The rule of law is losing out to tyranny.

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Note: This column went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday morning. I have also added a few extra links in the BizzyBlog version below to provide interested readers with more historical perspective.

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Someone I’ve known for a long time who formerly didn’t follow current events or politics very closely used to ask me, “Are we still okay?” when particularly disturbing news items would make the headlines. My response until the late 1990s was usually a slightly overconfident, “Sure. This is a great country. We can handle this.”

That person hasn’t asked me that question for many years. We both know, as do millions of other Americans, that we haven’t been okay for some time, and that the foundations supporting what has made this country so exceptional for so very long are crumbling.

We stopped being okay over a decade ago. In 1998, the country’s president repeatedly lied under oath in front of the American people. As George Will correctly asserted in January 2001: “There is no reasonable doubt that he committed and suborned perjury, tampered with witnesses and otherwise obstructed justice.” Additionally, credible allegations surfaced that, as Will noted, made it “reasonable to believe that he was a rapist 15 years before becoming president.” The failure of the United States Senate to remove Bill Clinton from office was a landmark defeat for the rule of law. Clinton himself didn’t merely survive impeachment; he has since thrived not in spite of it, but arguably because of it.

From that point forward, those whose stated agenda is to undermine this country’s essence knew that if they could only achieve sufficient power, they could probably get away with just about anything.

Meanwhile, over at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Democratic Party cronies were already a half-dozen years into executing the first prong of their strategic offensive targeting the ruin of the housing industry, the financial sector, and ultimately the economy. Beginning in 1993, Fan and Fred systematically deceived the bond rating agencies and defrauded investors by seriously exaggerating the quality of the mortgage loans underlying their debt securities. Then, mere months after the Senate failed to carry out its constitutional duty with Mr. Clinton, Fannie Mae announced that it would begin serving as a conduit for loans to unqualified and undeserving borrowers. Fan and Fred, which followed a short time later, facilitated hundreds of billions of dollars in such risky loans.

Thus, in November 2008, assisted by the crisis Fan and Fred primarily created (which conveniently had come to a head just two months earlier), millions of dollars in unaccounted-for campaign contributions (many of them more than likely from foreign sources), an ineffective opponent, and a derelict Fourth Estate, Barack Obama won the presidency.

After only seventeen months in office, the rule of law, where it hasn’t been routed, hangs by a mere thread.

One of the earliest assaults came when the administration and its car czars took control of financially insolvent General Motors and Chrysler, and  then orchestrated bankruptcy plans that deliberately shortchanged disfavored creditors to the benefit of the companies’ unions. Columnist Michael Barone characterized the campaign of intimidation against certain of Chrysler’s secured lenders as an “episode of Gangster Government,” and that it was “likely to be part of a continuing series.”

Sadly, Barone has been vindicated in more ways than can be counted. The most visible, and most risible, is the $20 billion BP shakedown.

That the government has incompetently thwarted most attempts to keep the oil from the company’s incapacitated rig from reaching shore is beyond dispute. The most blatant failure was reported at Canada’s Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill … each Dutch ship (had) more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

… The voracious Dutch vessels … continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. (But) nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

Incredibly, U.S. regulators would rather have hundreds of square miles of water and priceless shoreline polluted than contain the spill with equipment that might allow slightly less than perfect water back into the Gulf of Mexico.

When Venezuela’s state-run grocery chain recently allowed tens of thousand of metric tons of food to rot, Hugo Chavez’s “solution” was to conduct raids on privately run grocers, confiscating replacement goods as punishment for trumped-up charges of hoarding and gouging. When the Obama administration by its own inaction allowed a serious problem at a single oil rig to turn into an economic and environmental catastrophe, it conducted a demonizing blitz against BP that culminated with a $20 billion raid on the company’s treasury. Obama’s action is in substance far more lawless than the authoritarian Venezuelan’s.

Meanwhile, the press’s alleged watchdogs have turned into cheerleaders. David Sanger at the New York Times gleefully described Obama’s reestablishment of “command and control,” adoringly celebrated “the use of raw presidential power” against BP, and shamelessly excused the president’s unilateral action:

(The White House) conceded that Mr. Obama had no legal basis to force BP to create the $20 billion fund; they said he was making a moral argument, and used the jawboning power of the presidential pulpit to push the company.

