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The Leadership Program of the Rockies Annual Retreat, which I’ll be attending for the 7th year in a row at the end of February, is always one of the highlights of my year. Overflowing with lovers of liberty, and packed full of some of the most interesting speakers you’ll ever hear (if you’re interested in politics, and especially if you have a conservative/libertarian pro-free market viewpoint.), this year’s event promises to live up to past Retreats – and surpass them.

Last year’s retreat, probably my favorite so far, featured Charles Krauthammer as the dinner’s keynote speaker, along with a raft of other great people addressing the crowd on politics, economics, and foreign policy. This year might be even better, if you can imagine such a thing.

You can see highlights of the 2011 Retreat here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–HCSs8-KXw

This year’s Retreat will be held on Friday and Saturday, February 24th and 25th, at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, and LPR has an incredible discounted room rate available for Retreat attendees. (Just ask for the Leadership Program rate when you call hotel reservations at (866) 837-9520.)

It’s likely that this year’s event will be sold out, so please book soon. Registration is scheduled to close by February 17th.

While not all the speakers are currently confirmed, LPR has booked and confirmed Dennis Miller as the keynote speaker during the Friday night (2/24) dinner.

As always, there will be a VIP reception – at which you’ll be able to say hello to Dennis Miller and have your photo taken with him – available to those who purchase a package which includes it. The number of attendees permitted at the VIP reception will be fewer than last year in order to maintain/restore a true “VIP” feeling about that part of the event.

Information about Retreat packages can be found HERE. And if you want a paper/pdf version, to fax or mail, or an easy way to see all the package choices, click HERE.

I hope to see you at this great event. You’ll be telling your friends for months afterwards how much fun you had, how much you learned, and how many interesting people you met. So again, please visit the LPR Retreat web page to get more information and register!

http://www.leadershipprogram.org/2012-retreat/

As Aaron Goldsten and I have each noted, today’s jobs report must be a short-term boost to President Obama. Over at intrade.com, Obama’s betting odds to win re-election in 2012 are up from 55.5 percent yesterday (and 54.5 percent the day before) to 56.8 percent, having traded above 57 percent this morning.

But it’s economics I want to talk about for a minute, rather than politics.

It is all the rage among conservatives, libertarians, and others who, like me, fear and loathe the Obama administration to point out the labor participation rate and suggest that the numbers are being manipulated to the advantage of Barack Obama and that labor statistics are barely-concealed “propaganda.”

One of the leaders of this wave – and a guy who I think is generally quite a good analyst – is Tyler Durden who writes over at ZeroHedge.com. A perfect example is here:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/implied-unemployment-rate-rises-115-spread-propaganda-number-surges-30-year-high

I have some sympathy to this argument, but I think it’s getting much more traction than it deserves, as you can see in the comments to Aaron’s note and my note about the employment numbers.

But even someone who digs into the numbers as much and as well as Durden does can sometimes miss something important.

In particular, Durden says that the civilian non-institutional population rose by 1.7 million month-over-month but doesn’t mention that almost all of that increase was due to an adjustment by Bureau of Labor Statistics based on the results of the 2010 census, plus smaller annual adjustments.

From the BLS report:

The adjustment increased the estimated size of the civilian noninstitutional population in December by 1,510,000, the civilian labor force by 258,000, employment by 216,000, unemployment by 42,000, and persons not in the labor force by 1,252,000. Although the total unemployment rate was unaffected, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio were each reduced by 0.3 percentage point. This was because the population increase was primarily among persons 55 and older and, to a lesser degree, persons 16 to 24 years of age. Both these age groups have lower levels of labor force participation than the general population.

In other words, the participation rate (employment-population ratio) was reported to have dropped by 0.3%, exactly the amount of participation rate “drop” created by changing the population number used in the calculation (due to updated census data.) Without this once-a-decade adjustment, the change in participation rate would have been reported as…wait for it…zero.

