Get a job

I am not an economist. I think that much has been made clear by my blinkered bafflement with even the most basic of numbers. It's even in my official title: Brutal Overlord of the Northern Hemisphere, Direct Conduit to God, Party Chip and Dip Specialist, and Chief Non-Economist of These Bastards. But even I had to notice something bizarre with the jobs numbers. More people lost their jobs... but the unemployment and underemployment numbers went down. Guh?

The United States economy shed 20,000 jobs in January, the government said Friday, deepening concern that relief from the deepest economic downturn in a generation would be slow to come. But even as the economy struggled to start creating jobs again, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent in December.

As the broader economy gains steam and crucial sectors like manufacturing spring back to life, analysts say the recovery appears to be intact. But the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate remains a persistent thorn in the side of optimists, and economists expect the situation to worsen before it gets better.
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Many more Americans, even those with jobs, are feeling the pinch. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and those who are working part-time because of a lack of full-time positions, rose for much of last year. In January, it touched 16.5 percent, down from 17.3 percent in December.

It think I have it figured out: it has to do with alternate timelines, a seemingly evil timeless being made of smoke impersonating another man, a secret island existing outside of time and space, and wizards. Don't forget about the wizards.

Lesser wizard Paul Krugman explains that economics in general and the jobs numbers especially are all just a meaningless, confusing crapshoot and that nothing concrete can ever be drawn for the pointless void of numbers and math with which he has devoted his life to. OK, maybe he didn't say that, but he did say that these numbers were derived from multiple surveys and only rough indicators of economic strength. Yes yes, an endless nothing, existence is meaningless... we get it, Paul.

So what next? Will we shed more jobs while unemployment still falls? Will a discernible human ever get a new job in this country? Will these numbers spur or slow our elected betters in the Senate to actually start up on that jobs bill thing that they just had to kill health care reform in order to get to? Or are we all just going to continue to slog through a middling economy with 10% employment as nothing is done to improve the situation of actual Americans and we permanently teeter on the brink of total collapse? According to most economists, it's that last one. Oh well, good luck finding a job! It theoretically got easier, supposedly.

What the hell is happening?

I don't want to alarm you, but the natural order of things has been uprooted. In a realization that people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are rotten fuckers who should be left on a hill to be tormented by vultures, Harry Reid has been negotiating with the last two moderately sane Republicans, the ones from Maine, in order to get them on board for health care. I know you just grimaced right now, thinking about what further concessions will be made. But that's where it gets weird. Not only is Susan Collins offering up proposed changes to the bill in order to get her support, most of the changes....make the bill better. You're fucking with the natural order of things, Collins!

Collins met Monday with White House health reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle and Health and Human Services health reform director Jeanne Lambrew. The senator said she put several amendment requests on the table: raising the penalty on hospitals with high rates of hospital-acquired infections, changing the small business tax credit to prevent it from discouraging hiring and increasing wages and boosting the affordability of insurance.

My God, all of these things are largely good ideas on the merits that would expand the reach of reform. Does she not understand how "getting support" works? It's by making the bill worse. Hello? Plus, both Collins and Snowe are quite the pro-choice advocates and Ben Nelson's recent pledge to out-Stupak the House bill might further bring them aboard in a bid to, you know, protect things they actually believe in.

My world is spinning and I feel dizzy. I have to go sit down. It's just....using swing vote power to improve health care access for Americans and protect women's rights? In the Senate? I think the sun is going to explode any second now.

Guh?

So, uh, President Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the third sitting President and first in 90 years to win the award. In a surprise to everyone, Barry won the award without having that "peace" requirement that everyone else usually has on their Nobel resume. They're apparently grading on a curve.

The committee praised Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" during his nine months in office and singled out for special recognition Obama's call for a world free of nuclear weapons, which he first made in an April speech in Prague
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In response to questions from reporters in Oslo, who noted that Obama so far has made little concrete progress in achieving his lofty agenda, committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said he hoped the prize would add momentum to Obama's efforts. At the same time, Jagland said, "We have not given the prize for what may happen in the future. We are awarding Obama for what he has done in the past year. And we are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do."

