John Hayward - The undisexpectappointing job numbers for April from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were released today, and it’s a horror story:
Only 115,000 new jobs were created, which is
actually below the dismal 119,000 number predicted by the ADP payroll
company earlier this week, and well beneath the 170,000 jobs expected by
the “experts.” This is a significant slowdown from February and March,
which averaged an anemic 134,500 jobs, and a free-fall crash from the
fourth quarter of 2011, which averaged 252,000 per month.
The official unemployment rate nevertheless dipped
to 8.1 percent, a decrease of 0.1 percent. This was entirely due to
people leaving the workforce entirely, which means the BLS no longer
counts them in the widely-reported U-3 rate. The size of the American
workforce just hit a thirty-year low. We lost over half a million people from the workforce in a single month.
The same “experts” who anticipated 170,000 new jobs
for April also thought the unemployment rate would remain at 8.2
percent. In other words, they had absolutely no idea this horrifying
workforce collapse was coming. They thought people would be re-entering
the workforce and looking for jobs, which would balance out the
mediocre job creation and produce zero net change in the unemployment
rate. They thought we were in a weak recovery.
If all of the people driven completely out of the
workforce over the past three years were added back in, the unemployment
rate would be 14.5 percent. That’s the true rate, the number the media should be reporting. That’s what you’re voting for, if you give Obama a second term.
This brings us to 39 straight months of
“official” unemployment above 8 percent. When Barack Obama seized a
trillion dollars of your children’s money for his “stimulus,” he said
the unemployment rate would reach 7 percent without it.
The magnitude of Obama’s failure is staggering.
We’re teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession, if not an
outright depression, and we’ve got nothing to show for the Obama years
except for a gigantic pile of fresh debt, which we must pay enormous
amounts of interest on.
And the worst is yet to come. Consumer confidence
is flagging, and even lower GDP growth is anticipated in the next
quarter. It is widely thought that a warm winter “stole” a good deal of
construction work from the spring. Fair enough… but now it’s summer.
What next?
This is usually one of those moments when I’d
highlight media attempts to paint a happy face on the April job numbers –
“Look! Unemployment dropped by 0.1 percent! We’re on the right
track!” There have been a few attempts to look for silver
linings in today’s news, but even Obama’s media cheerleaders are
dropping their tattered pom-poms and admitting this report is awful.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is not merely disingenuous, but
delusional.
Melinda Liu - I’ve knowing Chen Guangcheng
for more than a decade—he’s been through intimidation, beatings, jail,
and extralegal house arrest—but through it all I never sensed he was
scared. Now he’s scared. Chen, whose case has escalated into a bilateral
crisis that threatens to dominate Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s
visit to Beijing this week, was weeping as he talked to me over the
phone from his hospital bed.
Chen
says he now wants to leave China as soon as possible: “My fervent hope
is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S.
on Hillary Clinton’s plane.”
When
U.S. officials escorted him out of the U.S. embassy shortly after 3
p.m. Wednesday, Chen thought he’d extracted a promise that at least one
of them would stay with him at the hospital, he said. “Many Americans
were with me while I checked into the hospital and doctors examined me.
Lots of them,” he told me from his hospital bed, where he’s being
treated for broken bones in one foot, an injury sustained when he fell
after climbing a wall during his daring escape from house arrest
late last month. “But when I was brought to the hospital room, they all
left. I don’t know where they went.” The ordeal was all the more
bewildering because Chen is blind and was hurt during his escape; he
needs crutches or a wheelchair to move around.
The
hours ticked by, and Chen became more and more agitated. Even though
he’d originally told friends and embassy officials that he wished to
remain in China, now he wanted to leave. “I hope to seek medical
treatment in the U.S. with my family, and then I want to rest,” he said.
“As for the future, we’ll deal with that in the future.” At the
hospital, Chen’s fears mounted as his wife told him she’d been tied to a
chair, beaten, and interrogated by Chinese guards after they learned he
had entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing last Friday.
