From a clearly appalled Reuters:

French deficit drops, auditor urges stronger action

By Daniel Flynn and Jean-Baptiste Vey
February 8, 2012

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s central government slashed its budget deficit last year by a third thanks to the end of one-off spending measures, the budget ministry said on Wednesday, but state auditors said much tougher austerity measures were needed to hit EU targets.

Have they gone mad?

The central government’s 2011 shortfall came in at 90.8 billion euros, 4.5 billion euros better than forecast in last year’s budget, meaning France should comfortably beat its overall state deficit target for last year of 5.7 percent of GDP.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said recently the overall public deficit — which includes social security and local authority spending — could have dipped as low as 5.3 percent of gross domestic product last year, putting France well on track to meet this year’s target of 4.5 percent.

Wednesday’s figures showed that, while revenues were flat last year, the central government was able to slash its deficit as spending tumbled by 14 percent to 365.4 billion euros.

In other words, they did not increase taxes. Or if they did, it didn’t get them any more revenue.

Spending in 2010 had been boosted by a 32 billion one-off charge for a government future investment program covering everything from industry to research and teaching, and an exceptional payment to regional governments to cover the cost of a reform to France’s local business tax.

France’s Court of Auditors — a quasi-judicial body charged with reviewing public finances — said in a report that the government last year had taken only one tenth of the measures required to keep its promise of balancing the public finances by 2016 and that much tougher steps would be needed…

Just imagine if we would take just one tenth of a tenth.

The Court of Auditors estimated that France had reduced its structural deficit — excluding cyclical economic effects — to 4.5 percent of GDP in 2011, down by just 0.5 of a percentage point from the previous year…

When was the last time we cut our deficit even a little?

A random act of journalism from the Washington Post:

Congressional earmarks sometimes used to fund projects near lawmakers’ properties

By David S. Fallis, Scott Higham and Kimberly Kindy
Published: February 6, 2012

A U.S. senator from Alabama directed more than $100 million in federal earmarks to renovate downtown Tuscaloosa near his own commercial office building. A congressman from Georgia secured $6.3 million in taxpayer funds to replenish the beach about 900 feet from his island vacation cottage. A representative from Michigan earmarked $486,000 to add a bike lane to a bridge within walking distance of her home.

They probably are Democrats, since the Post neglects to mention their party affiliation. But maybe not.

Thirty-three members of Congress have directed more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Under the ethics rules Congress has written for itself, this is both legal and undisclosed.

The Post analyzed public records on the holdings of all 535 members and compared them with earmarks members had sought for pet projects, most of them since 2008.

The process uncovered appropriations for work in close proximity to commercial and residential real estate owned by the lawmakers or their family members. The review also found 16 lawmakers who sent tax dollars to companies, colleges or community programs where their spouses, children or parents work as salaried employees or serve on boards.

Somebody alert Maxine Waters! She’ll get to the bottom of this corruption. — No, wait a minute.

By the way, has anyone ever investigated earmarks that Barack Obama directed to the hospital in Chicago that gave Michelle Obama her no show, $300K job?

For the record, the Washington Post has a link to their full investigation, if you think you can stomach it.

From the Associated Press:

Santorum jumps into second place in delegate race

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press
February 8, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Sen. Rick Santorum moved into second place Tuesday in the race for delegates with wins in Republican presidential caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota.

Santorum picked up at least 28 delegates while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney got at least six.

Sort of. In reality, things are little more complicated, as the article explains.

Overall, Romney has 107 delegates, including endorsements from members of the Republican National Committee who automatically attend the party’s national convention and can support any candidate they choose. Santorum has 45 delegates, Newt Gingrich has 32 and Ron Paul has nine.

The race for delegates is still in the early stages. It will take 1,144 delegates to win the GOP nomination.

Santorum also won the Missouri primary Tuesday, but the party is not awarding any delegates based on the results. Instead, Missouri will award its 52 delegates through a system of caucuses and conventions, starting March 17.

Which must make the people in Missouri who actually took the trouble to vote feel pretty stupid.

Minnesota had 37 delegates up for grabs Tuesday — 13 based on statewide results and 24 based on results in individual congressional districts. Colorado had 33 delegates at stake — 12 based on the statewide vote and 21 based on results in individual congressional districts.