Jagland specifically cited Obama's speech about Islam in Cairo last spring, as well as efforts to address nuclear proliferation and climate change and use established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue his goals. The committee -- made up of luminaries selected by the Norwegian government -- noted a profound shift in American policy and said Obama had "created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play."

I say again: Guh? That's strange, I've never seen a Nobel used to try to guilt someone into not escalating an armed conflict. Or someone say they hoped the award helped his future diplomatic endeavors, as if being President of the US isn't enough, he needs to be President of the US with a gold star on his lapel to be extra effective. Still though, Barry has tried very hard at outreach towards the Muslim world what with his speech there and all, made strides and agreements over nuclear non-proliferation, hosted a G20 event, has ratcheted back the inexplicable tensions the Bush Administration had with Russia by scrapping that missile defense, held that important "beer summit", seemed to make some progress with Iran, and has changed America's diplomatic posture from one of "intense pouting" to the arcane custom we refer to as "talking". Still....seems a bit light. Oh, I forgot he's not Bush. He is definitely not Bush. That's a plus. I guess it was just a down year for big diplomacy. It's sort of like when the Spurs won the NBA title during the 1998-99 lockout year.

Of course the same old critics came out to wail and moan at the award: the Taliban and the right wing of the GOP. Actually the fringe right's crazed disdain and sneering wasn't a surprise, but the Taliban kind of was. Who knew they had a lightning fast media office? So now we get to hear a few days worth of shrieking over diplomacy being gay and appeasement instead of interminable shrieking over death panels. At least it's a change from health care crazy to foreign policy crazy with a healthy dose of Euro-bashing.

So congrats, Barry. Excuse me; Nobel Prize winning Barry. Paul Krugman will show you the secret handshake. And hey, just think: if your Nobel acceptance speech is good enough and you take one of the diplomatic tracks you've started to the finish line, they'll give you a second one! Go back to back! Three-peat! Then you can rub that shit in the noses of assholes like Linus Pauling and the Office of the UN High Commission for Refugees.

Hawkeye for the gay guy

Good new gay community, a state supreme court has ruled that same-sex marriage is legal. That state is....Iowa? Rural Iowa? Heartland Iowa? The Iowa that's in America? We are talking about that Iowa, right, not some French island of Iowa in the Carribean? Well I'll be damned.

In an unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the right of same-sex couples to marry. The court, which was reviewing a district court decision allowing six gay couples to marry, found that “limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution”:

In a unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court today held that the Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.

The decision strikes the language from Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman. It further directs that the remaining statutory language be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage.

Iowa becomes the fourth state to legalize gay marriage and if the hysterical reactions of Iowa State Senate Republicans are any indication, it will become the second state to try to overturn that court ruling through a constitutional amendment. So there's that. But still, gay marriage and not civil unions or some such watered down version of rights, was viewed as constitutionally valid in a Midwest state's Supreme Court. Well done, Hawkeye State. We'll probably have to rescind the kudos after you codify discrimination into your Constitution, lest the gays take over the corn industry. But still, who would have thought? Iowa.

Our financial leaders

If you were one of the litany of people who thought Emperor of Cash Tim Geithner's bank bailout plan was....a tad on the vague side, well it seems there's a perfectly good reason for it: you see he.....LOOK OVER THERE! A SPIDER!

Just days before Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was scheduled to lay out his much-anticipated plan to deal with the toxic assets imperiling the financial system, he and his team made a sudden about-face.

According to several sources involved in the deliberations, Geithner had come to the conclusion that the strategies he and his team had spent weeks working on were too expensive, too complex and too risky for taxpayers.

They needed an alternative and found it in a previously considered initiative to pair private investments and public loans to try to buy the risky assets and take them off the books of banks. There was one problem: They didn't have enough time to work out many details or consult with others before the plan was supposed to be unveiled.
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Meanwhile, the sources said, Obama's senior economic advisers were hobbled in crafting the plan by a shortage of personnel. To date, the president has not nominated any assistant secretaries or undersecretaries at the Treasury, and the handful of mid-level staffers who have started work were still finding their offices and getting their building passes and BlackBerrys.
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But there still was not enough time to sculpt the detailed plan that the financial markets expected. In the end, Geithner and his colleagues decided that it would be better to take flak for being vague than publicly offer half-formed details that might later have to be revised. And ambiguity, the officials concluded, would make the plan an easier sell on Capitol Hill, as congressional leaders could be brought into the discussions of details rather than be presented a detailed plan as fait accompli.

