanted to live next to Julio the Puerto Rican—for the same “there goes the neighborhood” reasoning.
Of course Sanford wasn’t racist—because blacks can’t be, you big dummy.
Meanwhile, tribal wars still rage across Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, The Congo, Darfur and much of Africa where pre-teen boys are conscripted as soldiers and pre-teen girls are taken as their “child mothers.” Tribal wars is just a nice way of saying race wars between races that look essentially the same.
Nothing like this has ever happened in our country and certainly is not happening today. Yet, Gates is all worried about racist cops and being burdened with being a “black man in America.”
He should spend an afternoon as the white guy paired with Tiger. Talk about being burdened.
The point is, the United States—all 57 of them—have done more to correct our own racial wrongs than any nation in world history. We are way ahead of many nations much older than our little experiment in freedom and self-governance. Painful steps like the Civil War and the Republican-led Civil Rights Act were forced corrections that simply moved the country more in line with our Constitutional principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
You Might Be a Liberal Page 14