Pravda in its Communist heyday couldn’t have outdone Mr. Sanger.

With the establishment press asleep and the blogosphere still in its investigative reporting infancy, imagine what we can’t see, and won’t see. Mark Levin raised the warning flag about this over a year ago:

Do you know how much of this must be going on in the shadows, with the banks and the financial systems? What must be going on with one business after another, threatening them, warning them, punishing them?

Now imagine what the statists in government can accomplish to further their agenda and stifle dissent in their arbitrary and largely unappealable rulings on what is and isn’t a “grandfathered” employer health care plan; what is or isn’t acceptable executive pay; and now, with the imminent passage of what Investors Business Daily called “Financial Deform,” which “financial services” firms, no matter how currently healthy, should be taken over for taking on too much “risk.”

What we have is Institutionalized Gangster Government. There’s a single word for it — and it’s not okay.

From Roslindale, Massachusetts:

Posted Jul 01, 2010 @ 06:08 AM
Last update Jul 02, 2010 @ 02:28 PM

Hospital Corpsman Third Class Thomas J. McBride of the Navy said that Roslindale’s Keith Lepor doesn’t need to thank him for saving his life during a 2008 firefight in Afghanistan.

“I’m a medic. My job is to be a medic,” said McBride from Lepor’s Roslindale living room last week. It was the first time the two men had seen each other since 2008 in Afghanistan.

At that time, McBride was in the Navy and Lepor, a Republican who is running for U.S. Congress against incumbent Stephen Lynch, D-Boston, was a forward media team leader (not a member of the military), which means he was running a team of Afghan print and radio journalists. With that work, Lepor got to spend time on the front lines. Lepor quickly earned the respect of the military, said McBride, who added he feels like he can trust Lepor like he trusts any combat veteran.

But on that fateful day on Sept. 28, 2008, it was McBride and Nate Cordero, another medic, who pulled Lepor out after he was shot in the chest by a 7.62-round, but thankfully he had a sniper plate on, which stopped the ammunition from piercing into his body.

The firefight happened in the Korengal Valley, a place the military calls “the valley of death.”

“I felt something,” said Lepor. “It flipped me and put me down … I had never been shot before. I got dragged out and was still in direct line of fire. They pulled me another 15 feet and I was behind the barrier … I was pretty useless after I went down. That state I was in, I couldn’t move, if Tom and his guys didn’t grab me — I would’ve come home in a body bag.”

McBride compared getting shot to getting the air knocked out of you in sports — that is, if you have the protective gear that Lepor happened to have on that day.

After being pulled behind the barrier and the fighting continued, McBride checked out Lepor to make sure he was OK because as the medic explained, “Sometimes when people get shot, they don’t realize it.” Luckily, there was no blood on Lepor. He was up on his feet and back to normal within four minutes.

Asked about what he said to the two men who saved his life, “What can you say?

“What can you possibly say?” said McBride, who was injured in fighting on Oct. 16 and had to have the bottom half of his right leg amputated two weeks later. “Everyone who was there knows what happened. I think that’s the one thing that people could get from it. You don’t need to say anything when you go through a life-threatening experience…”

When McBride was injured in October, he still crawled to other wounded soldiers and provided medical support that saved their lives. McBride was presented with a commendation for his effort that day.

Lepor’s time spent on the front lines of wars throughout the world led him to wanting to run for Congress. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The Institute for Supply Management’s Non Manufacturing Index came in at 53.8% in June, down from 55.4% in May.

Here’s how AP’s Tali Arbel led the 12.17 p.m. wire service report:

The service sector grew more slowly in June, an industry trade group said Tuesday, offering the latest sign that the economic recovery is weakening as the second half of the year begins.

This may be the kiss of death, but Arbel’s coverage of the ISM report is exceptionally well-done, thorough and even quite educational for those who are unfamiliar with the significance of ISM’s data.

Here are some excerpts:

A reading above 50 indicates expansion. June’s reading is well above the 37.2 low in November 2008. But it’s far below the pre-recession high of 67.7 in 2004.

The index was broadened in January 2008 to consider four areas of information: business activity, employment, supplier deliveries and new orders. Before that, it only looked at business activity.

A robust service sector, which accounts for about 80 percent of U.S. employment, is crucial to keeping the economy expanding and adding jobs. Service-oriented jobs include those in hospitals, shops, restaurants, airlines, schools, construction, banks and consulting firms, among others.

