Fair warning – Don’t click through if you don’t want to read something political in nature.
I’m sensitive to those that don’t want to read that sort of thing, hence the fair warning. Nothing bad here, just a curiosity and I’m wondering if other people in the USA are doing the same thing, so testing it on WUWT’s wide readership will likely help answer it.
I have seen upside down US flags twice now in my town. The first time I just thought it was self commentary, now seeing it a second time in a different part of town, I stopped along E. 5th Avenue to get this shot. I wonder, how many people across the United States are doing the same thing after November 6th? In case you don’t know, flying the flag upside down is a sign of distress or emergency. Flying at half staff is respect for the fallen in service of our country. Combined it makes quite a commentary on the Benghazi incident, the fallen soldiers and ambassador, and the election. Checking the Internet I find there are others doing the same thing now, such as this fellow in South Bend, Indiana. Then there’s the story about an upside down half-staff flag at McDonald’s which has angered a lot of veterans even though it was claimed to be a mistake.
The U.S. Flag code says in section 8:
The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
Some people consider it flag desecration such as is on par with burning it as political commentary.
I wonder though, if this sort of visual political commentary I’ve seen in my town is being quietly repeated elsewhere since many people now see the USA as being in distress?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Note that I am not trying to convince the incurably cognitive dissonance-afflicted joelshore of anything. His mind is made up, closed tight, and filled with nonsense. He couldn’t keep a job in the private sector, he couldn’t get re-hired in the private sector, and took a 50% pay cut as a last resort. That says it all.
But for other readers, I note that joelshore says: “Republican apologists don’t deal with the real problems in your electoral appeal and have ever increasing trouble winning national elections.”
Oh, really? joelshore forgets the 8 George Bush years so soon? heh The Bush economy averaged extremely low inflation, national prosperity, and extremely low unemployment. But even in that great economy joelshore couldn’t find a private sector job. Very telling, no?
Regarding the pre-election polls, most of what I read on the Drudge Report were accounts of numerous different polls, and polls of polls. And speaking of self-identifying, American conservatives self identify at double the rate of U.S. libs, who are only about 20% of the population; the screwed up 20%. They constitute a big part of our current problems.
joelshore says: “People saying that Sandy was important in their vote doesn’t mean that they changed their vote because of Sandy.” That daydream is clearly refuted by my post and link above. Even Chrissy “Tingles” Mathews agrees. And no one is more Left than Mathews.
Finally, joelshore’s ridiculous “authority” is the lib blog Wikipedia, an unreliable source if there ever was one. People such as the thoroughly despicable William Connolley have completely destroyed Wikipedia’s credibility. No wonder the blinkered joelshore relies on it. And the Devil quotes Scripture.
@ur momisugly Joel Shore says: November 12, 2012 at 7:32 am
Figures do not lie, Liars do. here are the numbers straight from the primary source: Bush +7.5m. (135.8m to 143.3m) Source: bls.gov. Not Wiki which we all know how corrupt that place is. So much so that even teachers do not allow students to use it as a source.
@ur momisugly joeldshore says: November 12, 2012 at 11:42 am
Logic 101. Opinions are not facts. You start out saying you want to educate us, then give us an opinion piece. Logic Fail.
dahun says:
That “misery index” is a made-up thing. I don’t think that the inflation was generally eroding worker’s incomes since wages were inflating at a rate fairly similar to prices. And, again, the interest rates just reflected the decreasing value of the currency.
I am not saying that having such inflation is a good idea…but naive pictures of how inflation affects things are just that: naive. You have to look and see what was actually going on with both wages and prices.
No…It wasn’t far worse. The economy was not in recession and there had not been a major financial crisis, nor a major loss of wealth due to the bursting of a housing bubble.
Inflation at very high levels? Are you serious ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.request/cpi/cpiai.txt )?
