The news:

…Revised data from the Texas Workforce Commission now show that the Austin metro area was losing jobs from the very beginning of 2009, and that the job losses were deeper than experts thought.

The revised data also show that Texas as a whole had a tougher job market last year than thought. The state lost 354,000 jobs in 2009, which is 78,000 more than the 276,000 previously estimated, according to the updated data…

…The California Employment Development Department on March 1 reported the state had lost 292,000 more jobs in 2009 than officials had thought; the new estimate is 871,000 jobs cut, compared with the earlier estimate of 579,000. Oregon reported losing 28,000 more jobs in 2009 than previously estimated.

Why the difference? Because when you get a number in, say, March of 2010 for February, its an estimate. A bunch of data is collected but its not really hard data – the hard data is the actual tax rolls. If a business had to send tax money in to the government for an employee, then we know there was certainly an employee working. The new numbers are based upon comparing those tax-roll numbers with previous tax-roll numbers.

The happy-talk numbers we’re getting now on employment and retail sales are, just like the initial employment numbers of 2009, a guess. A guess with some validity to it, but still just a guess. It’ll be months before we know the full story. But we can assume that whatever numbers are being given to us now will be revised downwards as time goes on – so the supposedly rosy picture of March, 2010 will become a much cloudier figure in, say, June. Keep that in mind as you hear economics stories.

My contention is that the private, productive economy continues to shrink. I base this upon the fact that employment in things like construction continues to decline while sale tax revenues are still going down rapidly. If we were on the verge of a recovery, we’d see at least stability or only minor drops in those two things. We’re not – not yet, and thus my assertion of a contracting economy.

Its not a matter of if we’ll have a double-dip recession, but how long the government and the bankers can mask its existence. The banks, their books still filled with worthless assets, simply cannot afford another down turn – many of them would simply go out of business. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury, naturally, don’t want another crash – especially at Treasury where the primary goal is to get some sort of good economy in the public mind by 2012.

The entities which pull the financial strings will do everything they can to keep the fiscal ball in the air. They’ll print, they’ll borrow, they’ll use financial hocus-pocus. Their hope is that some how, some way the economy will genuinely recover, thus allowing them to cover the bad assets on the books. How long will they be able to keep it up? Beats all heck out of me – but the longer they hold it off, the worse it will be.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

Seems they won’t really have that new ObamaCare bill up for 72 hours before a vote:

House Democrats appear to be softening their pledge to allow the public 72 hours to review the health care reform package online before a House vote. “We will certainly give as much notice as possible, but I’m not going to say that 72 hours is going to be the litmus test,” said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Friday.

“The House bill or Senate bill, as proposed, has been online for some two-and-a-half months, otherwise known about 75 days,” Hoyer added, referring to the November and December dates each chamber passed its version of health care legislation.

But Democrats could vote as soon as next week on a series of changes to the health care package – called a reconciliation bill – and the number two House Republican criticized Hoyer directly on House floor.

“I’m a little bit taken aback that now that 72-hour rule has been completely cast aside, since nobody in the House has seen what’s in the reconciliation bill,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Virginia.

Its because they don’t know what legislative bribes they’ll need to get it passed and it might end up being that the last bribe or two comes in less than 72 hours before a vote. Plus, if you really had it up there for three days people would have a chance to read it and react to its provisions – and Democrats are not about to let public concerns get in the way of passing a bill.

But it is also just one more lie – one more broken promise. One more clear indicator that they don’t care about the people of the United States.

Interesting and must-read article about the clash between Islam and Christianity – in Africa, where Christianity surges towards a majority of the population:

Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University says the remarkable thing about the recent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria is that they are not remarkable. In a process largely unnoticed in the West, billions of people in Asia and Africa have swapped out their indigenous faiths for either Christianity or Islam. And to an even greater astonishment of Western intellectuals most have chosen Christianity. Now the equalization of numbers has caused a fault line to appear through the Third World at about the tenth degree of latitude where the two aggregations face each other “at daggers drawn”…

…With the numbers between Christians and Muslims equalizing in the region of the 10th degree of latitude, many places formerly dominated by Islam are now doubtful ground. It’s upsetting the equilibrium…

This being something I’ve been aware of for something like a decade now – perhaps longer. Probably because I don’t have a bias against Christianity, I was able notice that while Christianity has largely died out in Europe, it is surging in Africa and Asia – and undergoing a remarkable revival in South and central America (the United States, itself, is a bit of a special case – Christianity has largely died out among the elite, but not among the majority). Of course, as the linked article notes, Islam has grown as well. But not nearly as much as Christianity. Thus in places where there has never really been sectarian violence, we’re seeing it more and more often (and in spite of what might be said, it all stems from Islamist militancy).

