Free Republic

<p>Illinois employers warned they would lay off more than 1,000 workers in the coming months, according to notices filed with Illinois regulators in February.</p> <p>Accretive Health warned it would lay off 148 workers. The company said in January the layoffs are part of a broader restructuring in which positions will be moved from Chicago to other cities to be closer to clients. Accretive said then the layoffs could affect as many as 170 workers. The company employs about 600 people in the region.</p>

During his one-hour, six-minute snoozer of a speech supposedly about the economy in Galesburg, Illinois, on Wednesday, President Barack Obama denounced Washington’s “endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals.” “Phony”? The rest of the president’s speech was so utterly devoid of new ideas that even ordinarily reliable apparatchik Chuck Todd at MSNBC couldn’t handle it, aptly observing of Obama and his administration: “They have nothing new to say.” Obama, whose flunkies presented his speech as yet another “pivot” back to jobs and the economy, didn’t even identify employment growth as his top priority. Instead, he said that...

January’s Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was even worse than expected. Seasonally adjusted employment fell by 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 7.6%. In his Saturday address that followed this news, President Barack Obama was correct in pointing out that 3.6 million jobs have been lost since the recession, at least as “defined” by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), began. The recession, as normal people define it (”a decline in gross domestic product [GDP] for two or more consecutive quarters”), began in the third quarter of 2008 and became official...