The dip in the non-manufacturing index follows last week’s raft of economic data that points to a slowing recovery.

… One troubling sign from the service-sector report is a decline in new orders, which signal future business. While still growing, they fell in June to their lowest level since December.

… ISM also says hiring plans dipped in June after growing in May for the first time in 28 months.

… Of the 18 industries surveyed, 15 said they were growing. They were led by real estate and arts and entertainment. The finance and insurance sector and “other services,” a collection of smaller industries, said they were shrinking; educational services grew at the same pace in June.

Overall, the conditions reported are of a not as good as it has been situation with trouble signs in key metrics. Again, nicely done.

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Background: My BizzyBlog archive search indicates that Arbel was a co-author with Martin Crutsinger of a mid-June report on an unemployment claims release from the government that held out the possibility that private sector jobs might be lost. Sure, the number from BLS came in at +83,000, but ADP’s employment report two days earlier showed only 13,000 jobs added, and I suspect we’re going to see downward revisions coming out of the government in the next two months.

Going back further, he was a minor contributor to the AP’s June 2009 coverage of a Pew Research study that made demonstrably and obviously false claims about the robustness of “clean job” growth compared to job growth in the rest of the economy.

The opening rhetoric in Wayne Allen Root’s column at the Las Vegas Review-Journal is straight out of stand-up comedy, but its meaty middle excerpted below tells you what conditions on the ground are really like (bolds are mine):

You won’t find proof of the damage Obama is doing on Wall Street, but rather on Main Street. My friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business. Small business creates 75 percent of new jobs (and a majority of all jobs). I called one friend who was a wealthy restaurant owner. He says business is off by 60 percent. He’s drowning in debt. He won’t last much longer. His wealth is gone.

I called another friend in the business of home improvement. He says business is off 90 percent from two years ago. My contractor just filed personal bankruptcy. She won’t be building any more homes. The hair salon where I’ve had my hair cut for years closed earlier this year. Bankrupt. But here’s the clincher — ESPN Zone just closed all their restaurants across the country. If they can’t make it selling cheap food and overpriced beer with 100 big screens blaring every sporting event on the planet to a sports-crazed society, we are all in deep, deep trouble.

I’ve polled all my friends who own small businesses — many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies.

The days of jobs in the private sector with big salaries, full benefits, and pensions are over.

… Unfortunately, small businesses don’t have the power to impose taxes or print money. So unlike government, we’ll just have to cut employees and run lean and mean.

… The trillion-dollar corporate handouts (neatly named “stimulus”) may have kept big business in the money for the past 18 months, and artificially propped up the stock market, but small business is the real canary in the coal mine.

My small business-owning friends aren’t creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don’t need employees. And many business owners are making plans to leave the country. In a high-tech world where businesses can be run from anywhere, Obama has a problem. … (He) is chasing away the business owners he desperately needs to pay his bills.

The ESPN Zone story is more disturbing than you might think. This was an enterprise that went over a decade and presumably had many prosperous years before Disney pulled the plug, doing what Root’s friend the restaurant owner didn’t do when he probably should have.

Consider this anecdotal commentary from HillBuzz about an area in Chicago just north of where the Windy’s City’s closed ESPN Zone restaurant was:

“the economy is in rebound” .. is what this “Recovery Summer” the White House keeps Potemkin-messaging to us is supposedly all about. The truth, however, is that American businesses are terrified of what Democrats are doing to this country, and uncertain of whether or not they can remain in business … Couple that with the uncertainty the insane Obamacare legislation (which no Democrat, to this day, has probably read) brings, and it’s a toxic climate for entrepreneurship unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Small business owners we know are directly telling us this.

Here in Boystown, there was no new hiring for the summer in the bars and restaurants we know well…everyone is just making do with who they have on team already, because they do not want to be stuck with massive healthcare costs for their staff in the future. They also know that customers who are being impacted by Obama’s wealth distribution are all cutting back on their indulgences and extras in life, and that means no meals out or nights at the bar.