The battles of life – the real ones, which people will actually sacrifice for – are all moral battles. Fights between right and wrong. The world is choosing up sides and Islam, losing the battle, is lashing out. Lashing out at us, of course – but also lashing out at Third World Christians. Not for anything the inoffensive Christians of Nigeria and elsewhere have done, but for what they are. Do you understand that, liberals?

There is intense hatred and fear in Islam – needless to say, its among the ruling elite and those who aspire to become the rulers, but the hatred and fear is there and it is the main motivator. They hate the west for its immorality and decadence – for its cowardice and sloth. They hate the United States for those reasons, but also for our Believers who will not back down. They hate Third World Christianity because it beckons their own people – it threatens to turn the hearts and minds of the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” of Islam…freed from Islam’s stagnation, such people would no longer tolerate their subordinate position.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all comes out. Right now, we have a parish priest here in Las Vegas who is from West Africa – hearing him recite the Stations of the Cross is wonderful, given his accent. Yes, we refer to him as “Father”, and the very whitest of American Christians meekly accept instruction from him. He is one of many such in America – Christians from the Third World come to restore Christian faith in the West; and expand Christian faith in the Third World.

The only thing certain is that the week kneed who refuse to believe in any religion will have just about nothing to say in what happens.

Profiled in the MSM as just a bunch of really sweet guys and gals with no particular axe to grind – they just want government to work. Well, not quite:

CNN put more focus on Stacey Hopkins…, so I will start out by dissecting her information trail on the net. CNN paints a very nice picture of her as essentially someone that thinks the nation’s ‘work is not being done’ because of a ‘stifling’ Congress (whatever that means) among other things. She doesn’t even sound overtly political – pleasant, nice, unassuming. Perhaps like a neighbor that you may have.

C-Gen and I did some digging however and you might be surprised with what we found (actually, if you read this blog regularly, you will not be surprised). As was the case with Annabel Park, a few simple google queries (that CNN didn’t seem able to do) provided some amazing information. I hit the treasure-trove of Obama Astroturfing from her blog…

If you click the link, you’ll see all the wonderful Obama stuff. So, we’ve got an Obama activist setting up a Coffee Party to just get things moving? No, we’ve got an astro-turf movement designed to confuse the issues and take a bit of sting out of the TEA Party. It won’t work – they would have gotten away with it ten years ago, but the New Media has exposed it right out the gate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the left never has a ground-up movement. They are incapable of doing other than following orders on the left…someone has to tell them to get together and then tell them what to talk about and what actions to take.

The phrase “community organizer” nutshells the entire leftist mindset – Obama had to go in and get the community organized because the people who would follow Obama’s ideology simply will not do it on their own. This sort of thing can be done hard or soft – hard in leftist dictatorships like Cuba, soft in the United States states and other free nations – but the fundamental thing is an unwillingness to think and act independently on the part of rank-and-file leftwingers.

Keep this in mind – any group claiming to be grass roots which is not of the right simply will be astro-turf. It can’t be anything but – if it really comes from the people, it will be libertarian or conservative.

A friend sent me this and though the friend is reliable, I figured that I had to check it out – and it is true:

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto … Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids..) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

The year Irene was up for the Nobel Peace Prize … She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.

It appears this woman also saved about 500 adults, including the man she eventually married.

This is the sort of person to honor – this is what it means to show rare courage in a time of crisis and do what you can to bring light in to a dark world.

And the Nobel Committee gave the prize to a man who spoke in front of a camera for a while. Why did they do that? Because for our global leftists, making a political point is more important than doing the right thing.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”…

…Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”

If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party.(emphasis added)

Which is about how I view it – and, as an aside, so much for DNC spin that the bill doesn’t include abortion coverage. If it didn’t, then attaching Stupak’s amendment would be no problem.

They’re going to ram this through, abortion, kickbacks and all, regardless of what we, the people of the United States think. They’ll do it because its the leftist dream – the mechanism, in their view, for gaining operational control of the American people. The leverage to make us a social democracy – the end of the Great Republic.

I don’t think it will work out that way – but that does seem to be the way Democrat leaders, and their yapping chorus in the leftist netroots, views the matter. But that still begs the question – why, then, be insistent upon abortion funding? The left is willing to take this half a loaf ObamaCare bill knowing that if they get it in, they can always expand it, later. So why the big abortion push? I can only guess that the Culture of Death has become so entrenched – abortion has become such a leftist sacrament – that they just can’t part with it.

At any rate, any sort of abortion funding in the bill will just make it that much more unpopular – the American people do not want their tax dollars going to fund abortion. That has been clear in vote after vote and poll after poll for decades. It will be a useful tool for us to attack Democrats with in the fall – and should we win, it will be a strong means of getting the whole mess repealed.