As for the debt, Obama inherited a huge deficit plus a huge hole in the economy. If he had tried to shrink the deficit, we wouldn’t be talking about the Great Recession…We would be talking about the Second Great Depression. The only entity who could inject money into the economy that was in freefall was the federal government, through a combination of stimulus spending and tax cuts, which is exactly what was done. Economists like Paul Krugman warned at the time that the stimulus was smaller than the hole in the economy due to the crash. But, Republicans wanted less, not more…which would have meant an even worse economic slump.
What was really amazing is how G.W. Bush inherited an economy where there were surpluses projected as far as the eye could see and he managed to turn these into huge deficits. Admittedly, circumstances are partly to blame: Those projections were probably a bit optimistic and 9/11 did result in some necessary increases in spending. However, a huge component of the problem (probably the majority) was his ill-advised adventure in Iraq and his tax cuts.
Obama is cleaning up the economy after 8 years of irresponsibility. The American people understood that which is why, to the surprise of people who are not reality-based, they supported his re-election even though the economy is admittedly still not in great shape.
philjourdan says:
The opinion is that of an oil analyst and one who clearly does not have a strong partisan axe to grind, since he notes that neither the people attacking Obama for causing the rise in oil prices nor those who are crediting Obama for the large increase in domestic oil and gas production that actually has occurred have a strong case.
I know it is difficult for conservatives to listen to opinions other than those by conservative ideologues, but I might recommend trying it sometime. You can learn something. Do you have any evidence that his claims are incorrect?
D Boehm says:
You have invented a complete fantasy world. In the real world, GW Bush left us with the largest financial crash and economic downturn since the Great Depression, a huge increase in debt when he inherited a budget in surplus, and net private-sector job creation over his tenure that was slightly negative. I believe that Obama has already surpassed Bush in net private-sector job creation and this is despite the fact that he inherited an economy in which we were losing 800,000 private-sector jobs per month and thus dug him into a huge hole before his policies could even start to take effect!
Unemployment averaged 5.3% throughout George W. Bush’s 8 years in office. Obama’s lowest unemployment rate is 7.9%. Cherry-picking the last few months of GWB’s term, at the start of a business recession, is typical mendacity from those on the left.
The current extremely weak recovery has lasted far longer than any other postwar recession. Far longer. Normally within about 18 months the economy is recovering smartly. Not this time, and it is 100% the fault of the Obama Administration’s anti-growth, anti-U.S. policies. The number of jobs being created are not sufficient to keep up with population growth. We are in an extremely weak, long drawn out recovery. A double-dip recession is not out of the question.
Obama lies like a child, and he blames others like a child, while taking every bit of the credit for any positive news. He has zero character, and lies spray out of his mouth like water from a high pressure fire hose. He is the poster boy for psychological projection, imputing his own faults onto others. His apologists and lickspittles are no better.
joelshore, who could not hold or find a private sector job, presumes to opine on ‘Republican’ economic policies. He conveniently forgets that the recession began after the Democrats took over control of the House in 2008. But of course, they get a free pass from economic illiterate cherry-pickers.
I am not a Republican; never have been. But anyone today with any common sense would gladly trade the economy of Barack 0bama over the entire 4 years of his incompetent mismanagement, with the eight years of the GWB economy. Like any good lickspittle, joelshore blames everything on Republicans and Bush. Shows you how completely out of touch with reality joelshore is.
@ur momisugly joeldshore says: November 13, 2012 at 11:40 am
Opinion = Opinion. Opinion =/= Fact. It matters not WHOSE opinion it is. If you want to present facts (so far you have none), present them. Do not claim a fact and then offer an opinion.
Logic fail again.
Try education before you start teaching.
philjourdan says:
The numbers that I find at bls.gov for total non-farm employment seasonally-adjusted are ( http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm ):
January 2001: 132.5 million
December 2008: 134.4 million
Net gain: 1.9 million jobs, which is just what the Wiki source that I used said. Go figure!
