New Unemployment Data Reveals a Depressing State of Affairs

After a two-week delay, thanks to the good old government shutdown, the September jobs report was released on Tuesday.
The big takeaway – at least, according to most mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal – is that the unemployment rate dropped from 7.3% to 7.2%.
Keep in mind, only four years ago, the headline unemployment rate stood at a staggering 10%.
So the labor market is improving, right? Wrong!
The official government unemployment rate is nothing but a statistical deception.
With that in mind, it’s time to serve up a big dollop of truth with the help of a timely chart. Not only can you handle it, you deserve it!
The true unemployment situation holds profound investment implications.
Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
The U.S. economy added 148,000 jobs in September.
Economists expected more (180,000). But the August number was revised up by 24,000 jobs.
So no one really panicked about the miss. Especially since the unemployment rate managed to tick a tenth of a percentage point lower.
Here’s the problem…
You’d think a downtick in the unemployment rate would mean that more people are employed.
However, there actually aren’t more people working. Not when we dissect the data based on the percentage of able-bodied Americans.
Turns out, the number of Americans 16 years or older who have decided not to participate in the nation’s labor force increased by another 136,000 in September.
All told, a record 90,609,000 Americans don’t have a job – and aren’t looking for one, either.
In turn, the labor force participation rate (the percentage of Americans who have a job or are looking for one) stands at a 34-year low.
A simple chart really drives home the depressing state of affairs.

As you can see, in previous post-recession periods, the precipitous drop in the unemployment rate was always accompanied by an increase in the labor force participation rate.
In other words, the economy was improving so much – and so many new jobs were being created – that it enticed people who previously stopped looking for work to dust off their resumes. And not only did they start looking for work again, they found it.
Not this time around.
The economy might be adding jobs, but it’s not adding enough to keep up with the growth in available workers. So the drop in the unemployment rate is a total fraud. It has materialized based on more and more people opting out of finding work, instead of actually finding it.
As James Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute points out, if the labor participation rate was the same today as it was when the recession started, the unemployment rate would actually be 11.2% right now, not 7.2%.
How’s that for some truth?

Zombie.gov

Pinhead Jay Carney

Sebelius says she doesn't 'work for' those calling for her resignation

Bailey Comment: This one example of many just shows you how self-center all of these politicians are. 
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is rebuffing calls from Republicans for her to resign over the troubled launch of the ObamaCare sign-up website, saying those asking her to resign are “people I don’t work for.”
Sebelius gave the comments on a tour Thursday of an ObamaCare call center in Phoenix, which kicks off a multi-city tour by administration officials to promote the health care law amid the website's troubles.
Sebelius said “no one is getting fired” over the litches and that her main focus is to get the website up and running.
“The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don't work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place,” she said. “I have had frequent conversations with the president and I've committed to him that my role is to get the program up and running and we will do just that.”
Sebelius’ comments come after Rep. John Fleming, R-La., sent a letter to President Obama signed by 33 Republican members of Congress calling for Sebelius’ resignation over the troubled health care law roll out.
“It’s clear that Secretary Sebelius has mismanaged the ObamaCare roll out and is in over her head. Before the train wreck is allowed to continue… before more taxpayer dollars are spent trying to fix what’s already wrong… and before the Secretary continues on her damage control tour, it’s time for the president to admit that, despite three-and-a-half years to prepare, his HHS Secretary has dropped the ball on this and needs to step down,” the letter reads.
Also Thursday, the contractors who built the health care website defended their work at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and claimed the government failed to properly test the system before launch.
CGI Federal and the other contractors repeatedly claimed that overall "end-to-end" testing was the responsibility of an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, as was the decision to go live on Oct. 1. They suggested more time was needed to work out the kinks.
Sebelius came under fire after telling the House Energy and Commerce Committee she was not also available to testify Thursday due to a “scheduling conflict,” but then travelling to Phoenix.
Sebelius was already taking heat for snubbing the committee while planning to attend a health care gala in Boston on Wednesday night.
It's unclear whether Sebelius' "scheduling conflict" was the gala, the Phoenix event or neither.
The committee says Sebelius is now expected to testify next Wednesday on the health care law.