But is Stupak right? Is this the end of pro-life opinion in the Democrat party? I think so. Stupak says he’ll stick around as a Democrat, but it might become impossible for him – the left is already going after him with a campaign of hate and slander, just as they did against Lieberman. Stupak might be essentially forced out – perhaps to become the founder of a Christian-Democrat Party?

Who knows – but anyone who is actually pro-life can have nothing to do with the Democrat party, if they do pass through ObamaCare with abortion funding of any sort.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Much has been written of the recent Tom Hanks remarks to Douglas Brinkley in a Time magazine interview about his upcoming HBO series on World War II in the Pacific. Here is the explosive excerpt that is making the rounds today.

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hanks may not have been quoted correctly; and his remarks may have been impromptu and poorly expressed; and we should give due consideration to the tremendous support Hanks has given in the past both to veterans and to commemoration of World War II; and his new HBO series could well be a fine bookend to Band of Brothers. All that said, Hanks’ comments were sadly infantile pop philosophizing offered by, well, an ignoramus.

Hanks thinks he is trying to explain the multifaceted Pacific theater in terms of a war brought on by and fought through racial animosity. That is ludicrous.

Indeed, it is ludicrous. Hanson goes on to explain in detail why Hanks’ view is entirely wrong. But why would someone like Hanks – who has done really good work for our veterans – get it so wrong?

Mostly its because hardly anyone knows about the war with Japan. Outside of scholars and the vanishing veterans of that war (my father was one of the younger Pacific War vets – and he died last year at 82), there just isn’t much public knowledge about this war. This is sad on a lot of levels, not least of which is that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines defeated enemies who would have crushed anyone else (the rule of thumb is that once a unit suffers about 30% casualties, it’s done as a fighting unit until replenished – the 29th Marines on Okinawa suffered 81% casualties…and won).

The war had MacArthur’s brilliant campaign against the Japanese culminating in the liberation of the Philippines. The largest sea battles in history which including stunning, against-all-odds victories at Midway and Leyte Gulf. Campaigns which surged across thousands of miles of ocean and land. And most Americans have heard almost none of it – perhaps a bit about Pearl Harbor and then the bad, mean Americans drop atomic bombs on Japan. And someone like Hanks opines that we fought because we hated their race.

It is stupid. But it is also frustrating. Its like America’s glories have been shoved down the Memory Hole – our past is gutted so that fools can pretend the world is a certain way, when its actually entirely different from that.

One of our tasks over the next few decades will be to instruct the rising generation in the truth about their nation. We must eventually have a time when the glories of our ancestors are known, and honored – when we know the truth, not the fashionable theories of modern sophisticates imposed on the past.

But I don’t think the people in DC will listen:

Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.

As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late. At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise…

…The White House document released Thursday arguing that reform is becoming more popular is in large part fighting the last war. This isn’t 1994; it’s 2010. And the bottom line is that the American public is overwhelmingly against this bill in its totality even if they like some of its parts.

The notion that once enactment is forced, the public will suddenly embrace health-care reform could not be further from the truth — and is likely to become a rallying cry for disaffected Republicans, independents and, yes, Democrats.

Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies.

Which is, of course, exactly what I’ve been on about for months. Its not the economy, stupid. Its not the spin, stupid. Its not the “party of no”, stupid. Its the government – people are mad at government. Local, State and federal, the majority have had it with government and its bloated budgets, sweet heart deals for the well connected and serial political corruption. If Democrats are thinking they can swing people behind ObamaCare once its passed, or that improved economic numbers will save the day, they’ve got rocks in their heads. Unemployment could drop to 8% by November and it won’t matter in the least.

Unless Obama and his Democrats can convince the American people that they have changed their ways – that they have given up Big Government solutions and are really, seriously going to balance the budget and jail the corrupt – then the Democrats will lose in November, and lose rather badly.

The people are really waking up to this scam:

Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.

According to Gallup, just two years ago 65% felt that global warming was already upon us – now its 53%, with a plurality figuring that even if its happening, its being exaggerated. We’re only a step or two away, I think, from putting this absurdity to bed.

But, remember, the environmentalists will just make up another one. Each time one of their theories proves laughably false, they’ve got another all set to go. I’m sure there’s already been some obscure conference somewhere which put forth some alternative “we’re all gonna die” scenario which will gain ever more currency as anthroprogenic global warming goes down. There’s just too much money to be made off of end of the world scams…

One down, 49 to go:

ACORN, the liberal group notorious for allegedly trying to inflate voter rolls through fraudulent practices, has seen its last election in Ohio.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will permanently surrender its Ohio business license by June1 as part of a legal settlement with the conservative Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, both sides said yesterday.

ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group’s efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.

Keep your eyes peeled for some sort of successor organization. These fraudsters aren’t about to give up. We’ll have to pursue them and their attempts to subvert America relentlessly.

Of course, a good effort in this would be to get the ACORN-in-Chief out of office in 2012.