Back to 9.6% goes the official unemployment number – while the total unemployment rate (unemployed, partially employed, out of the labor force because discouraged) rises to 16.7%. All in all, we’re right back where we were in August of 2009, as can be seen in this chart. Meanwhile, because the BLS sacrificed a goat to the Shades of Keynes and re-massaged the June and July data, it appears that the employment picture for those months didn’t suck quite as bad as originally figured…and so stocks took heart and rose 1% in early trading.

Welcome, my friends, to the economic Alice in Wonderland world of Obamunism. It both sucks, and it doesn’t make sense.

Underneath the headline data is the true story – as Mish points out; and its a grim picture. The bottom line is that there has been no improvement in Obama’s “Recovery Summer”, and we have a host of recent information indicating future problems. Our rosiest scenarios figure we’ll limp along with 10%-ish unemployment and slack 1 and 2% GDP growth for a while…the worst-case scenarios have us dropping in to a 1930’s style Depression. I figure we’ll get the latter – but even if things turn out good, they’ll still be bad.

As I’ve said before, only a fundamental change in our economic policy will fix our problems. We need balanced budgets, reduced debts, lower taxes, eased regulations…and a basic attitude that if something is being made, mined or grown by Americans, it must be encouraged. The really bad news is that I don’t think Obama even suspects the problem…

With the recent defeat of Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the debate over the fundamental direction of the GOP has heated up. On one side are those who would rather lose a few races on November 2nd rather than keep or install a few more RINOs in to Congress, on the other side are those who say that the pragmatic facts of life are that we must have some RINOs in order to have a majority. Over at Hot Air Allahpundit wades in to this regarding the Castle vs O’Donnel GOP Senate Primary in Delaware.

Allahpundit admits that Castle is a RINO – that he’ll vote against us some of the time, but also asserts that only Castle can win. A vote for TEA Party-backed O’Donnell is, in effect, a vote to keep the seat in liberal Democrat hands. I have to say that I’m less than impressed with the argument.

If we lose the Delaware race then we’ll be replacing an ultra-liberal from a blue State with an ultra-liberal from a blue State. Meaning that if we lose, we’re no worse off than we are now. Additionally, none of us ever thought we had a chance to win the Delaware race, anyway. Getting the seat is not crucial to GOP or conservative long term prospects – it’d be a nice feather in our cap, but our movement doesn’t stand or fall on the Delaware result.

Now, let’s step back for a moment and ask ourselves, what do we want? I mean, as the Republican party and as a conservative movement, what are we trying to accomplish? Getting 51 Senators? Making Mitch McConnell Senate Majority Leader? Obtaining the chairmanships for our guys? No, that is not what we’re after. What we’re after – if we’re Republicans and conservatives, at all – is a constitutionally governed Republic.

Getting such means getting judges who will rule on the law, not make law. Getting legislators who will do their job, and not leave it to the permanent bureaucracy to work out the legal details of vague, badly-written legislation hastily passed through Congress. Getting our fiscal house in order by eventually balancing the budget and paying off the debt. Reducing the tax and regulatory burden on the American people. Fundamentally curbing the powers of the federal government so that the people and the States will be once again able to run their own affairs. This will, naturally, take a lot of time and effort – and the thing is that in getting to such a place RINOs would continually cut us off at the knees.

When we needed to curb the power of the minority to filibuster judges in the Senate, who stopped us? RINOs. When we needed to stand firm to stop Obama’s stimulus package, who gave way? RINOs. When it comes time to cut spending, who is out there willing to “compromise” with Democrats? RINOs. Always and everywhere, when conservatism – when the principles of Constitutional governance – are swept aside, it is always RINOs who are joining with the other side to defeat us.

I know the theory – better to have someone in office who will vote with us 80% of the time than someone who will vote with us 20% of the time. That would be fine but it is always on the most crucial issues where the RINOs decide its time to show “independence” and break with the GOP. It gets them invited to the nice parties; it gets them glowing write-ups in the MSM; it gets them on the Sunday morning talk shows…its all good, for RINOs. Not so good for the GOP and the United States.

We can already see a bit of what 2011 will be like if the GOP wins a Senate majority – Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Lindsay Graham will try to carve out some sort of “maverick”, independent position (at least in the MSM narrative – they’ll actually be slavishly devoted to the Ruling Class, of course). On the happy morn of our victory, it will be those RINOs who will irk us…who will “reach across the aisle” when its time to confront Obama and his Democrats. We’ll be trying to get them to concede to American Constitutional principle, and here will come our RINOs to completely wreck the program. Why add to our troubles by adding more RINOs? Why even get a Senate majority if it is by grace of RINOs? Better to have a strong, difficult-to-break-a-filibuster minority than be dependent every step of the way on placating people who are just waiting for their chance to throw us under the bus.

