"Divide and Conquer"

From a friend who posted this on Facebook today.  Thanks, Amy!

New Anti-Obama Movies Coming in Time for the Election. Will They be as Successful as Atlas Shrugged?

Two new anti-Obama movies are being released by wealthy right-wing financiers in time for the fall election.  Phil Waldmann discusses them at the American Prospect, in an article entitled "Crazy and Crazier."  Here is the trailer for the one that is supposedly more slickly produced, "2016."  Please note the contrast between the fussing folks at 1:05 of the trailer and the pious folks at 1:16.



"2016" is based on The Roots of Obama's Rage, a book by Dinesh D'Souza, published by the Regnery Press.  Regnery Press is a conservative publishing house which for a time was run by Al Regnery, a University of Wisconsin law grad who lost to Jim Doyle for Dane County DA back in 1976.  The guy was just five years out of law school but was trying to overcome that limitation by an amazingly clever campaign slogan:  "Tough on Crime." The New Republic did a fascinating piece on Regnery in 1986 that addressed his campaign, including a seemingly fabricated claim that his wife was assaulted by two black men in the weeks leading up to the election.  Presumably a claim intended to drive home the need to get "tough on crime."  Jim Doyle went on to become governor of Wisconsin, and Al Regnery took over the family publishing house publishing right wing books.

Dinesh D'Souza's book on Obama has been thoroughly and amusingly trashed by Andrew Ferguson, in an article in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, entitled "The Roots of Lunacy, How Not to Understand Obama."  It is a good reminder that there are honorable people on both sides of the political spectrum doing honorable work by exposing crazies on their own side of the spectrum.

Some passages from Ferguson:

Now it’s 2010, and among his former enemies, Clinton is enjoying a Truman-like renaissance. Even such sweaty anti-Clinton paranoiacs as the investigative journalist Christopher Ruddy and the newspaper proprietor Richard Mellon Scaife have decided he wasn’t so bad after all. It’s almost enough to make you forget the insanity that gripped Clinton’s political opponents. Kemp didn’t know the half of it! Throughout the nineties I heard mainstream Republicans describe the president as a shameless womanizer and a closeted homosexual, a cokehead and a drunk, a wife beater and a wimp, a hick and a Machiavel, a committed pacifist and a reckless militarist who launched unnecessary airstrikes in faraway lands to distract the public’s attention from all of the above.

At gatherings of conservative activists the president was referred to, seriously, as a “Manchurian candidate.” Capitol Hill staffers speculated darkly about the “missing five days” on a trip Clinton had taken to Moscow as a graduate student. Respectable conservatives in the media—William Safire, Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh—encouraged the suspicion that Clinton’s White House attorney, a manic depressive named Vincent Foster, did not commit suicide, as all available evidence suggested, but had been murdered by parties unknown, to hush up an unspeakable secret from the president’s past.

So what happened? How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with—“good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase? 

Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind—left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat—is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time. When Obama took his place in the Republican imagination, his titanic awfulness crowded out the horrors of Bad Old Bill; Clinton’s five days in Moscow were replaced by Obama’s three years in that mysterious Indonesian “madrassa.”

It’s in this light that the anti-Obama hysteria of recent months should be seen. Among professionals, political loyalties and hates are as changeable as the weather, bearing no relation to the plain evidence that normal people try to rely on. Taking the long view means never taking them seriously. Lucky for us, the hysterics make it so easy not to take them seriously. 

On the evidence of his new book, we can’t be sure if Dinesh D’Souza is a hysteric or a cynic. Newt Gingrich, for his part, thinks D’Souza is a visionary, and he’s been praising the visionary and his book with the patented Gingrichian intensity. D’Souza is the possessor of a “stunning insight,” Gingrich said recently, in an interview with National Review Online’s Robert Costa. This insight is “the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama,” Gingrich continued, while poor Costa looked for a table to duck under. “Only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior can you piece together [Obama’s actions]. That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

The two new anti-Obama movies will probably do about as well as Atlas Shrugged did last year.  AS, which cost $18 million to make, had total box office receipts of about $5 million, and a composite score of 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.  However, I imagine Paul Ryan liked it, coming as it did well before he recently repudiated his love for Ayn Rand to hold onto Christianists' support in case he gets the vice-presidential nod from Romney.

The New Jobs Data Source Cited by the Governor Shows Wisconsin is Still the Caboose of the Midwest

Yesterday I posted about the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages ("QCEW") data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that is now the Governor's new gold standard on job creation data.

