Author: Mark Noonan

RNC Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

I was very much impressed by Mrs. Romney’s speech – didn’t know that they had started that far down the economic totem poll.  Which, by the way, just shows the decency of Mitt Romney:  his life is not a talking point.  This is in stark contrast to Obama who has scripted himself to obtain maximum personal advantage from whatever situation he’s in.

Christie’s speech was also very good – a challenge to America to hear the truth and act upon it.  As a theme for the campaign, it is right on the money.  I do believe that the broad majority is done with the old politics and is ready for the revolution.  That Mitt might lead it is weird, but no stranger than the fact that we elected an exactly unqualified man as President in 2008.

What do you think of it all?

UPDATE:  “Mr. President, I’m here to tell you that the American people are awake, and we’re not buying what you’re selling in 2012.”  See the Mia Love video – if she wins her House seat, then she’s the next TEA Party political rock star.

UPDATE II:  Forgive me if I’m wrong, but methinks that was Rice’s “I’m going to run for governor of California in 2014” speech…

UPDATE III:  A Democracy Corps poll with a D+6 advantage shows Romney up by 15 points among Independents. Hot Air has the story.

UPDATE IV:  With all the GOPalooza going on  if you feel the need for some quality, Obama Time, then Suitably Flip has the torture implement ready.

Afghanistan and the Future of the War Against Islamism

Mark Noonan15 Comments

With the shocking rise of “green on blue” attacks in Afghanistan – incidents where Afghans trained and armed by us murder our troops in cold blood – it is time (probably way past time) to completely re-assess our goals in this war.  Long time readers will remember that my basic premise for supporting the war was a conviction on my part that the average, everyday Muslim pretty much wanted what the average, everyday non-Muslim wanted:  peace and prosperity and a bright future for the children.  Given this premise, I felt that if we could get in to several Muslim countries and overthrow their corrupt, cruel governments and give the Muslims a genuine choice, they would choose correctly.  I do believe, ultimately, that this is the correct view – but given the nature of American politics with our liberals determined that any use of military force is wrong, it is not practical for the United States to pursue it.  Liberals gum up the works – war is a brutal, hard business and part of the process is killing and humiliating people.  Liberals insist that we never humiliate and kill only in impossible conditions.  The liberals have won, again; just as they won on the Vietnam issue.  Congratulations, liberals!

Given our inability to properly fight the war, the fall of old tyrannies in the Muslim world has eventuated not in a hoped-for improvement, but an increase of barbarism.  Our weakness – insisted upon by liberals – has led to a convincing propaganda line for the Islamists:  “see, we beat these weakling Americans; follow us to Islamic glory”.  The upshot of our failure is a dramatic and disgusting rise of Islamist barbarism – more and more Muslims murdered and oppressed but, also, non-Muslims subjected to ever more horrific torments.  In the past week I’ve read stories of a Christian doctor nearly beaten to death because he took a drink of water during Ramadan (forbidden during the day to Muslims,  but the guy wasn’t a Muslim) and of a 12 year old Christian girl who is under threat of the death penalty because a Muslim boy she refused to sleep with cooked up a blasphemy charge against her.  That is just two drops in a hideous ocean of persecution.  I see no way forward at the moment for our military to secure what would be American victory – we’ve tied ourselves in to too many knots, we’ve handed the Islamists too many trump cards and we’ve entirely lost the momentum of victory we once had.  Obama will just stumble along in his blind, ignorant way – what Romney will do remains unknown.  My view is that it is time to withdraw as swiftly as possible – taking with us any Muslims who want to live a civilized life, but getting out in the shortest possible time with the least amount of fuss.

After we do get out, this is going to get a heck of a lot worse before it gets any better.  Sorry, liberals, but the reason the Islamists act as they do is not in response to our actions but in service of their Islamist goals – they are hate-filled, greedy, corrupt barbarians.  They are just like that and will remain like that until killed.  Already Islamists in Libya are destroying works of art deemed un-Islamic while in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood government starts to implement Islamism…and none of us know what horrors will emerge in the post-Assad regime of Syrian.  The Taliban will likely come back to power in Afghanistan (probably invited in to power by Karzai who seems these days mostly interested in preserving himself in power, cost what it might).  The mullahs of Iran continue to flex their muscle.  In the final analysis as Islamism grows and gets a tighter grip on the Muslim world we can expect an eventual attempt to attack us here at home.  Actually, a lot of attempts.  Most will be thwarted.  Eventually, they will get through and we’ll have some sort of replay of 9/11.