ObamaCare and America’s journey into the Third World

One need only compare the sense of dispatch at Federal Express with time endured to send a package via the U.S. Postal Service to recognize the federal government doesn’t do things quite as well as the private sector.
It doesn’t even function as well as state bureaucracies.
Now ObamaCare, which socializes an industry larger than the economies of France or Britain, is proving Health and Human Services can be more incompetent than many Third World governments.
These past few weeks, poor Mexico could sign up urban poor for health care with less mess than Washington did folks needing insurance in San Antonio.

ObamaCare, which socializes an industry larger than the economies of France or Britain, is proving Health and Human Services can be more incompetent than many Third World governments.

In Europe, national health care systems deliver coverage for everyone, at remarkably lower cost, and in countries with per capita income comparable to the United States, a lot better care. The United States spends 18 percent of GDP on health care; Germany and Holland spend about 12 with better results.
One only need look behind the rollout of the federal health insurance exchanges to see why.
President Obama sees every decision -- from the timing for sending his mother-in-law a birthday card to those required for the rollout of the exchange -- as a political calculation.
The bureaucrats at Health and Human Services ordered CGI, the private contractor primarily responsible for designing the exchanges, not to permit visitors to browse prices anonymously.
That would allow young people with decent jobs to compare the prices they must pay for insurance, or face harsh penalties, with the subsidized prices offered other young folks with lower wage jobs.
After all, those jarring differences might cause young voters, whose allegiance to President Obama has been weakened by an economic recovery that does not deliver decent prospects for their advancement, to vote for whatever Republican promises less government and dares to run against Hillary Clinton.
This political decision was made less than a month before the exchanges went live and threw a terrible wrench into the rollout.
Like the IRS decision to harass conservative non-profits and community activists, it is not clear how high up that decision was made -- was it made by the HHS division directly supervising CGI, Secretary Sebelius or the White House?
Fast forward to today, when Ms. Sebelius laments that the online marketplace should require five years to construct and a year of testing.
Yet California, whose economy is larger than most countries and problems as complex, managed to get the job done. Its exchange and those of other states, designed independent of federal incompetence, are running well despite initial glitches.
A basic problem Washington does not like to admit is that the federal civil service is a refuge for overpaid, politically-motivated and distracted-from-task statists, who are often cynical about the private sector and insensitive to citizens’ needs.
Like the Godfather’s henchmen, they look to what will please their political masters and act accordingly, even if it tramples civil liberties.
Consider the allegedly independent handiwork of the IRS bureaucrats on non-profits and citizens supporting conservative causes or Justice Department’s wholesale violation of privacy of AP communications.
American universities’ schools of business and engineering attract the best and the brightest -- not so schools of public policy, education and the softer social sciences that train foot soldiers that fill offices at HHS, Justice and the like.
Democrats in congress are now raising questions about HHS reliance on private contractors, but the truth is federal government simply does not have the resources to pull off something as large and complex as the health care exchange.
If the president wants ObamaCare and other federal initiatives to succeed, then he and his cabinet can’t make every decision a political calculation. And they need to recognize that the government civil service needs much more competent employees, not political activists masquerading as public servants.

Jon Stewart a Conservative Darling for Zinging Obamacare

Conservatives have found an unlikely hero in Jon Stewart after the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" continues to zing President Barack Obama, Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, and the glitch-riddled HealthCare.gov rollout this week on his satirical news show.

The rocky introduction of HealthCare.gov has garnered some blunt criticism from Stewart, who again on Monday bashed the website where consumers can sign up for Obamacare.

So far, Stewart has compared Obama to "Gil," the unfortunate salesman from "The Simpsons," freaked out about the site's broken calculator ("The one thing that's been included in computers since 1972 — you couldn't make THAT work?"), and gone toe-to-toe with Sebelius.

