No surprise in the latest CNN poll numbers on the President’s handling of the economy:

Only a third of all Americans approve of how President Barack Obama is handling the economy, according to a new national survey. And with a CNN/ORC International Poll also indicating that more than three-quarters of the public say the country is in bad shape right now, there’s little wonder why the president is getting such low marks.

65% disapprove of the President’s job on the economy, and it looks like under 25% are the only ones happy with where the country is at.

That is because there is no sign of economic growth out there in the workforce. As we have seen for months on end the liberals’ lame stimulus bill did nothing but pile up massive debt on our children and grandchildren. It did not create economic growth.

The unemployment level appears flat only because the workforce is shrinking as millions of able Americans give up hope of a real career style job. For months (here, here, here and here) I have shown how the stable U3 unemployment number is a sad fiction, that when you adjust for where the workforce should be right now based on population and historic trends, the unemployment is in the 10.5+% range. Here is the July graph as an example:

Click to enlarge. The adjusted U3 unemployment for July, based on a nominal workforce size (the red line) was 10.7% – and rising. We see the same basic pattern going back for months now (follow the links above, stretching back to February 2011). Which means this is not an aberration for one month but a harsh reality that has been dogging us all year long.

This week’s unemployment report is one more in a seemingly endless chain of weekly reports showing a stagnant, barely above-water economy. In fact, I could argue that we are slowly sinking since the workforce keeps shrinking, making all these DoL statistics look flat when they aren’t. This week’s first time claims are down, but only after last week’s claims were adjusted way up (from 5,000 new claims to 9,000 new claims). In terms of first time claims (the myopic focus of pundits and the media) – it looks to be a wash.

But dig deeper (or just scroll down the page) and the picture gets much darker. From August 6 to August 13 (one bloody week) the number of people on some form of unemployment shot up by 45,531. One week! Imagine if that went on for any number of weeks?

Worse yet, the number on EUC – the last vestige of the unemployed (and thus filled with the long term unemployed) – we see the total rise by 31,261 to a mind boggling 3,118,042 people who are now unemployed for many, many months. DoL states the total number of people on any form of unemployment support is 7,336,276. That means 42% of those on unemployment have been there a long, long time.

My guess is the August unemployment numbers are going to be bad again, and under reported again since the DoL is not going to fix its formula any time soon. I also predict the economic numbers for the 3rd quarter, which just ended yesterday, will not be that good. The federal government is strangling small business into oblivion with pointless mandates and regulations (see here for one idiotic example) and screwed up government take overs (a.k.a. Obamacare).

Now we patiently and nervously wait for 2012 and change that we can count on. The only question now is how many more will be hurt before we can turn this ship away from liberal fantasy land (and all the real pain that comes with it).

Update: Hot Air notices that finally, months into this disaster, the liberal news outlets dropped ‘unexpectedly’ and went with ‘expected’. At least for now!

Tags: Jobless Claims, US Economy, Weekly Unemployment

Boy, if our lame duck President needed to emphasize how much political capital he has lost, all he needed to do was try and demand time in front of Congress late in the game. Which he of course did. And the petulant POTUS tried to upstage a GOP presidential candidate debate to boot!

Since Obama has spent 2.5 years bumbling on jobs and the economy, I am sure we can all wait a day or two longer for his next set of tired and useless proposals. The House Speaker is not impressed either and has told POTUS he can come the day after the debate (with some good solid rational to go with it).

So what is the POTUS’ next move?

Will he pout and whine?

Will he stand outside Congress and demand to be let in?

Will he cry “Racists!”?

What, pray tell, is there for him to do but to pull his foot out of his mouth and come the next day???

Major Update: Some have questioned whether it is even possible to do plane rides given the path of the bus tour. After doing some Google Map analysis I agree that the story seems to be a fraud. There are no airports large enough to accommodate Air Force One near many of the stops. And it would be just as easy to drive to the next stop as go to the nearest airport large enough  for Air Force One and cargo planes large enough to transport the buses. Mea Culpa – should have done this check yesterday. Looks like someone fed us all a bit of fiction.

