Something Completely Different

U.S. troops in Afghanistan having fun with a remix tribute to the Miami Dolphin Cheerleaders:

"Proctology Exams?" No need without A-holes.

A few comments from leaders on the right in response to November 6th:

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and next Chairman of the Republican Governor's Association:

We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything.  We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.

It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that. It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

This guy is a Rhodes Scholar.  He deserves to be listened to.

Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor, on Fox News Sunday the Sunday following Obama re-election:

I think honest debate, fresh thinking, leadership in the Republican party and the leadership in the conservative movement has to pull back, let people float new ideas. Let’s have a serious debate. Don’t scream and yell over what one person says.  You know what?  It won't kill the country if Republicans raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.  It really won't, I don't think.

I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer to freeze taxes for everyone below $250,000. Make it $500,000, make it a million. Really?  The Republican party is gonna fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democrat, and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile to Republicans?

Haley Barbour, former Governor of Mississippi and former RNC chairman:

The ground game is really important, and we have to be, I mean we've got to give our political organizational activity a very serious...Proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.

 Barbour, speaking about immigration reform:

What are we going to do? Send them home? Send five million people home and then try to figure out how to replace them? We need those people to do those jobs

Was 2010 the high water mark of the Tea Party movement?

Dank Shot. No, not dunk shot. Dank Shot.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic's amazing goal in Sweden - England friendly last Wednesday:



Liverpool's Steven Gerrard, earning his 100th cap for England in the game, called it the best goal he had ever seen.

The New York Times was inspired by Ibrahimovic's goal to put together a retrospective of great goals over the years. I am partial to Zidane's. But Maradona's is considered the best ever by most.

The Wisconsin Nine: Helping to Demonstrate Why the Republican Party is The Party of the Unbalanced.

Chris Kapenga, Republican State Assemblyman from Deerfield.






To paraphrase Mark Twain:  "Politicians are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet."

Nine Wisconsin GOP legislators want to introduce a bill to have arrested any federal officials who enter the state of Wisconsin to help implement the Affordable Care Act.   That is just the tip of the iceberg of new legislation the nine are proposing.  At least one of them, Chris Kapenga, of Deerfield, apparently takes the position the ACA is unconstitutional, notwithstanding the decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.  Heaven only knows where Mr. Kapenga was back in June, when the Supreme Court ruled.  Here is what he had to say this week: "Just because Obama was re-elected does not mean he's above the constitution,"  Hopefully two years from now the citizens of Deerfield and other communities in his district will give some serious thought to whether Mr. Kapenga is intelligent enough to ably serve their interests in the assembly.  None of the nine has indicated whether they intend the legislation to mandate the president's arrest if he chooses to come visit the Badger State again. 

These nine devoutly dumb legislators are among the latest in a long string of bizarre folks the GOP has given us to lead at the local, state and federal level.  Until more mature and prominent leaders of the GOP are willing to promptly call out these kinds of folks for talking as if they have the intelligence of rocks, even at the risk of offending the far right base of the party, the Republican party can expect to have many more election nights like November 6 in the future. 

So what did Governor Walker or the leadership of the Senate or Assembly have to say about the silliness of the nine?  No statement was issued by Scott Fitzgerald or Robin Vos.  New Assembly speaker Vos was too busy threatening to cut UW-Madison funding for hosting President Obama's rally last month.  The best Governor Walker was willing to do was to parade out a spokesman on Thursday to say: "Governor Walker doesn’t support arresting people for implementing federal law.”   Gee, I'm glad we got that reassurance.

The GOP will continue its downward spiral  if its party leaders continue to refuse to rebuke the kind of crazed rhetoric that continues to issue from its elected officials and its Tea Party base.  Here are some recent examples of the craziness:

Alan West, Republican congressman from Florida who has refused to concede defeat in the 2012 election, at an April town-hall meeting of constituents:

"That’s a fair question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party,"

Joe Walsh, Republican congressman from Illinois who was defeated by Tammy Duckworth last Tuesday:

"Abortions are absolutely never necessary to save the lives of pregnant women.  With modern technology and science, you can't find one instance." "There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing."

Paul Broun, Republican congressman from Georgia, whom the party caucus named to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, speaking at a church gathering last month:

"God's word is true, I've come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."

The folks in Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is located, knowing that Broun was a shoe-in based on the electorate outside Athens, mounted a campaign to have Charles Darwin receive write-in votes.  The  British scientist now dead for 130 years, received some 4,000 votes.  I marveled in a previous post over a year ago about Representative Broun.

The Republican State Senate Caucus in Georgia (group inanity award!) had a four-hour briefing at a closed door meeting on the following topic:

How President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as "Delphi" to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities . . . and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth.

This doesn't even begin to touch the zaniness about climate change issuing from right-wing politicians. A topic for a future post perhaps.

Not Mississippi, but Darn Close. Wisconsin is 47th in Economic Growth Since January 2011

Here is the pledge Governor Walker made at the start of his inaugural address:

And as your Governor, I make this pledge:

Wisconsin is open for business. We will work tirelessly to restore economic growth and vibrancy to our state. My top three priorities are jobs, jobs, and jobs.

We will right-size state government by ensuring government is providing only the essential services our citizens need and taxpayers can afford. My fellow state workers, I invite you to partner with me in this necessary work.

Reasonable minds might differ on whether the governor has achieved his promise to "right-size" state government.  But it is difficult to find any indication that the governor's policies have restored economic growth and vibrancy to Wisconsin.