Chen Guangcheng with U.S. officials on Wednesday, before leaving
the U.S. embassy for a hospital in Beijing, US Embassy Beijing Press
Office / AP Photos
As
dinnertime came and went, he and his wife and two young children, who
had traveled to Beijing, had nothing to eat. Their 6-year-old daughter
began crying from the hunger pangs. “I kept asking the hospital
personnel for some food, but it never came. I asked many times.”
Finally, around 9 p.m., some food was sent in after friends contacted
American officials for help. But Chen says his numerous attempts to
reach the U.S. embassy directly during those dark hours failed: “I tried
to phone the embassy three or four times last night, but nobody
answered.” As of Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Beijing time, he said he has had
no contact with American officials since after he entered his hospital
room.
“I need your help, I’m absolutely, absolutely ready to fly
out on Hillary Clinton’s plane. Please tell the embassy what I’m
saying.”
At the embassy, Chen said he came under tremendous pressure from American officials—“not those from the embassy but others “—to leave the diplomatic facility
as quickly as possible. From the very beginning, he said, the
assumption was that he would stay in China. “I had no information, I got
no phone calls from friends, I was isolated,” he told me, his voice
trembling. “Then I heard about the threat that my wife would be sent
back home to Shandong if I didn’t leave the embassy. So I left.”
He
told me there was no explicit threat that she would be submitted to
physical violence, “but nobody had to say it, I know what we’ve
experienced all these years back in Shandong. Our home was surrounded by
guards, lots of guards. Our friends weren’t allowed to visit. If we
tried to go out we’d be beaten, often with clubs.” Security personnel
had even escorted his young daughter to and from school; Chen and his
wife hadn’t seen their son for two years before their reunion at the
hospital.
Human-rights
activists are now extremely worried about Chen’s fate, and some are
astonished at this startling—and dark—turn of events. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton had described Chen's departure as reflecting "his
choices and our values"; State Department officials said Chen was asked
several times if he was departing of his own volition and his reply was
"Zou!" or "Let's go!" U.S. officials also said they had reached an
understanding with Chinese authorities that Chen would be allowed to
pursue his education in a location away from his home province of
Shandong, to follow up on his work as a self-taught "barefoot lawyer".
In
Washington, the State Department went into crisis-management mode,
telling reporters and human rights activists that from the beginning
Chen said he wanted to stay in China with his family.
On Wednesday morning, three senior Obama
administration officials hosted a teleconference with representatives of
human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Human Rights
China to discuss the case of the blind legal scholar.
On the call were Michael Posner, the
assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor; as
well as Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia;
and Samantha Power, the National Security Council senior director for
multilateral affairs. According to one participant on the phone call,
the Obama administration officials had to beat back questions from the
activists based on stories breaking that said Chen wanted asylum in the
United States. "They told us not to believe the first reports but also
said they were looking to confirm reports at this stage," one
participant in the call told The Daily Beast.
arly in the day, State Department spokeswoman
Victoria Nuland issued a statement denying reports that the U.S.
conveyed threats to Chen about his wife while he was at the embassy.
"U.S. interlocutors did make clear that if Chen elected to stay in the
embassy, Chinese officials had indicated to us that his family would be
returned to Shandong, and they would lose their opportunity to negotiate
for reunification," Nuland also said.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human
Rights Watch, said in a statement, “There are serious concerns over
whether the Chinese government will honor commitments it made to the
U.S. government to not persecute Chen and his family members." She
added, “Not only does the Chinese government have an appalling track
record on human rights, but Chen himself has also already reported
receiving threats to his family’s safety by government officials and
fearing for his and their security.”
“[Chen's
current situation] totally contradicts the rosy picture" I got in a
conference call I had with U.S. officials Wednesday morning. They
summarized the situation, and it sounded like a beautiful, happy scene,”
said Bob Fu, president of the U.S.-based ChinaAid Association, which
has acted as a facilitator in Chen’s case. “They said they’d send some
photos of Chen ‘joyfully’ leaving the embassy.” Last week Fu had offered
to transport Chen out of China via an “underground railroad”—but at
the time, Chen declined.