I can’t believe this is true. Obama did not ride the bus on his big bus tour. He flew on Air Force One between stops and then rode a couple of miles pretending to ride the bus through America.

>An AP reporter said that Obama might have ridden these expensive buses only one mile at each stop. Therefore, it wasn’t really a “BUS TOUR”! Obama spent most of the “BUS TOUR” on an airplane traveling between stops. It looks like Obama has scammed the American people again……..with the help of the liberal media.

Emphasis mine. If the drama-media is complicit in staging this fiction – as they clearly are – then we should all just turn our backs on them and look elsewhere for news. It seems our ‘news’ is more Hollywood than fact these days. I fail to see the point in wasting time watching journalism majors pretend they have a clue what is going on around them, or watch them make things up like this. Really, why bother – life is too short.

Just think of the outrage if a GOP President pretended to travel among the poor masses using a secure form of mass transit?

Good Lord, help us make it through the next year until November 2012. H/T reader Kathie

I am a bit surprised on how well Rick Perry is doing so quickly. I was concerned the libertarian, anti-big-government fires may have died down a bit since the 2010 elections. All indications are that is not the case.They are as white hot as ever (since DC has produced nothing but empty promises and massive spending since).

Romney was always the big concern for much of the right because:

1. His Romney-Care in MA was a big-government take over of commercial, private insurance – just like Obama-Care
2. His belief in man-made, CO2 driven global warming would send him down the same route of expensive energy and ridiculous regulations Obama is on
3. His belief government had solutions to most problems is identical, if only less radical, than views held by Obama, Reid and Pelosi.

All of these factors made Romney toxic to this right-leaning independent. I would take McCain over Romney any day, and I was not a big McCain fan in the first place. I wager I am not alone in seeing Romney as just another political variant on the current madness

When Perry came into the 2012 presidential race he said things in Texas-clarity that are strongly held in the electorate. He immediately promised to work to limit government messing with our lives (i.e., pursuit of life, liberty and happiness). He has properly belittled the debunked theories of AGW (man-made global warming), as more and more data comes in and scientifically disproves all aspects of that dead concept. And he has taken aim at Obamacare and our financially shaky entitlements.

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There is a rule on NASA missions that we can never design or implement a mission which relies on foreign resources to succeed or be safe. It has been a major barrier to international joint efforts forever because just about everything in a space mission is critical to its success. You can’t have a successful Hubble, for example, if you can’t get it into orbit, can’t communicate with it on a daily basis, can’t respond quickly to anomalies. We really don’t waste money on the systems (in most cases) at NASA over frivolous items. We do have serious problems with process and paperwork – which consumes over half the resources committed to a mission. We also have waste, abuse and fraud in isolated cases. But we make sure the core infrastructure is American and incapable of being compromised by other nations.

The norm is for a  mission to be self sufficient in terms of US resources to operate within all expected and emergency scenarios. Until Obama, Pelosi and Reid took charge that is.

Now the International Space Station is incapable of being supported by American technology and resources. Not since the Democrat fools in the last Congress and this White House retired the space shuttle fleet AND ALSO cancelled the program to replace that fleet with another (cheaper) mode of transportation (i.e., the Orion program):

The Obama Administration’s proposed cancellation of the Constellation program in February 2010 and was signed into law October 11, [2010]

This job killing myopic act illustrates the clumsy, unthinking rashness of this White House and the last Congress. Apparently the President wanted Americans with shovels working, not exploring space and holding onto our technical edge in that final frontier of humanity. This White House is the first since Kennedy to halt America’s leadership in having people in space.

Now we see that we finished decades of investment and dangerous space walking work on the International Space Station just in time for Obama to force us to abandon it because of his short sightedness and – let’s be honest here – incompetence:

Astronauts may need to take the unprecedented step of temporarily abandoning the International Space Station if last week’s Russian launch accident prevents new crews from flying there this fall.

Until officials figure out what went wrong with Russia’s essential Soyuz rockets, there will be no way to launch any more astronauts before the current residents have to leave in mid-November.

