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Figures don't always tell the story. Possibly time will tell more than the figures and hype (See 1 below.)
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Bernie Marcus' comments regarding military healthcare. (See 2 below.)
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U.N. replaces Congress?
Will someone explain how we are now getting permission from the UN to do something militarily somewhere in the world instead of going to Congress?
Is this not the start of integrating ourselves into a Soros type world order, by-passing congress? Isn't this what O has been saber rattling about---going around congress?
Next thing you know the UN restrictions on gun ownership will attempt to be applied by this administration--
Subject: Panetta: 'International Permission' Trumps Congressional Permission For Military Actions
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Even Santorum is beginning to understand what voters are keenly interested in and as the campaign gets closer to the end voters will begin to signal what truly interests them and what was emphasized in the early stages will fade.
Candidates, worth their salt, should learn along the way as voters begin to send signals. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
1)Analysis: Quirks in jobless data could bite Obama
Thu, Mar 08 09:04 AM EST
By Jason Lange
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The sharp winter decline in the unemployment rate has put a spring in President Barack Obama's step ahead of his re-election bid. But some economists think quirks in the jobless data mean progress could stall out soon.
Several Wall Street economists believe the government is mismeasuring seasonal shifts in the labor market, and suggest the jobless rate's sharp winter drop was partly an illusion.
If their research is on the mark, the unemployment rate could change little in the coming months as pay back, robbing the Obama campaign of what otherwise might have been steady progress in the lead up to the election.
That could deny Obama the crucial support of swing voters in battleground states who might be swayed by a fall in unemployment in the months before the election.
"We think that the improvement over the last few months dramatically overstates the underlying improvement," said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs in New York.
"You will not see that rate of improvement going forward."
Goldman Sachs expects the jobless rate to end the year at 8.2 percent, barely below January's reading of 8.3 percent.
The unemployment rate has fallen by six-tenths of a percentage point from October's level of 8.9 percent. That is an unusually rapid decline and a growing band of optimists expect it to fall below 8 percent by year end.
But the recent steep drops have puzzled analysts who question whether the economy was growing fast enough to bring unemployment down so quickly.
Searching for an explanation, several Wall Street economists have crunched the unemployment numbers and now believe the darkest days of the 2007-2009 recession left a lasting impact, distorting the outcome of the government's adjustments for normal winter lulls in employment.
The government uses computer programs to filter out seasonal changes like the drop in construction jobs every winter. Without these adjustments, it would be harder to gauge the health of the labor market, as the jobless rate might rise every winter when it gets too cold to work outside. The raw unadjusted rates rose in both December and January, for example.
But because the computer programs make adjustments based on what happened in the recent past, the millions of jobs lost during the winter of 2008-2009 may have tricked the machines into expecting the winters that followed would be similarly bad.
And when the raw data for jobless rates did not rise as much as expected this winter, the computer programs appear to have over-adjusted the data downward, resulting in big drops in unemployment, JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli wrote in a note on Tuesday. In hindsight, some researchers on Wall Street argue the same effect was present last winter.
Even the Federal Reserve is puzzled by the sharp declines in the jobless rate. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said officials do not expect further substantial drops this year, and economists at the central bank are studying what lies behind the recent apparent improvements in the labor market.
February jobs numbers are due on Friday and the unemployment rate is seen holding steady.
AUTUMN HEADWINDS
Potentially worrisome for Obama, who stands for re-election on November 6, is that the Wall Street research suggests the seasonal adjustments make it less likely the unemployment rate will continue declining through the summer and fall.
According to Nomura's research, this effect could be pronounced in the October employment report due on November 2, four days before the election. Even if the underlying jobs market is slowly improving, the seasonal adjustment could make a mediocre October jobless rate climb upward.
"You could see a rise in unemployment a few days before the election," said Jeff Greenberg, an economist at Nomura in New York.
The government analysts who produce the data defend their methods for adjusting the numbers. Some real shifts in seasonal employment may have taken hold during the recession, meaning the winter of 2008-2009 may not have been an anomaly.
They argue that excluding the grim winter of 2008-2009, as the Wall Street economists have in their research, is a judgment call that might eventually prove to be wrong
"We don't want to change our seasonal adjustment methodologies on the fly," said Tom Nardone, who helps oversee the Labor Department's efforts to measure employment.
HIGH STAKES
Still, the department has made changes to other procedures after getting stung by the recession. Last year, it tweaked the way it estimates how many companies are starting up or closing down. Problems with a prior model led the government to underestimate job losses in 2008 and 2009.
Other organizations are also modifying their reports to take into account seasonal adjustment issues.
The private Institute for Supply Management in January revised seven years of data on manufacturing and the service sector, tweaking the way it seasonally adjusts the readings to treat parts of the winter of 2008-2009 as anomalous.
The Fed made similar adjustments last year to its data on industrial output. And the U.S. Census Bureau, which collects much of the economic data released by the government, is also looking into the recession's impact.
"The Census Bureau is fully aware of the particular challenges the Great Recession posed in these procedures," Mark Doms, the agency's chief economist, said in an e-mail.
Seasonal adjustment issues would not be enough to change the unemployment rate's long-term trend. The math involved takes gains from one part of the year and moves them to another. But they could take away some of the recent wind gathering in Obama's sails.
No U.S. president since World War Two has won re-election with an unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. Some political analysts, however, say it is the direction of the unemployment rate, rather than its level, that matters most to voters.