2010 is turning out to be a gift for us in the GOP. As recently as a couple months ago, our brightest dreams were of adding two or three GOP Senators. Now there is an outside chance of a GOP majority. But more important than what happens in 2010 for the Senate is the fact that in 2012 and 2014, we have the opportunity to really clean up – in those two cycles a large number of first-term Democrats from red States will be up for re-election. Well-run campaigns from us will allow us to really stock up on conservative Senators…enough, when added to those currently in and those we’re likely to get in 2010, to have a genuine conservative GOP majority in the Senate. Might still need some RINOs for cloture, but we’ll never need them to get a majority vote. If we play our cards right – and if we don’t shove a bunch of additional RINOs in there.

And, finally, we should never concede that liberalism has a place in America. When we say, “well, its a blue State so we’d better RINO-up or we’ll never win” what we’re saying, in effect, is that conservatism is not true and not worthy of support. Either we believe in our conservatism, or we don’t – if we do, then we should be presenting it everywhere. Tactical adjustments can be made depending on where we’re running – deciding on what part of conservatism to emphasize, that is – but we must hold that conservatism can win everywhere…because the truth can win everywhere.

Supposing O’Donnell, winning the nomination, does get clobbered (and, yes, I did read the Standard’s piece on her – she does drift in to some whining kookism..memo to O’Donnell…even if your opponents are rat bastards, don’t complain about it: it looks weak). So, what? Just an incident in the long process of turning Delaware conservative. It is what we must do – hit again and again on conservative ideals in all 50 States until we win the whole ball of wax…until, that is, all political debates are carried out within the framework of conservative ideals, just as when liberalism won it all back in the 1930s, for 40 years we essentially debated only what sort of liberalism to have. Better, at any rate, to fight it out on principle, and lose, than to fight it without principles and merely get a built-in knife in the back.

There is room for a wide variety of views in conservatism. For instance, no one can really question my conservative credentials, and yet I’m opposed to the death penalty and I favor some sort of path to citizenship for at least some illegal aliens. You can be conservative and be a lot of things – but what you can’t be, because we can’t afford it, is a “moderate” who just waits for the chance to go against us when the chips are down. When the crucial “either/or” votes – the votes which define conservatism as being in opposition to liberalism and in favor of a distinctive world view – that is when we must rally ’round. And that is when, precisely, we’ll regret it if we backed RINOs just to get someone with an “R” next to their name in Congress.

From Victor Davis Hanson – here is one of them, voted by me as most likely to annoy liberals:

American elites crucified Bush. Vein-bulging Al Gore called him a liar. John Edwards and John Kerry tag-teamed him in vicious attacks. Alfred A. Knopf published a novel imagining his assassination. The Toronto Film Festival gave first prize to “The Death of a President”, a 2006 docudrama about killing President Bush. I could go on again, but you remember the times, in which everyone from John Glen to Garrison Keillor played the Bush Nazi/brownshirt card.

And now? John Edwards imploded in scandal. John Kerry was exposed as a tax-dodging elitist hypocrite. Al Gore, if not a sex poodle, at least is a green-con-artist of the billionaire sort, who both hyped a world-ending crisis and then profited from his rhetorical overkill by selling supposed green snake oil in the fashion of medieval penances. CBS, the New York Times, and Newsweek now totter near financial insolvency, after showing both poor judgment and questionable ethics: from the Times’ offering a discount for the moveon.org “General Betray Us” ad to a Newsweek senior editor declaring Obama a “god.” Suddenly bad things have happened to most of Bush’s loudest critics. (Note I’ll pass on the post-Bush Letterman or the post-Bush Rangel)…

Read the whole thing – and then send it to all your liberal friends.

Human tragedy tends to bring people of different backgrounds together – but not always:

A Catholic Church figure in Pakistan has charged that local authorities decided with “deliberate intention” not to provide adequate flood protection to regions with high numbers of minority religious groups, including Christians and Hindus.

The international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) claimed that “a key church figure” who “cannot be named” described a deliberate failure to reinforce key sections of the Indus River overlooking areas in the Sindh province which have a high density of tribal communities…

He probably cannot be named because it would be at the risk of his life to do so – such is Islam as long as it has the attitude that non-Moslems are sub-human filth…as long, that is, as Mecca is off limits to non-Moslems, so will this double standard in the Moslem world exist.

