I will make this relatively short, but since I haven't seen anything on Kos in regards to diary policy on the VP announcement, I thought I would offer my own two cents.  Please do not post a diary immediately after you hear who the VP choice is.  We will all have presumably received the same text message and thus all that will be accomplished by trying to be the first to post and get recommended is that all other diaries will immediately get knocked off the recent diaries list (no matter how important they may have been).  Obama's VP announcement is not something that people should try to get mojo from, but a decision that should be analyzed with the time and insight and not a quick snapshot like this diary.

The unemployment rate today hit 5.7%, the highest in 4 years.  This once again shows how the economy is weakening and probably in recession, but  not a severe one just yet.  Below I am going to explain as simply as I can how the job creation numbers/unemployment rate are calculated, as I consistently see misunderstanding here on these issues.

Oh wait, there was no attack or any other supply disruption, just some absolutely stunning speculation.  For anyone that has been sticking to the idea that the current runup in oil prices is a supply/demand issue this should be your wakeup call.  

First off, congratulations to Barack Obama on finally wrapping up our nomination.  

Now, it is my belief that in winning, Barack broke our primary system wide open, which will require a fix before 2016 (hey, I'm an optimist).  He did this by exploiting the delegate distribution scheme that had previously been ignored by all of our other candidates in order to secure victory against what should have been insurmountable odds.

I have been advocating for a while now that the vast majority of the runup in oil prices we have seen is nothing more than the result of rampant speculation in the commodities markets and not a function of deliverable supply/demand.  Finally, I have some pretty good information to back up my contention.

First let me clarify the title by saying that this is not a Clinton would do better diary (she has as much chance of winning now as Kucinich), nor is this concern trolling, as I see this election as ours to lose and Obama has to be favored right now.  What I am going to write about though are a few of the reasons that will cause Obama to lose should they become (thanks to our beloved media) major campaign issues.

We all know that the Obama's tax returns were made public recently and what they show us is quite telling.  Now, I am not going to get into any pro or anti candidate crap here, but just examine the tax returns themselves.

Abcnews.com has this story as their top news item right now on the web.  So far, I haven't seen it on any other site yet, but if it does break (and you can be sure it will if Obama is our nominee) I wonder how big the implications will be in the general election.

Something that has been bothering me for a long time is the idea that all of a sudden we have run short of a number of commodities (like all of them, but specifically oil, metals, etc.) and thus have seen incredible run-ups in the price of these goods, which in turn is creating a fair amount of inflation.  The reason I have been bothered by this sharp price rise is that the world doesn't seem to be growing at a rate that would justify price spikes like we have seen.  So I did some digging and low and behold it turns out my suspicions may be correct and what we actually may have is not any real shortages, but market manipulation by traders.

I am not sure that anyone has brought this up before, but I believe that one of the reasons Hillary is not going to go anywhere after tonight is the newly begun Rezko trial and its potential to eliminate Obama from a serious general election run.  

After having spent way too many hours watching and reading about the primaries from various sources, I have come to the conclusion that the Republicans have the system right (or at least much better than ours).

Finally, one of our candidates had the guts to call out the incredibly disenfranchising caucus process that makes a mockery of our party's fight for the enfranchising of voters and the increase of turnout to make our democracy more participatory than it currently is.

This is more of a rant than anything else (and something I am typically loathe to do).  I have absolutely had it with the Iowa caucus's and their systematic disenfranchisement of potential (and even likely voters).  It is well known that the caucus's have extremely low turnout and in fact actively disenfranchise many what would be potential primary voters and yet our candidates (all of them) still pander to this mockery of the democratic process.  I am ashamed of them all.

The title caught your attention didn't it?

As many of you know I am usually the contrarian (read optimist) poster in many of the economic diaries on Dailykos, so I thought I would put my 2008 predictions in one nice concise diary.  

To start off with, I am much less optimistic than I was at the beginning of 2007, but still believe there is only about a 50% chance that we enter an actual recession this year (more on this later).  My biggest area to watch is interest rates (and particularly spreads), as if the cost of money goes up in an already weak economy then we are in real trouble.  So, without further ado are my predictions for 2008:

Link to List.

Here is the list.  It looks like Pujols, Clemens, The Boones (not surprising), Garciaparra, Sheffield, Pudge, Tejada, and Mo Vaugn are some of the big, not yet outed names on the list.  Hopefully, baseball actually takes this seriously.

As many of you know, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) has not been patched yet this year (for 2007 taxes) and thus approximately 20 million more American tax payers will be hit with this stealth tax when they file in 2008.  Our Democrats in the House passed a one-year patch in November, but tied it to an off-setting tax increase (actually closing the absurd loophole for private equity managers, but that's another story) that will in effect cause the idiot in chief to veto the legislation at the expense of those previously mentioned 20 million Americans.  Since nuance isn't exactly the forte of the American voter and since our candidates are rarely very good at explaining taxes, I think this will hurt us in the 2008 election if a straight up patch isn't passed.

This is going to be a very short diary, but I have a theory on how having the caucus on the 3rd of January may very well hurt Edwards (more than Obama/Clinton).  I am going to assume that college students (the most discussed faction) are actually pretty equal across all the candidates and also that they are so involved that they will be unlikely to miss the caucus.  But a much bigger wild card is the FedEx Orange Bowl.  

Today, Hillary Clinton unveiled her plan to provide every baby born in the US each year with a $5000 "Baby Bond" to start off their lives with.  She expounded on this as being a good idea to help the vast majority of Americans who are unable to save for their kids college and also suggested that the money could be used for a down payment on a first home if there was money left over/the person did not go to college.  I absolutely love Hillary's idea of starting each baby off with a $5000 savings "gift", but do not think she's right on how it should be spent.