* Unemployment has had a sharp drop from 9% to 8.6%! This happened as 120,000 new jobs were added.

Wait a second; how does that add up? How can a measly 120,000 jobs cause unemployment to drop that much?

Oh, 315,000 also gave up looking for work. Why do we keep using the regular unemployment statistic? It seems to conceal more than it reveals these days. Usually, a drop in unemployment would be a good thing, but these days all it means is that people have given up.

* GM is now offering to buy back Chevy Volts so they won’t burn your house down. Winning the future, people; winning the future.

You know, the future is never what we expect, so it’s always a dumb idea to try and force technology in a certain direction. Know what I want for the future? My house to not be on fire.

* New study says that religious people trust atheists about as much as they do rapists. Atheists are a bit scary, but they don’t actually exist. Everyone I know who calls himself an atheist subscribes to some morality, and morality is betting on long term results on short term actions. Since you can’t logically prove it out, it involves a leap of faith. And if you’re making leaps of faith, you pretty much have a religion. So it’s not that “atheists” don’t have a religion, they just have a disorganized one. Which isn’t that scary.

* In a scientific (Science!) study done by Saudi Arabia, it was concluded that allowing women to drive will cause the country to have no virgins and turn people gay. It’s funny when some weird fundamentalist makes a silly proclamation like this, but this is a whole country. They really should just start doing a tourist campaign like, “Come to Saudi Arabia and have your pictures taken with modern day cavemen! Laugh as they’re frightened and confused by your women drivers!”

* Wisdom of the Day: “Do your part to drop the unemployment rate! Convince a discouraged job seeker to despair, drop off the grid and become a hobo.” –David Burge

* New Crowder video!

Should we be encouraging our children to join the entertainment industry? I’ll make a TV show if someone will pay me lots of money.

* In a Rasmussen poll, Newt Gingrich beats Obama 45% to 43%. He’s the most electable!

Jim Geraghty has a round up of all the crazy, non-conservative stuff Gingrich has said before. You do have to wonder sometimes why he’s the more conservative choice to Mitt Romney. Maybe it’s just that the left hate him so much; we always take that as a good sign.

Reader Jimmy pointed out, though, that the last Speaker of the House to be president was Polk, America’s most effective one term president (got everything he wanted done the first term so he didn’t run again). Maybe that’s a good sign.

* Obama has decided to abandon the white working class. Instead, he’s going to try to make a coalition between college professors on one end and poor minorities on the other. So basically people who like to think they’re smart (and thus don’t want to be one of those people — the Republicans) and people who aren’t supposed to have any choice but vote for the Democrat because of their skin color. I’m not sure this is a coalition built to last into the far future. Then again, if you’re planning for the really far future, who the parties should really be working to appeal to are robots and monkey-men.

* Hard line Islamists are surging in the Egyptian polls. That’s great, because the one thing I’ve said we’ve always needed in the Middle East is more enemy states.

Are things ever going to improve in the Middle East? Maybe it’s the oil. It’s bad juju. We should steal it all from them for their own good.

* The Obama administration has sealed the records on the Border Patrol agent murdered by the guns from Fast and Furious. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything bad to hide. I mean, it was just the federal government selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels; how much could have gone wrong with that?

* So how is the economic situation? Well, Congress moved quickly to restore the horse-slaughter industry. We just need to make sure we have killing and eating horses as an option for what’s coming ahead. Fido is safe for now, but Obama could get another term.

* New scientific study reveals that babies are vindictive. It’s true. I once told Buttercup “No!” when she tried to play with the remote control, and now she just quietly glares at me whenever I enter the room. How old are kids usually before they learn how to murder?