If the seasonal adjustment bites into labor data in the fall, it might affect the decisions of voters who don't already lean toward Republicans or Democrats, said James Thurber, a political scientist at American University in Washington.
Those independent voters, who are particularly important in states with close races, can wait longer than others to make up their minds.
"If the unemployment rate stagnates, it will be harder for Obama to win in the battleground states," said Thurber.
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2) "Dick,
My apologies for not writing to you earlier. Both Phil and I were fascinated by your close knit community at Skidaway Island...I hope that my discussions resonated with the group that evening. I left all the political prognostications up to you.
I saw the attached article on the President’s new policy on healthcare for the troops and was rather upset by it. I do many interviews for Operation Share, which as you know is treatment that we have at The Shepherd Center in Atlanta for our active and inactive troops with post-traumatic stress disorder and spinal cord injuries. We are fighting constantly to get the same treatments available to the lowest workers for the Federal government that is denied to our military.
It is amazing that in this proposal the troops, who evidently won’t have a strong lobby, are getting shafted again. You’ll notice that the DOE employees are unaffected while those who carry 90-pound armor are denied. I don’t believe that the American people want to see this happen but I doubt the NY Times will be making much of it. I agree with you on act of valor. As you know the critics basically panned it which is obvious. These courageous people deserve kudos and instead they’re getting the shaft.
Best wishes,
Bernie"
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3)Santorum and Freedom
Santorum has surfaced a concern about Obama's economic policies and the issue of personal freedom.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
America's long-slog presidential campaigns are a process of discovery. Candidates, voters and the press criss-cross a complex nation trying to discover where the public mind will be the first Tuesday in November. No candidate has had a more interesting journey through 2012's campaign frontier than Rick Santorum.
Few are going to forget Sen. Santorum in the early debates, stuck in the left-field bleachers, begging to be heard over such center-ring heavyweights as Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. In August, no one thought this guy would be toe-to-toe with the Romney machine in March. What happened?
I went to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Monday to find out. Out of 1,189,530 votes cast the next day in bellwether Ohio, Mr. Santorum lost to Mitt Romney by only 10,288, at last count. He's doing something right, and what one learned in Cuyahoga Falls, an Akron suburb, is that it doesn't have much to do with the famous Santorum controversies over social issues. It's about ObamaCare. And it's about the idea of freedom.
What Mr. Santorum has discovered in this campaign is that for a large number of voters, a connection has surfaced between Barack Obama's economic policies and the issue of personal freedom. The potency of the latter is what's new, and a vulnerability for this presidency.
Freedom, or liberty, is a staple of conservative politics. Ron Paul speaks about "liberty" as libertarian philosophy, and that has drawn new support. In the Santorum version it comes out as "freedom," and it wells up from something more akin to the "Don't tread on me" motto and coiled rattlesnake sewn into the famous yellow Gadsden flag created before the American Revolution. The Gadsden flag was a staple at tea party rallies two years ago.
Rick Santorum has linked these concerns about the status of personal freedom directly to ObamaCare and beyond that to the broader policy legacy of Obama administration.
His 35-minute speech in Cuyahoga Falls touched an array of subjects that drew applause. But at the halfway point, when he tore into ObamaCare, his mostly working-class audience exploded into applause and cries of "Rick! Rick! Rick!"
Mr. Santorum didn't get this response by discussing health-insurance exchanges and guaranteed issue. He told these people that ObamaCare "is usurping your rights. It is creating a culture of dependency. Every single American will be dependent on government, thanks to ObamaCare. There is no more important issue in this race. It magnifies all that is wrong with what this president is trying to do." His call for repeal produced the explosion.
He followed with an tight description of how he understands the terms of the election: "This race is coming down to the economy, the deficit and control of your life, which is ObamaCare." (There was no mention of contraception, gays or the role of women.)
In any other election, complaining about the size of government might be GOP boilerplate. Not now. Mr. Santorum put the current moment's elevated concern about government in broader context. Of regulation, he said: "There's been this huge explosion of the federal government. . . . I've talked to so many business people who say, 'I could live with Clinton, Bush, it was a little better, but I'm spending all my time trying to figure out what this president is doing next to me.'"
People could live with big. It's too big that's getting to them. Under the Obama presidency, something outside the norm happened. Amid ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the $800 billion stimulus injection and a federal spending boom, something snapped in the steady-state relationship between many citizens and Washington. A lot of people feel the government, finally, is really starting to crowd them. It has made them uneasy. For the Santorum audience, the call-and-response word to push back against the unease is "freedom."
One can also describe this sense of dread in dry numbers. In the postwar period, spending as a percentage of GDP has been about 20%. The four-year Obama average is 24% of GDP, without ObamaCare's costs. In a $15 trillion economy, this is a phenomenal increase in the government's piece of American life.
Does it make upper-middle class, suburban independents uncomfortable to see that Mr. Santorum's working-class audiences push back by yelling "freedom"? Perhaps, but maybe it's also true that upscale voters have their own way of describing the Obama-era unease. Their less rustic version is finding its way into votes for Mitt Romney. Alas, Mr. Romney is the only GOP candidate who won't or can't deploy on his own behalf that one powerful, damning word Barack Obama doesn't want to hear: mandate.
Rick Santorum should stay in the race, repeating from now till summer the perverse link between the ObamaCare mandate and the American idea of freedom. It looks like the best argument the GOP nominee will have for a win in November.
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