The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in November, 315,000 people "dropped out of the labor force," while only 130,000 new jobs were added. In other words, the jobs situation took yet another significant turn for the worse. Yet in the unique math practiced by today's BLS - not accounting for those who have dropped out of the labor force in the U-3 unemployment number - that means the our nation's job situation actually improved, on paper only of course. The reality is that we still have "13 million unemployed workers, whose periods of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks" and that number continues to grow, far outpacing job creation. Nonetheless, the BLS calculates that the unemployment rate dropped from 9% to 8.6% in November, thus leading the New York Times to trumpet:

Signs of Hope in Jobs Report; Unemployment Drops to 8.6%

Many more signs of hope like that and our nation will be completely wrecked.

Update: The broader unemployment number, U-6, which includes the underemployed, is at a staggering 15.6%.

Rush Limbaugh has a colorful rant dealing with both the fraud in the unemployment number and the reaction of the drive-by media to the 8.6% number. Meanwhile, TIME magazine's Stephen Gandell suggests that this drop below 9% could be a "game changer," a sure sign of a strengthening economy. That level of intellectual dishonesty is stomach churning.

That said, not all left of center pundits are intellectually dishonest. My hats off to The New Republic for publishing this Brookings Institution analysis of the current job situation:

Three points are worthy of note.

First: Despite the growth of the working-age population over the past four years, the labor force (roughly, the sum of those employed plus job-seekers) has not expanded. For various reasons, more and more Americans have been dropping out of the labor force. If Americans of working age were participating in the labor force at the same rate as they were at the onset of the recession, the labor force would be nearly 5 million people larger, and unemployment would be significantly worse in both absolute and percentage terms.

Second: Despite the modest economic recovery since the recession ended in mid-2009, total employment remains more than 5.5 million below the level of 2007 and about 1.6 million below where it was when President Obama took office.

Third: To regain full employment (5 percent, which happens to be the same as the level when the recession began) with the pre-recessionary labor force participation rate, we would need 150.7 million jobs—10.1 million more than we have today. That’s a reasonable measure of the hole we’re still in, two and a half years since the official end of the recession.

The American people are unlikely to cheer up about the economy until we get appreciably closer to the top of the hole.

This graph, from Doug Ross, shows the depth of unemployment during this recession in comparison to all of the other recessions since WWII:

Michael Crichton very astutely observed several years ago that the green movement had become a new religion for the left with a belief system based on faith, a paradise, a fall from grace, a defined heresey, and a doomsday scenario. And if one questions the accuracy of that assessment, perhaps reading this Time magazine article on the Global Warming movement's High Priest, the Goracle, will be enlightening. It is authored by Bono.

As 2007 closes and 2008 begins, . . . Americans are looking for leadership that can turn spiritual yearnings into practical realities.

Al Gore is the kind of leader these times require. Not as President — God and the Electoral College have given him a different job. As it happens, Al is at work repositioning his country from the inside out as a leader in clean energy; and along the way restoring faith in the U.S. as a moral powerhouse that can lead a great, global spiritual revival as the temperature rises.

That's right, a spiritual revival. Because this apostle of all things digital is the first to admit that technology alone will not reverse the damage done. . . .

For Al, 2008 is a rendezvous with destiny and an appointment with the enemy. The foe he sees is our own indifference to the future and a lack of faith in our ability to do anything about it. He stresses that through crisis we can find opportunity. His language is pretty Biblical, but, then, doesn't the Bible say something about floods? He is like an Old Testament prophet amped up with PowerPoint and an army of the world's scientists at his disposal. The right response to the global-warming crisis, he explains, will be a mosaic of solutions that will kick off a whole new economic boom, one that is low-carbon and high-productivity, with truly sustainable development, and an atlas for planet management — using not New Age technology but old age wisdom generating sustainable solutions.

Is he Noah or are we King Canute? Are we prepared to make difficult choices on behalf of children not yet born? . . .

. . . [Bishop] Desmond Tutu often uses the word ubuntu, meaning "I am because we are." It's my favorite epithet, an ode to interdependence. When I told Al that, he responded with Gandhi: Satyagraha, meaning "hold tight to the truth."

Personally, I'm trying to live up to both words, but it's hard. Like a lot of folks, I've got a lot on my plate without trying to make sure the dishwasher liquid is in a biodegradable container. (It is, but were it not for the eco-warrior with whom I share a bed, I would have fallen behind.) As Al leaves our house, I fall over myself to explain that my fancy car runs on ethanol, then laugh nervously, like when you meet a parish priest in the supermarket and it turns into confession. . .

Read the article here. A big part of the global warming movement are secularists for whom belief in the environment and global warming has filled the spiritual void left in the absence of a true religion. And further, I think there are more than a few who may or may not be true believers in global warming, but who do adhere to socialism and see global warming as a vehicle to justify centralizing power and redistributing wealth. It is a potent marriage with the potential to do great harm - as at least one truly spiritual man has recognized.