As I said previously (see here, here and here), this has got to be the biggest screw up of all time. Last November humanity had just celebrated a continuous decade in space. Think about that – humanity’s first ever,  continuous and long term presence off planet. And less than a year later – because the Democrats are a bunch of clueless, pretend know-it-alls – we have to abandon this outpost in space. Decades of work, billions of dollars spent, the sacrifice of lives and untold careers – and Obama throws it un-curiously away.

And this is helping our nation’s critical jobs and economic situation how again?

Long post title, but it is really important to separate the successes surrounding hurricane Irene from the flakes. Flakes run around claiming bald face lies, like how Irene was caused by Global Warming. On the other hand, the National Weather Service (NWS) and National Hurricane Center (NHC) pretty much succeeded – though they need to resist the drama-media’s siren song when it comes to focusing on ‘worst case’ scenarios.

Or in the case of a Cat 3 hitting NYC, they need to avoid pathological case scenarios. These are scenarios so rare it is impossible to plan or prepare from them. For example, it is technically possible for every nation on the coast of an ocean to build for the threat of a 30 foot tsnumai – something we have seen twice in the last 11 years (once in Japan and once in the Indian Ocean). But the problem here is these kinds of events are extremely rare, so do we build everywhere for them?

What about 9.0 earthquakes? 3 foot blizzards? Comet or asteroid impacts? We cannot afford to make every home, restaurant, store and office building immune to all the natural disasters we know can hit us at any point in time. So we build and prepare to the reasonable spectrum of cases, and then hope we never see anything bigger. Katrina was a great example of missing the point.

In Mississippi, where the storm hit strongest, the coast was wiped clean of humanity’s structures. But the evacuation orders were heeded and very few people lost their lives. In New Orleans the city actually weathered the storm, but lack of maintenance on the city’s levies (due to funneling those dollars to special projects by corrupt politicians) combined with bad decisions not to evacuate by the Mayor and Governor of that state, led to a disaster that NEED NOT HAPPEN. Unlike Mississippi, where nothing humanity could do would stop Mother Nature, New Orleans showed what happens when we don’t maintain plans and preparedness. Human screw ups caused New Orleans – and no amount of pointing at President Bush is going to change that fact.

So here is what the NWS and NHC got right with Irene – they figured out early on WHERE the storm would hit:

By Monday night, five days before Irene first hit the East Coast, the hurricane center figured the storm would come ashore around the North Carolina-South Carolina border. By Tuesday night, they predicted it would rake the coast. And on Friday morning – 24 hours before landfall – they had the storm’s next day location to within 10 miles or so.

Twenty years ago, 24-hour forecasts were lucky if they got it right within 100 miles and the average 36-hour forecast within 146 miles. With Irene, that was about the accuracy of the five-day forecast.

“This is a gold medal forecast,” retired hurricane center director Max Mayfield said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt: I think they saved lives.”

There is no doubt people were saved. I remember the damage a hurricane could inflict in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The storms have not changed in force, the people have been forewarned and able to make decisions.

For those short sighted fools who think we don’t need the NWS this is what we invested our money in all these years – the ability to warn people precisely. Which is why most of us on the Eastern Seaboard did not have to be panicked or concerned. Those in the path of the storm surge and rain had to take precautions. But we do this all the time and every year. To this day, the worst flooding we had in my house was not from Hurricanes coming through but from 3 days of rain from a Nor’ Easter. Panicking the entire coast was not necessary. Warning those who needed to know was a necessity. Somehow the balance was lost this time.

However, what the NWS and NHC (and NO ONE) can predict is the hour by hour energy or life of the storm:

They knew where it was going. But what it would do when it got there was another matter.

Predicting a storm’s strength still baffles meteorologists. Every giant step in figuring out the path highlights how little progress they’ve made on another crucial question: How strong?

This is why we send planes into hurricanes 3-4 times a day to take numerous measurements across the structure – the cyclone as a system interacting with the atmosphere and ocean as independent systems is too complex. We don’t have the science yet to work this out even to predict out 4-6 hours what will happen (which goes to show you how silly it is for some to think they can predict out years an decades in advance what our global climate will be, when local climate still baffles us a week out).

