From New York City:

Nov 7, 6:01 PM EST

A Chilean miner ran, walked and hobbled his way to the finish line of the New York City Marathon on Sunday, showing the passionate grit that helped him survive more than two months trapped underground.

Edison Pena crossed the Central Park finish line at 3:24 p.m., with a time of 5 hours, 40 minutes, 51 seconds. He was draped in a Chilean flag as Elvis music played over the speakers.

The 34-year-old survivor had beat his own goal – to complete the course through the city’s five boroughs in six hours.

Bags of ice covered his swollen knees as a grim-faced Pena walked the second half of the marathon, but he summoned enough energy to run the last stretch along Central Park West.

“In this marathon I struggled,” he said. “I struggled with myself, I struggled with my own pain, but I made it to the finish line. I want to motivate other people to also find the courage and strength to transcend their own pain.”

Pena’s personal victory came just weeks after he was still training in near-darkness, jogging each day 2,300 feet underground in stifling heat and humidity. He and 32 other men survived 69 days in the caved-in mine.

He said running was his salvation – his way of proving how much he wanted to live.

On this sunny day in Manhattan, the strong will that kept him focused came shining through.

It didn’t seem to matter to the world whether No. 7127 actually finished the race running into Central Park – or ended his first marathon barely making it.

To the wildly cheering crowds, he was already a winner among the 45,000 runners, including some of the world’s best marathoners.

At a post-marathon news conference, Pena was asked to compare his hours in the New York race with the days in the mines?

“In the mine, I ran alone,” he said.

He called the marathon “an incredible dream” – because of “how warm and welcoming and supportive the Americans are here,” with signs along the route reading “Go, Edison!” and “Go for it!” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Gosh, this is good stuff:

“Power rests with we the people” — that includes their right to keep and bear arms.

Via James M. Andrews at American Thinker (“The Biofuels Scam”; bolds are mine, though I could have bolded the whole thing):

Since 2007 the price of food around the world has just about doubled. Bad harvests, inflation, or George Bush didn’t cause this price increase. According to a secret report from the World Bank, reported in the UK’s Guardian, 75% of the increase in price has one source: “Biofuels.” This contrasts with US claims of only a 3% biofuels-caused increase. The World Bank also says that rising food prices have pushed 100 million people worldwide below the poverty line. Riots have been sparked from Bangladesh to Egypt.

The Holy Grail of the Left in recent years is Climate Disruption (formerly known as Global Warming and Climate Change). Much ink has been spilled and much airtime has been devoted to pushing the Green Agenda. … Among other measures, Congress mandates that gasoline contain 10% by volume of ethanol. As a result, the US is currently burning about 25% of its corn crop as fuel. Government subsidies and mandates work quite well at converting food into fuel, thus reducing the amount of food. As anyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows, less of something results in higher prices. Hungry people? Pssh! Saving the planet takes precedence.

… Ethanol is highly corrosive. It absorbs water from the air like a sponge. It cannot be transported in pipelines, necessitating delivery by (diesel) tanker trucks. If used in aircraft, water in the fuel can cause engine failure at the colder high altitudes. If left in your lawn mower or chainsaw over the winter, it causes serious rust problems. It lowers your car’s mileage, negating any benefits from “reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” It causes rust in your fuel lines and engine. It burns too hot in catalytic converters, causing premature failure.

If biofuels made sense, they would have made their way into the energy supply on their own without a government mandate and massive government subsidies.

Simply scratch the surface, and it’s intuitively clear that, except for relatively narrow instances, biofuels don’t make sense, haven’t ever made sense, and probably will never make sense.

To generate biofuels, you have to expend large amounts of effort and huge amounts of energy and other resources just to grow the crops that represent their raw material — and then expend even more energy converting those raw materials (i.e., edible crops) into usable fuel.

To generate conventional energy, all you have to do is go out and get what is already there in nature in the form of crude oil, coal, natural gas, etc., and use time-tested and clearly less expensive (because of already-existing economies of scale, and having decades to work out the kinks) conversion methods.

The only way biofuels even start to make sense is if it can be shown that we are running out of naturally available resources. We’re not.

Thanks to enviro activists’ artificially-imposed barriers, obstructionist government regulations, and a frightening and growing lack of political will, it may seem that these resources are in short supply. They’re not.

