The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its October 2009 unemployment report. The numbers were worse than expected.

The unemployment rate rose from 9.8 to 10.2 percent in October, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline (-190,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The largest job losses over the month were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.

Most analysts had expected the unemployment rate remain just shy of 10%, instead it shot past that barrier reaching a 26 year high. In October, the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000 to 15.7 million. The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 10.2 percent, the highest rate since April 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by 8.2 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points. Factory payrolls dropped by the most in four months, and the average workweek held at a record low.

Since President Obama took office in January, the economy has lost 3.49 million jobs. Overall the US economy has lost 7.3 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, when the unemployment rate stood at 4.9 percent.

On the positive side, the number of temporary workers increased by 44,000 in October, adding to gains in the previous two months. This suggests that that businesses have squeezed as much production as they can out of their existing workforces and thus bring in temporary workers to fulfill orders. On the other hand, businesses seem reluctant to make permanent hiring decisions.

As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, companies are postponing major investments in either capital equipment or labor and instead holding more cash reserves. In the second quarter that ended in June, the 500 largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, by total assets, held about $994 billion in cash and short-term investments, or 9.8% of their assets, according to the Wall Street Journal's analysis of corporate filings. That is up from $846 billion, or 7.9% of assets, a year earlier. In the third quarter quarter that ended in October, cash assets increased to 11.1% of total assets, from 10.1% in the second quarter. The good news is that companies have cash to invest; the bad news is that so far companies don't seem to have a better use of cash other than to pay down debt. Translation, orders remain soft.

Though the right wing blogs have tried to write an apocryphal history of the special election in New York's 23rd congressional district, the fact is that Democrat Bill Owens ran on a platform that included support for healthcare reform and won. Now Owens, freshly sworn in as a United States Congressman, is reiterating his support for healthcare reform.

Rep. Bill Owens (D-NY) can be counted on as a "yes" in this weekend's expected vote on the House Democrats' health care bill, announcing his support in a press release.

"This legislation will reform the insurance industry and provide increased access to affordable healthcare without taxing healthcare benefits, cutting Medicare benefits or raising taxes on the middle class, and that is exactly the direction we need to go," said Owens. "There are still changes I would like to make, including raising the payroll exemption for small businesses, but like I said last week, there is a fundamental need for reform and we must act with a sense of urgency."

With Owens' support, as well as that of California's new Congressman John Garamendi (whose office confirmed to me this afternoon his intention to vote in favor of healthcare reform), Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now two votes closer to the 218 required to get H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, through the House and on to the Senate. Still waiting to hear, though, whether Michael Barone or anyone else is willing to take me up on my bet that Pelosi will get her 218...

Some in Congress seem to be suggesting that healthcare reform should be scrapped, or seriously curtailed, do to the poor state of the economy and the jobs market. The American people disagree.

Nearly six in ten Americans want Congress to continue working on health care reform bills that have been passed through various committees, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-nine percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey say lawmakers should continue working on the legislation, a rise of 6 points since August. But only a quarter say those bills should be passed pretty much as is, with a third suggesting that Congress should make major changes. The poll also indicates that one in four say lawmakers should start from scratch and 15 percent want Congress to stop all work on health care reform.

The CNN poll also finds that a majority of Americans, 55 percent, support the public option.

Coming in the wake of an election day that can be read as hostile to the current Democratic agenda (even as Democrats swept the two races actually involving the Democratic agenda on Capitol hill, including one in a congressional district much of which has not sent a Democrat to Congress in more than 150 years) and on the eve of the historic House vote on healthcare reform, these numbers could strengthen the hands of those whipping for 218 in the Democratic leadership. Certainly little in these numbers would lead me to want to renege on my offer to wager on the results of this weekend's healthcare vote in the House (the benefits of which would go to charity). But we'll have to wait and see.

Research 2000, polling for Daily Kos, answers in the affirmative, finding that while the Democrats lead overall on the generic congressional ballot -- which the aggregate of all polling agrees with -- the Republicans lead by a wide margin (49 percent to 20 percent) in the South.

Ipsos released its own polling yesterday, sponsored by McClatchy newspapers, which also showed the Democrats holding a lead on the national ballot (48 percent to 41 percent overall). Wondering whether the trend picked up in Research 2000 polling held firm across other surveys, I reached out to Ipsos to see if I could get a regional breakdown of their 2010 results. They obliged (and thanks to Ipsos for doing so):

First things first, it's important to note that the margin of error for the unweighted subsamples is higher than it is for the poll overall. Due to the size of these groups, the margin of error ranges from plus or minus 5 percentage points to plus or minus 7 percentage points.

That said, it's interesting to note that Ipsos does not find the same regional discrepancies on the 2010 ballot question as does Research 2000. In fact, where Research 2000 found a wide lead for the Republicans in the South, Ipsos actually sees a Democratic lead. (Go figure.)

Is one right and the other wrong? I don't think this is exactly the right question, at least not now, one year out from election day. What I do think, though, is that the differences between these results compel further analysis over the coming months, analysis that can only be undertaken if pollsters (a) are surveying sufficient numbers of people so that margins of error are not too large, and (b) are releasing regional breakdowns of their generic congressional ballot questions so that even if margins of error for smaller subgroups are larger, in the aggregate across polls they can nevertheless inform us about the regional coalitions that will help decide the make up of the next Congress.

