Governor Walker's War on Christmas

Fox News can't spend too much time taking Democratic Governors to task for calling evergreens in Capitol rotundas "Holiday Trees." Fox hashtags these pieces "War on Christmas."

Here is the Governor's and First Lady's Christmas message:



What's with this "Blessings of the Season" stuff? I am willing to bet the Gov isn't accused by Fox of waging War on Christmas.

The two Walker kids look just about as excited about this video project as my sons do when asked to gather for the annual Christmas, er, Blessed Season Picture.

Something Completely Different

A little Tchaikovsky Christmas favorite from the Basilica of Saint Stephen in Bologna, Italy



Thanks to Andrew Sullivan's Blog, The Dish.

A Great Navy Tradition Proudly Observed

 First Kiss





Many Navy ships raffle off the right to be the first sailor down the brow to kiss a loved one upon return to the ship's homeport. When the USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) docked in Little Creek, Virginia today, the winner of the raffle kissed her partner. Without fear of reprisal.  As reported by the Associated Press:

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta of Placerville, Calif., descended from the USS Oak Hill amphibious landing ship and shared a quick kiss with her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles. The crowd screamed and waved flags around them.

Both women, ages 22 and 23 respectively, are fire controlmen in the Navy. They met at training school and have been dating for two years.

Navy officials said it was the first time on record that a same-sex couple was chosen to kiss first upon a ship's return. Sailors and their loved ones bought $1 raffle tickets for the opportunity. Gaeta said she bought $50 of tickets. The Navy said the money would be used to host a Christmas party for the children of sailors.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Badgers v. Illini. We're behind in the Job Creation Contest Governor Walker declared.

Versus

Oh no.  Not another post on jobs!

I'll make it short.  Here is the Wisconsin November Job Report.  Here is the Illinois November Job Report.  Governor Walker threw down on Governor Quinn earlier this year over how his budgetary reforms were setting Wisconsin up to outpace Illinois in job creation.

Here are the facts:

Illinois population in 2010 census - 12,830,632

Wisconsin population in 2010 census - 5,686,986

Illinois population is 2.26 times the population of the Badger State.

Total Non-Farm Job creation in Illinois over the last 12 months - 57,000
Total Non-Farm Job creation in Wisconsin over the last 12 months - 4,500

Illinois created 12.66 times as many non-farm jobs.

Total Private Sector Non-Farm Jobs created in Illinois over the last 12 months - 66,600

Total Private Sector Non-Farm Jobs created in Wisconsin over the last 12 months- 16,600

Illinois created 4 times as many Private Sector Non-Farm Jobs as Wisconsin.

The difference between the Total Non Farm Jobs ratio and the Total Private Sector Non-Farm Jobs ratio results from the fact that Wisconsin has shed government jobs at a faster rate than Illinois. You might think that is a good thing, unless you were an owner of a grocery store, or a plumbing company, or an appliance store, or frankly any kind of business that depends on consumers making decent wages spending money with your business.  In that case you probably don't care who signs the consumers' paychecks.

Newt or Supervillain?

 Newton Leroy Gingrich

 Baroness Von Gunther






Some very clever person has thought up an on-line ten-question test to see if you can distinguish whether a particular earth-shaking idea "comes from an indestructible megalomaniac hell-bent on ruling the world, or from a fictional supervillain."

The introduction to the game:

You already knew he was an academic, a family man, and an all around great guy. But did you know that Newt Gingrich also has the potential to be one of history's great supervillains? Find out now if you can tell the difference between a Newt Big Idea and a scheme from your favorite evildoer!

Here is one of the ideas:

Idea: Deliberately allow terrorists to commit an attack on one's own country in order to show the people how much they need their leader.

Find the answer to who thought up this idea and the complete test here.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Says Wisconsin Job Creation Performance Worst in the U.S. in October 2011

 Is Wisconsin Effectively Open For Business?





Governor Walker promised to run his administration like a business: lean, efficient, result-oriented and based on measurable performance data.  His core metric was to be job creation in the private sector.  As his 2010 campaign's website stated:

One of the keys to the future of our state’s economy is setting and meeting goals. For too long, politicians and bureaucrats have taken the state’s economy for granted and delayed action until a business was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy or moving to a new state. Instead of reacting to each crisis as it comes, I will develop strategies for creating 250,000 new jobs and 10,000 new businesses by 2015.