Delegates to the party’s national convention from Minnesota and Colorado are not bound by the results of Tuesday’s caucuses. The caucuses were the first step of a multi-step process to award the delegates…

So technically, nobody won any ‘bound’ delegates yesterday.

What a system!

From the editors at the Wall Street Journal:

ObamaCare’s Great Awakening

HHS tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.

FEBRUARY 8, 2012

The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

Which, we have to say, is about time. But, in truth, most people still won’t notice.

In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

Actually, HHS made their ‘decision’ way back in August. Kathleen Sebelius only announced it back in January. And she cushioned it by giving these providers until after the elections to begin complying with the new rule.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule’s conscience exceptions for "religious employers" so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

Apparently, we are supposed to be grateful that churches and synagogues and mosques won’t have to give away free condoms and ‘morning after’ pills. But they are about the only exceptions allowed.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion.

Remember how many times the phrase, "as the Secretary shall determine" appeared in the 2,300 pages of Obama-Care? — And now we are discovering just how much power this unelected official has been given over our lives.

What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.

Not quite. "The entire thrust of Obama-Care is to" use healthcare as a way control every aspect of our lives that the government sees in need of being controlled.

To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it.

After all, birth control is a human right. No one should have to pay for their human right.

To take a larger example: The Obama Administration’s legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives.

By this logic, how long will it be before we are required to buy Volts? After all, when people buy gasoline powered cars we all suffer.

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius’s ministry. That may explain why her staff didn’t notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

They noticed. This has always been the plan. They just hoped that no one else would notice.

Bad call. The decision has roused the Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they’ve been joined by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually. Contraception is the single most prescribed medicine for women between 18 and 44 years old, and nine of 10 insurers and employers already cover it.

Yes, but even then there might be some token co-pay involved. And, again, we cannot have anyone pay anything, even a token sum of $1 dollar when it is a human right.

Yet HHS still decided to rub it in the face of religious hospitals.

Mr. Obama’s allies among Catholic liberals are also professing shock—even the Catholic Health Association’s Sister Carol Keehan, who lobbied for ObamaCare, and Notre Dame’s Father John Jenkins, who invited Mr. Obama to speak on campus in 2009. But if they now claim they were taken for a ride by the secular left, the truth is that they wanted to be deceived in the name of their grander goal of government-enforced equity. The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare’s great enablers.

Speaking of scales from the eyes, we’re eager to hear from former Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, who for a brief moment led a faction of pro-life Democrats against ObamaCare in 2010. They surrendered when Mr. Obama gave them the fig leaf of an executive order that will supposedly prevent federal funds from subsidizing abortions. Mr. Stupak is now a lobbyist at the D.C. law firm Venable LLP.

Translation: Mr. Stupak was given a golden parachute in exchange for betraying his constituents.

This is also a teaching moment for Mitt Romney, who has joined the calls to defend "the right to worship in the way of our own choice," as he put it in a Colorado speech on Monday. "This is a violation of conscience. We must have a President who is willing to protect America’s first right, our right to worship God," he added.

This is fine as far as it goes, but as usual the GOP front-runner is missing the larger policy and moral issue. The HHS diktat isn’t something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that "women’s health" trumps religious conscience.

In fact, we will soon learn that abortion trumps everything. Killing babies is the holiest of holies in Democrat doctrine.

If Mr. Romney can’t make the obvious connection between this infringement of American values and all the other infringements that are inherent in government health care, then he needs better political advisers.

And better conservative reflexes. – Which is to say, some conservative reflexes.

The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some "compromise" on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama’s second term. Religious liberty won’t be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

Again, rolling back the health care ‘conscience clause’ has been job one for Obama since he took office.

From the CNN archives:

White House set to reverse health care conscience clause

By Saundra Young
February 27, 2009

The rule protects the rights of health care providers who refuse to participate in certain procedures.

The Obama administration plans to reverse a regulation from late in the Bush administration allowing health-care workers to refuse to provide services based on moral objections, an official said Friday.

The Provider Refusal Rule was proposed by the Bush White House in August and enacted on January 20, the day President Barack Obama took office.