This past Tuesday the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank issued its Coincident Index for each of the fifty states for September 2012.   The coincident index is a measure of the growth of state economies.  Since Governor Walker's inauguration in January the economies of the fifty states taken as a group have grown at a rate six times the rate of growth of Wisconsin's economy.  Here is how Wisconsin's economic growth rate compares to our Midwestern neighbors over the twenty months since the governor came to office:




So Wisconsin's rate of economic growth is less than one-tenth that of Ohio,  less than one-eighth of Indiana's, and one-fifth of Illinois'.    Only three states have had slower rates of economic growth since January 2011:  Alaska, Delaware and Mississippi.  Remember back in February and March of last year when protestors around the state capitol in Madison carried signs accusing the governor of trying to remake Wisconsin into the Mississippi of the Midwest, "Wississippi?"  Well, we aren't Mississippi on the Philly Fed's Coincident Index.  We beat them out by one one hundredths of a percent!!

68 Nobel Laureates in the Sciences Support Obama

 Nobel Prize Medal




The New York Times reports today that sixty-eight American Nobel Prize winners in the science fields, including the two Americans who won this year’s chemistry prize have signed an open letter to American voters endorsing Barack Obama for president over Mitt Romney.  Is it any wonder that these distinguished scientists support the president?  The Republican party has become the home of some of the weirdest deniers of scientific facts imaginable.

The New York Times back in March 2011, reported on what Henry Waxman, the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee had to say at a forum in 2011 at the Center for American Progress, a left leaning research institute:

"But I have never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and policy,” he said. “The Republicans in Congress have become the party of science deniers, and that is profoundly dangerous."

Waxman also said that Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the new chairman of Energy and Commerce, had joined Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in sponsoring a bill to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that heat-trapping gases endanger public health and the environment. Mr. Inhofe has repeatedly referred to climate change as a hoax perpetrated by an incestuous coterie of climate scientists unwilling to consider contrary evidence.

If you are interested in trying to decide if this seemingly inane GOP opposition to findings about Climate Change  is heartfelt, or purchased,  read this article by Bill McKibben in the July 12, 2012 edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

Deep in the Hole! Walker yet to Create a Net Job in Wisconsin in his First Term

Big Hole in the Ground in the UK.




I have previously (ad nauseum) posted about the Walker Administration's vacillation between two different Bureau of Labor Statistics' job data surveys as providing the most appropriate scoring matrix for the Governor's promise to the citizens of Wisconsin to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first term in office. Originally the matrix the Governor was touting was the BLS' Current Employment Statistics (CES) monthly survey of jobs.  When earlier this year that survey proved to be unhelpful in demonstrating any measurable improvement in jobs in Wisconsin, the Governor's staff began to rely on the BLS' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), data that only comes out 6 months after the period of data being reported. (CES data comes out monthly and shows the survey results from the previous month.) 

The Department of Workforce Development issued the September job numbers based on the CES survey today.  Once again its press release doubled down on the QCEW being the far more reliable measurement:

The most accurate count of jobs data, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), is based on a census of approximately 96 percent of Wisconsin employers. DWD last month submitted unemployment insurance (UI) records for the first three months of 2012 to the federal government. The federal government will incorporate the data in its next QCEW release covering the first quarter of 2012 for all states.

Now we are assured that the Governor intends to use the QCEW data to score his job creation promise.  So we have an accepted matrix.  That's the good news.  No more waffling around on the data set to use.  Here is the bad news:  Starting with the December 31, 2010 QCEW data for private job employment, and using the most current QCEW data for March 31, 2012, the State of Wisconsin has lost a net of 19,255 private sector jobs in the Governor's first term.   That leaves the Governor with 269,255  net private sector jobs to create in Wisconsin from March 2012 to December 2014.   We need to see over 8,000 net new private sector jobs created per month for the final 33 months (beginning in March of this year) of the Governor's term.   If that were an event listed on Intrade I am guessing it would probably cost you $9.99 a share.

Not only is the Governor in the hole on job creation but the QCEW also shows that average weekly wages for  Wisconsin workers in the private sector have declined by $13.00 per week from December 2010 through March 31, 2012.  That's $676.00 per year.

You can double-check my accuracy on the data at this page of the BLS.  Make sure you enter the relevant quarter from which you wish to see data, and enter "all industries" and "private" ownership on Map Series "No. of Employed."

The Vagina Whisperer

Colbert, at his funniest. See his Super-ego kick in at 5:01.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Sad, actually

Poor Mitt:

Governor Walker gets an F after his First 20 Months

The Wisconsin DWD released the August 2012 job numbers today and things continue to go very poorly for the Walker Administration in terms of the governor's promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first four years. We were told that if the state balanced its budget on the backs of public school teachers and other state and local government workers, Wisconsin's K-12 students, and the UW system, the economy would mushroom and the private sector jobs would flow. Instead we have driven out experienced and talented teachers and other public employees, raised K-12 class sizes, decimated the University of Wisconsin budget and have a net private sector job loss since the Governor took office.  Here is the scorecard of seasonally adjusted monthly private sector job numbers to date:

We were also told that privatizing the former Department of Commerce into the new Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) would lead to faster economic growth and more jobs.  Today Paul Jadin the former mayor of Green Bay and the current CEO of WEDC announced that he was stepping down from WEDC effective November 1.  Thus, in the first two years of Governor Walker's administration he has had three secretaries of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and, soon, two CEO's of WEDC. 

As of today, based on the job numbers released by DWD, Governor Walker needs to create about 9,600 private sector jobs a month for the remaining 28 months of his first term.  He started out in January 2011 needing to create about 5,000 new jobs a month to fulfill his promise.