Kindly disregard what Governor Walker told Wisconsin Public Radio back in May of last year concerning how carefully compiled and reliable he believes the monthly unemployment reports issued by the BLS are.  On "Morning Edition" this morning, WPR played a sound bite of the Governor from last spring saying how reliable the BLS's monthly unemployment data are.  That data set, recently showing Wisconsin performing worse than all the other 49 states in job creation under the governor's tenure, is the old gold standard.

The new QCEW statistics for Quarter Four of 2011, released by Secretary Newson for the first time in advance of being audited by the BLS, are interesting for what wasn't released.

1.  There was no public release of weekly wage data,  Each year except for 2009, in the midst of the Bush recession, weekly wages have been rising in the Badger State on an annual basis.  In 2009, weekly wages dropped by a scant $2.00 compared to the previous year.  But weekly wages rebounded in Governor Doyle's last year in office, and over the entire eight-year period, average weekly wages grew by $143 or almost $7,500 in average annual income.  This was an increase in average wages of over 23% over the eight years of the Doyle administration.  We can't compare the growth in weekly wages over the last year, assuming there has been any growth, because the Walker administration hasn't provided us this data.  One has to assume that this is based on laziness or cunning.  I suspect the latter.

2.  There was no breakdown by industry groupings.   The data provided by Wisconsin to the BLS as part of the QCEW data set break down total jobs into the following categories:

Natural resources and mining
Construction
Manufacturing
Trade, Transportation and Utilities
Information Technology
Financial Activities
Professional and Business Services
Education and Health
Leisure and Hospitality
Other Services.

This breakdown would permit the citizens of Wisconsin to see where the 23,000 new jobs were created.  Are the new jobs in Manufacturing (Harley-Davidson) or in Leisure or Hospitality (Burger King)?  All this data had presumably been sent into the BLS, and while it is apparently safe to trust the voters with the total of "all industries" job creation, it isn't necessary to give us the industry segments breakdown.

3.  There was no data available on a county-by-county basis.   Here is a link to the Wisconsin QCEW data for September 2011 showing data on a county-by-county basis.  (You can alter the "Map Series" scroll-down table to select "total employment.")  If you scroll down to the tables below the map at this site, you can click on the total employment figure for each county and find ten years of job data on each county.  Think the Governor might provide the Milwaukee County data so that people could gauge his claim that Milwaukee has hemorrhaged jobs under the Barrett administration?  Think again.  No worry, that is a rather silly contention anyway.  Mayors have little impact on job creation or loss, and poor Barrett went through a massive economic depression in 2008 and 2009 which I will cheerfully continue to refer to as the "Bush recession."  One reason not to provide any county-by-county data is that much of the northern third of the state has in fact hemorrhaged jobs during the Walker administration.  You wouldn't want that kind of data slipping out just before a recall election!  23 of Wisconsin's 72 counties have actually lost jobs in the one year period from September 2010 to September 2011.  Tough break for you folks in the counties of Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett, Buffalo, Sawyer, Vilas, Price, Lincoln, Iowa, Kenosha, Rock, etc.,etc.

One interesting aspect (for the Walker Administration) of the release of the QCEW data in advance of its being audited and released by the Feds is that there isn't any comparable data from other states to which we can compare Wisconsin's job creation performance.  For this reason, the last data for which we can do this is Quarter Three of 2011, ending in September 2011.  Here is a table that shows Wisconsin's performance over the one year period from September 2010 to September 2011 compared to the usual suspects of other Midwestern states:



You will note that we trail all the other Midwestern states, half of them by a ton.   Minnesota and Michigan have created jobs at almost twice our rate, and there is that pesky Illinois, whipping us once again, even under the new gold standard for job data.

Governor Walker's Misplaced Exuberance on Job Creation

Yesterday the Governor began touting some new job numbers in a campaign ad:




You can find the DWD's press release on these new numbers here.   The essence of the press release by Secretary Newson was that the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly job data based on the Current Employment Survey (CES) is badly flawed in reflecting Wisconsin's actual job growth under the Governor's "Open for Business" policies.   The secretary doesn't attempt to explain how the CES job survey can be comparatively more flawed for Wisconsin's job picture than the other 49 states, all of which have outperformed Wisconsin in job creation according to the CES data.  (In addition, only two states, Alaska and Montana, have shown worse overall economic growth over the past year than the Badger state according to the Philly Fed's data.)  Let's put the "comparatively flawed" issue aside for the moment and focus on whether the more detailed data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data is really something for the Governor to be crowing about.  In his words: " [The Democrats] are desperate because the biggest issue they thought they had against us suddenly isn't there."