Fu
had spoken by phone with Chen shortly before I had. “He was very
heavy-hearted,” Fu said. “He was crying when we spoke. He said he was
under enormous pressure to leave the embassy. Some people almost made
him feel he was being a huge burden to the U.S.” Chen decided to leave,
Fu confirmed, because he was told “he would have no chance of
reunification with his wife and children if he didn’t. The choice
presented to him was walk out—or stay inside and lose his wife and kids.
Chen had no choice but to go.”
Fu
confirmed also that Chen seemed “absolutely clear” that he wanted to go
to the U.S. now. And Fu said his offer to help Chen leave via a network
of sympathizers inside China was still open: “Absolutely. If there’s an
opportunity for us to get him and his family out, as a secondary
option, we can do it. We have the tools and the personnel to do it. He
can be out in 24 hours.”
But
in order to go abroad, Chen and his family need passports—and in order
to apply for them, the family would have to go back to Shandong, where
the provincial thugs are waiting. “If the U.S. can intervene, and if the
Chinese central government can make a phone call, those passports can
be ready in a day. It might require a diplomatic push,” said Fu
hopefully. “Nothing would make me happier than to get Chen and his
family onto Hillary’s plane out of there.”
And
nothing would thrill Chen more, either. “Please try to contact the
embassy to send someone over here. I need your help, I’m absolutely,
absolutely ready to fly out on Hillary Clinton’s plane. Please tell the
embassy what I’m saying, Meiyuan,” he pleaded from his hospital room,
using my Chinese name. “I don’t know why the Americans didn’t answer my
phone calls.”
HOUSTON, TX- Judicial Watch
is the largest non-profit government watchdog group in the country with a
mission dedicated to prosecuting corruption. Headed by President Tom
Fitton, Judicial Watch is armed and ready for election 2012 and the
upcoming battle against voter fraud.
Since the Obama administration came to power in 2009, Judicial Watch
has filed more than 300 Freedom of Information Act requests with the
Obama Administration.
“It’s about time they are afraid of us,” Fitton said. “We just seek to enforce the law.”
The Obama administration is no stranger to scandals; Fast and Furious,
Solyndra, GSA, Secret Service, Black Panther Voter Intimidation Case,
etc. but Fitton warned attendees of the National True the Vote Summit Saturday
that Americans shouldn’t assume that because there’s a topic in the
news that people are interested in it and actually investigating it.
“Effective oversight isn’t coming in afterward,” Fitton said. “Effective oversight is stopping it [before it starts].”
As I wrote last night, it is clear the Obama Justice Department is out of control, but we haven’t seen everything yet.
“I’m not being over the top here, I fear the Obama gang is setting
themselves up to steal the elections if possible,” Fitton said. “The
most problematic area here is the Justice Department.”
Project Vote and ACORN have not gone away, they’ve just been splintered
and renamed. On top of still being in existence, even after Hannah
Giles and James O’Keefe proved the group was willing to help with the
sex trafficking of underage girls, the Obama Justice Department is
working directly with these groups in an effort to steal the White
House.
“The Justice Department isn’t being run by political appointees, it’s
being run by outside activists,” Fitton said. “This attorney general is
the most partisan hack we’ve had in office since Richard Nixon’s day.”
These same activists are pressuring states on their voter registration
and voter I.D. laws and are working hand-in-hand with the Justice
Department to sue those states.
Fitton also warned of Obama’s goals for amnesty and opposition to
citizenship verification at the polls. Illegal immigrants voting in
states that do not have voter I.D. laws or voter registration
verification, is a serious problem.
“This is not about the Hispanic vote, this about the illegal alien
vote. This is a serious threat to the integrity of our elections,”
Fitton said.
Despite these facts, the Obama machine isn’t going to take November without a fight or accountability.
“If this administration thinks they’re going to sneak their way into
office, we’re going to be there yelling at them, at least,” Fitton said.
