From the Department of Labor:

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA

In the week ending December 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 366,000, a decrease of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 385,000. The 4-week moving average was 387,750, a decrease of 6,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 394,250.

UNADJUSTED DATA

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 433,287 in the week ending December 10, a decrease of 95,506 from the previous week. There were 491,776 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

Business Insider’s email predicted 390K. Same with Bloomberg.

Pending the inevitable upward revision next week (upward revisions in the past 40 weeks have averaged just a bit over 4,000), it’s the lowest figure since the week of May 31, 2008.

Let’s hope it’s really the good news most will believe it is. Lefties are going to call it snark, but it’s quite legitimate, after 3-1/2 years of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, to wonder if companies aren’t running out of people to lay off who would be eligible for benefits.

Also in the mix: So much of the pick-up in employment since the recession ended is part-time in nature. When part-timers get laid off, they are rarely eligible for unemployment benefits.

Government stats tell us that only 417,000 full-time jobs have been added since the recession officially ended in June 2009:

Also note that until two months ago, the net change since June 2009 was negative. On the bright side, the 744,000 added to the full-time employment rolls in the past two months is a really nice sign after 27 previously miserable months.

The comparable figure during the first 29 months after the Reagan-era recession was 6.893 million (difference between Feb. 1985 and Sept. 1982 at linked pic).

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UPDATE: Zero Hedge notes that a net of 332,000 more of the unemployed began receiving extended benefits, “an unprecedent large number for a weekly change.”

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder follows. Other topics are also fair game.

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At NewsBusters yesterday — “Matthews Apologizes for MSNBC’s KKK Smear of Romney: ‘Appalling Lack of Judgment.’” Matthews had compared “a Mitt Romney campaign slogan to the Ku Klux Klan. The Hardball host conceded, “It was irresponsible and incendiary of us to do this, and it showed an appalling lack of judgment. We apologize, we really do, to the Romney campaign.”

Matthews was so full of remorse that “About thirty minutes after host Chris Matthews apologized for his network’s pathetic Ku Klux Klan smear of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, he disgustingly attacked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich saying, ‘You don’t give WMD to someone known even by his old former allies to be in a crunch, or even whenever things get edgy, to be himself a weapon of mass destruction.”

The good news is that twice as many total viewers watch Fox News during his time slots (example here).

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Spengler explains a lot about Team Obama and its regime of uncertainty: “Severing reward from accomplishment is just as important to autocrats as separating punishment from crime. To wield arbitrary power, the king/dictator/CEO must wield power arbitrarily.”

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Mood-altering narrative — “This slump won’t end until 2031.” If we let authoritarians and statists instead of free markets rule, that’s not impossible.

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At the College Conservative (HT Instapundit) — “My Time at Walmart: Why We Need Serious Welfare Reform.” I’ll bet there are thousands of stories just like it around the country. Make that “I’m certain.”

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Economic Bellwethers? — First, Best Buy:

Best Buy 3rd-quarter profit falls, shares skid —

Electronics retailer Best Buy said Tuesday that its third-quarter net income fell 29 percent as it cut prices in popular categories such as tablets and TVs to drive sales and traffic during the busy holiday season.

Its adjusted earnings missed analysts’ expectations, and its shares sank more than 15 percent.

You would think that Best Buy, which basically owns the brick-and-mortar portion of the electronics and appliance markets and is aggressively building its online presence, could do well no matter what.

Well, maybe it’s because its Internet competitors, principally Amazon, are eating into its business in a profitable way.

Nope:

Amazon.com Inc shares dropped to levels not seen since March Wednesday on concern that big spending and aggressive pricing by the No. 1 Internet retailer will hit profit during the crucial holiday season and well into next year.

My take is that both outfits are deeply discounting because the goods won’t move if they don’t. That runs against the robust holiday spending meme the establishment press is attempting to build and doesn’t bode well for the post-Christmas letdown/employment shakeout in retail.