"I'm going to try and download every movie ever made, and you're going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we'll see which happens first," he challenged her last week.

Several conservative news outlets, including The Blaze and Fox Nation, have mentioned Stewart's segments, and Republican political action committee America Rising even highlighted his comments on Twitter this week.

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EXCLUSIVE: Key suspects in Benghazi attack include former courier, bodyguard for Al Qaeda, sources say

At least two of the key suspects in the Benghazi terror attack were at one point working with Al Qaeda senior leadership, sources familiar with the investigation tell Fox News.
The sources said one of the suspects was believed to be a courier for the Al Qaeda network, and the other a bodyguard in Afghanistan prior to the 2001 terror attacks.
The direct ties to the Al Qaeda senior leadership undercut early characterizations by the Obama administration that the attackers in Benghazi were isolated “extremists" -- not Al Qaeda terrorists -- with no organizational structure or affiliation. 
The head of the House Intelligence Committee, Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who receives regular intelligence briefings and whose staffers continue to investigate the Benghazi terrorist attack, would not discuss specific suspects or their backgrounds.
But he said the ties to Al Qaeda senior leadership, also known as Al Qaeda core, are now established.
“It is accurate that of the group being targeted by the bureau, at this point, there’s strong Al Qaeda ties,”  Rogers told Fox News. "You can still be considered to have strong ties because you are in the ring of operations of Al Qaeda core. ... There are individuals that certainly fit that definition."
Counterterrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News that investigators are finding "more and more ties -- not just to Al Qaeda's branch in North Africa ... but Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan."
A year ago, Fox News' Bret Baier was first to report that a former Guantanamo detainee, Sufian bin Qumu, was suspected of training jihadists in eastern Libya for the attack.
Now, sources tell Fox News that Benghazi suspect Faraj al Chalabi, also a Libyan national whose ties to Usama bin Laden date back to 1998, is believed to be a former bodyguard who was with the Al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan in 2001.
After the Benghazi attack, al Chalabi fled to Pakistan where reports suggest he was held, then later returned to Libyan custody and eventually released. He was first publicly identified as a suspected terrorist in 1998 by the regime of former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi for his alleged role in the murder of a German intelligence official, Silvan Becker and his wife. An Interpol arrest warrant in March 1998 named al Chalabi, two other Libyans and bin Laden as the likely perpetrators.
“Our sources say al Chalabi is suspected of bringing materials from the compound to Benghazi to Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan. It's not clear what those materials consisted of but he is known to have gone back to Pakistan immediately after the attack,” Joscelyn said.
Separately, and for the first time, Rogers laid out a timeline for the attack which suggests significant advance planning. According to the congressman, there was an “aspirational phase” several months out, where the idea of an attack was thrown around, followed by “weeks” of operational planning, and then the ramp up to the Sept. 11 assault which lasted up to several days. This assessment is in stark contrast to initial administration statements that the attack was “spontaneous” and achieved with little planning.
“I believe that they had an operational phase that lasted at least a couple of weeks, maybe even longer. And then an initiation phase that lasted a couple or three days prior to the event itself. And so this notion that they just showed up and decided this was a spontaneous act does not comport with the information at least with what we have seen in the intelligence community,” Rogers told Fox News.
Some counterterrorism analysts concur with Roger’s assessment, describing the mortars used to strike the CIA annex in the second wave of the attack as "smoking gun" evidence -- as mortars require skill to fire, and typically must be pre-positioned to ensure accuracy. On Sept. 11, two mortars struck the CIA annex, killing former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
The opposing analysis is that the mortars were set in the early morning hours of Sept. 11, and that the terrorists did not bring equipment with them that suggests significant planning.
Fox News contacted the FBI which is in the lead on the Benghazi investigation, as well as the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC. Both the NCTC and the CIA declined to comment. There was no immediate response from the FBI.