From Friday’s All-Stars.

On the unemployment rate falling from 9.5 to 9.4 percent in July:

It’s good news, but there are caveats. The reason that the rate went down is because…the number of people who are looking for jobs had decreased. People have given up. There is a high level of discouragement.
If you take those people out of the equation, then you get a drop in the unemployment number.
And secondly, it’s within statistical error because it’s from a survey….If you look inside the numbers, as they say on SportsCenter, the number of those who have been unemployed for a short time is dropping a lot, which means that the shedding of jobs in private industry is decreasing and it’s going to plateau.
However, the number of people who have been unemployed over 15 weeks is the highest ever. “Ever” means the last 61 years when they started recording this. And you have got over a third of the unemployed have been unemployed for over 27 weeks.
That implies that the precipitous drop in employment, which had occurred earlier in the year, is leveling off. However, those people are not getting their jobs back. And what we could have is a chronic unemployment on a European scale, which we have not seen in America for a long time.

On Democrats continuing to denounce protesters at health-care town halls:

Look, Democrats are out of control on this. Under Bush, dissent was the highest form of patriotism in America. And now it’s a form of Nazi insurrection.
Last year community organizing was such a high calling that the Democrats elected one [community organizer] to the highest office in the land. And now if you organize a community it’s called a mob…