Everyone’s lives are amazingly connected here in Chicago. The real estate agents who’ve lost their businesses in the Obama economy can no longer afford to go to the hair dressers as often. That means the hair dressers make less money, and can now no longer afford their lifestyles, or their apartments. That leads to vacancies in buildings that are usually always rented, which means landlords make less money now, but have to pay enormous mortgage payments anyway, and this means those property owners no longer have the discretionary funds to pump into the community via those restaurant and bar visits. And the glut of apartments for rent is incentive for people to wait the economy out and not buy, or else they can’t buy because money isn’t being lended, which cycles back to the real estate agents who can’t get their businesses back on their feet because people don’t have the cash to buy homes anymore. And that, of course, takes us back to people like the hairdressers who no longer have any money because in the Obama economy people are cutting back on the entire service industry in general.

This downward spiral is still occurring in so many areas of the country. A genuine recovery would have put the brakes on most of them. But we’re not in a genuine recovery.

From Rio de Janiero:

Jul 6, 2010 / 12:23 am (CNA).- The world-famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janiero, Brazil has been re-inaugurated after four months of restoration work.

The large statue of Christ with his arms outstretched above Brazil’s second largest city is recognized as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. It is currently illuminated with green and yellow lights to support the Brazilian World Cup soccer team.

The statue, which is one of the most recognized Catholic symbols worldwide, will be 80 years old next year.

The repairs fixed a series of leaks that were affecting the chapel located inside the base of the statue. Technicians reported removing 80 gallons (300 liters) of water from the inside of each of the statue’s arms. The structure was also rebuilt to protect it from lightening strikes. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Here’s another account of events at the Gulf that would lead any reasonable person to admit to the possibility that the government may have deliberately allowed the BP spill to spread.

Wait until you see who the author is.

There’s no substitute for reading the whole thing, but here are key paragraphs (bolds are mine):

It has been apparent from the outset that the Obama administration had no wish to be responsible for fixing this problem without having some sort of “plausible deniability.” They saw what happened to George W. Bush with New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina and wanted no part of that kind of trap. Instead, the White House embarked on a program of finger-pointing, bad-mouthing, scolding, and threats. Reckless, greedy, and incompetent as BP may be, this only made the company’s task considerably harder to perform—especially with the government’s much publicized “boot on their throat.”

… Between double and ten times the presently available personnel and equipment is needed, and they are needed now.

People here have become cynical. There have been suggestions that Obama wants to use the oil spill as a “teachable moment” in his effort to pass his cap and trade energy legislation. And there are even darker intimations, the suspicion that something else must be afoot. If the spill had occurred in Long Island Sound, say, or San Francisco Bay—or in Nantucket Sound with oil lapping at the beaches of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard—would there be this indolent a response from Washington?

… Each morning seems to bring a new fool’s errand. On June 18, for example, the U.S. Coast Guard apprehended a dozen oil-skimming barges in the midst of performing their duty, and shut down their operations for the rest of the day in order to determine if they were carrying the proper number of life preservers and fire extinguishers. If the Coast Guard was so worried about safety, why not simply take a big pile of life preservers and fire extinguishers out to these craft and hand them around, so that the skimmers could keep at their essential job?

But that is not the way government operates. At least not this government, which has created a perfect storm of bureaucratic and regulatory gridlock around the Deep-water Horizon disaster. Whatever is done to prevent the oil from coming ashore must be approved by the EPA, OSHA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and a host of lesser bureaucracies.

… It seems oil skimming or booming requires taking courses and passing tests given by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. -Otherwise you run the risk of being arrested.

Same goes for trying to save oiled birds or other wildlife. Federal permits—which can take up to three years to process—are required, and violators are subject to arrest, fines, and jail. So if an oiled mallard washes up on shore, best leave him be and call the proper authorities to scrub him down with Dawn soap, never mind if he dies before they get there.

Some brave souls are resisting this nonsense. A couple of fire chiefs from the Magnolia River and Fish River communities in Alabama got tangled up in five weeks’ worth of red tape just to bring in equipment to block the oil from getting into their rivers. “They can arrest me and Jamie if they want to,” one of them said, “This is the biggest damn mess I’ve ever seen.”

… These people have known for two months there was a giant oil slick forming out there, bound to come onshore, and haven’t figured out how to connect the scout planes with the skimmer boats? Haven’t they ever heard of RadioShack?