And then the war will resume – and when it does (not if, but when – its as certain as night following day) then it is to be hoped that we’ll do it differently.  In hindsight, the primary failure of the Bush war policy was a failure to attack all of Islamism at once.  On September 12th he should have asked a joint session of Congress for declarations of war on Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – take on the whole problem and not try to treat it as a series of separate, country-by-country events; the Islamists don’t view the Muslim countries as in any way legitimate and so neither should we.  By so doing we would have unified all Islamists against us, except for the fact that they already were…but we would have had the great advantage of being able to attack all of them at once as well as raising an army large enough to physically conquer the entirely of Islamist territory thus preventing one Islamist area from supporting Islamist insurgency in an American-controlled area (which was our problem in Iraq and is now our problem in Afghanistan).  If the Islamists attack us at home again, that is what we must do (though we can now add Egypt to the list of nations to declare war on as they have gone Islamist):  declare war on them all, fight them all, kill and humiliate them all.  That is the way wars are fought and won – and by doing it in such a manner we’d prevent liberalism from gumming it up (we’d be moving too fast on too many fronts without any apparent stagnation to allow liberalism to make its absurd case against war).

That will be as it will – but the main thing for now is to get out.  Unless we want to pour in 100,000 more troops and start exterminating Islamists in great, big bloody batches, I don’t want our soldiers to remain in Afghanistan.  They’ve done magnificent work and almost made even Obama’s slipshod policy a success.  But there’s nothing for it, now:  Obama won’t do what is necessary to win and it is unlikely that Romney will be able to, either.  If troops can’t fight for victory, better to not fight at all.  Bring them home.

Neil Armstrong, RIP

Mark Noonan60 Comments

From ABC News:

 Neil Armstrong, the astronaut who became first to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 11, has died. He was 82 years old.

He was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, on Aug. 5, 1930.

On July 20, 1969, half a billion people — a sixth of the world’s population at the time — watched a ghostly black-and-white television image as Armstrong backed down the ladder of the lunar landing ship Eagle, planted his left foot on the moon’s surface, and said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”…

Symbolic of a nation which used to be able to do everything – Armstrong’s death reminds us of what we used to be, and should inspire us to be that nation, again.

A Liberal Whine: Obama Not Playing Race Card, Enough

Mark Noonan49 Comments

From Ta-Nehisi Coats in The Atlantic:

…From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.

Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said in his “More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race…

The article is quite long and it just goes on and on like that – America is and has been a hopeless, racist hell and Obama hasn’t been doing enough to pay whitey back for his transgressions.  Obama is just playing the white man’s game, as it were, for fear that an enraged black man will awaken the racist within us all and thus defeat him on November 6th.  The underlying premise of it all is that all white people are guilty and until they confront their terrible crimes, we can’t get past the race issue in the United States.

The reality is a bit different, of course.  The true issue of race in America is that it is dead as a doornail except for those who need it for fun and profit.  The fact that Obama has been treated just like anyone else doesn’t enter in to liberal minds – it was my (very white) wife who first clued me in to the Obama phenomena.  She was quite taken with this well spoken, good looking man who was clearly ambitious for higher office.  I, too, could not escape immediately the charm of Obama.  While I wouldn’t have voted for him under any circumstances this was entirely due to his standard-liberal positions on the issues.  That he is a black man was, is and always will be entirely irrelevant.  It wasn’t until the Jeremiah Wright issue came up that I became aware of the dishonesty underneath the surface of Obama – and while an author like Coats clearly admirers people like Wright, anyone who is not committed to the con-job which is race in America these days would immediately be offended by someone who lives well off America and yet condemns it in such hateful terms.  And as Obama and team started going “Jeremiah who?” it really just told us that Obama is dishonest – he sat in the man’s church for 20 years and could not reasonably argue that he was unaware of Wright’s raving lunacy.