Unfortunately for the Governor, the new data he is citing really doesn't help him to establish that his fiscal policies are pro-growth.  Let's go through this by the numbers, the new QCES numbers he is now citing.

First, let's accept as true that the state's preliminary QCES numbers show job growth of some 23,000 jobs from December 2010 through December 2011.  (We won't have these preliminary numbers from the fourth quarter of 2011 audited by the Feds before the recall election on June 5.)  The most obvious question to ask is how this will translate over the next three years into a gain of 250,000 private sector jobs for the state in the governor's first term of office?  He will have to grow the economy by over 75,000 jobs a year over the next three years to hit the mark on his job creation promise.  You can go back into the historical data of the QCES and see that isn't going to happen.

Now let's look at how the 23,000 new jobs on the QCEW reports under Walker's tenure compare to the new jobs created on Governor Doyle's watch using the same QCEW data.  The short answer is that they don't compare very well.   From December 2009 to December 2010, the last full year under Governor Doyle, the state increased its employment by 33,600 new jobs.  This was an increase in employment of 1.3%, and that result outpaced all the other Midwestern states except Michigan.  So Walker's performance in the same twelve month period in 2011 lead to 10,000 fewer jobs than in Doyle's final full calendar year.   Comparing Wisconsin to the other six Midwestern states is not possible for December 2010 to December 2011, as Wisconsin chose to report the unaudited QCEW data early, and the data from the other Midwestern States is still unreported.  But if we look at the Third Quarter data for September 2010 to September 2011, it shows that Wisconsin didn't outperform a single Midwestern state in job creation.  We tied Iowa Ohio, and all other Midwestern states did better than we did.  You recall how Governor Quinn's policies in Illinois were going to send job creators flowing from Illinois to Wisconsin?  Well, Illinois created 53,000 more jobs than Wisconsin in that twelve month period, while raising taxes and protecting schools from the kind of massive cuts the governor imposed here.  Minnesota, which has fewer people than Wisconsin, created almost twice as many jobs as Wisconsin in the same period.

The QCEW data is as its name indicates, a quarterly report.  If we look at the last three quarters before the fourth quarter ending in December 2010, Wisconsin was consistently outpacing most of its Midwestern neighbors (Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio) in percentage change in jobs.  In the twelve months ending September 2010, only Michigan and Indiana outperformed the Badger state.  In the twelve months ending June 2010, again only Michigan and Indiana outpaced Wisconsin.   In the twelve months ending March 2010, only Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota did better in job creation than Wisconsin.  In the quarter previous to that, only Minnesota and Iowa did better than Wisconsin.  So under Governor Doyle we regularly ranked among the highest of the Midwestern states in job creation using the QCEW data.  Again, under Governor Walker, we ranked dead last.

So the data the Governor is touting really doesn't make him look like a job creator compared to his predecessor and compared to the other Governors in the Midwest, including his good friend, Governor Quinn.

Politicians Having Fun Across the Aisle

A video produced by New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie and Newark Democratic Mayor Corey Booker for the NJ Press Association Annual Correspondents' Dinner.   Booker was recently in the press for shrugging off his security detail and dashing into a burning building to save a resident.  He is also known for shoveling the snow off his neighbors sidewalks.  The two are supposedly very friendly.

Romney Wants Obama to Outperform All Republican Presidents on Job Creation

The U.S. Department of Labor reported this morning that while the unemployment rate fell marginally from 8.2% to 8.1%, only 115,000 non-farm jobs were created in April. It did not take long for Mitt Romney to hop on Fox and Friends to criticize President Obama.



Romney claiming that a solid recovery would involve month-after-month of 500,000 new jobs being created each month is about as silly as Gingrich running on $2.00 gasoline.

The monthly job creation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is available on-line for the years 1939 to 2012. Since January, 1980, 500,000 jobs or more have been created in a single month a grand total of three times, or once in every ten years. September 1983 (Reagan), September 1997 (Clinton), and May of 2010, on Obama's watch. In fact, if we drop down to months in which 400,000 jobs or more were created, we only add another ten months in which this has happened since 1980.

Since 1939, there has been only two occasions where the U.S. experienced back-to-back months of 500,000 or more non-farm jobs being created, March and April 1946, during the Truman administration shortly after the end of World War II, and March and April 1978, during the Carter administration.

Since January 1939, there have been more than 400,000 non-farm jobs created in just 54 months out of 876 months. Of the 54 occasions, 43 of the months (or 80% of the occasions) had a Democrat in the White House. George Bush's administration never saw as many as 400,000 new jobs created in a single month.

Romney and his team know how to access labor data. They simply prefer to ignore it in order to distort.