The hype around Irene was from the big-government left-wing and drama-media, trying to prove they are still viable and important to society. They are not. Sober and balanced communication of what the NWS and NHC models were saying would have been plenty and sufficient. Warnings on times and locales, breadth of wind and rain, and hourly checks on strength are all people need to avoid harm.

Those who seek out danger tend to be injured because they are in need of a life lesson, they cannot be helped. And then there will always be the acts of God, such as the lightening strike or the tree that finally falls. That comes with the territory of being alive.

Big government and drama media were a useless irritants in this case. We did not need all the staged hype (news casters should not be trying to act out while normal folks walk by in the background). Just send out the warnings, we are more than capable of processing and acting on the data ourselves.

Update: To those who claim hurricanes are worse now than ever before, a little real data is in order (from WUWT – click to enlarge):

As can plainly be seen, we are actually experiences a historic LOW in intense cyclonic storms here on Planet Earth.

OK, this has gotten way out of control. The NY Times is running an article about Irene that is 100% rubbish and 100% Global Warming propaganda:

The scale of Hurricane Irene, which could cause more extensive damage along the Eastern Seaboard than any storm in decades, is reviving an old question: are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change?

Emphasis mine. Apparently the NY Times is not aware that 8 years is not a longer time span than ‘decades’. In 2003 a little ‘ol Cat 2 hurricane (not a middling Cat 1 such as Irene) hit the “Eastern Seaboard”, rearranging the outer banks and pitching the DC area into darkness for days.

A reminder of the power Isabelle applied to the Outer Banks:

 

There was no such damage from Irene this weekend, so the NY Times wrote a bald faced lie.

I live in the DC area, and recall the power issues we had from Isabelle only 8 short years ago.

The result was thousands of trees being riped apart and toppled in the area, causing extensive property damage and unprecendented power outages.

Approximately 2 million area residents were put in the dark.  It took over a week to restore power in all areas, despite crews being brought in from far away.

Again, the NY Times has published a shabby bit of political propaganda that is completely false. Irene was  much less powerful than Isabelle and was overblown and exaggerated, just like the AGW hype has been for decades. The NY Times is now a house of fiction and drama, not a news source. The NY Times has drunk the green Kool-Aid and is completing the destruction of what tiny credibility it had left. This is unforgivable. Either the folks at the NY Times  have the attenti0n span (and IQ) of a gnat, or they are high paid liars.

Either way, they have no credibility after this POS.

Tags: Global Warming, Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Isabelle

Irene made fools of the media, the Pols and the nanny state. They all cried “wolf!” and no wolf showed up.

Case 1:

Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.”

The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.

…

The images summed up Hurricane Irene – the media and the United States federal government trying to live up to their own doom-laden warnings and predictions while a sizeable number of ordinary Americans just carried on as normal and even made gentle fun of all the fuss.

Case 2:

With not much to report on the island of Manhattan, the cable news channels switched to places like Long Beach, Long Island, where such correspondents as NBC’s Al Roker and CNN’s John King delivered their wind-whipped reports. “It looks pretty hurricane-ish to me,” Fox anchor Shep Smith said as reporter Jonathan Hunt, British and breathless, showed a hotel parking lot under a foot and a half of water.

Long Beach, it should be noted, is a narrow barrier island three feet above sea level and prone to flooding.

Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going wall to wall for days with dire warnings about what would turn out to be a Category 1 hurricane, the lowest possible ranking. “Cable news is scaring the crap out of me, and I WORK in cable news,” Bloomberg correspondent Lizzie O’Leary tweeted.

Major Update: WUWT has a hit list of ‘staged’ dram from yesterday by the news media. Truly pathetic. And WUWT also tackles the silliness if blaming the NWS, – end update

Fox News has just produced one of the dumbest articles on the size of government I have ever seen. They question whether the nation needs the National Weather Service – I kid you not:

While Americans ought to prepare for the coming storm, federal dollars need not subsidize their preparations. Although it might sound outrageous, the truth is that the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Weather Service, are relics from America’s past that have actually outlived their usefulness.

…

Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds. It issues severe weather advisories and hijacks local radio and television stations to get the message out. It presumes that citizens do not pay attention to the weather and so it must force important, perhaps lifesaving, information upon them.