Obama’s 2008 persona, though, carried him through to victory – just as anyone else with that sort of persona and given that set of political circumstances would likely have been carried in to the White House.  In other words; treated just like anyone else.  The problem for Obama is that his management style (probably the worst decision-maker we’ve ever had in the White House) coupled with the disastrous policies normal to liberalism have ensured complete failure of his Administration.  And just like any other person who is failing in the job of President, he’s getting hammered in popular approval and will likely lose on November 6th.  He wasn’t elected due to race in 2008, won’t be defeated in 2012 because of race – he was elected because of his personality and circumstances and will be defeated because of his policies.  But if this narrative is accepted as true then all the racial con-artists out there (people like Wright and Farrakhan and Jackson and Sharpton) would shortly be out of work.  A certain segment of the population (which does include a very large number of white people, of course) needs to have race to be a painful, divisive issue now and forever more.

It will be funny – not to me, as I’ll be dead right around that time – in 30 or 40 years when America is no longer a white-majority nation to see the successors of these people.  How will they keep the race hustle up?  Don’t doubt that they will try – Mugabe in Zimbabwe is still blaming the white people of Zimbabwe for his problems even though there are hardly any white people left in that country.  It’ll just be entertaining to watch the mental back flips these people will have to do to convince people that whitey is still keeping the black man down.   Think of it like this – the race-hustlers of 2052 will be trying to convince a panel of 1 (aged) white guy, two Latinos, two Asians and three mixed-race people that we still need racial set-asides to clear up the racial disparities of the Jim Crow era.

The sad part of it is really the way these people feel the need to keep hate alive.  We all know the truth of our past – the glory and the sins; slavery will always be a stain upon the Great Republic, as will segregation.  But it is also very much long past, now.  There are no slaves left.  No children of slaves, either.  I doubt we even have a great-grand-child of a slave alive in the United States.  The Jim Crow laws have been a dead letter since the mid-60’s.  Black people serve at all levels of American society and no one would ever dream of barring anyone from any position simply based upon their skin color.  More and more of us, also, have mixed race families – while I’m sure there are still some hill-apes out there who don’t want their daughters to marry a black man, they are few and far between (and getting ever fewer by the day); people just don’t care about it any longer.  All we want is decent people who obey the law and do the right thing – skin color is irrelevant.  But here are our liberals – so fearful that the race-baiting gravy train may come to an end that they will do whatever is necessary to keep old hatreds inflamed.

Pray for them.  Don’t get mad about it.  Hopefully they will wake up from their befuddlement in the by and by.

 

Gambling for “The Children”

Mark Noonan5 Comments

Geesh:

…Emanuel said Thursday that he doesn’t want the revenue a casino would bring for city coffers, but would rather divert it to schools.

“As I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, if we were to get a casino, I’d like to direct all the resources to school modernization and school improvement so our kids will be in modern school buildings with a full school day and full school year,” Emanuel said…

Haven’t seen anything like this since, well, this…

The Decline and Fall of College Education

Mark Noonan35 Comments

From Market Watch:

Late summer is when parents bring their children to college. As they drive to campus they’re worried about tuition increases, the burden of student debt and whether their children will find jobs when they graduate.

Some parents and high-school students are beginning to question the value of a four-year college degree in this post-Great Recession world.   And you can certainly understand why they have these concerns…

…The job market for recent college grads is grim and incomes are down. The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%.  But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income.   Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome)…

The article details far more than that about what is wrong with getting a college degree – and then, in typical (for modern times) Alice-In-Wonderland mode, still goes on to claim that getting a degree is worth it.  I hold, though, that it is only worth it if you are going for a degree in medicine or one of the hard sciences (I don’t even count law school as worth it any longer as we have a glut of lawyers in the United States).  We have, in our higher education system, far too many people pursuing far too many degrees of doubtful immediate utility and the whole thing is financed with a trillion dollars (and growing) of student debt which is increasingly impossible for the college grads to repay.  What happened?