It expanded on a 30-year-old law establishing a "conscience clause" for "health-care professionals who don’t want to perform abortions."

Under the rule, workers in health-care settings — from doctors to janitors — can refuse to provide services, information or advice to patients on subjects such as contraception, family planning, blood transfusions and even vaccine counseling if they are morally against it.

For Obama and the Democrats, destroying religion is an article of faith.

The goal of Karl Marx and his followers has always been to destroy everything but the government, the state. So that everyone will be dependent on the state. Which is why Marxists seek to destroy every other competing institution in society.

That is why they want to destroy marriage, the family and, of course, religion. Everything must come from and through the state.

From Stephen Moore, via the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:

A Fairness Quiz for the President

Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama’s largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees?

By STEPHEN MOORE
February 7, 2012

President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria?

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country’s income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?

Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?

For the record, Japan actually cut its rate from 40% to 35% back in December 2010. That rate went into effect in April 2011. So we are tied with them for having the highest corporate rate.

Moreover, for all intents and purposes, no companies pay the top corporate rate in Japan.

Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

The same question could be asked about the fairness of the tax on capital gains. (Which several countries do not tax.)

Is it fair that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel and other leading Democrats who preach tax fairness underpaid their own taxes?

Not to mention Warren Buffet, and for that matter, many of the staffers on Capitol Hill.

Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?

Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?

And the other 22% probably went to Ron Paul.

Is it fair that the three counties with America’s highest median family income just happen to be located in the Washington, D.C., metro area?

Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is "subsidized"?

As we have stated time and again, oil companies are not subsidized at all. They pay a slightly lower tax rate because they deal in an product that is being depleted when they produce it. Every other manufacturer in the same boat can get the same tax break.

Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don’t work?

And is it fair that the unemployment insurance employers have to pay is going up to cover these extended benefits? Which means they will have less money to hire more workers.

Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can’t afford to repay?

Also, renters, who never took out loans they can’t afford, are now going to have to pay more in taxes to subsidize people who ‘bought’ houses they could not afford.

Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?

Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama’s largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees on their investments in renewable energy projects that went bust?

And if there was such blatant crony capitalism in green energy, you know it is happening in other fields.

Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office?

Is it fair that soon almost half the federal budget will take income from young working people and redistribute it to old non-working people, even though those over age 65 are already among the wealthiest Americans?

This is one item we would challenge. Does Mr. Moore want ‘means testing’ for Social Security and Medicare? If so, they will become another welfare program, rather than the ‘insurance’ plans they pretend to be.

Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?

Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?

The percentage is actually 47% (based on 2009 numbers, which seem to be the most recent available), which is more than four out of 10. It is almost 5 out of ten.

Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?

Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

When Mr. Obama took office every man woman and child in the US owed $34,000. Today that is up to $48,000 per person. By election day it will be more than $50,000.

Anyway, Mr. Moore’s list is just for starters. It could go on and on and on.

From an unfazed BBC News:

BBC News – More pupils wetting themselves, say teachers

More pupils wetting themselves, say teachers

Hannah Richardson – BBC News education reporter
6 February 2012

More children are starting school before they are fully toilet trained, teachers say. A snapshot survey suggests many primary school staff are noticing a rise in the number of children wetting or soiling themselves.

The online survey of 848 staff for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers suggested the main cause was a lack of toilet training. ATL said the problem put extra pressure on school staff.

The ‘Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ is a British teachers union.

Two-thirds of the respondents to the survey, carried out by the ATL with the charity Education and Resources for Improving Childhood Continence, said they had noticed an increase in children having toileting accidents during the school day.

It also found that 38% of respondents were in schools with no written policy for dealing with such issues.

Perhaps it is just understood that the schools are against toileting accidents.

ATL general secretary Mary Bousted said: "Schools need to give staff clear guidance on how to deal with toileting accidents so that they know what they are allowed to do, and who should be dealing with an incident.

"It is also important that education staff feel that have support from their school nurse or head, and that they know where to obtain guidance should they need it."

Probably because they are afraid of getting charged with sexual abuse.

