Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Neal Boortz has some good statistics you’ll never see except here:

* The peak unemployment rate during the recession that began in Clinton’s term was 6.4 percent. The current unemployment rate is 5.6 percent.

* In the last year more than 2,000,000 new jobs have been added in the United States.

* Between 1983 and 2003 outsourcing went from 6.5 million jobs to about 10 million jobs.

* Between 1983 and 2002 jobs in-sourcing — jobs coming TO the United States — went from 2.5 million to 6.5 million.

* If you subtract the jobs coming to the United States every year from the jobs going out every year you come up with a “net” figure. The net outsourced jobs reached its peak in the early 1980’s; a peak of about 4 million jobs. In other words, things were worse at the end of the Carter Administration then they are right now.

* During this same period … from ’83 to ’03 a total of 38 million jobs have been created by private businesses in the United States. No other industrialized country in the world has matched this number.

He also has an interesting Edwards campaign poster.

UPDATE: Power Line has yet another table comparing Bush’s first three years to Clinton’s. Interesting.

I have never understood the tie blacks have to the Democratic Party. Democrats wrote and enforced the Jim Crow laws in the South. Democrats in Massachusetts were some of the most racist people in the country back in the ’60s and ’70s (Kennedy and Kerry come to mind?). Our “first black President” Bill Clinton didn’t have a single one on his staff of policy advisors. Every program pushed by Democrats has done nothing but drive blacks as a group deeper into poverty and dependence.

“For black Democrats and white Democrats, their calculus is pretty much the same: They want to get rid of George W. Bush,” said David A. Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center. “George W. Bush represents everything — war, violation of civil rights, tax cuts for the rich and program cuts for everybody else. There’s not one issue that really much matters; it’s the whole package.”

Rhetoric wins the day with Democrats. Neither logic nor knowledge are required. They cannot cite violations of civil rights, but it sounds ominous. Those terrible rich folks are keeping almost 30% of what they earn. Can anyone identify a single program cut? And WAR is always the first thing cited.

Republicans, on the other hand, have embraced blacks. You find many “people of color” holding office as Republicans. The only place you see that with Democrats is in congressional districts gerry-mandered to ensure a black majority. Of course, Bush has Rice and Powell. Neither is there as a token.

What makes a difference is that the Democrats don’t expect much of blacks. They just want their vote. Make no mistake, Republicans want those votes, too. But they aren’t willing to pander.