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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (50314)	7/5/2004 9:03:23 PM
From: NOW	Respond to of 89467

great post! sadly very true not just of him, but of so many of us

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (50314)	7/5/2004 9:20:45 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

FWIW, I tend to agree quite a bit with Democrat Zell Miller. He is considered a genuine moderate US Senator by those who know him best. The following article by him accurately depicts what I have come to loath about all too many in the Democratic party..... I love my party but hate what it has become By ZELL MILLER Published on: 07/05/04 ajc.com <font size=4> I have been a proud member of the Democratic Party from the time I first breathed the Georgia mountain air. But lately I can barely recognize my once-great party. Between Al Gore's rants, Michael Moore's falsehoods, the felons-for-hire shenanigans of America Coming Together and Moveon.org's crazy conspiracy theories, the Democratic Party has become a coalition of the wild-eyed. Driven by a rabid desire to defeat President Bush, they seem eager to say and do anything to tear him apart. All the loudmouthed liberals were recently shouting in unison. Gore accused Bush of deliberately deceiving the American people before the Iraq war. According to Gore, Bush made up connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein to dupe us into Iraq. But as with so much of what Gore has said recently, it's just not true. As the Republican chairman and the Democratic co-chairman of the 9/11 commission said countless times, ties between al-Qaida and Iraq definitely existed. What we're not sure about is whether Saddam had anything to do with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And guess what? That's exactly what Bush said last year: <font color=blue>"We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11."<font color=black> So much for deception. Hollywood sleazemonger Moore recently released his latest movie. It throws around rumors and innuendos, trying to blame Bush for the heinous acts of terrorists. No wonder the French gave Moore their highest honor for filmmakers. Moore operates in Hollywood cities, where reality plays second fiddle to whatever outrageous fantasy you can create. It is absurd to think that Bush is responsible for terrorism. It existed well before he came into office. He's just the first president who's going head-on after the terrorists to stop them. Then there's the ultraliberal group America Coming Together. They don't officially work with any campaign, but the Associated Press reported that <font color=blue>"ACT is stocked with veteran Democratic political operatives, many with past ties to [Sen. John] Kerry and his advisers."<font color=black> Now these former Kerry advisers have come up with a brilliant plan to get him elected. They've actually been paying convicted felons to go door-to-door registering people to vote. Excuse me if I seem old fashioned, but I'd prefer not to have convicted felons showing up on my doorstep. Unfortunately for people in Missouri, Florida and Ohio, that's exactly what's happening. And these aren't petty criminals. According to the Associated Press, these paid canvassers have been convicted of burglary, forgery, drug dealing, assault and sex offenses. Politics does make strange bed-felons. And of course we've all heard the harangues from Moveon.org, the far-left political organization that tries to stir up anger about President Bush. These folks became famous when they put a couple of ads on their Web site that compared the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler. Then a few weeks ago, they hosted a big speech by George Soros, the billionaire bankroller of the Bush-bashers. Soros claimed that Bush's leadership in the war on terror has turned Americans from victims of terrorism into perpetrators. As crazy as these charges sound, more and more they seem to represent the standard thinking among Kerry Democrats. After all, right before Soros spoke, one of my Democratic Senate colleagues introduced him by saying,<font color=blue> "We need people like George Soros, who is fearless and willing to step up when it counts."<font color=black> I'll tell you, if we need people like Soros speaking for our party, then we are in a whole heap of trouble. It's time for responsible people to speak up and keep this election from becoming a sideshow of disgusting claims and hysterical attacks. More of my fellow Democrats — including Kerry — need to put America first and turn their backs on the wild-eyed partisans who want to tear us apart. I still love the Democratic Party — the party of Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy. But the more screaming and ranting I hear, the more I wonder whether those Democratic heroes of old would find much to be proud of today.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (50314)	7/5/2004 11:43:30 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Indictment of Enron's Lay Seen Next Week Message 20276631 jw: this is happening just like clockwork so GW Bush can pardon Kenny Boy on the way out of office (next January). -s2@NothingSurprisesMeAnymore.com

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (50314)	7/6/2004 12:01:30 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

June Jobs Report: A Reality Check When does 77,000 actually equal 112,000? Only in the attempt to spin this month's jobs report into something remotely favorable to the Bush Administration. When we tuned in last month, the estimate for total nonfarm payrolls stood at 131.224 million. This month's nonfarm payroll estimate weighed in at 131.301 million, or 77,000 higher. But the announcement was made that 112,000 jobs were created in June, simply because the BLS corrected the last couple of months downward, losing 35,000 jobs in the process. After that adjustment, the new figure is indeed 112,000 higher than the new figure for last month. But wait, there's more. The "birth/death model", the BLS's statistical technique for guesstimating the number of jobs they think were created by businesses they don't know exist yet, added 182,000 jobs to this month's (unseasonally adjusted) total. (See earlier post for an explanation of how the BLS imputes the existence of new jobs from new businesses by looking at the number of jobs destroyed by recently deceased businesses.) When you do all the math involved, it turns out that the BLS actually detected a job LOSS of about 68,000 jobs through it's direct sample measurements, and that only by virtue of applying the birth/death statistical fiction could any positive number be discussed at all. But Even That's Not All. In that recent blog entry "Most of Those New Jobs Reported Are Imaginary", I calculated that 85% of the new jobs touted as created since March 2003 are the imaginary product of statistical fiction. Updating the charts and numbers with the just-announced June numbers and the April and May downward revisions, it's even more drastic. At this point only 97,000 of the 1,380,000 jobs purported to have been created since March 2003 were actually measured by the BLS sample surveys. The other 93% were "imputed" by the birth/death model. Here's the updated graph: So What's It Mean? It means that job growth is far less robust than what's been advertised. That carries with it all kinds of implications for stock markets, interest rates and business decisions. So Caveat Emptor. Here's what it doesn't mean: It doesn't mean the BLS are a bunch of lying scoundrels. The birth/death model is a serious attempt to measure something real, albeit undetectable: the number of jobs created by new enterprises that haven't checked in with the unemployment insurance offices that the BLS samples to collect it's establishment job data. The BLS has been completely straightforward in it's admissions of the shortcomings of the statistical estimation techniques it uses to guess at the undetectable. The BLS has also said that birth/death modeling stinks at detecting changing trends. (I'm liberally paraphrasing.) It also doesn't necessarily mean that all the jobs imagined by the birth/death model don't exist. SOME of them do, since there has to be some new businesses out there that DID create some jobs that haven't reported in to their state bureaucracies yet. However, when looking at other employment measures, it doesn't look too good for too many of those imputed jobs to be real. We've been stuck at 5.6% unemployment for months now. The number of unemployed is up 84,000 from April to June. There is very little evidence that we have anything more than the same "jobless recovery" we've been experiencing for months. If most of these imputed jobs have not come to pass in reality, then we should see that in ongoing lackluster jobs reports, as the unrealistic projections of the birth/death model continue to be reconciled with reality and month after month of data ends up being revised downward gradually. June's BLS release at least follows this pattern. Footnotes There's been an ongoing discussion about my methodology in the comments section of my previous post. Thanks to a handy and brand new FAQ posted at the BLS site, many of the issues in question are now put to rest. Some comments about all of this are posted to the comments page of this post. rtorgerson.blogspot.com