This Wednesday former Hewlett-Packard CEO and John McCain presidential adviser Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for US Senate. Her candidacy, Fiorina hopes, will have her take on longtime and proud liberal California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer in the conservative Orange County. While her campaign kicked off with a day-time talk show looking logo and a mea culpa for her lack of voting in California elections (she's missed 75 percent of all votes since 2000, including gubernatorial and presidential elections), Fiorina's campaign kickoff lacked any sort of excitement according to LA Times columnist Michael Hiltznik. However before the very wealthy businesswoman takes on Boxer in the general election in November 2010, she'll have to win the Republican primary in June of 2010. But she won't. She won't lose the primary because of a lackluster launch or a fancy logo or an interesting life story as a female CEO (even though her career as CEO is spotty at best) or a survivor of breast cancer, the problem is Fiorina's politics.

While she announced that she has signed a pledge to never vote for a tax increase, her politics don't fall far right enough for what is remaining of the California Republican party. While Fiorina pledges to be tough on taxes, she falls in line with the John McCain wing of the Republican Party and McCain only received 37 percent of the statewide vote in 2008.

So that leaves the question, what Republican Party leaders can come to California to stump for Fiorina and get national donations? From the 2008 election results, John McCain isn't that person. From his abysmal approval ratings, "moderate" Republican Governor Schwarzenegger won't help on the stump for Fiorina. What about Sarah Palin? She drew huge crowds when she stumped for Vice President in Los Angeles in 2008. Fiorina won't get the Palin wing of the GOP to endorse her because super conservative Orange County Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has also announced his candidacy for Senate. And Palin specifically won't stump for Fiorina after Fiorina famously said during an interview that Palin couldn't be a CEO of a large company. That leaves Megan McCain as the only Republican popular enough in California to stump for Fiorina.

Writing in the Investor's Business Daily, conservative political pundit Charles Krauthammer finds that "the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical." According to Krauthammer, the results from these but two state elections in New Jersey and Virginia demolish "the great realignment myth of 2008."

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future.

One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservativism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression.

And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance.

Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus 15 Democratic in 2008 to minus-4 in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20%; the under-30 vote by 50%. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African-American president.

November '08 was one-shot, one-time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

I wouldn't judge national trends by just two governors races in an off-year election. To begin with, Governor Corzine, deeply unpopular in the Summer, nearly eked out a win. And let's not forget that the GOP has lost four straight special Congressional elections, two of them in districts that lean Republican and one of them that had been in GOP hands since Reconstruction. There are now but two Republican members of the House east of the Hudson. Nor would I take solace if I were a Republican from this election because while the conservative base was energized while the Democratic one stayed home. In heavily Democratic Hudson County, only 39% of registered Democrats bothered to vote.

The US-brokered Guaymuras deal that was reached to restore the ousted Manuel Zelaya to the Honduran presidency for the duration of his term has hit a snag.

Under the terms of the agreement, which works off of an earlier proposal by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, a national unity government and truth commission are to be formed while the international community is asked to reverse suspensions in aid and recognize the result of the scheduled November 29 elections. But Zelaya's return to office remains a complicated matter and far from certain. Under the terms of last week's deal, Zelaya can return to office only if Congress approves.

While there is no timeline for the Congress to vote, the deadline for the implementation of the national unity government is 1:00 AM Eastern Standard Time on November 6th. While de facto President Roberto Micheletti and his cabinet stand ready to step aside, the Honduran Congress is not in session and is taking its time in voting. Earlier this week the leader of the Honduran Congress José Alfredo Saavedra said that he had not yet decided when legislators will be called back into session. The Honduran Congress leader must have taken obstructionist lessons from Senator Jim DeMint.

More at Al Jazeera.

At least one gunman and perhaps up to three gunmen have shot and killed 12 soldiers wounding 31 others in a deadly rampage Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood, the nation's largest military base, in Texas. Authorities have killed the gunman, who has been identified as Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army major who was about to be deployed to Iraq.

From the US Department of Defense:

President Barack Obama condemned the fatal shooting rampage today on Fort Hood, Texas, that left 12 soldiers dead and another 31 wounded, and promised full-scale support to get to the bottom of what happened and help the Fort Hood community recover from the tragedy.

More than one gunmen – two being held as suspects and another believed to be among those killed -- fired shots at about 1:30 p.m. Central Time at the post’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center and Howze Theater, Fort Hood officials confirmed.

The incident reportedly occurred as soldiers were conducting their final preparations for deployment.

“These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk, and at times, give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis,” the president said.

“It's difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas,” he said. “It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.”

Obama said he is in close coordination with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen in monitoring the situation.

Meanwhile, the White House is working with the Pentagon, FBI and Department of Homeland Security to ensure Fort Hood is secure.

Obama said his thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and families of the fallen, and the Fort Hood community.

“We will continue to support the community with the full resources of the federal government,” he said. “We will make sure that we get answers to every single question about this horrible incident.”

Obama said he has no greater honor than serving as commander and chief, but also recognizes the responsibility that entails in ensuring servicemembers are properly cared for and that their safety is assured while they are at home.

“So we are going to stay on this,” he said. “But I hope in the meantime that all of you recognize the scope of this tragedy, and keep everybody in their thoughts and prayers.”

Speaking to reporters at Fort Hood, Army Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, commander of 3rd Corps and Fort Hood, credited quick response by police forces with bringing down a gunman after he opened fire at the soldier readiness unit.

“There were several eyewitness accounts that there was more than one shooter,” he said, noting that two additional soldiers had been taken into custody.

“The soldiers and family members are absolutely devastated,” he said. “It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said, but offered assurances, “We will work through it.”

On behalf of the MyDD community, I wish to offer our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the victims as well as to our enlisted personnel affected by this horrific tragedy.