Subby, I don't know who you are, but I'mma buy you a beer for making me laugh so hard with Tears of Tufte. Brilliant.

It's easy to see once you harmonize the statistical quarks

Tears of Tufte.

That is quite awesome, congratulations subby.

But let's be clear, Tufte acts like he is the leader of clear visual communications and the fighter of bad ppts but, in reality, his communications ar quite beautiful but not easy to read or clear at all.

Ah. So that's what they mean when they say a person's brain is "full of f**k".

Jobless Recovery?

EnviroDude: Jobless Recovery?

That's right. And we're still in recession. How observant of you.

What the fark did I just read?

NewportBarGuy: EnviroDude: Jobless Recovery?

That's right. And we're still in recession. How observant of you.

The recession ended in the summer of 2009. What hasn't come back are the millions of jobs that were lost between 2007 and present date. So, what are you going to do? Attack the messenger? Blame Bush? Or hold the current occupier accountable?

Wyalt Derp: You're telling me the Bush Recovery is a myth?

Of course it's a myth. There was never anything to recover from!

Stop listening to the libtard talking points that the economy tanked under Bush! LIES! All of it!

I love this: if a Democrat states that America is not going in exactly the right direction, he or she is attacked for not believing in "American exceptionalism." But the Republican playbook for the 2012 election seems to be mostly about saying "Well, yeah, it probably feels to you like things are going better now, but trust us, this country is going straight down the shiatter."

Those aren't that bad. I know folks prefer those to column bar graphs labeled "Paradise" and "Sucks" whenever anything close to politics is discussed.

But it could be worse:

Askani: Every time I would teach students powerpoint design with Tufte, I would have to sit through hours of boring poorly designed powerpoints. We would agree as a class what makes certain powerpoints suck then they would make those same mistakes anyways. I too have experienced the tears of Tufte.

all I need is for each powerpoint to have (printed at the bottle of each slide): X/N where X = current slide and N = the total number of slides.

Then I can a decide whether to hold out or just slit my wrists immediately.

Jokes aside, the guy does have a point. The numbers are encouraging, but the problems still exist. We have dealt with symptoms, but not the real problem--that is a lot of toxic debt and slashed savings for a lot of the nation. While there has been a bounce up, we are still in the midst of a cycle, and cheering doesn't actually fix the real problem.

In part, we dismantled the very mechanisms that limited the boom-bust cycles that typified the American economy for much of its history. We did limited it so that we wouldn't have such gyres in markets. We put up protections to prevent exactly this sort of gaming of the system, and some folks were just not pleased that they couldn't play with that much risk and reward, so we took off the gloves and said, "Let's doooooo this!" and lo, we watched the system do exactly what the new design was supposed to do: allow for a looting of a lot of folks, and then a collapse that could be covered up, and now we're left with a vacuum, that our markets and consumers had to cover, and put us further in the hole as a nation to try to clean up. Until we face actually putting those market protections back up, and get serious on actual enforcement, we are sort of weathering a storm, and no matter of cheering is going to affect those aspects of the financial landscape.

It wasn't by mistake that this mess happened. It was very much by design. Folks figured that it wouldn't be quite so bad, that no one would take it so far, and then no one figured that the government would bail out quite so deep, but by that time, they had the bull by the tail, and no one was going to be so stoopid as to let go, so we're still riding this thing. Yes, the bull is tired now, but we've still got our mitts firmly on that tail, and hoping he doesn't go for another charge through the streets, but at some point we have to get the sucker back in the corral, rather than just letting it wander the streets.

Our Dear Author doesn't do us a lot of favors in this article, but he does have a point that goes beyond NOBAMA! in that we have to address the real issues, not just the symptoms.