A foundation stage teacher from Wales stated: "We used not to take children until they were fully toilet trained. Now we accept them anyway as we operate in a deprived area and attendance at nursery is usually deemed to be in the child’s best interest."

You see, some parents are too poor to provide toilet training. But exactly how much does toilet training cost?

Another foundation stage teacher said: "This is a major problem for us – over 45% of our nursery children are not toilet trained when coming into nursery when they are three years old.

"We also have children who soil and wet a great deal, even in reception.

"Our parents just have no idea when and how to toilet train their children. We are having to put on a workshop to support them."

Who are these so-called ‘parents’?

Children normally start school in the academic year that they turn five, but increasing numbers are attending pre-schools from the age of three.

Jenny Perez, director of ERIC, said: "Schools should be clear about their expectation that children should be using the toilet independently when they start school.

"They can support parents to achieve this by providing resources and information at the time the child’s school place is confirmed."

And to think how people used to laugh when some warned about a ‘cradle to grave’ nanny state.

From an un-outraged Washington Post:

D.C. workers face potential firing in alleged unemployment fraud

By Mike DeBonis
February 6, 2012

Nearly 90 city employees were suspended Monday and face potential firing and prosecution for receiving unemployment benefits while holding their city jobs, District officials said.

They face "potential firing and prosecution"? What would they have to do to face certain firing and prosecution? Not be in a public sector union?

In addition, about 40 former city workers cashed unemployment checks they were not entitled to and also face sanctions. In all, the city estimates it has paid out as much as $800,000 in unemployment benefits to working city employees since 2009.

“By holding people accountable, that sends a clear message we’re not tolerating this behavior,” said Lisa Mallory, director of the D.C. Department of Employment Services, which administers the jobless benefits program.

Yes, they all must be given four weeks vacation administrative leave – with pay.

Monday’s action, which follows at least three years of scrutiny from local and federal authorities, represents an unusually broad crackdown on corruption in the District government workforce.

Of course any crackdown on corruption in the District is ‘unusual.’

The volume of benefits claims has soared alongside the District’s jobless rate, and investigators have taken an increasing interest in how the unemployment program guards against fraud.

D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby and Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan are involved in the investigation, and authorities anticipate referring at least some cases to federal prosecutors for criminal action…

"Some"? Are there any Republican public sector employees in Washington, DC?

Employees accused of wrongdoing worked in various arms of the District government, including the public schools and the D.C. Council staff, according to a high-ranking official to Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) who was not allowed to speak publicly on the investigation.

How surprising.

Some of the employees, Mallory said, received $20,000 or more; others received only a few hundred dollars.

The alleged fraud is not complicated, nor is it uncommon in unemployment insurance programs: Workers apply for checks and receive them legitimately for a time but fail to inform authorities when they go back to work…

It could happen to anyone.

Still, this could be an argument for making people physically report to an unemployment office.

The District employees placed on leave Monday were informed of the allegations against them in letters delivered at least 15 days ago. “They are afforded an opportunity to provide the history of what transpired,” Mallory said. “Most of these individuals, from what we can tell, did not do that.” …

They can’t even be bothered to try to lie about it.

In early 2009, the federal Labor Department “detailed several long-standing and serious concerns” about the unemployment insurance department in a briefing given to Joseph P. Walsh, the employment services director at the time. In December 2010, Walsh told Willoughby his department had installed a new fraud-detection system and other improvements.

In a July 2011 letter to Gray, Willoughby said that his office was conducting an “ongoing special evaluation” of the unemployment compensation office and that he expected to submit a report later in the year.

The letter accompanied a management alert that found “essential safeguards” in an agency computer system were “inappropriately turned off” from February 2009 to July 2010, allowing an unknown number of checks to be mailed to ineligible recipients. According to the letter, a city contractor told investigators that a former agency manager had ordered the safeguards to be disabled, perhaps to allow officials to more easily handle a record number of claims…

Oh, that was surely why they turned it off. Because they were swamped with claims.

And never mind that Washington, DC has had the lowest unemployment in the nation.

From CNN’s Money.Com:

More than a third of Americans live in households receiving government assistance.

Government assistance expands

By Tami Luhby
February 7, 2012

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — More than one in three Americans lived in households that received Medicaid, food stamps or other means-based government assistance, according to a new report.