(If you want to use January 2009 as the end of Bush’s term, its 133.6 million and the net gain is only 1.1 million jobs..)
[I have no idea what data you used…but I will note that if you don’t use the seasonally-adjusted data and you insist on going from Jan 2001 to Dec 2008, then you get a gain of 6.4 million jobs, which is at least getting close to what you had. The problem is that if you go one more month to Jan 2009, that gain drops to just 1.1 million jobs: You are just seeing the artificial effects of Christmas, which is why they seasonally-adjust, or why if they don’t, you should choose the same month for the comparisons.]
Oh…and thanks for motivating me to go to the source. This also allows me to actually put numbers on my point that things are worse for G.W. Bush if you look at private sector jobs only. In that case, the seasonally-adjusted numbers for Jan 2001 to Dec 2008 show a net gain of only 0.2 million jobs! (If you go until Jan 2009, that becomes a LOSS of 0.6 million jobs.)
So, yes, I apologize. The numbers that I gave made the Bush job creation record look better than it actually was because essentially all the net jobs created by Bush were government jobs! Boy, I bet that one is going to stick in your craw!
D Boehm says:
It was not a “business recession”…It was a complete financial meltdown, unlike anything since the Great Depression. It would have in fact been the Great Depression all over again if a combination of measures were not taken, some by the Bush Administration, which thankfully abandoned ideological purity to actually step in and take some actions and some by Obama who set about cleaning up the complete mess that he inherited.
It is not “cherry-picking” to note the condition that Bush left the economy in for the succeeding Administration. He gets no major credit for unemployment having averaged what it did during his term…That is because he inherited a sound economy and a strong fiscal position from Clinton
This is not a normal recession. It was a major financial meltdown and housing crash that left families with mountains of debt. It wasn’t just a cyclical contraction in spending…People weren’t spending because all of a sudden, they had much less money and many had mortgages with higher principle than the worth of their houses.
If the Tea Party ideologues had been in charge, we would have matched the Great Recession or worst.
How can you expect anyone to take what you say seriously anyway? In this thread, you haven’t even acknowledged basic facts that are in no serious dispute. You have claimed fantasmagorical nonsense like that Obama inherited a perfectly fine economy. It may play well in your little corner of the world, but anybody in the reality-based community who I show this thread to will be amazed that such nonsense was promulgated here and that I was the only one who actually challenged it.
philjourdan says:
Actually, I am essentially the only one here presenting facts. You presented “facts” that turn out to have been incorrect, as a post I have in the queue shows. If you actually go the BLS and look at the numbers, one can see that my number for the number of jobs Bush created is correct and yours is not. Worse yet, if we take out government jobs, Bush actually created no private sector jobs at all over his 8 years in office. There was a slight loss.
Since D Boehm likes graphs, here is one for him: http://www.frontiernet.net/~jshore/PrivateSectorJobs1989to2012.pdf
I used the BLS graphing option to generate a graph of private-sector jobs data from 1989 to the present and then I copied it into MS Word and annotated it with the historical events of Clinton, Bush, and Obama taking office.
Enjoy!
joelshore is arguing with everyone. But the consensus here is correct. And regarding that last joelshore chart, what it doesn’t say is that hiring is too anemic to keep up with the growing population.
0bama’s economic policies are a disaster, as everyone but our blinkered idiot knows.
adults arguing over the great santa’s gift distribution?
http://rapidshare.com/files/923615579/2016.obamas.america-primor.digitalevolution.tv.rar
Böehm says:
November 13, 2012 at 12:19 pm
“joelshore, who could not hold or find a private sector job, presumes to opine on ‘Republican’ economic policies. He conveniently forgets that the recession began after the Democrats took over control of the House in 2008. But of course, they get a free pass from economic illiterate cherry-pickers.”