Enviros and the subsidy-seeking politicians who have championed biofuels must admit that they’ve been on the wrong side of this equation — financially and morally (whether they admit it or not, they have been). What they advocate has led to higher food prices and worsening worldwide poverty. Free-market capitalism, when legitimately implemented, leads to the opposite result.

• Saturday — AP, Which Called NY-01 For Bishop, Hasn’t Pulled Back, Despite Recanvass Results
• Sunday — Here We Go Again: Climate Taxes on the Table, Accompanied by Usual Media Slant

In the spirit of the second post, here’s the latest vid from Minnesotans For Global Warming (HT to an NB commenter):

I wonder how long it will take for the YouTube takedown (which is what happened to all versions of “Hide the Decline”).

In a weekend editorial:

Iowa’s Total Recall
Voters give activist judges the boot. Lawyers are shocked.

Iowans made a clean sweep of the state Supreme Court on Tuesday, voting to recall all three justices who were up for a retention election. The rout is being played as an unprecedented politicization of state courts. Maybe if judges behaved less like politicians, they’d have less reason to fear recall votes.

Voters were expressing their dismay over a 2009 Iowa court ruling that gave the green light to same-sex marriage. That unanimous decision, which overturned a state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, struck voters as an attempt by the seven justices to impose their views on the state. This is precisely the kind of judicial arrogance—finding a right to gay marriage in the state constitution after many decades in which no one noticed it—that the recall election was designed for.

… According to the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s nominating commission includes 12 Democrats, one Republican and one member whose affiliation is unknown. Critics of the judicial ouster naturally deplored the recalls as a “misuse of the judicial retention vote.”

But Iowa’s voters aren’t yahoos who recall judges willy-nilly, and when judges exceed their writ in such blatant fashion they shouldn’t expect an automatic pass from the people whose lives are governed by their decisions.

… Far from a beacon of judicial independence, the three Iowa justices were fired because they put their own political preferences above their commitment to the law. If judges want to avoid recalls, they should leave social legislation to legislators.

I should add that in the process they violated oaths they swore to uphold the state’s constitution.

Read the whole thing (if you run into the subscriber wall, Google the editorial’s title) for further discussion of the flawed process that allows temperamentally disqualified activist judges to reach these positions in the first place.

November 12, 2011 Update: I thought long and hard about just deleting this post and pretending that it never happened, but decided that to do so would be inappropriate.

I’m letting this post and my other post on Paterno in 2005 stand as a warning to all, including yours truly, that things are not always as they appear, even in the seemingly brightest of circumstances.

___________________________________

From State College, PA:

Nov 6, 9:00 PM EDT

As camera flashes lit up Beaver Stadium, Joe Paterno got a ride to a victory celebration atop the broad arms and shoulders of two burly offensive linemen.

Career win No. 400 for Penn State’s beloved coach will be remembered around Happy Valley for a long time.
(more…)

Darn. If only the midterm elections had been held after Friday’s Employment Situation Report instead of before, the results might have been very different.

Apparently that’s what the Associated Press’s Liz Sidoti (pictured at right) wants us to believe, as she ended her borderline bitter take on the origins of Congressional Republicans’ successful electoral comeback and takeover of the House of Representatives four days ago with this sentence:

Ten months later (after Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate race victory in Massachusetts — Ed.), victorious Republicans met to plan their transition to power in the House – just as it was announced that the economy created 151,000 jobs.

As if one good jobs-added number — even with the unemployment rate stuck at 9.6% — proves that the economic recovery is finally in high gear. Zheesh.

Along the way, Sidoti sought to create the impression that Republicans might have been rooting for the poor to non-existent economic recovery that has occurred — as opposed to knowing that the history of large-scale stimulus-based recovery efforts has been one of failure, despite the AP reporter’s lipstick-on-a-pig attempt in the last two of the excerpted paragraphs that follow:

GOP comeback strategy factored in lagging recovery

All but wiped out in 2008, Republicans groping for a comeback strategy determined there would be no swift return to economic health under incoming President Barack Obama.

They soon also agreed privately to oppose his major legislation.

