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As more temporary census jobs ended, employment fell for a second straight month in July while private hiring rose “less than expected.” Reuters reported that this indicates “an anemic economic recovery”:

Non-farm payrolls fell 131,000, the Labor Department said on Friday as temporary jobs to conduct the decennial census dropped by 143,000. Private employment, considered a better gauge of labor market health, rose 71,000 after increasing 31,000 in June.

In addition, the government revised payrolls for May and June to show 97,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast overall employment falling 65,000 and private-sector hiring increasing 90,000.

“We’re seeing an economy that’s moving ahead slowly but not creating net on balance a lot of new jobs, and it points to continued expectations the economic slowdown we’ve seen will probably extend another two to three months, if not longer,” said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at The Davidson Cos. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Economic recovery? What economic recovery?

The bad jobs news sent stocks sinking:

The highly-anticipated jobs report sent Dow Jones Industrial Average futures down 55 points to 10580, Standard & Poor’s 500-share futures down 7 points to 1116 and Nasdaq 100 futures down 11 points to 1891. Prior to the data, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures had been up 15 points, S&P 500 futures edged up 2 and Nasdaq futures rose 3. Changes in stock futures do not always accurately predict early stock moves after the open.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by 131,000 last month as the rise in private-sector employment was not enough to make up for the government jobs lost, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday. Only 71,000 private-sector jobs were added last month while 143,000 temporary workers on the 2010 census were let go. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires were expecting total nonfarm payrolls to drop by a smaller 60,000 in July.

In the wake of the Christmas Day bombing, the Obama White House dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano out to the networks to insist that “the system worked,” a claim that got roundly ridiculed and gave the administration a public-relations bloody nose. They apparently have learned little in the nine months since, as Obama sends Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to CNBC to insist that we’re having the best recovery in a generation… No, really…

The jobless rate, which is calculated using a separate household survey, held steady at 9.5% in July. Economists were expecting it to edge higher to 9.6%.

Despite the Obama Administration’s efforts to put a positive spin on the latest news, the U.S. economy is hurting for jobs, and so is an angry electorate just 90 days away from the midterm elections:

The employment-population ratio remained at 58.4%, which means we’re still skipping along the bottom end of a generational dive. Discouraged workers remained at 1.2 million for the second straight month. The minimal job creation hasn’t moved people back into the workforce, and the population is still outgrowing the jobs.

This isn’t a Recovery Summer. It’s a slow slide, certainly better than the rapid disintegration of 2009, but we haven’t replaced those jobs yet, either. Job losses are cumulative. In a normal recovery with proper economic policies of lower barriers to investor entry, we would see a rapid replacement of jobs in this time frame that would take us back to somewhere around 80% of what was lost, with the remaining 20% being the most difficult to recover. We have not yet even begun that ascent. I’ll update this with a couple of slides later this morning to demonstrate the problem.

Expect the White House to hail the best private-sector job creation numbers since March, but economists won’t get fooled. We’re still descending, and will until we get job creation solidly above 100,000 new additions per month.

- JP

Voters in Missouri Tuesday rejected the federal mandate to purchase health insurance, as an overwhelming 71 percent marked their ballots for Proposition C. The vote is seen as a rebuke of President Barack Obama’s administration and encouragement to Republicans intent upon reversing the unpopular health care law mocked as ObamaCare which was rammed through Congress in March:

“The citizens of the Show-Me State don’t want Washington involved in their health care decisions,” said Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation that put Proposition C on the August ballot. She credited a grass-roots campaign involving Tea Party and patriot groups with building support for the anti-Washington proposition.

With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cunningham said at a campaign gathering at a private home in Town and Country. “Citizens wanted their voices to be heard.”

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says the Missouri vote is even more devastating for Democrats than it appears:

According to preliminary results, just under 668,000 Missourians voted in favor of Proposition C. Only 578,000 Republicans voted in their party’s primaries. Another 40,000 voters appear to have cast votes on Proposition C without voting in either the Republican or Democratic primaries. So, even if you assume that every single Republican voted for the initiative and every person who didn’t vote in a primary voted for it, at least 40,000 Democrats — more than one in every eight Democratic primary voters — voted against the centerpiece of President Obama’s health-care plan. And these aren’t just any registered Democrats; these are the party activists, the Democratic base.

Do we need any more evidence of how unpopular this bill is?

- JP

Republicans will begin casting their votes in the Kansas Republican primary for U.S. Senate in less than 12 hours. The polls will open at 7 AM in the Jayhawk State and will close at 7 PM. Two U.S. Congressmen have been battling to be the GOP nominee, a candidate who will be all but assured of victory in the November general election in Republican Kansas. The Senate seat is being vacated by Sam Brownback, who is the front-runner to be the state’s next governor.

Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran have been waging a contest to convince voters that each is the true conservative in the race. Moran has the larger campaign war chest and has led the lead in the polls, but Tiahrt has been narrowing the gap in the most recent polling. Although a Survey USA poll released on the eve of the primary election showed Moran with a 10-point lead, the race could actually be closer than that:

The pollster says that compared to two weeks ago, Moran is down one percentage point, and Tiahrt is up three. Tiahrt’s strategy to paint himself as the true conservative appears to be working, at least among conservative voters. Today he leads among conservatives by five percentage points, where two months ago Moran led by 21 percentage points in this group.