Next Tuesday we see the release of the August 2012 Coincident Index from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank.  (See my last post on this index here.)  Wisconsin has been mired in 47th place in this measurement of economic growth for several months, so we will see on Tuesday if there has been any improvement.  Wisconsin ranks dead last among all the Midwestern states in terms of economic growth under this index.

It is not too late for the Governor to bring his grade up, but for now, close to midterm, his grade is an F.

Something Completely Different - Mudd

Mudd has fun

The 47 Percenters, Continued

David Brooks and Gail Collins have an interesting on-line conversation at the New York Times today about Romney's view of the 47 percenters.  I found this comment by a reader interesting:

I guess my family is among those 47 percenters, though I hardly think of us as moochers and layabouts. My 30 year old daughter stays at home with her infant while her husband works. My 23 year old son spent four years as a U.S. Marine, including almost two years overseas, half of that in Afghanistan. He is living at home, going to community college full time (paying his own way and saving G.I. benefits for when he goes to a more expensive college) and working part time for $10 an hour. My 90 year old mother is on Social Security and Medicare after working 40 years as a schoolteacher. I'm on disability after being laid low by a brain tumor after 30 years at a demanding job. None of us pay income taxes. My husband and son in law are exceptions. They help provide income to support us. I guess veterans and stay at home moms, retired schoolteachers in their 90s and people forced out of work by illness aren't on Romney's list of responsible Americans. He's right, though. We won't be voting for him.

Romney Gone Wild!

Earlier I posted one of the videos of Mitt Romney disparaging the "47%" of American voters that support President Obama.

Here is the entire Mother Jones article.   Other videos of the fundraiser are embedded in the article.

Howard Dean blew up as a presidential candidate in 2004 after a single howl captured on tape after his loss in the Iowa caucus in 2004.   Dean was mocked as unbalanced.  What will this fund-raising appeal of Romney, so demeaning of half of all Americans, mean for Romney's chances?  

Forget the 99%. Are you in the 47%?

Mother Jones secured this video of Governor Romney speaking at a private fundraiser in California. In it, Romney tells his wealthy contributors that 47% of American voters are dependent on handouts from the government.



The idea that the 47% of voters polled as supporting Obama do not pay income taxes to the federal government is comical. Moreover, anyone working that does not end up owing federal income tax, still pays local and state taxes and contributes employment taxes. Apparently Governor Romney wants to be president of the 53%. Not the leaches.

Romney's Statement on the Benghazi Attack

Mitt Romney's effort this morning to politicize the senseless killings of American diplomats in Libya yesterday was both bizarre and disgusting.  No one unprincipled and irrational enough to try to make political points out of the tragedy is worthy to lead this country.

State of Economy a Plus for Obama?

The accepted thinking has been that it serves Mitt Romney to keep the electorate focused on the state of the U.S. economy. At the Washington Post's Wonkblog today, Ezra Klein looks at a new model for predicting presidential elections with an incumbent candidate and suggests that the current state of the economy is just fine for President Obama's re-election, provided his job approval rating remains in the 40% to 50% range.  The model was collaboratively designed by Klein with Seth Hill, postdoctoral associate at Yale University; John Sides, associate professor at George Washington University; and Lynn Vavreck, associate professor at UCLA

Klein:

Some months ago, I worked with political scientists Seth Hill, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck to build a model that used data from every presidential election since 1948 to forecast the outcome of this presidential election. But when the model was done, I thought it was broken: It was forecasting an Obama win even under scenarios of very weak economic growth.

After a lot of frantic e-mails, my political scientist friends finally convinced me that that’s the point of a model: It forces you to check your expectations at the door. And my expectation that incumbents lose when the economy is weak was not backed up by the data, which suggest that incumbents win unless major economic indicators are headed in the wrong direction, as was true with unemployment in 1980 and 1992.

This year, the major economic indicators are headed in the right direction, albeit slowly. We’ve been adding jobs, though not enough. We’ve been growing, though not particularly fast. We’ve seen the unemployment rate drop, though partially because workers are leaving the labor force. All in all, it’s not an impressive record. But it’s weak growth, not a new recession. And the political valence of that weak growth is unusually hard to discern, as voters continue to place more blame for our current economic troubles on George W. Bush than on Barack Obama.

You can play with a calculator for the model here.  At the bottom of the calculator there is a link to expand the post and read the methodology used in constructing the model.

First quarter GDP on an annualized basis was 2.0%.  Second quarter was 1.7%.  Even assuming that the annualized GDP in quarter three drops off to 1.4%, that would leave the growth rate at 1.7% for the first three quarters.  As of today, Gallup has President Obama at a 50% job approval rating on its six day rolling average polling.  This undoubtedly reflects some bounce from Bill Clinton's down home public policy "'splaining" in Charlotte.  Before Charlotte, Obama was running at about 45% to 46%.  The model though actually relies on the incumbent president's job approval rating in June of the election year.  During June, the average of the thirty days of President Obama's job approval rating was 46.7666%, or 47%.

If you go into the model linked above and enter 1.7% GDP growth and 47% job approval rating, it projects that Obama has a 81.6% likelihood of winning in November.  If you bump up nine month GDP to 1.9%, Obama's likelihood of re-election jumps to 84%.  This is very close to the projection of Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times based on current polling numbers.  Silver's has Obama with a 79.8% likelihood of winning.  Silver's described his methodology here in 2008.