Over the next two years, they criticized, attacked, voted against and then attacked some more as Democrats struggled to pass an economic stimulus measure, health care legislation and a bill to rein in Wall Street. Unemployment, 7.4 percent when Obama took office, soared to 10.1 percent, then barely budged for months.

On Election Day, those calculations made in Republican suites in the Capitol reaped dividends that must have seemed almost unimaginable even to the architects of their strategy: a gain of 60-plus House seats, enough to win a majority and end two years of Democratic dominance in Congress, as well as six new seats in the Senate.

… Many economists agree the economic stimulus, with its combination of tax cuts, aid to states and federal spending on construction and other areas, did create jobs. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress in July that “we should maintain our stimulus in the short term” to strengthen the recovery and help reduce unemployment.

It was not a point Republicans chose to acknowledge.

This is funny. After almost two years of enduring the hogwash over jobs “created and saved” — a phrase that was never used by Democrats and stimulus fans until after Barack Obama was safely elected (noted in December 2008 at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) — Sidoti’s “many economists” (i.e., “economists whose opinion I like”) insist that the stimulus created (some) jobs. By how many, Liz, and of what duration?

Reporter Ryan Kost at Sidoti’s own news organization sharply jabbed at the Obama administration’s stimulus-related jobs-created claim in July:

At the federal level, President Barack Obama has said the federal stimulus has created 150,000 jobs, a number based on a misused formula and which is so murky it can’t be verified.

The “misused formula” is known as “Okun’s Law.” It says that “for every percentage point that the unemployment rate falls, real GNP (GNP is now called “GDP” — Ed.) rises by 3 percent.” The trouble is that the late economist “cautioned that the law was good only within the range of unemployment rates—3 to 7.5 percent—experienced in that time period.” The unemployment rate was already about 8.2% in February 2009 when the president signed the stimulus bill.

In any event, 150,000 jobs is only about 2% of the 8 million jobs lost since the end of 2007. Republicans “chose not to acknowledge” the supposed good effects of the stimulus because they were at best insubstantial and at worst totally made up.

Sidoti leans one more time on economists she likes later in her piece:

Republicans correctly foresaw that unemployment would rise, and that if the economy remained weak, Obama and Democrats would get little or no credit from the voters for having stopped a near collapse. The GOP would not have fared so well if voters had agreed with leading economists who said things would have been much worse without those actions, or if Obama’s economic fixes had hastened the recovery.

Peter Raymond, in a marvelous piece at American Thinker, has an appropriate response to this claptrap:

… these same charlatans credit the recent multi-trillion-dollar spending orgy with preventing a depression even though they cannot produce a shred of evidence that it yielded any sustainable economic growth or created a single long-term job.

Sidoti does her best to portray GOP opposition to the president’s initiatives as a Hail Mary pass flying in the face of proven conventional wisdom about how to fix and economy instead of as a reasonable strategy based on that conventional wisdom’s utterly predictable failure. Nice try, Liz. Epic fail.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

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

__________________________________________________

Related: The column recounts Keynesianism’s three biggest failures (1930s USA, 1990s Japan, 2009-2010 USA).

Ben Bernanke’s latest round of “quantitative easing” is already not impressing economists, including one quoted in Bloomberg:

Unemployment Likely to Stay High Despite Fed, DeQuadros Says

The Federal Reserve’s plan to purchase $600 billion in Treasury securities through June is unlikely to bring down the unemployment rate, said Conrad DeQuadros, a senior economist at RDQ Economics LLC in New York.

“I think we probably still have an unemployment rate above 9 percent next summer,” DeQuadros said in an interview today on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene.

The Fed announced the purchases yesterday in Washington in a bid to “promote a stronger pace of economic recovery,” according to the Fed’s statement. The central bank will purchase Treasuries with an average duration of five to six years at a pace of about $75 billion per month. The purchases of additional bonds could boost the economy by lowering borrowing costs and boosting asset prices.

“I just don’t think that it’s interest rates that are holding back the recovery so I’m not sure what the Fed purchasing a significant amount of Treasuries really does to help the economy,” DeQuadros said.

Yet they keep on doing what won’t work, and pointedly criticize and ridicule what historically has.

Yeah, it’s collective lunacy.