Finally, there’s this at the AP from Christopher Rugaber, who just a day earlier was trying to put smiley-faces on retail numbers with which almost everyone else was disappointed:

CEOs of big companies foresee no pickup in hiring

Two-thirds of chief executives of the largest U.S. companies say they don’t plan to increase hiring or will cut staff in the next six months, mainly because of sluggish growth in the United States and financial turmoil in Europe.

Okay, large companies usually don’t drive employment during recoveries, but not at all? It’s still not looking good out there.

From Rome:

Dec 14, 2011 / 01:50 pm

Nhora Valentina Munoz, the 10-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a Colombian rebel group last October, said she is now free thanks to the prayers of Pope Benedict XVI.

Munoz told CNA that seeing the Pope “means a lot to me, because Pope Benedict XVI prayed for me when I was kidnapped, and thanks to him I am free.”

The girl was in Rome with her family to participate in a Mass for Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12.

After hearing of the girl’s capture, the Pope began offering prayers for her immediate release and “for all those kidnapped in Colombia.”

Munoz said she was “very happy” to represent Colombia at the Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday. She was among dozens of young people who each carried the flag of their respective country.

Juan Sebastian Lozada, 25, who was kidnapped for three years by Colombian rebels together with his mother and brother, also attended the Mass. He said the experience was “very exciting” and that “to see first-hand what the Holy Father conveys is always a reason for admiration and pride.”

Lozada’s mother, Gloria Polanco, is a former congresswoman and the widow of the former governor of the province of Huila, Jaime Lozada. She was kidnapped by the Marxist rebel group FARC, along with her husband and two sons on July 26, 2001. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Late Friday afternoon, Todd Shields at Bloomberg News broke a story about some guy, who happens to be an Obama and Democratic Party donor (but not disclosed), against whom the Securities and Exchange Commission is formally considering an enforcement action (also not disclosed, though it was noted at the New York Times’s Dealbook Blog five hours before Shields’s report), whose “wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of global-positioning system receivers examined in a U.S. government test.” Though it generated a fair amount of center-right blog discussion over the weekend, the establishment press largely ignored the stunning result.

Earlier this evening, Shields and Alan Levin reported even more troubling info (as carried at the San Francisco Chronicle; bolds are mine throughout this post):

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Doug Ross has published “The Horrifying Chart That Democrats and RINOs Don’t Want You to See,” based on work done by Heritage.

If they don’t mind (I’m sure they don’t), I believe it would be helpful to identify who is responsible for the surpluses and deficits charted therein:

In 1997 and 1998, current Ohio Governor John Kasich and Newt Gingrich, followed by House Speaker Denny Hastert, set the nation on the course towards a balanced budget and the surpluses identified above. President Bill Clinton merely signed the bills, and would never have initiated any kind of meaningful improvement without the GOP Congress’s efforts.

George W. Bush’s debt and deficit responsibility began on October 1, 2001 after the end of fiscal 2001. He received substantial “help” from a GOP Congress which, though nowhere near as reckless as the Democratic Congresses of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in the final years of his second term, largely functioned as RINOs during his terms (the only real exception being fiscal 2007). His share of responsibility for the fiscal 2009 deficit obviously excludes all of President Obama’s stimulus plan, but does include most of the rest of the deficit incurred during that year.

Barack Obama owns most of the fiscal 2009 deficit and all recorded and projected deficits from that point forward. And yes, as illustrated, he took the promised “one-time” stimulus plan and added it to (as far as he and his party are concerned) the permanent spending baseline as far as the eye can see. Obama lied; the country’s financial well-being died.

Obama’s argument that we are enduring our current economic difficulties because of what he likes to call (paraphrasing) “the policies of the past” is a sick joke. Americans should not buy it. This is all on him, his policies, and his party.

Well, this is a slap in the face.

My “new” congressman, thanks to Ohio’s convoluted redistricting (latest version, hot off the presses, is here), is co-sponsoring a bill which could lead to “an Internet without uploading,” i.e., it would gut the Internet.