Having said all this, the Badgers were 32 point favorites against Northern Iowa and 7 point favorites against Oregon State, so it's the actual contest that counts, not predictive models.  And, of course, we have to wait and see whether there is an October Surprise, perhaps from Netanyahu. 

Defend This!

Lionel Messi's third goal in a friendly in June of this year against Brazil played at Met Life Stadium in the Meadowlands, East Rutherford, NJ.




The amazing thing is that he was defensed very well by the Brazilian defenders

Welcome Back!

One of the Grimmer boys, a brand new Badger, appears at 0:48 of this UW video welcoming back students.




He spent his entire summer working on the Union waterfront as a Hoofers' instructor to get this gig. Hope he doesn't get typecast in kayaking movies.

Something Completely Different: Game of Thrones Theme

I'm a fan of Game of Thrones.  Anxious for Season 3 in hopes that Joffrey Baratheon's head ends up decorating the end a pike at the gates of King's Landing.  Here's a video courtesy of a post on Andrew Sullivan's blog today:

 

Romney In Favor of "God" on Our Money! But not His.

 Swiss Franc Coin











Mitt Romney implies this weekend in Virginia that the Dems and the False Prophet seek to take God out of our society:



Oh Mein Gott! If having the word  "God" appear on one's money is so important to Romney, why is his money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands?

Swiss Twenty Franc Note

 Cayman Islands Dollar

How to Get Romney's Returns

 Larry Flynt, Publisher of Hustler Magazine





Back in early August the Daily Kos summarized the past record for presidential candidates (since Reagan-Carter) in releasing their previous federal income tax returns to the electorate.  By and large, Republicans have been more effusive in releasing their returns than Democrats.  Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, an Eisenhower-style Republican, released 12 years of his returns when running for president in the Republican primaries in 1968.  The elder Romney famously said at the time: “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”

Here is the record for release of tax returns from the Daily Kos:

2012
Barak Obama-D: 11 years
Willard Romney-R: One year - 2010 (plus estimate of 2011).
2008
Barack Obama-D: 7 years
John McCain-R: 23 years
2004
George W1 Bush-R: 13 years
John Kerry-D: 5 years
2000
George W. Bush-R: 7 years
Al Gore-D: 16 years
1996
Bill Clinton-D: 19 years
Bob Dole-R: 30 years
1992
Bill Clinton-D: 15 years
George H. W. Bush-R: 18 years
1988
George H. W. Bush-R: 14 years
Michael Dukakis-D: 6 years
1984
Ronald Reagan-R: 14 years
Walter Mondale-D: 8 years
1980
Ronald Reagan-R: 10 years
Jimmy Carter-D: 8 years

I saw on the internet today that Larry Flynt of Hustler Magazine fame has offered a million dollars for information about Mitt Romney's pre-2010 tax returns.  In the past, Flynt offered similar bounties to the public for information about the sex life of various politicians he sought to discredit.  In one case, involving David Vitter, a sitting Republican senator from Louisiana, Flynt scored information that Vitter was a client of a D.C. prositution ring.  Vitter successfully defused the incident by immediately coming out to a Louisiana press conference with his wife and admitting his mistakes. Wendy Vitter made a very courageous and moving statement that day.

I suspect that unless the rumors are true that Romney's pre-2010 returns were stolen (by computer hacking) from one of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers' offices in Tennessee, Flynt's money will stay in his pocket.

How about a different approach for ferreting out the returns, since simple moral suasion and heavy political pressure from Dems and the media have not moved Romney from his position?   If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is convinced that the returns will astound us with how modestly (as a percentage of income, of course) the Romneys contributed to the public fisc prior to 2010, he should use his contacts to put together a fund to purchase the returns off Romney himself.  Maybe George Soros and other Democratic heavy-hitters would contribute $15,000,000 to a trust fund that will have as its goal the release of the Romney returns.  The trustee of the trust could be empowered to make charitable contributions to three veterans assistance charities that are rated A+ by Charity Watch:  Fisher House Foundation, the National Military Family Association, and the Semper Fi fund on the basis that each would received a million dollars for every year of tax returns for years immediately prior to 2010 the Romneys release.  Mitt Romney claims he is a strong supporter of American's vets.  This would allow him to show us and the vets.

Wisconsin in 47th Place in Economic Development since Walker Inauguration

 Governor Walker at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida last Tuesday Night.



Governor Walker had a key prime-time role speaking last Tuesday night at the GOP national convention. The Huffington Post reported that he received a one-minute standing ovation when he walked into the Tampa Bay Times Forum.  This was predictable, given that he took on the public sector unions that Republicans love to hate and not only neutered them in our state, but survived the recall election spawned by his anti-union efforts.  He is well deserving of his celebrity status in the national GOP party, and especially with its Tea Party component, for these two reasons alone.   Here are two sections of his speech:

On June 5th, voters in Wisconsin were asked to choose between going backwards to the days of double-digit tax increases, billion dollar budget deficits and record job losses or moving forward with reforms that lowered the tax burden, balanced the budget and helped small businesses create more jobs.

Like many places across the country, Wisconsin lost more than 100,000 jobs from 2008 to 2010. Unemployment during that time topped out at over 9%. But because of our reforms, Wisconsin has added thousands of new jobs and our unemployment rate is down from when I first took office.

What is more questionable is whether the governor's rock star status is deserved among the citizens back home in Dairyland.  I have previously posted about the lack of any evidence or data supporting a conclusion that Governor Walker's reforms have spurred economic growth in our state.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Standards'  monthly Current Employment Statistics ("CES") data for July 31, 2012 was released in the middle of August by DWD, and it shows that Wisconsin has lost 17,800 private sector jobs since the governor assumed office.

