Click here for an animated display of the unemployment rate by county as it develops from 2007 to September 2009.

What strikes me is the huge increase across the entire United States over the last 4 months, as the multimedia display at the link above shows. As I have said before, this depression recession is transformational.

We have crossed the threshold of exporting jobs in the name of cutting costs for investment profits, to the point that we have damaged the coherence of the the regional networks that govern the economy. For example, California is more geared for trade with China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and South America than California is with Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. These investment profits earned by this reallocation of resources accrues to a very small fraction of the general population, and the surplus does not re-invest in the local economy but gathers into brokerage accounts to fuel further profit making investment "opportunities" in the foreign markets.

But don't worry. United Way and charitable donations will fill the gap, right?

You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep, and the people upon whom they choose to give great responsibility.

From Talking Points Memo's David Kurtz at 08.12.09 -- 8:34AM

If you were White House counsel and someone from the White House political shop approached you, just before the midterm elections, about intervening with the Justice Department to help out a congressman from your party under criminal investigation, you would:

(a) Fire his ass on the spot.
(b) Drop kick him from the West Wing to a closet-sized office in the EEOB, never to be heard from again.
(c) Send a memo to everyone in the political office warning against any contacts with DOJ officials regarding any ongoing investigations.
(d) Get the deputy attorney general on the phone and see whether you could get him to publicly exonerate the congressman, then dutifully email back the political operative to report on how the call went.

If you answered (d), you're qualified to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

In other words, Bush wanted someone who would willingly be a tool on behalf of a hidden agenda to become a lifetime member of the Supreme Court making decisions about the Constitution and the Laws of your freedoms and the Nation.

I will never understand why people trust anonymously sent chain emails for any type of validity.

But the "stupids" apparently do. Either that, or the political thugs and opportunists seem to be well versed about the content of such emails. Is this a coincidence?

The recent banter of lies about what the Health care reform legislation will do seems to stem from the content of a recent chain email that was more than 40 pages long. The St. Petersburg Times has a pulitzer prize winning site called PolitFact that analyzed the facts.

Also The Kaiser Family Foundation compares the legislation current passed by out by the various Congressional Committees.

Jenny Tolbert is an independent health care analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation that studies health care reform. She is quoted in the Polifact article above. Here's what Jenny Tolbert says about the chain email :

"It's awful," she said. "It's flat-out, blatant lies. It's unbelievable to me how they can claim to reference the legislation and then make claims that are blatantly false."

Click here for 10 informative bullets that factually contradict that notion.

Here's the first three:

Before you join the euphoria, please consider these 10 sharp bubble-popping pins:

1. Structural unemployment is skyrocketing. Job Losses Moderate:

But structural unemployment worsened. The number of people who've been out of work longer than six months soared by a record 584,000 to 5 million, accounting for more than a third of all unemployment for the first time on record.

"Structural" is a polite way of saying there won't be any jobs for the long-term unemployed this year, next year, or the year after that.

2. The jobless rate declined because the work force shrank. This is typical smoke-and-mirrors statistics, courtesy of your Federal government: as people lose extended unemployment benefits, they are classified as "discouraged" and are no longer counted in the "headline" unemployment number.

Unemployment fell by 267,000 to 14.5 million, while employment fell by 155,000. The labor force declined by 422,000, which means the jobless rate declined because people dropped out of the work force, not because they got jobs. The employment-participation rate fell from 65.7% to 65.5%.

3. Everyone seems to have forgotten we need to create 250,000 jobs a month just to stay even with population growth. So while "only" 250,000 jobs were lost last month--never mind a big chunk of employment was linked to the "cash for clunkers" giveaway--that means we're still 500,000 jobs short of a return to a rising employment scenario.

~hattip to Barry Ritholz.

Most of the nation has more than 7% U2 unemployment (black and purple). The most broad measure of unemployment (including long-term unemployment and part-time workers unable to get full time) is probably more than 11% in all those states.

This data also doesn't measure the disparity within each state between urban and rural regions.

The principles of Right-wing conservatives consist of making up documents and faking citizen upheaval. The latest uproar concerns a photograph of a document (not the actual document) purporting to be the "authentic" birth certificate from the "Republic of Kenya".

BULLSHIT! Click here for the take down

As this works its way through the mediocracy, recall that Dan Rather was fired from CBS in 2004 when certain typed memos appeared from the early 70's that discredited Dubya Bush's time spent boozing, snorting, and sleeping around in the Texas Air National Guard.

Paul Krugman does us a great service. He simplifies the current Health Insurance reform proposals.

The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.

Everything else is about making that core work. Individual mandates are a way to prevent gaming of the system by people who don't sign up until they're sick; employer mandates a way to hold down the on-budget costs by preventing a rush by employers to drop insurance; the public option a way to create effective competition and hold costs down further.

But what it means for the individual will be that insurers can't reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.

That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying that he doesn't want to understand it.

Never underestimate the wiles and motives of the willfully ignorant.

This is excellent and informative. And funny. Here's a snippet:

I had cancer a few years ago. I like the fact that if I lose my job, I won't be able to get any insurance because of my illness. It reminds me of my homeowners' insurance, which gets canceled after a break-in. I like the choice I'd face if, God forbid, the cancer recurs—sell my house to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, or die. That's what you call a "post-existing condition."

I like the absence of catastrophic insurance today. It meant that my health-insurance plan (one of the better ones, by the way) only covered about 75 percent of the cost of my cutting-edge treatment. That's as it should be—face cancer and shell out huge amounts of money at the same time. Nice.

I like the "lifetime limits" that many policies have today. Missed the fine print on that one, did you? It means that after you exceed a certain amount of reimbursement, you don't get anything more from the insurance company. That's fair.