OH-01′s Steve Chabot, whose sensible conservative cred was pretty high during his seven previous terms in Congress, who embraced the Tea Party movement in its early stages, and who regained his seat by defeating incumbent Steve “Sore Loser” Driehaus in 2010, inexplicably became one of the early co-sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (link is to large PDF of the original bill) back on October 26.

(Before getting into specifics, Steve, you and other Republican co-sponsors need to buy a clue based solely on a few of the other co-sponsors who have since come on board: John Conyers (D-MI), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL and DNC Chairwoman), and Melvin Watt (D-NC). You should know better than to associate yourselves with anything these folks get behind.)

Bill Wilson at Americans for Limited Government succinctly states the potential harm the legislation would do in its current form, even after main sponsor Lamar Smith of Texas’s “manager’s amendment” (bolds are mine throughout this post):

… It doesn’t come close to addressing all of the concerns with this legislation. In fact, it doesn’t appear to have changed much about it at all.

This legislation will still give government the power to censor the Internet in the name of protecting copyright. It will still threaten any website that allows users to upload content with being shut down, including social networks and search engines.

It still takes the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and throws them in the garbage. Those safe harbor provisions have for years protected websites that provided easy takedown procedures for potential infringing materials, and already had a system in place for their removal under current law.

The bill will still allow copyright holders to pursue private actions against alleged infringing websites with the force of law behind them, including seeking the termination of advertising and payment services, whether the site is foreign or domestic.

Finally, even with its so-called “savings” clauses, the manager’s amendment will still risk placing unfeasible, court-ordered technology mandates on Internet service providers requiring websites to somehow prevent their services from being used to post infringing material, even if doing so is technically impossible. To avoid litigation, Internet companies will simply stop allowing uploading and file sharing all together.

That is the greatest danger of all. That, in the name of protecting copyright, this bill bring about the end of the Internet as we know it.

More from Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds:

It’s a terrible bill. Simply by introducing it, the sponsors — including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) have violated their oaths of office. In a moral society, they would immediately resign and commit honorable suicide. Since this isn’t such, we must hound them and humiliate them as best we can. They’ll probably try to make that illegal next.

Memo to Steve Chabot: I’m trying to come up with a reason why the “honorable resignation and (career) suicide” option shouldn’t apply to co-sponsors. I can’t.

Eric Schmidt of Google (yes, I know he hasn’t been the best of examples throughout his own career, e.g., the Great Firewall of China) has also weighed in:

Google chairman says online piracy bill would ‘criminalize’ the Internet

An online piracy bill in the House would “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt said the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would punish Web firms, including search engines, that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. He said implementing the bill as written would effectively break the Internet.

“By criminalizing links, what these bills do is they force you to take content off the Internet,” Schmidt said, calling it a form of censorship.

… I understand the goal of what SOPA and PIPA are trying to do,” Schmidt said of the Senate counterpart bill, the Protect IP Act. “Their goal is reasonable, their mechanism is terrible. They should not criminalize the intermediaries. They should go after the people that are violating the law.”

If you’re wondering why the legacy media outlets haven’t been all over this (e.g., searches on various terms at the Associated Press’s main national site yielded only one November 30 story about Schmidt’s outlook), it’s simple: If bloggers and others can’t excerpt or potentially even link to others’ content without running afoul of fear-driven ISP policies, the establishment press would regain near-total control over the news narrative — especially in the early stages — that they have substantially lost during the New Media age. Other than having an improved ability to complain to each other, we’d be back to the 1950s, just like that. They would consider that a feature, not a bug.

Getting back to Chabot — Steve, if you didn’t have your previous track record, I would disown you on the spot. As it is, you have a limited amount of time to regain your sanity and renounce this bill. Waiting …

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UPDATE: Especially offensive is the bill’s frequently repeated inclusion of provisions that no matter what the Attorney General does or how wrong he may be about whether a site has actually committed any of the offenses indicated, he and the government are immune from liability.