I don’t want to overstate the significance of Durden’s oversight, which conservative voices around the media and the web are also making, namely the idea that the participation rate dropped 0.3 percent and the labor force dropped more than 1.2 million in the past month. Those things are simply not true no matter how loudly people scream “conspiracy” and “propaganda.” (Having been trading financial markets for about 25 years, I’ve heard these same accusations about economic data being manipulated to help the incumbent president – whether Democrat or Republican – so many times, they just bore me now.)

And while the actual participation rate might in fact be this new lower number, that would also mean that prior numbers were lower. In other words, the top-line change – caused almost entirely by using new census population numbers – is an artifact of the new census data, but few people have read to the end of the BLS report to get that important piece of information.

Furthermore, there are cyclical reasons that the participation rate shouldn’t be as high now as it was a few years ago in a different part of the economic cycle, as economist Brian Wesbury (no liberal, he) explains.

http://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2012/2/2/low-labor-force-participation-rate-not-so-fast

Look, I don’t like writing anything that is likely to benefit Barack Obama or his supporters. But the facts are the facts, and the claims of a big one-month drop in labor force and participation rate are simply wrong. If our side is going to call certain data “propaganda", the least we can do is make sure we understand the data.

About 2 feet of snow since 6 PM last night, and it’s supposed to snow hard for the rest of the day and into the night. Already at the top estimate of the National Weather Service’s winter storm warning estimate for snowfall and the storm is only half done. Not sure where my little ATV with plow will be able to push the new snow since the last plow creating big drifts on the sides of my driveway.

(Click on picture for larger version)

Not so long ago, the Great Satan to the labor movement was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker – who faces a union-led recall election later this year. This week, if perhaps temporarily, that title is being claimed by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels whose signature Wednesday made Indiana the only right-to-work state in the upper Midwest and one of only two such states in the entire northeast quarter of the nation. (See right-to-work state map here.)

Labor unions would like you to think that right-to-work laws outlaw unions. But what they actually do is say that a person can’t be compelled to be a union member or pay union dues in order to hold a job. In other words, right-to-work laws increase the economic liberty of all Americans while threatening the funding sources for union bosses in states where workers are held captive to big labor. This of course threatens Democrats whose life blood is that same union money.

Please read the rest my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/03/labor-pains

The January employment report, released this morning, must have big grins on the face of President Barack Obama and his campaign staff. And despite the negative political implications (of helping Obama’s reelection chances), I still can’t find myself rooting against good economic news. The key is that this is happening despite, not because of, Obama’s policies.

The month-over-month gain in non-farm payrolls came in at 243,000, far exceeding the highest estimate in Bloomberg’s survey of economists, which was 189,000. Private sector payrolls came in at 257,000, again far above estimates, and showing the additional good news that government head counts are shrinking.

The unemployment rate was reported at 8.3%, matching the lowest of the estimates. Average workweek length and average hourly earnings were also very strong.

The political issue here, if this sort of economic trend were to continue, is how Mitt Romney will make his case, which is primarily an economic one, if the economy seems to be on a solid recovery track. I do not believe this pace of improvement is sustainable. Nevertheless, the argument that “this is the weakest recovery in modern American history” is somewhat too subtle for the average voter to understand.

The stock market is looking much stronger prior to Friday’s open, though one has to wonder whether some of this good news was already “baked in", given the rally the market had earlier in the week. I would not be surprised to see modest profit-taking by the end of the day. That said, I think plenty of people will be caught short here and if the market is still near its highs in the last 15 minutes, I think they’ll take it higher as the shorts are forced to cover going into the weekend.

Government bond and note years are up modestly, and markets have raised their bets on a Fed rate hike by the end of 2013 by about 25%, to a 100% chance of the Fed moving from a 0% target to a 0.25% target. If anything, I think this may still represent lower interest rates than we’ll see if the economy gains traction.

There are no two ways about it, at least from an economic point of view: This was a great number, the best in years, and I’m very glad more Americans are finding work. I just hope they don’t credit President Obama.