While the Governor and his Labor Secretaries (three since January 2011) started out hyping his administration's job creation based on the CES data, once those numbers started trending poorly, the Walker Administration quickly shifted to impugning them.

In a recent press release, the Governor clearly seems to have finally settled on the BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) reports as the new gold standard for assessing his performance in meeting the promise he made to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first four-year term.  But here is what a careful mining of the current QCEW data shows:

o  In the last full year of the Doyle Administration, ending December 31, 2010, Wisconsin ranked 8th in the nation in private job creation, an excellent ranking.

o  As of December 31, 2011, only nine states had worst job creation percentage-wise over the prior twelve months than Wisconsin. We ranked 41st in private job creation during Governor Walker's first year in office.

o  As of December 2010, the average weekly wage for Wisconsin's private sector employees was $835, which represented a 3.9% increase over December 2009.  Only 15 states had a higher percentage increase in private weekly wages over the year than did Wisconsin.

o  As of December 2011, the average weekly wage for Wisconsin's private sector employees was $818, an annualized decrease of average private sector wages of $884.   The drop of $17 in weekly wages for the average worker ranked Wisconsin 34th in the nation in term of preserving weekly wages over 2011.

o  Over the course of 2011, here are the new private sector jobs created by Wisconsin and its Midwestern neighbors:

         Michigan     -    105,244    -    3.3% increase

         Minnesota    -     58,681    -    2.7% increase

         Indiana         -     56,557    -    2.4% increase

         Ohio             -     88,226    -    2.1% increase

         Illinois          -      68,982    -    1.4% increase

         Iowa             -     16,633    -    1.4% increase

         Wisconsin    -      27,811    -    1.2% increase.
 

The Philadelphia Fed released its Coincident Index for July 2012 on August 21.  I have previously posted on the purpose and data of the Philly Fed's Coincident Index here and here.  Since January, 2011, the month of Governor Walker's inauguration, here are the five worst performing states in terms of economic growth as measured by the Philadelphia Fed Bank's Coincident Index.

What the coincident index data means is that over the 19 months since the Walker inauguration, Wisconsin's economy has grown by one-third of one percent, at the same time that the U.S. coincident index has risen by 4%, or twelve times faster. Here is how Wisconsin matches up in terms of economic growth with our sister states in the Midwest over the same nineteen-month time frame:

This isn't a red state versus blue state deal.  Ohio and Indiana are states with GOP governors and legislatures.  Ohio's economy has grown at a rate over twenty times our rate of growth since Governor Walker entered office.  Indiana has grown at a rate fifteen times our rate.  Illinois has had a rate of growth of its economy eight times ours. Economic growth in Wisconsin has been stuck in neutral since January 1, 2011.  That is a story that wasn't addressed by anyone last week in Tampa. 

The Dude Abides

Jeff Dowds of Seattle, the original Dude, and inspiration for Jeff Bridges in The Great Lebowski:

A Solid Rise in Industrial Production under Obama

 Here is a chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on industrial production over the last thee presidencies:



Matt Yglesias has an interesting take on the data at Slate.

A Chart to Remember This Week

Ezra Klein at the Washington Post's Wonkblog suggests that everyone watching the GOP convention in Tampa this week keep the following chart in mind as they are bombarded with the GOP's debt clock:

Key quotes:

On the Republican convention stage tonight, you’re going to see a really large clock. But the clock isn’t for keeping time. The idea isn’t to stop speakers from going over their allotted time, or the convention from running late. It’s a debt clock. And the idea is to blame President Obama and the Democrats for the national debt.

But in doing so, the Republicans will end up blaming Obama for the policies they pushed in the Bush years, and the recession that began on a Republican president’s watch, and a continuation of tax cuts that they supported. They’ll have to. Because if they took all that off the debt clock, there wouldn’t be much debt there to blame him for at all.

Romney Convert to the Birther Movement?

Mitt Romney in a speech in Michigan today:



His willingness to cozy up to the most deranged elements of the GOP base seemingly knows little bounds. The campaign always stages the people behind the candidate to score points with voter groups, and I appreciate the desire of the campaign to showcase Catholic nuns. Romney is really working hard to poll better with Catholics than McCain did in 2008. In a July 2012 poll by the Pew Research Center, Obama led Romney 51% to 42% among Catholics generally. In 2008, the Catholic vote went for Obama 54% to 45%.

A New Tithing Standard for the Catholic Church

 Paul Ryan, who according to Madison Bishop Robert Morlino fashions his policies pursuant to Catholic Social Teaching





I am a converted Catholic, having joined the church some fifteen years ago.  I love my church.  That is with a little "c."  What this primarily means is that I love the church's liturgy and the hour or so of reflection at Mass, enjoy my parish, greatly admire my parish priest.  I like going to church in a distant place on Sunday knowing that throughout the world, including back at my parish in Madison, Catholic congregants are listening to the exact same readings and following the same liturgy, albeit in hundreds of different languages. I like the stories of the saints.  I love the good social works done by Catholic nuns and other religious.   I like that the Mayos, father and two sons, were cajoled (and funded by) the Sisters of St. Francis into starting a small twelve-bed hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, that has grown into one of the most prestigious medical facilities in the world. 

