The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "What Does Peace Mean Anyway?" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Robert Stacy McCain's post "Brett Kimberlin Saga Takes a Bizarre Turn, Forcing Me to Leave Maryland" over at The Other McCain.  Congrats!

Where's the stolen oil I keep hearing about?

I can't believe I'm still hearing the same stupid "war for oil" talking points now that I was hearing back when Saddam Hussein was cowering in his spider hole.  I was talking to some friends earlier today and had to listen to a few of them saying Iraq was a lie, it had nothing to do with liberating anyone, it was all about oil, it was all a big joke, blah blah blah.

Well, Iraqis are free, aren't they?  Their government is far from perfect, but at least it's theirs now.  And where is all the oil we stole?  Seems like we could sure could use some of it right about now.

The rape rooms are gone.  Iraqis aren't being shoved feet first into giant shredding machines anymore.  Saddam isn't funding terrorism anymore, or buying votes on the U.N. Security Council, or doing his best to acquire WMDs, or gassing his own people, or forcing droves of people to the polls at gunpoint to vote for him.  But it's really all about that oil we stole that we don't seem to have anywhere, right?

Whatever.

Who is Brett Kimberlin?

If you're wondering why you keep hearing the name Brett Kimberlin mentioned so much lately, this is why:

There's plenty more where that came from over at Lee Stranahan's website.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "The Fascist Boogie Fever" by The Noisy Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Mark Steyn's post "The Spirit of Geert Wilders" over at National Review Online.  Congrats!

The Happiness Index

President Obama promised us that passing his so-called stimulus bill would keep the unemployment rate below 8%... and how did that work out for everyone?  He got his bill passed, but we still ended up with unemployment stuck above 8% for three years straight, and the Misery Index has been above 10% since November 2009.

The recession ended in June 2009, but only in the most technical sense... when at least 76% of the population thinks we are still in a recession, that should tell you something about how weak the economy really is.  This hasn't stopped Obama from repeatedly trying to claim credit for bringing about some sort of miraculous economic recovery.  If this is what he thinks a successful recovery looks like, then I'd hate to see how bad things would have to get for him to ever admit failure.

As bad as unemployment has been and continues to be, the official unemployment rate leaves out several pieces of data that would paint an even bleaker picture of the unemployment situation.  The alternative ways of measuring unemployment have their uses, but the 1994 changes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics made to these methodologies can sometimes make it difficult to compare apples to apples.

I thought it might be interesting to see what would happen to the Misery Index if it could also account for those who have become so discouraged that they simply gave up looking for work.  Instead of trying to rejigger a new Misery Index by using the U4 unemployment rate in place of the standard rate, I decided to just turn the Misery Index on its head.  Instead of adding inflation to unemployment, I subtracted inflation from the employment-to-population ratio... I call this the Happiness Index, since it's a sort of Bizarro version of the Misery Index.  I averaged the monthly data for each presidential term going all the way back to Truman's second term, and then created this graphic to show the Happiness Index for each term:

Are you happier now than you were four years ago?

Obama's term is not yet complete, but I included his average so far just for the sake of comparison... you have to go back to Reagan's first term to find a worse number than Obama's, and Reagan was at least moving things significantly in the right direction.

Despite the 9/11 attacks and the bursting of the tech bubble, George W. Bush's first term still managed the second highest Happiness Index shown here... the numbers for Bush's second term are not as good as his first, but are still the fourth best.  While Bush was in office, we kept hearing the phrase "jobless recovery" over and over again, but so far it looks like the best Obama can do is not nearly as good as Bush's worst.

Update: Oh, so the lousy economy is all Bush's fault?  Fine... let's see what happens to the numbers when you take the first year of Obama's term and place it at the end of Bush's second term.  This would give Bush a slightly lower Happiness Index of 59.35 percent, and bring Obama's number down to 55.99 percent.  Why stop there?  Let's also place Obama's second year in office at the end of Bush's term and see what happens.  This would give Bush 58.94 percent and Obama 55.14 percent.  It seems like the more of a grace period we try to give Obama, the worse his numbers get.  This is because Obama's monthly Happiness Index didn't hit bottom until 2011, when it reached 54.53 percent in both August and September... you have to go all the way back to March 1984 to find a lower monthly number.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Inside Vladimir Putin" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was William Jacobson's post "Cruel irony in Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee saga" over at Legal Insurrection.  Congrats!

Ann Althouse: Ghost Hunter

Ann Althouse has been using her Kindle version of "Dreams From My Father" to analyze how often Obama uses certain words and in what context... here's a snippet:

Obama portrayed black people as having an inner white person, and he wondered "whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams." So that inner white person wasn't real. It was a ghost — a ghost that haunted dreams. The book is "Dreams From My Father," so it's quite significant to find the notion of dreams haunted by white people, and white people conceptualized as ghosts.

She found 8 different examples of ghosts referred to in the book... very interesting stuff, go read the whole thing.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Pathological Politics -- Predatory Partners and Persecuting Patriots" by The Noisy Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Joel Kotkin's post "The New Class Warfare" over at City Journal.  Congrats!

What's a fair share? How much is enough?

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Yom Hashoah - Reflections On The Holocaust" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Raymond Ibrahim's post "How the Media Whitewashes Muslim Persecution of Christians" over at Pundicity.  Congrats!