Someone decided to poll Obama and Bush in Ohio:

From Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling on Tuesday: “We’ll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there’s one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.”…

I guess we can certainly say that the bloom is off the Obama rose. This is what happens when you hide your past and pretend to be something you aren’t – once you get found out, people turn pretty swiftly on you.

From Fox News:

The South Korean government, in an effort to raise money for its military, wants to sell nearly a million antique M1 rifles that were used by U.S. soldiers in the Korean War to gun collectors in America.

The Obama administration approved the sale of the American-made rifles last year. But it reversed course and banned the sale in March – a decision that went largely unnoticed at the time but that is now sparking opposition from gun rights advocates…

The official story is that the Obama Administration is afraid the weapons will fall in to the wrong hands. My attitude is: almost of all of them will certainly fall in to the right hands – ie, the hands of the American people. The chances that gangsters or terrorists will want the weapons is small – they are large, heavy and impossible to conceal. They are not the weapons of criminals and thugs, but of people who want to defend themselves.

As a matter of fact, if these weapons are in good working order (and from what I understand, they are) they are precisely the sort of weapons Americans should have. Powerful, durable weapons which would be excellent for home defense. They are also, of course, good for target practice or just for collecting a famed weapon – it was with the M-1 Garand that we won the Second World War, after all.

This move by the Obama Administration just shows that gun-grabbing is still intrinsic to the left…they just can’t stand the thought of American citizens being armed.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In an ominous sign for the holiday shopping season, American consumers behaved like skinflints in August, focusing on bare necessities and budget-priced deals as they made back-to-school purchases.

Shoppers spent slightly more last month than they had the year before, according to MasterCard Advisors, which crunches data from credit cards, checks and cash payments to form sales estimates. But in nearly every category, the sales numbers were far short of 2008 levels, indicating the economic recovery remains sluggish…

That last should actually say “indicating the economic recovery remains a figment of Bernanke’s imagination”. Who has money to spend right now? For those who do, who is willing to greatly extend themselves when the next couple of months might bring economic collapse and spreading unemployment?

Get ready for a grim rest-of-the-year, and then a miserable 2011 as the Bush tax cuts expire and put yet more downward pressure on the economy.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Freudian slip, or liberalism’s true color? We report, you decide:

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration is considering a range of new measures to boost economic growth, including tax cuts and a new nationwide infrastructure program, according to people familiar with the discussions…

…in the mix: a possible payroll tax cut for businesses and individuals, as well as other business tax breaks, according to people familiar with the discussions…

A payroll tax cut would be the most useful thing Obama could do immediately for the economy – and for the people. But this also shows the level of desperation Democrats are reduced to – facing big losses in the fall, they are looking for expedients to just hold the line. Their thinking might be that a tax cut with a flourish enacted shortly before election day might give them a boost…might, that is, save the Senate for them, and prevent a complete blow out in the House.

If it works – I’m not so sure it will; given the attitude of the American people, such a move could backfire and be seen for a cynical, political ploy.

But, my fellow Americans, we’ve got them on the ropes – they are considering a dose of Reaganism two months in front of an election to boost their popularity!

From the Wall Street Journal:

Stocks limped to their worst August since 2001, battered by a wave of discouraging data that cast doubt on the faltering economic recovery.

Investors now enter September, a month that has been historically challenging for the stock market, against a backdrop of broad uncertainty, including slow growth and deflation fears.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average battled to a stalemate on Tuesday, rising 4.99 points, or 0.05%, to finish at 10014.72. The blue-chip index’s 4.3% drop for the month was the worst since a dismal May, and the measure’s first down August in five years. The Dow had rallied 7.1% in July…

I’m not so sure that September will prove a bad month – seems to me that the markets are being either manipulated, or controlled by coked-up monkeys. It should be down thousands of points from where it is as the economy is clearly in the dumpster – but, it still hangs on around the 10,000 mark. It will eventually fall, but I suspect that the Powers That Be will try their best to keep it up until November 3rrd.

The curious thing is that I don’t see how we get out of this while Obama is in office. Supposing the GOP wins big in November, the fact remains that the only thing the GOP can do for sure is halt any further Obama initiatives…but with Obama holding the veto, we can’t roll back any of the disastrous policies (Obama-made or inherited from decades past) which are preventing us from recovering. It could be a very long two years.