… Boom comes in various forms—large ocean boom, smaller containment boom, absorbent boom—but not nearly enough of it has been available on the Gulf Coast. Alabama governor Bob Riley was infuriated when, after his office secured a dozen miles of hard-to-come-by ocean boom to protect Mobile Bay, he was summarily informed that the Coast Guard had confiscated it for use in Louisiana.

… A few weeks ago, at the height of tourist season, as oil began washing up on beaches in Alabama, the Coast Guard announced that the best way to deal with the problem was to let the oil wash ashore and then clean up the beaches once the tide went out. That tactic proved sadly wrong.

Can incompetence alone really explain a debacle this complete?

It’s here.

The sub-headline: “The rule of law is losing out to tyranny.”

For those who question the appropriateness of the word tyranny, its primary definition is “arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.” There have been more than enough in-plain-sight examples of this to justify the use of the term.

The column will go up here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

From Madison, Wisconsin:

Jul 3, 2010 / 07:07 pm

A lawsuit challenging a Wisconsin constitutional amendment which protected the definition of marriage failed to persuade the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected its arguments. Supporters of the amendment said the challenge was “baseless.”

The suit had challenged the amendment on the grounds it violated a Wisconsin requirement that amendments deal with only one issue. In a 7-0 opinion issued Wednesday, the court judged that the two propositions contained in the amendment’s text “plainly relate to the subject of marriage.”

More than 59 percent of Wisconsin voters approved the amendment in November 2006, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) reports in a June 30 press release. University of Wisconsin professor William McConkey filed suit in July 2007.

The ADF filed an amicus brief in the case. Its litigation counsel Jim Campbell said in a statement that voters adopted the measure “for one clear and simple reason: to protect the institution of marriage.”

“We should be strengthening–not undermining–marriage, which is one man and one woman. Once again, activists tried to use the courts to force something on the people that they have repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected.”

Wisconsin Family Council president Julaine K. Appling said the claim that the amendment addresses multiple subjects was “just a sneaky attempt to tear down what the voters clearly wanted.”

“The court was right to reject this baseless lawsuit.

Go here for the rest of the story.

The first six words (bolded by me) of Deb Riechmann’s report from Kabul, Afghanistan for the Associated Press are refreshing:

“We are in this to win,” Gen. David Petraeus said as he took the reins of an Afghan war effort troubled by waning support, an emboldened enemy, government corruption and a looming commitment to withdraw troops – even with no sign of violence easing.

It would have been even more refreshing if the AP’s Riechmann, who obviously felt compelled to tick off as many of the reasons Petraeus and the troops he leads may not meet the goal as quickly as possible, would have reminded readers that Petraeus’s boss, President Barack Obama, has been decidedly allergic to using the words “win” and “victory” in Afghanistan since his inauguration. One of her later paragraphs presented a perfect opportunity to remind readers of the president’s aversion. She passed; she shouldn’t have.

Petraeus, thankfully, feels no need to hold back, as noted later in Reichmann’s report (bolds are mine):

… “We are engaged in a contest of wills,” Petraeus said Sunday as he accepted the command of U.S. and NATO forces before several hundred U.S., coalition and Afghan officials who gathered on a grassy area outside NATO headquarters in Kabul.

… “In answer, we must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and international forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win,” Petraeus said on the Fourth of July, U.S. Independence Day.

Continual discussion about President Barack Obama’s desire to start withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011 has blurred the definition of what would constitute victory. That coupled with the abrupt firing of Petraeus’ predecessor, a move that laid bare a rift between civilian and military efforts in the country, has created at least the perception that the NATO mission needs to be righted.

… June was the deadliest month for the allied force since the war began, with 102 U.S. and international troops killed.

… “After years of war, we have arrived at a critical moment,” Petraeus said. “We must demonstrate to the Afghan people – and to the world – that al-Qaida and its network of extremist allies will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world.”

Petraeus suggested he would refine – or at least review – the implementation of rules under which NATO soldiers fight, including curbs on the use of airpower and heavy weapons if civilians are at risk, “to determine where refinements might be needed.”

In a March 27, 2009 address at the Council on Foreign Relations, President Obama outlined a “Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The words “win” and “victory” or synonyms of those words do not appear. The closest he got was a promise “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” Later in the speech, he said: “To the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you.”

Maybe that suffices for some, but then there was this incident, four months later, as reported by the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama says he’s uncomfortable using the word “victory” to describe the United States’ goal in Afghanistan. He says the U.S. fight there is against broader terrorism and not a nation.