_________________________________________________

UPDATE: Peter Raymond at American Thinker (bolds are mine) —

The Keynesians finally got their wish. The Federal Reserve plans to inject $600 billion of the most caustic debt imaginable into the economy. This is the Agent Orange of monetary policies that has the potential to wreak financial havoc.

In the hope of generating inflation, the central bank is going to enable deficit spending by buying treasury bonds. You read that correctly: the primary goal is to erode the value of the dollar, and we get to watch our currency and wealth literally dissolve before our eyes.

Only a desperate government would consider debasing its own currency.

… This strategy of monetary sabotage will punish savers and creditors, but Keynesians simply will not tolerate anything that impedes deficit spending. Since deflation hamstrings spending, they will stop at nothing to reverse deflationary pressures.

… It is astonishing to watch the self-proclaimed experts preach the falsehood that the fascist polices of the FDR administration that was enamored with the “triumphs” of Stalin and Mussolini successfully ended the Great Depression. Quite to the contrary, they were a colossal failure that resulted in years of unnecessary misery.

And these same charlatans credit the recent multi-trillion-dollar spending orgy with preventing a depression even though they cannot produce a shred of evidence that it yielded any sustainable economic growth or created a single long-term job.

In actuality, the only thing the abhorrent spending accomplished is an historic theft of wealth from future generations, who will bear the awful burden of our malfeasance.

… Unfortunately, with the student pilot who fancies himself an airline captain currently at the controls, the prospects of avoiding a financial crisis that could dwarf FDR’s man-caused disaster of the 1930s would be a miracle at this point.

Whatever remedial action is taken, there are very scary times ahead that will test the steadfastness of even the most ardent supporters of capitalism and limited government. Panic-stricken policymakers will undoubtedly act irrationally in trying to prevent the inevitable plunge off the cliff.

As stated: Colllective lunacy.

From Baltimore:

Nov 5, 6:46 PM EDT

As soon as collector Doug Walton heard about a rare Honus Wagner baseball card that had been bequeathed to an order of Roman Catholic nuns, he told himself he had to have it.

So Walton put in a bid that far exceeded the amount offered by other potential buyers.

Walton, of Knoxville, Tenn., will pay $262,000 for the card, which was auctioned off this week by the Baltimore-based School Sisters of Notre Dame. Proceeds from the sale will benefit the order’s ministries for the poor in 35 countries.

The price exceeded the expectations of auctioneers at Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries, who had predicted it would fetch between $150,000 and $200,000.

Walton, 35, who owns seven sports card stores in the Southeast, said the story behind the card motivated him to make a generous offer.

“To be honest with you, we probably paid a little bit more than we should have,” he said Friday. “But with the back story, and the fact that it’s going to a really good charity, to us it just seemed worth it.”

The Wagner card, produced as part of the T206 series between 1909 and 1911, is the most sought-after baseball card in history. About 60 are known to exist, and one in near-perfect condition sold in 2007 for $2.8 million, the highest price ever for a baseball card.

A shortstop nicknamed “The Flying Dutchman,” Wagner played for 21 seasons, 18 of them with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He compiled a .328 career batting average and was one of the five original inductees into baseball’s Hall of Fame.

The School Sisters of Notre Dame inherited their card from the brother of a deceased nun after he died earlier this year. The card had been in the man’s possession since 1936 and was unknown to the sports memorabilia marketplace. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

It’s strange how this “mandate” thing works, at least at the Associated Press.

In Ohio, Republican John Kasich defeated incumbent Democratic Governor Ted Strickland on Tuesday with a victory margin of about 2.5%, or almost 100,000 votes. Strickland is the first incumbent Buckeye State governor to lose a reelection bid since Democrat John Gilligan lost to Republican Jim Rhodes in 1974. In that race, everyone went to bed on Election Night believing that Gilligan had held on — including Rhodes himself, who conceded the race — only to wake up the next morning learning that late ballots had pushed Rhodes over the top by a razor-thin margin.

In Illinois, incumbent Democratic Governor Pat Quinn defeated Republican challenger Bill Brady by about 20,000 votes, a margin of about 0.5%.

Look who has permission to claim a “mandate,” at least according to the Associated Press’s headline writers:

Ill. Dem gov. earns chance to argue he has mandate (link)

Gov. Pat Quinn’s quest to become the elected leader of Illinois was fulfilled Friday when his Republican challenger conceded the state’s closest governor’s race in decades, leaving Quinn to argue he has a mandate to push a tax increase in the face of one of the nation’s worst state budget problems.