Isn't it nice to see the man in charge of the financial sector bailout described in terms you would usually reserve for a forgetful 9 year old who left his class presentation until the night before, decided to quit because something good was on television, and hoped a furious writing session before first period combined with a litany of vagaries would somehow get him an A?

Furthermore, don't you like the fact that he spent weeks working on proposals that he deemed too risky, expensive, and complex? He had to know that from the start, didn't he? You don't just start work on bailing out an entire industry and then find out at the end it's all really complex and expensive. Then there's the the whole "Everyone's too stupid to understand/we'll tell you about it the day before/watch these rubes get their minds blown by my use of 'fiscal', 'sector', 'depreciation', and 'Keynesian'" tone of the new "We'll Wing It" plan. Not to mention you really gotta love throwing another half a trillion on a plan that got sketched out on a napkin at the bar at a TGI Friday's. This all bodes well for our financial future.

I'm just becoming convinced that everyone working in the financial and banking sectors is at least partially retarded. There aren't a lot of competing theories or evidence to the contrary.

Correlation does not imply causation

Remind me again when Geithner announced his plan?

The Geithner Plan

Treasury Money Overlord Tim Geithner unveiled his plan to spend the remaining $350 billion of "Throw Money at Banks and Pray to All of the Gods" fund. The consensus? No one has any idea what the fuck is going on because the plan is so vague.

Krugman thinks it might be a Trojan horse to sneak in a good policy and analyzes it for what it isn't, Justin Fox notes Geithner has no big plan but praises him for the openness of it, Felix Salmon seems baffled that this is the best thing Geithner could come up with after 11 weeks, Robert Reich isn't sure what Geithner just did but knows what he still has to do, Kevin Drum professes the plan as "clear as mud" and then go on to explain all the ways the vagaries make things hard to understand, and the WSJ is mad because Geithner still won't liquidate the poor to oil the machines of capitalism and think the plan is kinda vague.

So to sum up: it's vague, might be good, probably not horrible but not willing to rule out horrible, and some of the best experts in academia, news media, and bloggery have no clear idea what is going to happen. Also, after he announced this plan, the stock market dropped 3%. We're in the 7000's! Feel good now? It's not like its your money, you don't even have a job.

Obama/Petraeus '08

I must confess I don't fully understand the mind of the 'elected Republican' or warmongerus republicanus. Sure I didn't expect praise of Joe Biden from their end, hell I'm not praising it that much other than for the Howlin' Mad Murphy "Zing of the Day" quality he'll bring. So the cries that he didn't sufficiently blow Obama hard enough during the primary and once upon a time referred to McCain without cursing were expected. To some extent so was McCain's bizarre "Shoulda Picked Hillary" ad which appeals to all the bitter PUMA's that he hopes will ignore his horrid record on women's issues (no equal pay, all your uterus belong to us, pro free boner pills against free contraception, voted to gut family and medical leave, etc...) and his general right wingedness to vote for him based on pure Obama spite. It's Obama's fault for having the nerve to win.

Bridge collapsing evangelical, Minnesota Governor, and McCain VP hopeful Tim Pawlenty decided to go in another direction. Oh sure he hit on the "Biden is a political insider" thing, which is interesting considering the man he's stumping for, but he went for the gusto: he criticized Obama for not picking General Petraeus as his VP. Guh? Uh, OK Tim. That's not the direction I would have gone in, but uh, yeah, uh, Obama really dropped the ball on this one. How dare he not pick the sitting commander in Iraq. It's unconscionable. Democrats hate the military or something. Tim, next time don't go of script, freelance, or 23-skidoo an answer off the top of your head. It sounds crazy and weird. Just stick to Obama is a/an elitist/tax and spend liberal/Muslim/not ready to lead/liberal liberal liberal and Joe Biden is a/an consummate insider/blowhard/McCain lover/Muslim. It'll save us all brain pain.