… When Obama delivered a speech in March about his strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, he did not use the word “victory.”

Obama spoke with ABC’s “Nightline” while traveling to Ohio and Illinois.

A lengthier report at Fox News included this nugget:

“We’re not dealing with nation states at this point. We’re concerned with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Al Qaeda’s allies,” he (Obama) said. “So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can’t attack the United States.”

The only sure way to “to make sure they can’t attack the United States” is to kill or capture as many of their members as possible until the rest surrender or disband and permanently give up their terrorist ways — in other words, to win (i.e., achieve v-v-v-v … victory in) the unconventional war we are fighting against them.

Rhetorical reluctance aside, one can only hope that President Obama will let General Petraeus do what must be done to win, even if he (Obama) will probably never acknowledge it when it occurs — just as he has never acknowledged the victory in Iraq (Petraeus, as shown here, more than likely has).

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Just watch (NT NewsBusters):

The fourth and final verse of the Star Spangled Banner:

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

The Most Depressing Numbers in Friday’s Employment Data

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Shortly after the release of the government’s Employment Situation Report courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, my overall evaluation was that “while the results aren’t totally depressing, they’re still quite unimpressive.”

Let me amend that. Maybe total depression is justified. The tables and historical context coming up shortly, combined with the president’s cluelessness, will show readers why.

To fully grasp all of this, one first needs to understand the difference between what has really happened and what people usually hear relating to these monthly jobs reports.

Every month what has really happened out here in the real world with jobs and unemployment, also known as the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) data, is “smoothed out” by means of seasonal adjustment.

There’s really nothing wrong with this statistical technique, except for one thing: the BLS doesn’t do a particularly good job of flagging its data as “seasonally adjusted” in its main report. Because of that, most of the press and seemingly all politicians seem to believe that the seasonally adjusted numbers represent what really happened.

They don’t. What follows are tables from the Household Survey (used to determine unemployment rates) showing changes in the seasonally adjusted (SA) workforce, whether employed or not, followed by the analogous NSA changes:

The SA number for June is bad enough. In fact, June’s seasonally adjusted workforce shrinkage is the largest for any June since 1963.

But the NSA number representing what really happened is even worse. In a normal June, the workforce increases significantly, because lots of people occupied with other things during the rest of the year typically test the waters in the seasonal and summer-job market. But whereas an average of about 1.75 million did so during the past seven Junes, including almost 1.6 million last year during the recession, only 901,000 did so in June of 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1954 to find a worse June on the ground in the private sector than the June we just experienced. On a population-adjusted basis, June’s figure is the worst performance in the 63 years BLS has been tracking the data.

Yet today, President Obama claimed that “We are headed in the right direction.” I’m not buying it, nor are hundreds of thousands of people who figuratively sat on the couch in June because they know how bad the prospects for gainful employment in the real world actually are.

Note: This post is a July 4 BizzyBlog tradition. It belongs in Positivity because the sacrifices of those involved contributed to the founding of these United States.

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The column below is, for reasons described in “Background” below, unenforceably copyright © 2000 Boston Globe, and is reposted here for discussion, critique, and educational purposes only, pursuant to the fair use exemption of copyright law.

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Background: In July 2000, veteran Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote the column that appears below.

After publication, his ignorant editors (putting it kindly) felt that he should have included a line pointing out that he was far from the first to write about the fates of the Declaration’s signers. Because he hadn’t, Jacoby was suspended for four months without pay. Note that The Globe did not, because they could not, suspend him for plagiarism.

Jacoby’s full response to his suspension is here. His most important points were these:

In short, whatever-happened-to-the-signers is an old, old theme in American inspirational writing …. These stories have been repeated so often, and by so many people, that they have risen to the level of American legend. Which is why it didn’t occur to me to take up valuable space in the column with footnotes or citations to earlier versions….

…. I care greatly about accuracy. Knowing that previous treatments of the lives-of-the-signers theme contained mistakes and exaggerations, I tried to take pains not to repeat anything untrue. As best as I could given the constraints of a deadline, I double-checked the biographical information I had, using encyclopedias of American history, books on the American Revolution, and relevant web sites, such as the one at www.colonialhall.com.