Quinn defied a national Republican surge that cost many other Democratic incumbents their jobs by defeating state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, but it was far from a resounding victory with just more than 19,000 votes separating the two.

Still Quinn, who has held the office since replacing ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich in January 2009, says he’ll continue arguing for an income tax increase to deal with a budget shortfall that could soon reach $15 billion and already has forced the state to stop paying some of its bills.

“I have a mandate, I think, to serve Illinois for the next four years, and I’m going to take that seriously and work hard on the issues that I espoused in the campaign. … I think there are those who understand the election returns gave us a lot of support, and that will help us get the votes in the Legislature to do challenging but very important things,” Quinn said Thursday.

Well of course. Quinn has a “mandate” because he wants to increase taxes. Kasich apparently doesn’t because he wants Ohio to align its tax receipts and spending without tax increases. In fact, Kasich has talked of gradually phasing out the income tax that John Gilligan and Democrats imposed on the Buckeye State in the early 1970s. Somehow, Ohio got by without an income tax until then without disappearing into Lake Erie. Since then, states without income taxes like Florida and Texas have generally prospered. Ohio? Not so much.

Separately, AP writer Deanna Bellandi describes Brady as “more socially conservative” than Quinn. This strong implication that Quinn is also socially conservative is not supported by the facts, as more fullly described here. Some examples:

• Quinn had the endorsements of gay agenda-supporting newspaper the Windy City Times, the Pro-Abortion Political Action Committee, Planned Parenthood Illinois Action, and the pro-gay lobby Equality Illinois. Brady did not.
• Brady had the endorsement of Illinois Family Action, the political arm of the prolife Illinois Family Institute. Quinn did not.
• Brady was rated as “100% prolife” by Illinois Citizens for Life. The same group tagged Quinn as “not prolife.”

Other than that, there was very little difference between the candidates on social issues (/sarcasm).

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Econ Catch-up:

On Wednesday, the Institute for Supply Management reported that its Non Manufacturing Index went further into expansion in October, moving from 53.2 to 54.3 (anything above 50 indicates expansion). As was the case with the improved Manufacturing Index ISM reported on Monday, the accompanying comments were strangely downbeat to neutral compared to the index number. The employment component of the index improved and was slightly positive for the second month in a row.

Also on Wednesday, ADP’s Employment Report came in with 43,000 seasonally adjusted jobs added in the private sector during October. September was revised nicely, from -39k to -2K.

Again on Wednesday, the car companies reported their sales. Overall industry sales were up 13.4% year over year, with a significant divergence. Car sales were up just 3.3%, while light trucks were up 23.5%. As to specific companies:

• Government/General Motors, up 4.2%, beat expectations of a slight decline but still lagged the industry. The irony is that GM’s vehicle mix is tilting heavily towards those supposedly eeeeevil light trucks (up 11.5% from October 2009 and 16.1% year-to-date) vs. cars (down 8.6% and 6.1%).
• Ford was up 19.4% over October 2009, also beating expectations, with the gains spread evenly among cars and light trucks.
• Chrysler continued on what appears to be a more legitimate recovery path than GM, as its October 2010 was 37% higher than October 2009. Like GM, its October improvement was pegged far more to light trucks (+44.6%) than cars (+16.0%). Chrysler’s current and year-to-date sales mix is more tilted towards light trucks (more than 3-to-1 compared to cars in both cases) than any other major makers.
• Toyota was down 4.4%. Uncle Sam’s and the media’s orchestrated campaign against the company, which is showing signs of being exposed as an utter sham, appears to be having its desired effect from the government’s perspective.
• Rounding out the Big Six, Honda (+15.6%) and Nissan (+16.1%) had strong months.
• Many other smaller makers turned in very strong numbers, including Hyundai (+37.6%), Kia (+38.7%), Subaru (+25.0%), and Volkswagen (+17.9%).

On Thursday, the Department of Labor reported that seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims increased from the previous week. The government also reported an upward revision to the prior week’s number for the 15th week in a row. The raw number of initial claims was only about 13% below last year’s figure.