And when Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits are included, nearly half of the nation lived in a household that received a government check, according to the analysis of third-quarter 2010 Census data done by the Mercatus Center at George Washington University. That’s more than 148 million Americans.

Those numbers are on their way up thanks to the Great Recession and its aftermath, which have pushed record numbers of people onto public assistance programs.

Why are these numbers still going up? The ‘Great Recession’ officially ended back in June of 2009. That is more than two and a half years ago. (Just kidding. We know why. The elections are coming.)

In particular, the stubbornly high unemployment rate has left millions of Americans in dire straits.

Gosh, that high unemployment rate is evil.

The federal government sent a record $2 trillion to individuals in fiscal 2010, up nearly 75% from 10 years earlier…

Some 26% of Americans lived in households where someone received Medicaid, while the figure was 15% for food stamps. Those programs were by far the largest of the safety net.

Meanwhile, 16% of people lived in households collecting Social Security and 15% receiving Medicare benefits. These entitlements have been expanding as the Baby Boom generation retires.

We don’t understand the constant effort to blur the distinction between ‘means-based government assistance’ and Social Security and Medicare. Or, rather, we do.

But that we have a third of the country in the safety net is pretty shocking. And unsustainable.

From the Gaia cultists at the Associated Press:

Electric car maker Fisker: Layoffs in Del., Calif.

By RANDALL CHASE, AP Business Writer
February 6, 2012

DOVER, Del. (AP) — Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that received a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, said Monday that it has laid off workers in Delaware and California.

The layoffs include 26 workers at a former General Motors plant in Wilmington that Fisker is retooling to manufacture its Nina plug-in hybrid sedan. Another 40 contractors and employees who were working in design and development of Fisker’s Karma luxury car in Anaheim, Calif., also have been cut.

The layoffs come as Fisker is seeking to renegotiate its loan agreement with the Department of Energy.

Fisker has received $193 million of the $529 million DOE loan, mostly for work on the Karma, which sells for about $100,000. The introduction of the Karma was delayed because of regulatory issues and battery pack problems that prompted a voluntary safety recall by Fisker.

This is just what the world has been waiting for. A $100,000 electric car.

The DOE made loan availability for the Nina project contingent on Fisker meeting development and sales milestones for the Karma, which the company missed. Fisker is now negotiating with the DOE to modify the loan agreement so funds for that project can be released…

In other words, Fisker hasn’t been able to sell its cars. But the taxpayers will continue to lend them money, anyway.

Which sounds very familiar.

But Levin said he had spoken with Fisker co-founder and chief operating officer Bernhard Koehler last week and believes that the company and the DOE are close to signing an agreement.

A DOE spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment.

In 2009, Vice President Joe Biden headed joined Fisker officials in Delaware in announcing the resurrection of the former GM plant, and Delaware’s Council on Development Finance approved a $12.5 million loan to Fisker to help build the Nina in Delaware.

The loan will become a grant if Fisker spends at least $175 million renovating the old GM facility and shows that it created 2,495 jobs in five years.

The state also agreed to provide a $9 million grant to help Fisker pay utility bills while the former GM plant is retrofitted and restarted. About half of that grant has been used to date, Selander said…

Delaware’s taxpayers love giving money to car makers for the super rich.

While continuing to negotiate with the Department of Energy, Fisker also is pursuing alternative financing that could prove critical if talks with DOE fall through. Fisker said it raised $260 million in private equity in late 2011, bringing total private equity financing to more than $850 million.

"We’re always in the market for equity," Ormisher said.

We thought private equity was evil?

Or is it only evil when Republicans do it?

Here is our usual weekend discussion thread, where comments on the general topics of the day are welcome.

But please remember to post and comment on specific news items in the ‘News Selected By Our Correspondents’ thread below or via the link found in the sidebar.

Thanks!

This thread is for the busy bees of S&L to post news articles that may not warrant their own thread.

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To make the articles as readable as possible, please:

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Posts of articles that do not follow these guidelines may be edited or deleted.

Thanks!

From ZeroHedge:

Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low

by Tyler Durden
02/03/2012

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%.

Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation…

Pretty appalling.