Government happened.  Government (lobbied by the education establishment) decided that everyone should go to college and so set up education systems designed to feed colleges as opposed to educate kids.  Government then set up a student loan program (initially via the private sector under government control, not entirely under government control) which provided easy funding (literally, an 18 year old with no income and no credit rating can borrow tens of thousands of dollars to go to college) for anyone who is willing to put his butt in a college seat.  Colleges love this because they get the money up front so it doesn’t matter if the kid ever graduates or whether the kid learns a marketable skill.  Colleges additionally love it because by providing loans the government allows the colleges to continually hike tuition rates outside of market variable – the kids aren’t thinking of having to pay that back four years later (four years to an 18 year old is forever in the future) and so aren’t actually calculating the loan cost against possible future returns; they are just told by guidance counselors that a college education will allow them to make more money than a non-college education.  No one ever tells them that there are college educations and then there are college educations…and education in medicine will immediately allow you to make a bucket of money per year while an education in post-feminist studies not so much.  As is typical whenever government gets in involved a tiny elite profits (in this case the education system) while the people get screwed.

In addition to that, except for those learning a hard science (in other words, those who are really in nothing more than a high-grade trade school), the kids aren’t even being educated.  100 years ago, a college education included learning Latin and Greek, just to tip-of-the-iceberg what isn’t being done in schools any longer.  We’ve massively dumbed-down college education to the point where I hold it mostly in contempt – because after all that time and money in the class room, I see no ability of a college graduate which is superior to my abilities.  I don’t know Latin or Greek, either…and I’d stack my non-college education knowledge of history, economics, philosophy and theology against anyone who graduated college in the last 50 years.  For most kids, it would be better if they went to a trade school rather than college – it would be cheaper and, for instance, if you are a tool and die maker you are in massive demand, even in this down economy.

When Obama talks about how he wants to spend more on education all he’s really saying is “I want to subsidize this massive failure because it provides campaign funds for me”.  The Education people know which side butters their bread – they know that as long as they keep the donations flowing to the Democrats the Democrats will keep the money flowing to the education system, no matter how lousy the product is and no matter how many poor kids are burdened with massive debt (nothing like starting out in life as a debt slave, huh?).  Its all a crock, a scam and a national disgrace – end the student loan program and you’ll pull the lynchpin out from under this rotten edifice.  It’ll collapse in a heap if there’s not a flow of loan money in to colleges – they’ll have to cut staff (and the staff most likely to be cut is the heavily liberal areas, such as the aforementioned feminist studies), cut tuition and start offering a more meaty education program which provides something you can’t get in high school or trade school.  We’ll also cut off a huge source of funds for the Democrat party and the larger left.  There’s no downside to eliminating student loans – certainly not for the kids who won’t be $30,000.00 in debt for a useless degree.

But, will we?  Not yet.  We’re still in a cowardly phase where we’re afraid of a Democrat “Republicans hate education” attack line.  But the fall of college education proceeds apace and maybe when we’ve got kids sitting under $2 trillion in worthless education debt there will come the will to change.

 

The Ryan Plan and Catholic Social Teaching

Mark Noonan98 Comments

Our liberals have been running with a meme which goes “Ryan’s budget plan is anti-Catholic” – the basis of the liberal argument is that a letter was written under the letter head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which condemned the Ryan plan when it was first presented.  Without getting in to the intra-Catholic weeds on this, the mere existence of such a letter does not either indicate Catholic doctrine nor how the Bishops, if pressed on the matter, would rule.  Lots of liberals reside on the staff of the USCCB and they do take their opportunities to help liberal Democrats.

The letter, itself, held that the alleged cuts to social spending in the Ryan plan violated Catholic teaching as it relates to helping the poor.  Of course, Catholic teaching is that the poor have an absolute moral claim upon the wealthy for sufficient housing, clothing, food and health care – there can be and is no argument about that.  If you’ve got the means, you are morally obligated to help out the less fortunate.  On the other hand, how you are to help out is not set out with precision – because it can’t be.  Circumstances are so varied among both the haves and the have-nots that no one person can figure out exactly what one person should do for another in all circumstances.  The bottom line is that there can be a great deal of different opinion on the best means to the end – and Ryan’s bishop, Robert C. Morlino, has written an article clarifying the Catholic view – first laying out what is required:

…It is the role of bishops and priests to teach principles of our faith, such that those who seek elected offices, if they are Catholics, are to form their consciences according to these principles about particular policy issues.

However, the formation of conscience regarding particular policy issues is different depending on how fundamental to the ecology of human nature or the Catholic faith a particular issue is. Some of the most fundamental issues for the formation of a Catholic conscience are as follows: sacredness of human life from conception to natural death, marriage, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, and a right to private property.