These goals will guide every decision made by my administration; every initiative that’s undertaken and every program that’s administered will be examined for its effect on jobs. Every decision must be considered in the context of what it means for job creation and economic recovery.

I posted yesterday and previously about the fact that the Wisconsin job creation numbers have been dismal.  Wisconsin DWD Secretary Reggie Newson issued a press release on Thursday attacking the job reporting requirements of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), claiming that the monthly preliminary numbers for Wisconsin had been revised significantly in the month following their initial release, and that the preliminary numbers tended to make Wisconsin's job creation curve look unduly flat:

“The monthly revisions show a much steadier trajectory with gains being higher and losses being much lower than the BLS’ initial reports. While there certainly is more progress to be made, we are moving Wisconsin in the right direction and laying the groundwork for the private sector to create jobs.”

I wondered what had inspired this attack on a national data system that seemed to be working quite well back in April, May and June when the Governor appeared to be on track to meet his 250,000 new private sector jobs promise.  So I went to the BLS monthly report released on all 50 states' performance in October that was released on November 22, 2011.  There I found that the BLS had singled out Wisconsin as being the only state in the country with a statistically significant decline in employment during October:

In October, non-farm payroll employment increased in 39 states and the District of Columbia, and decreased in 11 states. The largest over-the-month increases in employment occurred in Illinois (+30,000) and California (+25,700). The largest over-the-month decrease in employment occurred in Wisconsin (-9,700), followed by New York (-8,300) and Minnesota (-6,100). Delaware experienced the largest over-the-month percentage increase in employment (+1.0 percent), followed by North Dakota (+0.7 percent) and Oklahoma (+0.6 percent). Wisconsin experienced the largest over-the-month percentage decline in employment (-0.4 percent), followed by Maine, Rhode Island, and Wyoming (-0.3 percent each). 

Here is Table C from the report that details states with statistically significant increases or decreases in employment between September and October 2011:



The change detailed by this report of BLS on October job figures has now been followed by a month where the job losses in Wisconsin are even direr.  Wisconsin DWD reported losing 11,700 non-farm private sector jobs and 2,900 government jobs in November.

If the state government is going to be run like a business, it is time for a new plan to be circulated by the CEO that explains why we are seeing such poor results and lays out a new path for achieving the four year plan.  Think of the state citizens as the board of directors of the business.  It is time for the board to be approached by the CEO in a proactive way explaining either why we are seeing delayed results from the current business model, or why that model is going to be replaced by a different one that will show better results.

Governor Walker's [Insert adjective here] Job Creation Numbers. Suggestions: doleful, sad, lugubrious, dismal, bleak (Keep it Clean!)

The November job numbers were released by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development last Thursday and job creation in Wisconsin continues to be anemic.  Since the Walker administration and the GOP controlled legislature took charge in January, non-farm private sector jobs have risen by 16,300, while government jobs have fallen by 12,400.  Total workers employed have risen by 14,400, which means that if the agriculture sector had not shown some modest job growth since December, the job picture would be even bleaker. At the current rate of private job creation, the Governor will not even meet one-third of his promise.  The state is currently on track to create 71,000 jobs by the currently scheduled end of the Governor's first term.   His campaign promise was to create 250,000 new private sector jobs by January 2015.

What is more interesting than the numbers themselves is the manner in which they were reported in DWD Secretary Reggie Newson's press release.  (Newson is the third secretary of DWD appointed in the last ten months.  Talk about a tough job to hold.)  

The press release contained Newson's attack on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for forcing the state to release monthly preliminary data that were subject to significant revision in the following month:

“October was the fifth straight month and the eighth month this year in which the federal government overestimated the preliminary job loss numbers or underestimated job gains for Wisconsin,” Secretary Newson said. “I am particularly concerned by the disparity in the October preliminary numbers, which were off by 7,300 for total jobs and 7,900 for private-sector jobs. These unreliable employment statistics out of Washington misinform the public and create unnecessary anxiety for job seekers and job creators about the shape of our state’s economy.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Wisconsin’s revised numbers show the state lost 2,400 jobs in October, roughly a 75 percent correction from their initial estimate of 9,700 jobs. Meanwhile, Wisconsin added 11,000 jobs in June, but BLS initially underestimated that number by roughly 1,500 jobs.