On the January 29th edition of The Ross Kaminsky Show, we spoke with State Senator Greg Brophy about his plan to introduce a bill to repeal Colorado’s criminal libel statue, under which certain publications or even signs can result in a criminal charge if a person “blackens the image” of a dead person or “exposes the natural defects” of a living person – even if the statement made is provably true!

Good to his word, Senator Brophy has introduced the bill, now numbered SB102 (or 12-102), which will probably be heard in the State Senate’s Judiciary Committee on the morning of February 14th.

You can keep track of the bill’s progress HERE.

As I predicted yesterday, it is now being reported that Donald Trump will endorse Mitt Romney rather than Newt Gingrich. It’s no surprise to me since Trump’s main issue (now that he’s stopped talking about President Obama’s birth certificate) is China.

Mitt Romney has the most aggressively anti-China rhetoric of any of the candidates. Romney is right to focus on Chinese theft of American intellectual property but dangerously naive with his populist appeal to “unfair” Chinese trading practices, especially when based on the value of the Chinese currency.

Trump was never actually going to run. He was just keeping himself in the news to boost his television ratings. Romney’s sharing Trump’s idiocy on China gives Trump the most graceful possible way to explain to the fawning news media while he is not entering the race.

As for Romney, he should say “Thanks” to The Donald, but just once, and then never mention it again and do everything he can to keep Trump quiet, and far from the campaign trail. A Fox News poll suggests that three times as many voters are likely to vote against a candidate whom Trump endorsed as are likely to vote for the candidate for that reason.

Perhaps the most important number out of Florida’s Republican primary last night is not that Mitt Romney beat Newt Gingrich by 14.5%. Rather, it’s that Romney beat “the Anti-Romney,” namely the combination of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. (Ron Paul’s count can be excluded from this analysis since those votes are no more likely to go to either of the non-Romney candidates than they are to go to Romney himself.)

Romney’s 46.4 percent exceeds, if just barely, the 45.3 percent garnered by Gingrich and Santorum together, for the first time in this race preventing either Gingrich or Santorum from arguing that one of them could, as the “true conservative,” garner the nomination if only the other would exit, stage far-right.

Romney’s bogeyman of being unable to get beyond about 25% in any contest (he was even under 28% in South Carolina) has been has been mortally wounded, clearing away perhaps the largest obstacle to a renewed projection of inevitability – in a world where perception can often turn into reality.

Obviously, there is a realm of unknowns which could trip Romney up. But at this point, the 89 percent betting odds on his receiving the Republican nomination seem hard to quarrel with.

Another point:

I’m no longer buying the argument that a much longer primary process will make Romney a stronger candidate, especially with the gutter tactics Newt has now shown he will stoop to. As of now, the GOP primary is, despite Jeff Lord’s likening Gingrich to Ronald Reagan, a circular firing squad. Indeed, whether Jeff meant to point it out or not, the 1976 process led to a Republican loss, and we don’t know with any confidence that the general election outcome would have been different with a different GOP nominee. That too was a circular firing squad, though with smaller caliber ammunition than Gingrich and Romney and their Super-PACs are spraying in the early Republican contests.

As Bill McGurn concluded in an op-ed on Tuesday, “Those of us who believed that a primary fight would toughen Mr. Romney up have little to show for it. Far from sharpening his proposals to reach out to a GOP electorate hungry for a candidate with a bold conservative agenda, Mr. Romney has limited his new toughness to increasingly negative attacks on Mr. Gingrich’s character. It’s beginning to make what we all assumed was a weakness look much more like arrogance.”

McGurn believes, and I concur, that “at bottom the Newt insurgency is fueled by the sense that Mr. Romney’s tepid policy agenda reflects no fixed beliefs.” This is something Romney should – but won’t – change, because his obvious election strategy from the beginning has been to be only as conservative as necessary to win the nomination so that he can maintain an aura of “moderate” in order to appeal to independent voters in the general election.