Violations of the above involve intrinsic evil — that is, an evil which cannot be justified by any circumstances whatsoever. These evils are examples of direct pollution of the ecology of human nature and can be discerned as such by human reason alone. Thus, all people of good will who wish to follow human reason should deplore any and all violations in the above areas, without exception. The violations would be: abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, government-coerced secularism, and socialism…

So, we can say, “politician A is in favor of elective abortion and as that is an intrinsic evil, I must not vote for politician A”.  But outside of the area of intrinsic evil, there is a lot more flexibility – and it becomes a matter of prudential judgement on the part of Catholics (and, indeed, everybody) to decide as best they can.

Continue reading →

What Media Bias? Part 192

Mark Noonan49 Comments

Though this might be “What Attacks on Mormonism?, Part 1”, depending on how you look at it – from Warner Todd Huston over at Breitbart:

As the race for the White House heats up, Reuters suddenly realized that the massive Mormon Church has a lot of money in its bank accounts. The news service went on to needle the Church, saying if it were a business “wealthy adherents like Mitt Romney would count as its dominant revenue stream.”

Reuters took the if-it-were-a-business theme even farther in its opening paragraphs.

“It would also likely attract corporate gadflies protesting a lack of transparency. They would call for less spending on real estate and more on charitable causes to improve membership growth — the Mormons’ return on investment.”

Of course, a religion is not a “business” proposition. A religion does not operate like a company does, it has far different goals. But assessing a religion wasn’t Reuters’ goal here. Making Mormons out to be “rich” elitists that act suspiciously and are pushing a snobbish presidential candidate on the nation was Reuters’ goal…

This from the same MSM which essentially went all “Reverend Wright, who?” in 2008.  I don’t recall any stories about how Wright’s organization was financed – and that leaves aside anything more than a glance at the fact that Obama attended a racist, anti-American church for 20 years.

One might want to think that there would be only one trip in to the gutter for our Democrats and their lapdog MSM in 2012 – forget it; they’ll troll in every gutter there is.  They will attack Romney because he’s rich.  They’ll attack him because he’s white.  They’ll attack him because he’s Mormon.  They’ll attack him as a war monger and they’ll attack him because he had college and missionary deferments during the Vietnam War.  They will lie.  They will launch whispering campaigns claiming all sorts of horrors about Romney’s past.  They will attack his wife.  They will attack his children.  They will attack his friends.  They will try to intimidate people in the right blogosphere who are favorable to Romney.  This will be the dirtiest political campaign in human history and the MSM will be right there in the trenches with the DNC, doing what they can to help Obama.

So, just get ready for it – it will get nauseating but the payoff will be the crestfallen looks on MSM faces on November 6th.

 

 

Adam Smith, Chick Fil A and How Hatred Makes You Stupid

Mark Noonan72 Comments

I was unaware of it until just a short while ago, but it seems that during “Chick Fil A Appreciation Day” a man named Adam Smith (yes, the irony is flabbergasting)  made a video of himself berating the random Chick Fil A employee he confronted after ordering a cup of water.  What first struck me about the story was just how monumentally stupid you’d have to be to do something like that.  At most, you’d have to figure your strongest effect would be to make a hard-working person’s day lousy – along with having to deal with all the actual work and,  of course, the genuine customers who make demands which can run from the difficult to the impossible, here comes a guy who wants to rant and rave at you for the positions held by a senior, corporate boss you’ve probably never met.  Additionally, there is the chance that if you wanted to go off on a rant like that then the person you’re ranting to might actually be someone on your side:  people don’t carry their views on signs tacked to their heads…for all this dunderhead knew the person he confronted could have ended up not just being in favor of gay marriage, but also actually gay…and maybe even hoping to get married.  What possible good effect could you hope to have by doing it?

But now it turns out that the video Smith posted and which went viral has resulted in his being fired:

An executive at a medical manufacturing firm lost his job after a YouTube video of him verbally ambushing a young employee at a Tucson Chick-fil-A went viral.