“The most troubling thing to me is the effects these initial estimates have on the perception of Wisconsin’s workforce,” continued Secretary Newson. “The monthly revisions show a much steadier trajectory with gains being higher and losses being much lower than the BLS’ initial reports. While there certainly is more progress to be made, we are moving Wisconsin in the right direction and laying the groundwork for the private sector to create jobs.”

Under an ongoing annual contract between the state and BLS, the monthly employment estimates are generated from a survey of 4 percent of Wisconsin employers. The survey data are transmitted to Washington, where BLS generates the preliminary estimates and sends the numbers to Wisconsin to publish. The BLS revises the estimates as additional data comes in, but the revisions aren’t published until the following month. The BLS’ November preliminary estimates for Wisconsin indicate a decrease in total jobs by 14,600 on a seasonally adjusted basis.

“We are required by the federal government to release its preliminary numbers on a monthly basis, even though the numbers can be off by as many as 9,400 jobs and still be considered by BLS to be within an acceptable margin of error,” Secretary Newson continued. “This margin of error may be fine for Washington, but not here in Wisconsin. In order to address the serious needs of Wisconsin’s workforce, our state needs an accurate jobs reporting system that allows us to understand the trends without unnecessarily alarming the state’s job seekers and job creators.”

So there you have it.   The perception of the Governor's problem in job creation is the fault of the Feds!

But when you unpack what Secretary Newson is saying, his criticisms are really just a effort to divert attention from the fact that Wisconsin's job recovery has stalled out after a relatively quick start in the first several months of the Walker administration. “The monthly revisions show a much steadier trajectory with gains being higher and losses being much lower than the BLS’ initial reports. While there certainly is more progress to be made, we are moving Wisconsin in the right direction and laying the groundwork for the private sector to create jobs.”    

The "laying the groundwork" reference has to be seen as an admission that job creation in the first year of the Walker administration has been crummy. And even if one uses the final data for October, rather than the preliminary data for November of this year, the Governor stands to fall short of his job creation promise by one-half, creating only 134,000 new jobs in the private sector.

Rest in Peace, Colonel Potter

Harry Morgan died in his sleep today in Brentwood, California at age 96. Here is one of his more memorable scenes from Mash:

Newt a Marxist?

 Karl Marx






In an op-ed piece published last Friday in the Washington Post, conservative columnist George Will, evaluated the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, and found both men sorely lacking as presidential candidates.  Romney is dismissed as a modern day John Dewey, smooth and credentialed, but someone nobody will come to like in the general election.  Romney is also described by Will as a conservative of convenience.

Far more scorn is heaped on Gingrich.  Here are the money quotes:

Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.

There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.

His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/vFbjAk). And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.  Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

Romney might not be a Dewey. Gingrich might stop being (as Churchill said of John Foster Dulles) a bull who carries his own china shop around with him. But both are too risky to anoint today.

It is clear that Will thinks Huntsman is the best GOP candidate, with which I whole-heartily agree.

"We have awakened a Sleeping Giant" - Admiral Yamamoto

 December 7, 1941








Today's NYTimes Op Ed page had an interesting piece for Pearl Harbor Day on the unsuccessful efforts by the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, to dissuade his country from war against the United States in 1941.

Excerpts from the Op Ed piece by Ian Toll:

During the Second World War and for years afterward, Americans despised Yamamoto as an archvillain, the perpetrator of an ignoble sneak attack, a personification of “Oriental treachery.” Time magazine published his cartoon likeness on its Dec. 22, 1941, cover — sinister, glowering, dusky yellow complexion — with the headline “Japan’s Aggressor.” He was said to have boasted that he would “dictate terms of peace in the White House.”

Yamamoto made no such boast — the quote was taken out of context from a private letter in which he had made precisely the opposite point. He could not imagine an end to the war short of his dictating terms in the White House, he wrote — and since Japan could not hope to conquer the United States, that outcome was inconceivable.  . . .