UPDATE 2, 8 p.m.: I called the Congressman’s Washington office shortly before 6 p.m. and was promised an email response, which I have yet to see.

The graphic at the right tells most of the story.

The Wall Street Journal’s accompanying editorial this morning gets to much of the rest, but leaves a few holes which really require fill-ins, the most important of which leads to the graphic near the end of this post.

Here are excerpts from the editorial:

Regulation for Dummies
The White House says its rule-making isn’t costly or unusual. The evidence shows otherwise.

To answer the most basic question—has regulation increased?—we’ll focus on what the government defines as “economically significant” regulations. Those are rules that impose more than $100 million in annual costs on the economy, though there are hundreds if not thousands of new rules every year that fall well short of that.

According to an analysis of the Federal Register by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the Cabinet departments and agencies finalized 84 such regulations annually on average in President Obama’s first two years. The annual average under President Bush was 62 and under President Clinton 56. [1]

Cass Sunstein, the director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has been shopping around lower numbers that selectively compare Mr. Obama’s first two years favorably with Mr. Bush’s last two. [2]

Now to the hole-filling:

[1] — A relatively minor detail is that more regs may have pushed over the $100 million threshold during the Obama years because of inflation.

[2] — Far more important, Sunstein’s comparison to Bush’s last two years is disingenuous, because during those last two years Democrats controlled Congress. Bureaucrats knew they could run rampant (this was doubly true in 2009 and 2010), because congressional oversight was essentially AWOL.

[3] — What the editorial completely fails to communicate is the fact that this is all cumulative. I know it doesn’t mean to, but the analysis makes it appear as if each president starts out with a clean piece of paper and no regs. We should be so lucky. With rare exceptions, old regulations, though they are often revised, don’t go away.

To elaborate on item [3], the roughly 540 regs with economic burdens of over $100 million issued under Obama in 2009 and 2010 ADDED to the burdens imposed by the roughly 2,300 regs issued from 1995-2008. Thinking longer-term, on top of all of the regs issued from the time of FDR until 1994, the participants in the economy now have about 2,850 MORE high-impact regs to worry about thanks to the regulatory zealotry of the past 16 years.

At some point, the pile of regs accumulated over decades (don’t forget what states and localities also add to the mix) gets to the point where businesspeople, investors, and entrepreneurs throw up their hands and say, “This is too much. I can’t possibly learn all of this, let alone comply with it. I’ve had it. I’m outta here.” Or maybe they decide not to expand or not to explore a new product line. The economy-inhibiting impact should be obvious.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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This one definitely does not go into the “how to persuade people that your cause is right” file.

Obama For America’s latest attempt to beg people to contribute $3 to enter a drawing for a dinner with POTUS and FLOTUS has a pathetic, insufferable, punkish and privacy-invading twist, wherein you get the opportunity to tell a Republican acquaintance that you just gave money to the Obama campaign:

Just an aside, Julianna — Someone putting up a Mitt Romney sign is probably not a conservative.

Geez, these people are more obsessed with birthers than the birthers.

Here’s part of what you see if you follow the link:

Wow … we’re supposed to be impressed that someone gave three whole dollars to win a contest where the prize is a dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama.

I’m guessing that second prize is two dinners with Barack and Michelle Obama.

Also note that there is no reason to believe that the emails of those being taunted aren’t being illegally collected for some other purpose. They certainly aren’t being provided voluntarily by the taunted party. Where’s the FTC when you need ‘em?

If a Republican or conservative president or candidate did this, the press would properly be criticizing the utter boorishness and privacy invasion involved. As it is, expect stone silence, as was the case when Nancy Pelosi invoked the wonderfulness of the Occupy movement in a fundraising letter.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: Taranto at WSJ’s Best of the Web — “Commander in Creep”

Today’s Advance Monthly Retails Sales Report for November from the Census Bureau came in with a seasonally and shopping-day adjusted 0.2% increase over October. Analysts expected 0.6%, and a whole host of them described the result as “disappointing,” as shown here in a Google News Search for the past 24 hours on ["retail sales" disappoint"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets; as of 6:40 p.m. ET, over 1,100 results were returned, but only about 400 are from after the report’s release).