Many online and print readers of Jacoby’s columns (I believe that The Globe never did tell us how many) protested his suspension, including me. My protest e-mail to the Globe’s ombudsman said, in part:

Repeat after me, sir: FACTUAL history, especially from over 200 years ago, is public domain, and once verified and researched, does not have to be attributed. Your position is akin to having to look in three dictionaries to get to the meaning of every word and then having to cite those dictionaries every single time.

Where Jacoby found this factual history, whether “in a short book … by Paul Harvey,” “……in a widely circulated e-mail,” on a paper napkin, or on toilet paper is, after the fact-checking that YOU acknowledge he did, (repeat after me) IRRELEVANT.

The Globe did not reconsider the suspension. Matt Drudge “suspended” the Boston Globe’s link at his web site during the term of Jacoby’s suspension. Many online users “suspended” The Globe by refusing to read anything it published during that time, and more than a few print readers cancelled their subscriptions.

Upon learning of the suspension, Joe Farah of World Net Daily wrote:

I have read Jacoby’s column. I have read other works that inspired it. In my professional and expert opinion, this is not plagiarism. Neither is it a close call. It is, simply, the kind of derivative journalism that we read in American newspapers every single day — online and off. Jacoby did nothing wrong.

In fact, the only thing he is guilty of is writing a first-rate Independence Day column that reminded Americans of the great sacrifice our founders made for the freedom we enjoy. And that, I suspect, is what really bugs the politically correct crowd at the Boston Globe.

Indeed. Which is why, on this Independence Day, I am posting that column, omitting additional information about Thomas Nelson Jr. that Jacoby subsequently found to be inaccurate.

So we never forget.

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Fifty-Six Great Risk-Takers
By Jeff Jacoby

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted 12-0 — New York abstained — in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

On July 4, the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson — heavily edited by Congress — was adopted without dissent. On July 8, the Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Philadelphia. On July 15, Congress learned that the New York Legislature had decided to endorse the Declaration. On Aug. 2, a parchment copy was presented to the Congress for signature. Most of the 56 men who put their name to the document did so that day.

And then?

We tend to forget that to sign the Declaration of Independence was to commit an act of treason — and the punishment for treason was death. To publicly accuse George III of “repeated injuries and usurpations,” to announce that Americans were therefore “Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown,” was a move fraught with danger — so much so that the names of the signers were kept secret for six months.

They were risking everything, and they knew it. That is the meaning of the Declaration’s soaring last sentence:

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Most of the signers survived the war; several went on to illustrious careers.

Two of them became presidents of the United States, and among the others were future vice presidents, senators, and governors. But not all were so fortunate.

Nine of the 56 died during the Revolution, and never tasted American independence.

Five were captured by the British.

Eighteen had their homes — great estates, some of them – looted or burnt by the enemy.

Some lost everything they owned.

Two were wounded in battle.

Two others were the fathers of sons killed or captured during the war.

“Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It was not just a rhetorical flourish.

We all recognize John Hancock’s signature, but who ever notices the names beneath his? William Ellery, Thomas Nelson, Richard Stockton, Button Gwinnett, Francis Lewis — to most of us, these are names without meaning.

But each represents a real human being, some of whom paid dearly “for the support of this Declaration” and American independence.

Lewis Morris of New York, for example, must have known when he signed the Declaration that he was signing away his fortune. Within weeks, the British ravaged his estate, destroyed his vast woodlands, butchered his cattle, and sent his family fleeing for their lives.

Another New Yorker, William Floyd, was also forced to flee when the British plundered his property. He and his family lived as refugees for seven years without income. The strain told on his wife; she died two years before the war ended.

Carter Braxton of Virginia, an aristocratic planter who had invested heavily in shipping, saw most of his vessels captured by the British navy. His estates were largely ruined, and by the end of his life he was a pauper.

The home of William Ellery, a Rhode Island delegate, was burned to the ground during the occupation of Newport.

Thomas Heyward Jr., Edward Rutledge, and Arthur Middleton, three members of the South Carolina delegation, all suffered the destruction or vandalizing of their homes at the hands of enemy troops. All three were captured when Charleston fell in 1780, and spent a year in a British prison.

“Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Thomas Nelson Jr. of Virginia raised $2 million for the patriots’ cause on his own personal credit. The government never reimbursed him, and repaying the loans wiped out his entire estate.