In the course of his naval career, he traveled widely through the United States and Europe, learning enough English — mostly during a two-year stint at Harvard soon after World War I — to read books and newspapers and carry on halting conversations. He read several biographies of Lincoln, whom he admired as a man born into poverty who rose to become a “champion” of “human freedom.”

From 1926 to 1928 he served as naval attaché in Washington; while in America, he journeyed alone across the country, paying his way with his own meager salary, stretching his budget by staying in cheap hotels and skipping meals. His travels revealed the growing power of the American industrial machine. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.” . . .

And yet even in the final weeks of peace, Yamamoto continued to urge that the wiser course was not to fight the United States at all. “We must not start a war with so little a chance of success,” he told Admiral Nagano. He recommended abrogating the Tripartite Pact and pulling Japanese troops out of China. Finally, he hoped that the emperor would intervene with a “sacred decision” against war. But the emperor remained silent.

On Dec. 7, 1941, all eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet were knocked out of action in the first half hour of the conflict. More than 180 American planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground, representing about two-thirds of the total American military aircraft in the Pacific theater. The Japanese carriers escaped with the loss of just 29 planes.

The Japanese people exulted, and Yamamoto was lifted in their eyes to the status of a demigod. Now he could dictate his wishes to the Tokyo admirals, and would continue to do so until his death in April 1943, when American fighters shot down his aircraft in the South Pacific. . . .

But perhaps the most important part of Yamamoto’s legacy was not his naval career at all, but the part he played in the boisterous politics of prewar Japan. He was one of the few Japanese leaders of his generation who found the moral courage to tell the truth — that waging war against the United States would invite a national catastrophe. As Japan lay in ashes after 1945, his countrymen would remember his determined exertions to stop the slide toward war. In a sense, Isoroku Yamamoto was vindicated by Japan’s defeat.

Yamamoto intuitively knew that sneak attacks often end up poorly for the aggressor because of the intense passions and mobilizations they engender.  Yamamoto knew that the Pearl Harbor attack really had to deliver a knock-out punch, or it would go horribly wrong.  You can see this dynamic playing out today at card tables all across the state.  As a newly installed ruling party in 2011, the Republicans in Wisconsin chose to govern in juggernaut fashion, including their infamous "dropping of the bomb" on public employees and school teachers:

"This is an exciting time. This is — you know, I told my cabinet, I had a dinner the Sunday, or excuse me, the Monday right after the 6th. Came home from the Super Bowl where the Packers won, and that Monday night I had all of my cabinet over to the residence for dinner. Talked about what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it. We’d already kinda built plans up, but it was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb. And I stood up and I pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan, and I said, you know, this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air-traffic controllers."

February 22, 2011, Governor Walker speaking by telephone with blogger Ian Murphy, a person he thought was David Koch.  Full transcript here.

Sunk Near the Bottom of the Barrel - Wisconsin Job Creation. Thank God for Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, Delaware, Rhode Island and Arkansas!

The Governor, back in April, having great fun at Illinois' expense.





Today, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics issued  the October 2011 figures for job creation by states and large metropolitan areas.    The results are here.   Wisconsin ranks seventh from the bottom of the fifty-state barrel in job creation over the one-year period, October 2010 to October 2011.  We beat only the six sad states mentioned in the header above.

During that one year period, Wisconsin saw 5,500 new non-farm jobs created.   That represented an increase in employment in Wisconsin of two-tenths (0.2%) of a percent.  By contrast, Minnesota increased its non-farm jobs by 0.7%, Iowa by 0.9%, and Michigan by 1.2%. 

And what about our fourth border state?  Remember the Governor erecting the "Open For Business" signs at the Illinois border back in April, while calling out Governor Quinn by name as a vicious tax and spending profligate who could be counted on to drive Illinois businesses into our welcoming arms?  At the time, I talked about it here, and speculated that the stunt might come back to haunt the Governor.  Well, while we increased our non-farm employment in Wisconsin by 5,500 jobs or 0.2%, Illinois increased its labor force by 62,000 jobs or by 1.1%.  Maybe those "Open for Business" signs needed some flashing neon lights.