That didn’t stop the Associated Press’s Christopher Rugaber and the wire service’s headline writers, in separate items at 11:44 a.m. and 3:05 p.m., from getting really close to in essence claiming, as Kevin Bacon’s character Chip Diller did in “Animal House,” that “all is well.”

First, from 11:44 a.m. (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Retail sales rise for sixth straight month

The start of the crucial holiday shopping season in November helped fuel the sixth straight monthly increase in retail sales. Gift-buying Americans spent more on clothing and electronics, and sales of autos and furniture also rose.

Still, the overall gain was the smallest since June. Consumers pulled back on some purchases unrelated to holiday shopping, such as groceries and building materials.

Retail sales rose 0.2 percent in November, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That was lower than October’s gain, which was revised up to show a 0.6 percent increase.

Even so, more spending on retail goods shows the economy is continuing to grow steadily, if slowly.

Then, 3:05 p.m., which incorporated news from two other government reports which were published later in the day:

Retail sales are helping economy grow consistently

Economic growth is picking up in the final three months of the year, fueled by higher consumer spending, rising business stockpiles and modest increases in hiring.

The start of the holiday shopping season in November helped produce the sixth straight monthly increase in retail sales. Gift-buying Americans spent more on clothing and electronics, and sales of autos and furniture also rose.

To be fair, Rugaber tempered the enthusiasm in later paragraphs. To be critical, those paragraphs are the ones less likely to be read by news readers or to be heard by radio listeners or TV viewers at subscribing AP outlets.

Here’s just one contrasting of the tone found elsewhere from CNN Money:

Retail sales rise, but disappoint

Retail sales picked up in November … but not by much. The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that retail sales were up 0.2% compared to October, growth that fell well short of the 0.6% increase forecast by economists surveyed by Briefing.com.

The story was similar when auto sales were excluded. Those sales increased by only 0.2%, well off the 0.5% forecast.

The disappointing numbers do not bode well for retailers that depend on strong holiday sales — despite a recent wave of optimism in the industry.

Black Friday shoppers showed up in droves and spent a record amount of money over the Thanksgiving weekend — but that doesn’t mean holiday sales momentum will continue through Christmas.

One commentator indicated that today’s report provides reason to believe that fourth-quarter growth, which many have been thinking will be an annualized 3% or greater, will be more like 2.5%.

All is not well, Chris, even you do work for the Administration’s, er, the Associated Press.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Business Insider calls it a “shocker” — Up 0.2% in November vs. 0.6% expectations (without considering inflation).

The Census Bureau’s report is here.

I’m going to go contrarian on this one and speculate that this month’s figure is going to get revised up a bit. Having said that, I think December may very well disappoint. My gut reaction to retail traffic during the weeks after Black Friday is that it has ranged from disappointing to miserable for the Christmas shopping season. Things may pick up during the final 12 days, but they’ll need to.

Uncle Sam’s Monthly Treasury Statement for November came out yesterday. The results: Tax collections through two months of the fiscal year are up 4.4% over fiscal 2010; spending is down 5.5%, but only because about $31 billion in checks which would ordinarily have gone out on October 1 (a Saturday) were sent on September 30; and the deficit of $235 billion is $55 billion less than last year.

The headline in the report by Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press (“Gov’t on pace to run budget deficit below $1T”), celebrated the totally untenable claim, only two months into the year, that the deficit might come in below $1 trillion for the first time in four years. Crutsinger’s coverage was otherwise adequate, except near the end, when he threw in the following obviously gratuitous and recklessly false and misleading statement: “A decade ago, the government was running surpluses and trillion-dollar deficits seemed unimaginable.”

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