Free Republic

COLUMBUS — Ohio’s unemployment rate jumped to 11.1 percent in June, up from 10.8 percent in May and the first time in nearly 26 years that the rate has topped 11 percent. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services released the rate on Friday, July 17. “Ohio’s labor market continued to weaken in June,” Douglas Lumpkin, ODJFS director, said in a press release. “Significant job losses in both the goods-producing and service-providing industries led to an increase in the unemployment rate to 11 .1 percent. The state’s nonfarm wage and salary employment decreased 33,000 over the month, from 5,133,200...

Thirty years after Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, we return to the days of rising joblessness, an unresponsive economy, deference to dictators, gutting the military and an energy policy tilting at windmills... As history repeats itself on the anniversary of the speech MSNBC's Chris Matthews wrote, we wonder if the "Hardball" host, who has worked for four Democratic politicians, is still getting tingles up his legs. The Democratic Party apparently has learned nothing in the past three decades. Will we see a return of the misery index? The only thing that's different is the sweater.

No worries. It’s only because unemployment lags behind recovery or “stabilization” or whatever sunny euphemism he’s using now to spin the nightmare. It’s probably just a quirk of my online reading habits but I’ve stumbled across more pessimism about the economy today than I’ve seen since the stimulus passed in February, which makes me wonder if public confidence in The One’s blueprint is starting to deteriorate in earnest. Start with Mort Zuckerman’s harrowing op-ed about how things are much worse than they seem, with the possibility of sustained unemployment at 11 percent ahead. Then read Politico’s description of the “widespread...

More than a million small business owners and about two-thirds of the profits earned by U.S. small businesses would be hit by the income tax increase on the "rich" that House Democratic leaders want to enact to pay for the health-care reform plan President Obama wants passed this summer, a taxpayer watchdog says. Ryan Ellis, director of tax policy for Americans for Tax Reform, told CNSNews.com he calculated that 1.09 million of 21.5 million small business owners would see a one- to three-percent surtax on their profits in order to fund the House of Representatives’ trillion-dollar health care reform bill....

Washington Post Poll: Growing Numbers See Obama as Old Style, Tax and Spend Democrat Lots of interesting data from the ABC News/Washington Post poll today. Read a summary of the top line findings here. The four-month trend in the question below is probably producing a Rolaids moment for Obama. The overall results are troubling enough. But I suspect the numbers are even worse among swing voters. Unfortunately the poll doesn’t report results among independents. However, support for Obama dropped off almost immediately after inauguration day among Republicans. Democrats still strongly support the president. So lots of the movement in the...