The Democrats took over the House in 2006 ! The Republicans regained control in 2010. Simply look at what happened to the economy during the years from 2006 to 2010. My biggest complaint about GWB was his willingness to go along with Nancy Pelosi while she and her party drove us into the famous ditch, all in the name of cooperation. Do not forget that the deficit laden budget for FY 2009 was held up by the Democratic controlled Congress because GWB would have vetoed it if it passed. It was finally signed into law in calendar year 2009 by the new President Barack Obama. As a Senator Obama voted to hold it up knowing he would most likely beat McCain (which he did) and then he would, as President, be able to sign that pork barrel travesty into law. That was the last budget passed during his term, continuing resolutions containing the same trillion dollar deficits have been the order of the day since.
Check out dailyjobcuts.com It lists companies that have made cut backs in the number of people they employ, cut back on hours or have closed up shop completely. The numbers took quite a jump after Nov. 6, 2012.
Many companies are cutting employees to 28 or 29 hours a week since the “Obamacare” law has redefined “full time” as only 30 hours.
@ur momisugly joeldshore says: November 13, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Sorry Joel, you are projecting again. You are incorrect. The BLS shows that employment at the end of the Clinton term was 135.8m. At the end of the Bush terms it was 143.3m. Those are facts. You have not presented any. I can even give you the direct link if you are google impaired. Here is a link to the end of the CLinton term: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/history/empsit_01052001.txt
Here is a link to the end of the Bush term: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01092009.htm
NOTE: See the dubya, dubya, dubua and the the dot and the the BEE EL ESS and then the next dot and the GOV? That means it is a GOVERNMENT web site, not a fluff site. The PRIMARY source. not an opinion piece.
Check out table A, the “Employment” line. You will see that at the end of December 2000, employment stood at 135,836 and at the end of December 2008, employment stood at 143,338 (the numbers are in thousands for the math challenged). The difference: 143338-135836 = 7,502. Or for the math challenged, Jobs rose 7 million, 502 thousand. So you are just plain wrong. You sourced none of your opinions, except to other opinions.
Now I have given you the EXACT links, and the EXACT numbers. I cannot make you comprehend them. That requires education on your part.
Remember. Opinions are not facts. by definition.
philjourdan said:
Look, here is the relevant difference: You gave links to two different press releases from BLS at two very different times. By contrast, I gave you a link to BLS where you can download all of the numbers you want: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm See the http://www.bls.gov … that means it is a GOVERNMENT web site, not a fluff site. The PRIMARY source. not an opinion piece. (Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to link to a page where I got the data after making the particular choices of dates and numbers to download, but I have explained which data I used very clearly in the above posts, so you ought to be able to do it yourself. Hint: You have to let it just give you ten years of data by default and then when you get to the final page with the data, you can change the “From:” date in the drop-down menu.)
Why do your two press releases show something different than my link to one consistent source of BLS data? The reason, I presume, is that BLS is always revising things…including how they do seasonal adjustments and so forth. (They even have warnings about that in the very press releases that you link to.) Hence, you can’t just put together data from their data set as of 2001 and the data from their data set as of 2009. You have to look at numbers from one consistent data set where the numbers have been treated consistently.
You’d see the same thing if you looked at Spencer and Christy’s UAH data over time…They have made various revisions to the analysis and to their baseline, so comparing a number that they reported in 2001 for 2001 to a number that they reported in 2009 for 2009 would be meaningless. You have to look at the latest revision of their data and compare numbers for 2001 and 2009 within that.
Get it?
joelshore actually believes the rejiggered government numbers. It is preposterous to believe that in only a couple of months, and right before the election, unemployment suddenly fell from 8.6% to 7.9%. For the truth about government statistics, see here:
http://www.shadowstats.com
Get it?
philjourdan: Another part of the difference between our numbers may be due to the fact that I am using the “establishment survey” and you are using the “household survey”. (See discussion here: http://www.bls.gov/lau/lauhvse.htm#hvse ) I haven’t been able to determine what part of the difference between our numbers might be due to that because I can’t find where the BLS has a consistent monthly source of household data. I can only find yearly averages, which are not that useful for times like 2008/2009 when employment was changing rapidly.
