News Links: Under Obama, a Record Decline in Government Jobs

Over all – including a decline of 12,000 public sector jobs in the Labor Department report for December – government employment is down 2.6 percent over the last three years, compared to a decline of 2.2 percent in the early Reagan years. That is a record.

the same financing structures that are used to finance mass industrial warfare were used to create a liberal national economy and social safety. Liberals supported national mobilization in favor of warfare and the social safety net during the New Deal and World War II (and before that, during the Civil War and WWI), but splintered when confronted with a wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The corruption of the financial channels and the destruction of the social safety net now challenges this 20th century conception of liberalism at its core (which is heavily related to the end of cheap oil).

Representative Gabrielle Giffords led a crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, in a rare public appearance tonight at a candlelight vigil one year after surviving a deadly shooting. The Democratic congresswoman – who has struggled to re-learn to walk after being shot in the head – stepped onstage to cheers from the crowd. Ron Barber, a staffer who was wounded in the rampage that killed six people one year ago, invited her to lead the audience in the pledge.

The average website sees more than 20% of its requests coming from some sort of automated bot. These bots include the usual suspects like search engine crawlers, but also include malicious bots scanning for vulnerabilities or harvesting data. We’ve been tracking this data at CloudFlare across hundreds of thousands of sites on our network and have found that on average approximately 15% of web total requests originate a web threat of one form or another, with swings up and down depending on the day.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Sunday rejected talk of a euro crisis and said Rome was open to the idea of a tax on financial transactions championed by France – but only if the measure was part of an EU-wide effort.

In 2008, with the nation’s economy in crisis, Washington and Wall Street offered American taxpayers a Sophie’s Choice: spend hundreds of billions of dollars to save big banks from failure, or witness the collapse of our financial system and irreparable economic harm. Taxpayers were promised those bailouts would be a one-time, emergency measure. Yet today, we can already see the outlines of the next financial crisis and bailouts.

The New Normal, previously believed to be bell-shaped and thin-tailed in its depiction of growth probability and financial market outcomes, appears to be morphing into a world of fat-tailed, almost bimodal outcomes.

As banks prepare to report fourth-quarter results and make final bonus decisions for 2011, total compensation is likely to be the lowest since 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed some firms and left many survivors on government life support.

The idea that the troubled eurozone could collapse is "complete fantasy" according to a policymaker at the European Central Bank (ECB).

Falling unemployment and growing business confidence not only help Obama, but create a conundrum for his GOP opponent

Increasingly over the years, search engines – Google in particular – have given more and more support to SEOs and publishers. But 2011 marked the first significant reversal that I can recall, with both linking and keyword data being withheld. Here’s what happened, why it matters and how publishers can push back if Google and Bing don’t change things.

Ifo-Chef Hans-Werner Sinn sieht Deutschland in der Zwickmühle: Falls die EZB die notwendigen Staatsanleihen-Käufe nicht tätige, werde das über den Rettungsschirm geschehen. Die Rechnung gehe sowieso an Deutschland.