The poll notes potential trouble for Moran: “Most ominous for Moran: Among the 17 percent of voters who report they have already cast their ballots, Tiahrt is nominally ahead, 46 percent to 43 percent. Among those who tell SurveyUSA they are likely to vote, but have not yet done so, Moran leads by 13.”

If these potential Moran voters don’t turn out tomorrow, it could be good news for Tiahrt.

Moran has been endorsed by Senators Jim Demint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK). Tiahrt has the backing of 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, former White House chief of staff Karl Rove and political activist Phyllis Schlafly.

Update:  At NRO’s The Corner, Denis Boyles reports “(Mostly) Good News from Kansas.”

- JP

There’s good news for big government proponents in a report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO). The more than $1.9 billion in stimulus funds spent by the Department of Energy (DOE) has created 10,018 jobs through May. The bad news is that it has cost the American taxpayers an average of $194,213 for each full-time job that was created:

“As a small business owner for nearly 22 years, I’m shocked that these jobs cost taxpayers nearly $195,000 each,” U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said. “Taxpayers deserve more for their investment. This is more evidence that the private sector is far more capable than the federal government at creating the long-term jobs required for a sustainable economic recovery.”“It looks like the Department of Energy got in over its head when it was handed $6 billion in stimulus money to create jobs by accelerating environmental cleanup work. This report says that DOE managed its timetables well enough, but it also indicates that so far, the jobs that DOE created cost $194,213 each,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

While DOE reports that it created 10,018 jobs through May of this year, the department has also used a more unorthodox methodology to inflate job creation in some of its reports, a methodology the GAO says may mislead the public. For example, using the method GAO was critical of, the agency reports roughly 20,000 jobs created through May of this year, counting the number of “lives touched” in some documents.

Barton and Walden, then-ranking member of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, asked the GAO in March 2009 to examine the Department of Energy’s management of the stimulus funding for environmental cleanup. U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, later joined the request when he became the subcommittee’s ranking member.

“It seems our concerns about DOE’s ability to effectively and efficiently use the funds given to them have become reality. This is yet another example of how, despite the White House’s assertions, the almost $1 trillion of stimulus funding has failed to stimulate anything other than government bureaucracy,” Burgess said.

The funds given to DOE were intended to create jobs and stimulate economic recovery by ramping up the environmental cleanup of hazardous waste material at the federal government’s nuclear weapons complex. But government’s good intentions often only serve to pave the road to perdition, and the taxpayers always get stuck with the bill.

- JP

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) had reportedly worked out an arrangement which would allow him to avoid the humiliation of a public trial, but now word comes that the deal has fallen though:

Harlem friends of Rangel tell WCBS_TV they have been told that the details could be unveiled when the House Ethics Committee meets Thursday afternoon.

It’s the culmination of two years of scandal for the 20-term Democratic lawmaker. At issue is whether the former head of the House Ways and Means committee will admit to any serious ethical wrongdoing. Rangel is being charged with misusing his office for fundraising, failure to disclose income, belated payment of taxes and possible help with a tax shelter for a company whose chief executive was a major donor.

An ethics subcommittee had charged the 80 year old U.S. Representative with “unspecified violations” July 22 after an 18-month investigation into his fundraising, taxes and financial disclosure statements. Rangel’s lawyers have been negotiating with ethics committee staff hoping to avoid the hearing.

Rangel’s Democrat colleagues are worried that publicity from his ethical troubles could be another albatross around their necks in the November midterm election that will decide which party will control Congress after January of next year:

Republicans have been reminding voters that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi orchestrated the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress in part by promising to “drain the swamp” of ethics violations.

“The fact is that the swamp has not been drained,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Two Democrats facing competitive reelection campaigns this year have called on Rangel to resign and many others have returned his campaign contributions. Asked about the potential political impact of the hearing, Pelosi said, “the chips will have to fall where they may politically.”

Update: Latest word is that the a deal between Rangel and the committe has fallen through. The embattled congressman was not willing to admit to any wrongdoing, something the committee had insisted upon to avoid a formal hearing:

A House ethics panel was meeting Thursday to discuss a deal with New York Rep. Charles Rangel after holding a briefing earlier in the day on possible charges against the longtime lawmaker.

Rangel said he’s done nothing wrong to warrant an adjudicatory subcommittee’s review of 13 allegations of misconduct.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, ranking member on the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, said Rangel was given an opportunity to settle charges during the investigative process, and that time has passed.

“Let me be clear that Mr. Rangel under these rules was given opportunities to negotiate a settlement during the investigation. Let me be clear that I did not participate in any attempts to cut a back room deal behind closed doors,” McCaul said at the start of a hearing on possible corruption charges.

McCaul said it’s not lost on any member of the panel that the approval rating of Congress is at an all time low, and requires the probe, which has involved 28,000 pages of documents and 60 meetings as well as one deposition from Rangel, be fair and open.

- JP