Employment Report Run-up:

• Zero Hedge reports that Goldman Sachs is predicting 25,000 additional jobs (+75K private; -50K government) instead of +50K a few days earlier.
• The Associated Press is carrying a predix of +60,000 jobs and the unemployment rate staying the same at 9.6%.
• Reuters — same.
• Bloomberg — same.

The Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) BizzyBlog Benchmarks (graphics will come later, perhaps not until this evening):

• Private sector — Based on reviewing prior-year numbers, it needs to be +225k to be considered acceptable, regardless of how the seasonally adjusted number comes in.
• Overall — Based on reviewing prior-year numbers, it needs to be +750k to be considered acceptable, regardless of how the seasonally adjusted number comes in.

The report will be here at 8:30 a.m. (HTML version of entire release will be here).

Here it is, and it’s a mixed bag:

Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 151,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Since December 2009, nonfarm payroll employment has risen by 874,000.

… The number of unemployed persons, at 14.8 million, was little changed in October. The unemployment rate remained at 9.6 percent and has been essentially unchanged since May.

… Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 151,000 in October, reflecting job gains in mining and a number of service-providing industries. Private-sector payroll employment rose by 159,000 over the month; since December 2009, employment in the private sector has risen by 1.1 million. (See table B-1.)

Within professional and business services, employment in temporary help services continued to increase in October, with a gain of 35,000. Temporary help services has added 451,000 jobs since a recent low in September 2009. Employment in computer systems design and related services increased by 8,000 in October and has risen by 53,000 since a recent low in June 2009.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised from -57,000 to -1,000, and the change for September was revised from -95,000 to -41,000.

Fairly good news (finally) on jobs added, but the unemployment rate stays the same. Note that temp services is responsible for 40% of the private payroll gain this year (451K divided by 1.1 million). If a Republican were president, the press would be calling this a “temp economy,” as it has done in past GOP administrations with far flimsier evidence.

The irony of the employment gain being partially ascribed to pickups in mining in an administration that wants cap and trade, which would devastate the industry, should not be overlooked.

The prior-period changes were also good news, meaning that the BLS’s current best estimate is that 261,000 more people (151K current, 56K pickup from August, and 54K pickup from September) were working at the end of October than it estimated were working at the end of September.

Sadly, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate really went up, if you extend the numbers:

• September — 14.767 mil divided by 154.158 mil = 9.579%
• October — 14.843 mil divided by 153.904 mil = 9.644%

Compared to September (again, seasonally adjusted), October had more unemployed, and a quarter-million fewer people in the labor force. Saved by the rounding, so to speak.

In fact, compared to a year ago, the civilian adult population is up by 2 million, but the number of people in the labor force is the same. Therefore the number of adults in the labor force is also up by 2 million. This is not good, and it’s not sustainable.

More later, perhaps as late as this evening.

_________________________________

UPDATE, Nov. 9: Didn’t get to this because of a number of conflicts, but finally, here’s how the NSAs and SAs turned out:

The actuals beat my in-advance benchmarks by substantial amounts (919K vs. 750K in the overall, 409K v. 225K in the private sector). Both numbers are the best since 2004. The Birth/Death estimate is relatively small at 61K.

I don’t see how you can complain about this result. It (meaning “numbers that are as good or almost as good as the best years of the mid-200os”) just needs to happen about 20 more times.

It should also be pretty clear that the administration is getting bad breaks from the seasonal adjustment calculations:

• In 2004 overall, 982 NSA led to 351 SA. In 2010, 919 SA led to only 151K SA. Huh?
• In 2004 private sector, 456 NSA led to 330 SA. In 2010, 409 SA led to only 159K SA. Again, huh?

I’d be more reassured that something resembling a legitimate recovery is finally underway is the “A” information (used to calculate the unemployment rate) weren’t showing a still-shrinking workforce and a dropping jobless rate. But they aren’t.

From Nova Scotia (video is at link):

November 4, 2010

Nova Scotia couple won big and then they gave it all away.

Allen and Violet Large, both in their 70s, won $11.2 million in the July 14 Lotto 649 draw, but instead of spending their new found fortune on lavish gifts they decided to hand it over to friends, charities and hospitals.

“What you’ve never had, you never miss,” Violet, 78, told the Canadian Press. …

Go here for the rest of the story.