Richard Stockton, a judge on New Jersey’s supreme court, was betrayed by loyalist neighbors. He was dragged from his bed and thrown in prison, where he was brutally beaten and starved. His lands were devastated, his horses stolen, his library burnt. He was freed in 1777, but his health had so deteriorated that he died within five years. His family lived on charity for the rest of their lives.

In the British assault on New York, Francis Lewis’s home and property were pillaged. His wife was captured and imprisoned; so harshly was she treated that she died soon after her release. Lewis spent the remainder of his days in relative poverty.

And then there was John Hart. The speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, he was forced to flee in the winter of 1776, at the age of 65, from his dying wife’s bedside. While he hid in forests and caves, his home was demolished, his fields and mill laid waste, and his 13 children put to flight. When it was finally safe for him to return, he found his wife dead, his children missing, and his property decimated. He never saw any of his family again and died, a shattered man, in 1779.

The men who signed that piece of parchment in 1776 were the elite of their colonies. They were men of means and social standing, but for the sake of liberty, they pledged it all — their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We are in their debt to this day.

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A FINAL NOTE (originally added July 2, 2005 at 8:30 PM): A distinction needs to be made between Jacoby’s column and the contents of an e-mail that was making the rounds of the Internet in the late 1990s. That e-mail (but not Jacoby’s column) has been critiqued at the Snopes.com Urban Legends web site and deemed “Some true. Some false.” None of the falsehoods or exaggerations criticized at Snopes appear to have made their way into Jacoby’s column, and Jacoby’s column provides a few additional facts not in the e-mail that have not been addressed by Snopes or verified by me (though it should be noted that The Globe never published a correction to any of the facts presented in Jacoby’s column).

A comment about the Snopes critique: Much of their non-factual criticism revolves around what they believe is an implied claim that the Signers were specifically targeted because they signed the Declaration. The subject e-mail never makes that claim, nor does Jacoby’s column. In both cases, I don’t see how any such implication can be derived. Why Snopes devotes so much of its critique to debunking the idea of “targeting,” and why the final two non-sequitur sentences of that critique are so, well, almost immature, is bewildering, to say the least:

But we should also not lose sight of the fact that many men (and women) other than the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence — some famous and most not — risked and sacrificed much (including their lives) to support the revolutionary cause. The hardships and losses endured by many Americans during the struggle for independence were not visited upon the signers alone, nor were they any less ruinous for having befallen people whose names are not immortalized on a piece of parchment.

Nobody ever said the Signers’ suffering was worse than that of others. But the Signers on average certainly had more to lose, at least materially, and they bore a special burden because they ensured that The Revolutionary War, already a year old, was about independence, and not some kind of peaceful coexistence with the British. It is my unprovable opinion that Snopes’ borderline-disrespect for the Signers comes from a deep-seated politically-correct need to minimize heroism wherever it is found.

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Also: Michelle Malkin wrote a hard-hitting piece in late July 2000 on The Globe’s immature reaction to the controversy described above and the subject reporter’s outstanding body of work.

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July 4, 2010 Add-on: It’s important to recall that Jacoby was beginning to build a bit of an online national audience for his Globe at places like FreeRepublic and Townhall, and had produced a number of hard-hitting columns going after presidential candidate Al Gore’s enviro obsessions and other considerable shortcomings (the linked column is dated October 12, 2000 at Jewish World Review, but I believe it was originally written before the suspension). In addition to carrying a routine link to his column, Matt Drudge had directly cited his column several times during the previous several years.

Given the Globe’s relentlessly leftist editorial slant and what it may have seen as Jacoby’s annoying and growing popularity, it’s reasonable to believe that the paper might have concocted its specious complaints about the origins of the content of his July 2000 column to muzzle him during the remainder of the 2000 campaign. The four-month suspension was timed to expire just days after the election.

July 4, 2010 Add-on II: About six weeks after Jacoby’s suspension, in what many including myself saw as an attempt to undercut Jacoby and perhaps eliminate the need to have him return, the Globe announced that it was adding two purportedly “conservative” columnists (additional interesting info is at the linked FrontPage item). Both were flaming moderates; one of them definitely still is, while the other is as best I can tell not currently writing columns. I don’t believe that the Globe continues to carry either of them. Thankfully, the tactic didn’t work.