I freely confess to being a cafeteria Catholic.  I weigh the importance of following the church's positions based on my own conscience, which I hope has become reasonably well-formed through careful reflection and trying to always be open to the church's teachings.  One example of my picking and choosing is that I don't accept the church's teaching that homosexual conduct is inherently disordered and sinful.  I have concluded for myself that God knew what was being placed in motion in the formation of sexual orientation and didn't err intentionally or (God forbid) through inadvertence.  I have little problem with the church choosing in 2012 not to bless gay marriage with church weddings, but I don't agree with the strong opposition the church's hierarchy and many priests have mounted against civil unions or marriages or marriages in other religious denominations being accepted in civil society.  I oppose the church's position on birth control.  It seems counter-intuitive in a world that should always seek to see abortions becoming ever increasingly rare, to tell people they shouldn't take steps to guard against unwanted pregnancies.  I think it is unfortunate that half the population of the church is shut off from the priesthood.  I have experienced good priests and mediocre priests, and I have to believe that among the women members of the church worldwide, many thousands of them could be as good or better priests than male priests I have encountered.  I suspect that with female priests, the Catholic doctrines of Just War and duty to care for the poor would be addressed more frequently in American homilies than now occurs. I find demeaning the constant drumbeat of the importance of "obedience" to the church's hierarchy coming from the bishops.  I  dislike the current effort being made by the hierarchy to intimidate America's nuns into putting aside their own consciences and toeing the line of edicts from a distant Rome. 

I recognize that a religion has to be formed around some basic precepts, structurally and morally.  I spent time attending a Unitarian church in the early 80's and found that it was too free-wheeling for me. To belong to a church means that you are buying into some shared values.  Otherwise you are just going through the motions if not being hypocritical.  The question becomes: What is the duty of a member of a particular church to put aside his or her differences of opinion with the shared community and adopt the values of that community.  Is it moral to join a church that maintains rules that you feel are unwarranted and occasionally silly?  Can one do so with the hope of seeing an evolution in the moral thinking of the church over time?  What about the challenges that this approach brings to the cohesiveness of the church community?  Is a member of a church entitled to prioritize the values of the community and declare himself or herself in agreement with enough of those values, short or even well short of all of them, without being an apostate?   One of the things I love most about the Catholic Church is that all of these concerns have been thought out over time by great thinkers, including some really great thinkers I know that never rose higher than their roles as parish priests.   To the extent I am, in the exercise of my wildest imagination, capable of conceiving an issue in the realm of theology and morality, I can be pretty confident that many thousands of words have been carefully put to paper by Catholic thinkers about the issue. 

While I think and hope that I am a good Catholic, whatever that really means, I am constantly being reminded now that in the views of many of the bishops and cardinals of the American church, I am not.  For I invariably vote for Democrats.  I favor equal rights for people in gay relationships.  I support President Obama.  I favor universal health care that extends birth control coverage.  I support a social welfare safety net that protects the elderly and poor in ways that will help them live fulfilling and economically productive lives.  I oppose changes in our public educational system (kindergarten through college) in ways that will perpetuate the advantages given to the children of wealthy parents.  Though I wish there were no abortions in the world, I consider Roe v. Wade a well-reasoned accommodation among the strong religious or moral beliefs of many, the rights of the unborn,  and the rights of women to exercise free choice, in the application of their own well-formed consciences, not to go through a pregnancy and face raising an unwanted child.  I support free access to birth control. 

There is a full court press being put on by the American church hierarchy to oppose Barack Obama and any other politicians that don't accept the church's doctrine on abortion, gay marriage, and public access to birth control.  On a national level, this push has reached its apogee, at least for now, in the announcement this week that Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the head of the Archdiocese of New York, and the top prelate in the American Catholic Church, will deliver the closing prayer at the Republican national convention in Tampa next week.  Anyone who thinks this is not intended as a partisan act by Cardinal Dolan is a possible mark for the re-sale of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Dolan has even endorsed Mitt Romney's running mate, whom he knows well from his stint as Archbishop of the Milwaukee diocese.  According to the Washington Post,  Dolan recently told a radio program that he "was happy" to see Paul Ryan on the ticket and considered him "a great public servant."

Madison's Bishop Morlino has for some time been on an intense anti-Obama, anti-Democrat kick.  His weekly columns in the diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Herald, have over the past months had the quality of a recording loop, playing out week after week the message that no self-respecting Catholic voter can give a second thought to voting for the President come November.  This week's column was the most clearly partisan to date.  Among the thoughts shared by the Bishop, with emphasis supplied. were these:

It is the role of bishops and priests to teach principles of our faith, such that those who seek elected offices, if they are Catholics, are to form their consciences according to these principles about particular policy issues.

However, the formation of conscience regarding particular policy issues is different depending on how fundamental to the ecology of human nature or the Catholic faith a particular issue is. Some of the most fundamental issues for the formation of a Catholic conscience are as follows: sacredness of human life from conception to natural death, marriage, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, and a right to private property.

Violations of the above involve intrinsic evil — that is, an evil which cannot be justified by any circumstances whatsoever. These evils are examples of direct pollution of the ecology of human nature and can be discerned as such by human reason alone. Thus, all people of good will who wish to follow human reason should deplore any and all violations in the above areas, without exception. The violations would be: abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, government-coerced secularism, and socialism.

In these most fundamental matters, a well-formed Catholic conscience, or the well-formed conscience of a person of good will, simply follows the conclusions demanded by the ecology of human nature and the reasoning process. A Catholic conscience can never take exception to the prohibition of actions which are intrinsically evil. Nor may a conscience well-formed by reason or the Catholic faith ever choose to vote for someone who clearly, consistently, persistently promotes that which is intrinsically evil.