As I noted yesterday the news media hype over Irene was pathetic – but that is the news media, not the NWS. The weather service, operating under NOAA, expends enormous money to fly sophisticated weather satellites and radar stations around the nation. It has invested many millions in perfecting the art of forecasting so that we have a prayer of understanding where danger may come. The fact New Orleans ignored the warnings of Katrina is not the NWS fault, nor was the hype of Irene.

The fact is the news media and political left wing in power wanted to demonstrate the importance of big government, and over played it horribly. Even GOP governors in NJ and VA went too far. When the YMCA in my town closes down in a drizzle we have become wimps. People need to be responsible for themselves and loved ones. The government cannot cover everyone every minute of the day. This responsibility begins with driving safely and taking care of your health. It continues into not doing things you are physically incapable of performing -like swimming in a raging surf. Some people can, most cannot.

So to straighten Fox News out we do need the NWS. They do save lives and protect people, and their service has not disappeared but grown. Because of their information the flying public dodges dangerous weather every day of the year, and people do not die in tornadoes by the hundreds.

What we don’t need is the drama-queen news media and the know-it-all bureaucrats and pols. Those can go. The author was right that yesterday’s 24×7 soap opera was annoying as hell. But don’t shoot the messenger, shoot the morons who pushed them onto the air waves to remind us we can easily live without the nanny state. Yesterday sealed the fate of big government types.

Addendum: Back to the moronic nanny state moves, the all time bozo-award goes to Mayor Bloomberg for turning off elevators in NYC’s massive skyscrapers. Bloomberg feared someone may get stuck if the power went off, but apparently was oblivious to the risks in cramming stairwells with people, and what would happen if people with heart conditions missed their rides and had to hike up tens of stories to get home. Personally, this was one of the dumbest rationales I have ever seen.

Let’s look at Ocean City, MD, which was in the target zone and a low level area right on the Atlantic:

In the resort town of Ocean City, Md., damage appeared minimal. A few small trees along a major road had been uprooted. Scattered piles of sand about two feet high covered areas of the boardwalk. The end of a wooden pier was sagging and a wooden railing was askew.

At the Quietstorm surf shop on the boardwalk, part of a wall where the shop’s name is advertised had been torn off, exposing wiring and scattering insulation. Locals, though, said they had seen worse during ordinary storms.

It’s amazing humankind survived all those millennium to reach this point of fragility.

Addendum_2: The other clown moment yesterday was Wolf Blitzer reporting from DC in a massive coat, perfectly collared-up to look dashing, while it drizzled in the background. Watching from only a few miles away in VA I had to laugh because the air temperature was hot and humid and Wolf was wearing this massive red coat, obviously baking in the heat and lights. Can anyone say ‘staged’?

Tags: Hurricane Irene, News Media

Why anyone listens to the morons on the green left any more is the only mystery left surrounding the now disproved theory of CO2 induced global warming.They are running around like Chicken Little screaming ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling’ at each normal weather event now.

In a truly cosmic case of irony, the cries of doom prior to Irene landing came just as all the energy was dissipating from that storm and bringing the East Coast of America an above average wet weekend. For example take Brad Johnson, hand-wringer extraordinaire:

Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as a Category Two storm, and is expected to track a path of destruction up the densely populated Atlantic coast, with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordering the first-ever mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas of the city. As the U.S. government report “Global Climate Change Impacts in the US” summarized in 2009, warming of the oceans is causing Atlantic hurricanes to become more intense and dangerous:

Before Brad could even catch is frightened breathe, Irene was falling apart yesterday afternoon. By this morning it limped to shore a Cat 1. Sadly, Brad is not the only easily excitable green lefty out there. Mayor Bloomberg probably pulled the trigger a little too quickly based on the ridiculous hype this storm has received. The Nanny state went into pure and pathetic melt down yesterday, and is not looking good this morning. Remember the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” folks.

I suggest we remember humankind has survived much worse than this many times in our history, usually with much less technology and basically no warning at all. It is strange that all our fancy modern warnings have produced is rampant fear mongering- instead of sober preparations.

Update: More over at Hot Air (aptly named today).

Tags: Global Warming, Hurricane Irene