I understand the strategy but don’t agree with it, at least in degree. This should be not just an election about competence but also about ideas, not least because Barack Obama has woken the American people up to the damage that bad ideas can cause. But Romney is running as a pure technocrat with very little principled underpinning. This is not only bad for his own campaign in the sense of not inspiring the GOP base to donate their time and money to help him, but the lack of inspiration may also be bad for Republican candidates on the ticket who would benefit from a highly motivated GOP electorate.

I am not saying that Romney’s strategy will be a losing one. I continue to believe that he will win in November because so much motivation for voters comes from just wanting to avoid another disastrous four years of Barack Obama. But I don’t think it’s his (or the party’s) best strategy, and I sure wish Mitt Romney would give us something we really want to vote for, rather than just leaving us in the usually less successful environment of “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy.”

As the WSJ editorial board put it succinctly this morning, “After crushing Gingrich, can he make his campaign a cause?”

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/289740/newt-s-unorthodox-attacks-patrick-brennan

My friend Jeff Lord, a Gingrich supporter, makes a wrong-headed defense of Gingrich HERE, to which I responded as follows:

Sorry, Jeff, you’re utterly wrong on this one.

First, assuming the National Review article is correct, the option to one version of kosher food was a different version of kosher food. Thus, even if Romney had gotten his way, he would not have been eliminating kosher food from the program.

Second, what sort of conservative even tries to argue that budget cutting is only defensible if it’s mandatory, as you imply regarding Romney?

Third, what about getting government out of the nursing home business entirely, or at least “block granting” the spending so we don’t have government making these decisions?

If it weren’t your guy Gingrich making the reprehensible claims about Romney, you would never stand for the arguments you yourself are making.

What happens after Florida’s Republican primary today, which polls show Mitt Romney leading by double digits as the official ballot-casting day arrives? For Newt Gingrich, the answer may lie in some of his state’s most famous military history.

First, the other candidates:

Mitt Romney will be working to solidify his lead. The fact that there are only caucuses over the week after the Florida contest (except for a meaningless primary in Missouri which will not result in the allocation of delegates) can only help the former Massachusetts governor whose caucus organization is only matched by Ron Paul’s.

Despite coming to Colorado on Wednesday to campaign ahead of that swing state’s February 7^th caucuses, Rick Santorum will soon get out of the race primarily because he’ll be out of money but he will say (and it will to some degree be true) that it’s to be with his youngest daughter who was born with an inevitably fatal genetic anomaly and whose health has been bad in recent days. There are two things which could make this prediction wrong: First, the fact that he really doesn’t have anything else to do and he’s proven that he’s willing and able to stick around on the lowest of budgets. Second, if he dislikes Newt Gingrich more than he dislikes Mitt Romney, he could stay in just to keep trying to split the “anti-Romney” vote. Your guess is as good as mine, though I’d have to think Santorum would prefer Gingrich to Romney.

Ron Paul, who will also be in Colorado this week, will never get out of the race because he, like Santorum, has nothing else to do (since he’s retiring from Congress after this term), and he has plenty of money to keep going. But he’s basically a non-event since Ron Paul voters are just as likely to vote Libertarian, Democrat, or not at all, as to support either Romney or Gingrich. He will not run on the Libertarian ticket because it would put his son in an impossible position.

Newt Gingrich has said that he intends to stay in until the nominating convention, and given how deeply personal his antagonism toward Mitt Romney has become, it’s hard to see that as an idle boast. Newt is out for blood, feeling that he would be leading the chase for the nomination if only Romney weren’t so well funded, and feeling wronged at every turn by a “Massachusetts liberal” dissembler. This despite a Gallup poll released Monday showing that on the question of who is more “sincere and authentic,” Americans give Romney a 14 point edge over the former Speaker of the House…not to mention a 20 point lead on the question of presidential personality and leadership skills.

Please read the rest of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/31/gingrichs-march