However, a conscience well-formed according to reason or the Catholic faith, must also make choices where intrinsic evil is not involved. How best to care for the poor is probably the finest current example of this, though another would be how best to create jobs at a time when so many are suffering from the ravages of unemployment. In matters such as these, where intrinsic evil is not involved, the rational principles of solidarity and subsidiarity come into play. The principle of solidarity, simply stated, means that every human being on the face of the earth is my brother and my sister, my “neighbor” in the biblical sense. At the same time, the time-tested best way for assisting our neighbors throughout the world should follow the principle of subsidiarity. That means the problem at hand should be addressed at the lowest level possible — that is, the level closest to the people in need. That again, is simply the law of human reason.

Making decisions as to the best political strategies, the best policy means, to achieve a goal, is the mission of lay people, not bishops or priests. As Pope Benedict himself has said, a just society and a just state is the achievement of politics, not the Church. And therefore Catholic laymen and women who are familiar with the principles dictated by human reason and the ecology of human nature, or non-Catholics who are also bound by these same principles, are in a position to arrive at differing conclusions as to what the best means are for the implementation of these principles — that is, “lay mission” for Catholics.

Thus, it is not up to me or any bishop or priest to approve of Congressman Ryan’s specific budget prescription to address the best means we spoke of. Where intrinsic evils are not involved, specific policy choices and political strategies are the province of Catholic lay mission. But, as I’ve said, Vice Presidential Candidate Ryan is aware of Catholic Social Teaching and is very careful to fashion and form his conclusions in accord with the principles mentioned above. Of that I have no doubt. (I mention this matter in obedience to Church Law regarding one’s right to a good reputation.)

Here is Bishop Morlino's message to the faithful of his diocese in a nut-shell, obviously as I interpret it:

1.    Forget about the importance the Catholic catechism puts on the careful formation of one's own conscience through being open to reason and the Holy Spirit.  Instead, in matters of politics, I'd prefer for you to think as I tell you to.

2.    Certain political positions are so inherently evil that no Catholic may ever vote for a candidate advocating them, notwithstanding a sincere and careful effort by the Catholic voter to balance the pros and cons of all the positions brought to the public by the contesting candidates.

3.    Public access to birth control or the ability of gays to enjoy civil unions or civil marriage are policies so intrinsically evil, that no true Catholic may ever vote for a politician that supports these positions.

4.    On the other hand, letting the poor go hungry by reducing access to food stamps,  or letting the poor or elderly suffer debilitating illnesses by cutting back on access to public health care like Medicaid or Medicare are matters that are not the concern of Catholic bishops and priests, and are appropriately left to "lay people" and politicians to sort out in the exercise of good faith in order to achieve a "just society."

5.    A gay person's ability to be honored and enriched by a committed spousal relationship recognized by civil society is, in the exercise of human reason and "human ecology," simply not an ability that implicates whether a society should be considered just or not.

6.   Social welfare programs, which necessarily involve the redistribution of assets from the wealthy to the poor, at some point invariably cross the line and become collectively "socialism,"  an intrinsically evil condition.

7.   As your bishop and spiritual leader, I am not going to tell you anything about when the line is crossed into intrinsically evil socialism, as to attempt to do so is to concede that the line can't be defined by reference to a common sense of natural law binding on all human minds.  

8.   Nevertheless, rest assured that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to be a lot less likely to cross the line into intrinsically evil socialism than Barack Obama and Joe Biden. 

9.   I am not going to provide you my insights into another intrinsic evil, "government coerced secularism," but am counting on you to understand, at a minimum, that intrinsically evil "government coerced secularism" includes laws, administrative rules or executive orders requiring certain Catholic institutions to provide health insurance benefits which include free birth control pills and other devices. 

10.  Rest assured that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to be a lot less likely to cross the line into intrinsically evil government coerced secularism than Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

11.   When I say "subsidiarity" I mean "keep the Feds" out of the picture and make the decisions of how to best care for the poor and elderly and sick at the most local level possible.  (You might recognize this as a Republican position, like the Ryan voucher plan for Medicare, or block granting health care money to Republican governors to spend as they like.)   If this approach means that the poor move from Mississippi and Alabama and Texas, and flood into Wisconsin and Minnesota and New York and Massachusetts, collapsing the ability of those states to deal with the poor, at least there has been a genuflection in the direction of the principle of subsidiarity.

12.   Don't listen to what a broad range of Catholic social thinkers are saying about Paul Ryan's budget and its devastating effect on the poor.   I personally know Paul Ryan.  He is our diocese's native son.  I have no doubt that he will always be guided by Catholic social teaching, unlike the other party's candidates.

13.   Vote for Romney and Ryan in November!

But if you have read the entire column by our bishop, you might point out that the column could not have been intended as a partisan message, since the bishop said it wasn't intended to be partisan at the very beginning of his column:

 It is not for the bishop or priests to endorse particular candidates or political parties. Any efforts on the part of any bishop or priest to do so should be set aside. And you can be assured that no priest who promotes a partisan agenda is acting in union with me or with the Universal Church.

To this I can only say that the Bishop's column spotlighted just a few intrinsically evil acts under  Catholic doctrine.