Adam Smith, formerly chief financial officer at Vante, stepped down after the video – which Smith shot and uploaded himself -caused embarrassment to the company…

So, Smith is now unemployed in addition to being revealed as an idiot.  As someone who has suffered because of the expression of speech (long time readers will remember that I’ve been stalked, my car has been vandalized, I’m pretty sure my computer has been hacked – and along with threats of violence, I also had one person try to post a picture of my house on the ‘net…turns out it was a house belonging to a different Mark Noonan) I do feel bad for Smith losing his job and I hope his employer reconsiders the move.  But I also hope that Smith and everyone else learns a lesson:  there is no need to get nasty about politics.  It really isn’t the be all and end all of existence.  To build yourself up to such a level of hate that you are doing monumentally stupid things – as Smith did – is just bizarre.

Relax.  Take it easy.  For me, it is pretty simple – God wins and as I’m trying to walk with God, I’ll be ok, in the long run.  If you don’t believe in God then it can get a bit more tricky…but, still, you’re not going to live forever on this earth.  When you’re dead will it matter if you managed to get off a rant on some random person?  What is the point of being a jerk?  What do you get out of it?  A sense of superiority?  Is it really that much of a rush?  That much a salve to your pride?  For goodness sakes, take a pill – have a glass of wine; go watch the sun set.  But don’t go off on a rant.  Stupid.

Unemployment at 8.3%

Mark Noonan22 Comments

So, how is that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?  41 months at 8% or higher unemployment.  And with 150,000 dropping out of the labor force, you know that the real unemployment rate is much, much higher than the official number.

The BLS, apparently working hard for Obama’s re-election, decided that with unemployment rising they’d better give the MSM something else to talk about – certainly don’t want them talking about the massive number of people out of work.  Better to have them talk about the number of jobs being created!  So, they just made up some numbers to make it look like the number of jobs went up.  From Zero Hedge:

Happy (about) the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the US “added” 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an “adjusted” rise? Simple: the BLS “added” 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This was the largest seasonal addition … for a July NFP print in the past decade…But wait, there’s more: the Birth Death adjustment, which adds to the NSA Print to get to the final number, was +52k. How does this compare to July 2011? It is about 1000% higher: the last B/D adjustment was a tiny +5K! In other words, of the 163,000 jobs “added”, 429,000 was based on purely statistical fudging.

I’m a little bit surprised at this much brass on the part of the Bureau of Labor Statistics – all economic indicators in July were lousy:  there wasn’t the slightest indicator that we were actually adding jobs…and here they come up, straight faced, and try to tell us not only that the economy created jobs, but created them faster than in June, when things were better than in July.  But putting out that number – even with 16 million people out of work – allows Obama and his Democrats to keep up the meme of “jobs are being created” thanks to the stimulus.  That meme – which is the only positive thing Obama has – would be permanently finished if we had a jobs print in negative territory.  Now we know:  until after November 6th, no matter what is really happening, the BLS will not put out a negative number…even if actual jobs losses will be in the 200,000 range, they’ll just fudge it until they get a positive number.

Fine and dandy – we know that Obama’s hope for re-election revolves around lying about himself and lying about Romney.  The jobs report is the “lie about Obama” part, the latest fracas over Romney’s tax returns (set aloft by Harry Reid, who also seems to have some unanswered questions about his own past which have been floated just as credibly as the tax charge) is the “lie about Romney” part of it.  We’ll see if it works – the idea is to turn off independents, depress Republicans and fire up Democrats as Obama’s only hope is a narrow win in a low-turnout race which allows him to cobble together 270 electoral votes.  If it works, then it works – but it only works if Obama can fool the people.  He managed it in 2008; I don’t think he’ll be able to do it in 2012 (much harder to fool people by scaring them than to fool them by making nice).

In the end, I expect that reality will defeat Obama – he and his minions can lie all they want but the people know what they are going through.  I don’t know about you out there – maybe you’re all rich – but as for me it has been quite a lot of cutting back.  My shirts, for instance, are bought at Goodwill these days…and I’ve found in conversation that I’m not remotely alone among my friends determined to bargain shop or do without.  Things are rough; people fear the future; and for me and mine we’re actually far better off than many millions of people who were suckered by Obama in 2008 and now know the reality.  After all the hype and lies I think that on November 6th the real people of the United States who have been living in the Obama Recession will show up to vote – and we’ll have a new President on January 20th.