Also note that the information dividing out the jobs according to private vs public sector is only available with the establishment survey.
philjourdan: Here is a recent paper by BLS discussing recent differences in trends between the 2 surveys: http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ces_cps_trends.pdf As an appendix, they also have the latest household survey numbers by month.
Using these household survey numbers, we find: Change in employment from Jan 2001 to Jan 2009 is +4.6 million jobs. By comparison, the establishment survey over the same time period shows a change of +1.1 million jobs. (You can get another million or so in each survey by going from Dec 2000 to Dec 2008 but I don’t see how that can be justified unless you think that the President’s policies can change the January numbers by virtue of his taking office 11 days before the end of the month!)
So, part of the difference between your numbers and mine are due to using different surveys and part is due to you using Dec. to Dec. instead of Jan. to Jan. and using numbers that are not from the same consistent revision of the data set.
So, realistically, the jobs record for Bush is somewhere between about +1 million and +5 million, depending on which survey you rely on.
And, then if you want private sector instead of public sector jobs, you need to subtract about 2 million (1.75 million is the exact number) assuming that the ***difference*** in trends between total and private sector employment in the establishment survey are accurate. So, the Bush record over 8 years is -1 million to +3 million private sector jobs, depending on which survey you believe.
D Boehm says:
Actually, as I have now explained, part of the discrepancy in Bush’s job numbers is between the household and establishment surveys…and conservatives haven’t liked the household survey for the last few months since it is the one that gives unemployment numbers. However, the household survey is what philjourdan used; I used the establishment survey.
Of course, we know what D Boehm’s solution to the problem is: Use whichever survey gives you the results that you want. Don’t even worry if you have numbers using different baselines so they are not consistent at all…What matters is that the data agree with his ideology. If there is disagreement, the ideology isn’t wrong; the data is!
Here is a blog piece by Greg Mankiw discussing the difference between the establishment and household survey, and how that difference was particularly pronounced in the first couple years of the Bush administration: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-two-labor-market-surveys.html (Note: Mankiw was Chair of the Council on Economic Advisors under Bush from 2003 to 2005, so he should represent a respectable opinion in the minds of those who will only listen to opinions of people who share their ideology.)
philjourdan wrote, “[between 12/2000 to 12/2008] Jobs rose 7 million, 502 thousand.”
You are correct, Phil, but the only reason job growth was that low is that you’re counting Bush’s last two years, when Democrats were in charge of both the House and Senate, meaning that Bush had very little say in the nation’s economic affairs:
BLS household data:
Dec. 2000 employment: 135,836
http://bls.gov/news.release/history/empsit_01052001.txt
Dec. 2006 employment: 145,926
http://bls.gov/news.release/history/empsit_01052007.txt
[Democrats took control of Congress January 3, 2007, and Barney Frank took over as chairman of the House Banking Committee]
Dec. 2008 employment: 143,338
http://bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_01092009.pdf
For Bush’s first six years (i.e., the six years before Democrats took over control of Congress), job creation averaged (145,926,000 – 135,836,000) / 6 = 1,682,000 per year — not Reaganesque, but still a reasonably healthy rate.
However, even before Democrats won control of Congress, Democrats in Congress, with the unfortunate help of some Republicans, had stymied the Bush administration’s repeated efforts to put safeguards in place that would have reined in Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, and prevented, or at least greatly reduced the severity of the 2007-2008 banking crisis, which was the trigger for the recession. Google can find you the details, but here’s a brief summary:
http://www.thepilot.com/news/2012/sep/28/when-dems-took-over/
P.S. — regarding the difference between the establishment survey and the household survey, the establishment survey is considered more reliable for short-term (month-to-month) trend detection, but the gradual shift of workers into self-employment (where they’re not “seen” by the establishment survey) means that he household survey is better for long-term trend analysis.