Thanks, guys:

Regional and state unemployment rates were universally higher in December. All 50 states and the District of Columbia recorded both over-the-month and over-the-year unemployment rate increases, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.

Sadly, in July, I called it and said that they were probably driving an economic downturn. Now it’s spread almost everywhere.

We’ll learn just how bad the POR-inflicted damage was in last year’s fourth quarter in Friday’s GDP report.

Added Jan. 28: Another forgotten marker — April 2008’s alltime high federal tax receipts prove that first- and second-quarter 2008 economic growth wasn’t artifically juiced by the tax rebate-driven stimulus package passed earlier in the year. Not only did those receipts reflect record tax liabilities from 2007, but they also included first-quarter estimates for 2008. Obviously at that point, corporations and especially non-withheld individuals, whose payments were a whopping 16% higher in April 2008 than April 2007, were reasonably optimistic about how the economy was doing, or they wouldn’t have made such large first-quarter payments.

Pelosi, Obama, and Reid fixed that two months later.

Marker Number Two: At first glance, the June 2008 Treasury Statement would lead you to believe that the optimism I just referred to was gone by the June 15 due date of second-quarter estimated payments.

You would be partially correct.

Starting with this post from July of last year — If you add back the stimulus payments sent to individuals (which really should have been treated as federal spending and not negative receipts), you see that tax collections were 4% higher than the previous year.

So far so good. But looking at detail not referenced here, most of that was due to June 2008 having five high-collection Mondays vs. four in June 2007. The facts are that corporate receipts were down $6.2 billion (-9.3%), while individual non-withhelds were up by $0.9 billion (+1.4%).

This makes sense, as the hard-core Democratic Party opposition to any kind of energy exploration and drilling started to appear a week or so before the June 16 due date for second-quarter estimated payments (see this NixGuy post from June 9, and this June 11 Weapons of Mass Discussion post about a Jean Schmidt pro-drilling House floor speech). Corporate payments declined in reaction to all of this, while individuals, who largely wouldn’t have caught on until later in the month, generally paid the same amounts as they did in April.

….. But I don’t Have Any Time For:

• Gerald Warner at the UK Telegraph, a week ago — “It seems the era of Hope is to be inaugurated with a slaughter of the innocents.” Indeed, that era has begun (text of Executive Order is here).
• From last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal — “Agents Raid Two Pennsylvania Defense Contractors.” The plants involved are in the district of Pennsylvania congressman John Murtha, who got these companies millions in earmarks. This could work out really well. Murtha has volunteered to have terrorists currently detained at Guantanamo Bay housed in his district. If the plants raided are shut down, those buildings could be used for Murtha’s desired prison. In a perfect world, John “Abscam” Murtha could join the Gitmo guys as an inmate.
• Gunga Dann’s leftovers dumped on taxpayers — “AG women settle with state for $495,000.”
• Juan Williams — “Yet there is fear, especially among black people, that criticism of him or any of his failures might be twisted into evidence that people of color cannot effectively lead. That amounts to wasting time and energy reacting to hateful stereotypes. It also leads to treating all criticism of Mr. Obama, whether legitimate, wrong-headed or even mean-spirited, as racist. This is patronizing. Worse, it carries an implicit presumption of inferiority. Every American president must be held to the highest standard. No president of any color should be given a free pass for screw-ups, lies or failure to keep a promise.” Less than a week after Obama’s inauguration, CNN is already going there (”Will Obama have to be better because he’s black?”; HT Warner Todd Huston at NewsBusters).
• I wonder if Williams were a student at Ohio State, and his comments in the previous item offended another student, would he be hauled before the university’s Bias Assessment and Response Team (HT Collecting My Thoughts)?
• Flashback — The Rev. Joseph Lowery who did the racist riff in his “benediction” at Obama’s inauguration is the same guy who, in his presence, ripped on then-President Bush at Coretta Scott King’s funeral three years ago, declaring “We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there (in Iraq).” (Sigh ….) Yes …. there …. were, not to mention 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium.

From Waukesha, Wisconsin (several related pics are at the link):

Posted: Jan. 20, 2009

Waukesha – A 25-year-old Milwaukee woman who nearly froze to death in a Waukesha snowbank over the weekend is being hailed as a medical miracle by the Waukesha Memorial Hospital physicians who brought her back to life.

The woman, Tia Ross, shared her story Tuesday as she lay in pain in an intensive care unit bed of the hospital.

A tired Ross tried to wave her frostbitten and swollen right hand as she expressed gratitude to the medical team that repeatedly pulled her from death’s grip during 90 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation to ignite a pulse and high-voltage defibrillation when her fragile heartbeat became silent.

“I was gone, and they brought me back to life,” Ross said.

When Ross arrived at the hospital Sunday morning after nearly six hours of exposure to brutal cold, she did not have a pulse, was not breathing and had very little heart activity, said Michael Sore, a doctor and medical director of the trauma center.

“You could say she was technically dead,” said Paul Seifert, a cardiologist on duty the day Ross arrived.

Deep hypothermia from being in subzero temperatures would have killed most people, Sore said.

Ross could have been pronounced dead, but on-duty physician Grant Moehring was not ready to give up on Ross, a mother of an 8-year-old girl and two boys, 5 and 3.

Sore credited Moehring for initiating “heroic measures” that eventually brought Ross back to life.

The medical measures allowed Seifert to hook Ross onto a device that circulated warm and oxygen-rich blood into her body. Her temperature was only 73 degrees when she arrived.

“This is one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my 22 years of practice,” Seifert said. “By the next morning, she was breathing on her own.” …..

Go here for the rest of the story.