Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.Just think, only a couple of months ago, Bush and John McCain were saying the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Well, no thinking Americans bought that load of crap. In fact, consumer confidence is plummeting....The unemployment rates for adult men (6.5 percent) and adult women (5.5 percent) continued to trend up in November. The unemployment rates for teenagers (20.4 percent), whites (6.1 percent), blacks (11.2 percent), and Hispanics (8.6 percent) showed little change over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 4.8 percent in November, not seasonally adjusted.
Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their job and did not expect to be recalled to work increased by 298,000 to 4.7 million in November. Over the past 12 months, the size of this group has increased by 2.0 million.
The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.Heaven help Barack Obama. I don't know how he's going to fix this, or even get things on the right track with both the GOP and the short-attention span MSM and public breathing down his back to assign blame for not pulling an economic rabbit out of a hat."We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history," said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. "It is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs."
Protests by conservative lawmakers led architects to promise to add "In God We Trust" as the national motto and to engrave the Pledge of Allegiance in the new $621 million Capitol Visitor Center. Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, had threatened to delay Tuesday's opening of the marble-and-stone center that took seven years to build at triple the original cost.I like Bob Geiger's take:...Despite winning a months-long battle to highlight the importance of religion in American life, DeMint said the center still misrepresents American history by downplaying the faith of the founding fathers and other prominent figures. "The current Capitol Visitor Center displays are left-leaning and in some cases distort our true history," DeMint said. The center's "most prominent display proclaims faith not in God, but in government."
DeMint, rated the most conservative senator by several think tanks and advocacy groups, also protested an engraved statement near the center's entrance: "We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution."
That quote was uttered by Rufus Choate, a Massachusetts lawyer who represented his state in the House of Representatives in the 1830s and in the Senate the following decade.
"This is an intentional misrepresentation of our nation's real history and an offensive refusal to honor America's God-given blessings," DeMint said.
Given that DeMint and his Republican colleagues have contributed mightily to Bush and Cheney utterly trashing the Constitution and our true national creed for eight years, it's not at all surprising that a quote heralding the Constitution as our governmental foundation -- and not the bible, I guess -- should make him so angry.And I guess South Carolina voters must approve of DeMint spending his time and energy on this while we have two wars going on, an economy in deep recession and people losing jobs and homes every day.
I'm assuming the inclusion of the Flat Earth Society somewhere in the newest D.C. attraction is coming next or a DeMint insistence that the Capitol Visitor Center include a mural of Adam and Eve riding a dinosaur to a church social.
Although I still oppose the campaign to boycott the Sundance Film Festival, I was disappointed to read Sundance officials' tepid response in yesterday’s New York Times article about the Festival, the relevant portion of which is:
Mr. Cooper and Mr. Gilmore said festival officials were stepping carefully around demands that they cooperate with a boycott of businesses associated with supporters of California’s Proposition 8, banning gay marriage.
The festival, for instance, will make certain that no film is screened only in the Holiday Village theater in Park City, operated by Cinemark, a chain whose chief executive, Alan Stock, donated to Proposition 8’s backers in the November election. The idea is to give anyone who has qualms about Cinemark the opportunity to see a movie somewhere else.
But, given the dearth of theaters, programmers don’t intend to abandon the Holiday Village.
“We don’t have an alternative,” Mr. Gilmore said. “If we had another theater we could walk down the street to, we might be thinking about that.”
Source: Sundance Tilts to Heart-Tuggers by MICHAEL CIEPLY. Published: December 3, 2008
Two questions:
1) If the movies shown at the Cinemark theater will all be shown elsewhere, why not pull all of them from the Cinemark? I understand it means fewer showings and less convenience but when did taking a stand about human rights not require sacrifices?
2) “If we had another theater we could walk down the street to, we might be thinking about that.” You might be thinking about that? What a weak answer. Why not, “If we had another theater we could walk down the street to, we would have already switched.”
Of course, it doesn’t really have to be a theater “down the street.” Films are already shown outside of Park City (e.g., in Heber and Salt Lake) with shuttles transporting movie goers to and fro. They could do the same thing with the movies scheduled to be shown at the Cinemark theater.
Sundance could send a powerful statement if it did not use the Holiday Village (Cinemark) because of the Cinemark CEO’s support of Proposition 8. It might mean a little less money, a little less convenience, and a little less scheduling flexibility for the Festival and its attendees but isn’t the cause of Civil Rights for All worth it?
~ Mark Worthen
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