I'll end by noting that I was curious to see what Paul Ryan's tax returns looked like since they were released after he was picked to run for Vice President.  Ryan only released his 2010 and 2011 returns as he didn't want Governor Romney to look silly by releasing more than Romney had agreed to release.  The 2010 return of Paul and Janna Ryan showed adjusted gross income of $215,417, and charitable deductions of $2,500, which presumably captured all the contributions made by the couple to the Catholic church, assuming there were any.  Thus their charitable contributions were just a smidgen over 1 percent of their adjusted gross income.   Since Paul Ryan is, according to the bishop, "very careful to fashion and form his conclusions"  "in accordance with" "Catholic Social Teachings," presumably a new standard for gifts by faithful Catholics to the church has been set. 

Scott Walker's Shell Game on Job Creation

 Governor Walker has manipulated federal employment data sets to try to excuse what can only be described as a very poor performance in job creation.  With every month he is falling farther behind the power curve on his 250,000 new private sector job promise.  At some point you would assume that Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce members who have been such ardent supporters of the governor would ask themselves if they saddled the wrong horse.  Many of these WMC members probably agree with the contention of the Romney-Ryan campaign that the slow pace of job creation nationally is reason enough to bounce President Obama out of office.  Why then shouldn't the same rationale for regime change be applied to Governor Walker in 2014, if he falls far short on meeting his job creation commitment to our state?  

To understand the manipulation of job numbers by the governor, you have to go back to March of last year, shortly after the governor was inaugurated, and follow a series of DWD press release starting on March 16, 2011.  Here is a summary of the press releases:

 

 
 


 
 
 
 

The governor started out in the middle of last year preening over the results found in the BLS's monthly CES employment reports.  When that data demonstrated that Wisconsin had actually lost private sector jobs in the first year of his administration, he shifted to promoting the BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) as the more reliable measure of his job creation performance.   But the problem for the governor is that his new preferred measure of job performance shows a result every bit as as bad as the old data.

The QCEW for the fourth quarter of 2010, the three month period ending December 31, 2010 (and the month before the governor was inaugurated) showed that Wisconsin private sector employment stood at 2,270,985.   The QCEW number at the end of December 2009 had stood at 2,237,327.  Thus, in Governor Doyle's last year in office, the state added over 33,600 jobs.   By contrast, at the end of December 2011, following Governor Walker's first year on the job, the QCEW private jobs number was 2,298,796, a net gain of less than 28,000 jobs, or 5,600 less than the Doyle Administration had created in its last year.  If you factor in the 8,300 good paying public sector jobs (federal, state and local) lost over Governor Walker's first twelve months, the stagnancy of the state's job creation efforts is even more dramatic.  (Doyle had shown a net gain of 2 government employees his last year.)

And now we have the employment data from the QCEW for April 30, 2012, which was released by the DWD on August 16th.   As of April 30, 2012, Wisconsin had 2,251,697 private sector employees, or 19,000 fewer private sector employees than at the end of December 2010, just days before the governor took office.  If we are now to use the QCEW data to judge the governor's job creation promise, he has less than 33 months to create 269,000 private sector jobs.

The CES data for July 31, 2012 was also released in the middle of this month by DWD, and here is what it showed:  Wisconsin has lost 17,800 private sector jobs since the governor assumed office.  That is a number that compares pretty accurately with the QCEW job loss number.

There is much more data to mine from the QCEW, and none of it is flattering for the governor.  The QCEW data available from BLS has a very handy map and tables application for you to quickly spin your way through the job numbers and average weekly wage data for all the states.  You can access it here.  Among the data you will find are the following:

o  As of the end of December 2010, the last year of the Doyle Administration, Wisconsin ranked 8th in private job creation.

o  As of December 31, 2011, only nine states had worst job creation percentage-wise over the prior twelve months than Wisconsin. We ranked 41st in private job creation under Governor Walker.

o  As of December 2010, the average weekly wage for Wisconsin's private sector employees was $835, which represented a 3.9% increase over December 2009.  Only 15 states had a higher percentage increase in private weekly wages over the year than did Wisconsin.

o  As of December 2011, the average weekly wage for Wisconsin's private sector employees was $818, an annualized decrease of average private sector wages of $884.   The drop of $17 in weekly wages for the average worker ranked Wisconsin 34th in the nation in term of preserving weekly wages over 2011.

o  Over the course of 2011, here are the new private sector jobs created by Wisconsin and its Midwestern neighbors:

         Michigan     -    105,244    -    3.3% increase

         Minnesota    -      58,681    -    2.7% increase

         Indiana         -      56,557    -    2.4% increase

         Ohio             -      88,226    -    2.1% increase

         Illinois          -      68,982    -    1.4% increase

         Iowa             -      16,633    -    1.4% increase

         Wisconsin    -      27,811    -    1.2% increase.

The other Midwestern states had not publicly released their QCEW data for December 31, 2012, when the Wisconsin DWD jumped the gun and did so just before the recall election in early June.  The DWD did this to bolster the administration's meme that the governor's policies were working to create new private sector jobs.   The administration had to have known that it was going to be free to tout its performance without there being any basis to compare the Wisconsin QCEW data to that of these other neighboring states.  Now we know that Wisconsin in fact ranked dead last of the Midwestern states in job creation as of the end of last year. 

I will end with a note to Governor Walker which, of course, I realize he will never see:

Dear Governor:   You may be right that the QCEW is a more reliable measure for your private job creation promise.  Just tell us the exact data set against which you intend to measure your new private job creation promise.  Don't flop between data sets as you have in the last eighteen months.  Issue a bar graph each month showing us how you are doing on the 250,000 new jobs based on the data set you chose.  Have the courage to take a "forceful" position.  That's what you recently told Governor Romney to do to have a chance at being elected.  You should follow your own advice.  Forcefully tell us the metric you want to use and stick to it. 

Thanks!