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While the steady rise of the nation’s unemployment rate has become shorthand for the recession’s impact, many economists say the grim figures — 8.9 percent in April — don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ financial distress. While the plight of the jobless tends to dominate social policy conversations and media coverage, a less-exposed but equally vulnerable population is the millions of underemployed. This diffuse, often poorly tracked cross-section of citizens who bear the individual and collective challenges living on the economic fringes often go overlooked by policy makers and elected leaders.

“The number of people under economic stress is much bigger than the official unemployment rate,” said Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Who are these people? The Bureau of Labor Statistics takes a stab at quantifying these people to create a more comprehensive picture of who’s not working and why not. The Bureau identifies categories of Americans it labels as “marginal,” meaning that they are unemployed and have looked for a job in the past, but not recently, and “employed part time for economic reasons,” referring to workers who would take full-time schedules if they could. Once these groups are added to the base unemployment rate, the number climbs all the way up to 15.8 percent in April, the highest number since the BLS began tracking these sub-groups in 1994.

Yet there are some who say even these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Progressive think tanks talk about “skill underemployment.” “It’s the computer engineer who lost [his] job and is now working at 7-11,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “They show up as employed, not as a bad labor market outcome,” she said. In reality, though, these workers, are both earning and contributing far less than their potential — one definition of underemployment. The labor bureau’s data-collection also doesn’t take into account the millions of Americans who have had their hours or wages cut in recent months.

There’s no single agency that tracks the underemployed, so researchers have to cobble together data from all corners of the economy to come up with an estimate on disenfranchised workers. According to Philip Harvey, a professor of law and economics at Rutgers School of Law, the United States is short by nearly 23 million jobs, a far greater number than the 13.7 million of officially unemployed workers.

Gertrude Goldberg, chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition, says that lowballing the number of distressed workers leads to an inadequate response. “By under-defining it you reduce the notion of a mass of people at risk in terms of tomorrow,” she said. And while they may disagree on precisely how to count underemployed Americans, nearly all agree that their growing numbers could lead to problems both in the short term as well as in the future.

“When you have productive people that can’t get the hours they need, that represents a huge contraction for the economy,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. Lower paychecks in the case of forced part-time employment means less money going into federal, state and city tax coffers, at a time when many local governments can ill afford a shortfall.

Social Security also takes a hit, according to Shierholz. “To the extent that people paying into Social Security are paying a percentage of their income, as people are seeing their hours reduced, that reduces their weekly paychecks, so that will reduce the amount they pay into Social Security.” In reference to recent concerns about the longevity of the Social Security trust fund, she said, “it is absolutely a contributor to this.”

As bad as this sounds, the damage to individuals’ own retirement accounts is even greater. “One of the biggest factors for having larger 401(k) balances is continuous participation in a plan,” said Craig Copeland, senior research associate for the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Since 401(k) contributions grow from stock market gains, workers who are laid off even briefly miss out on the chance to invest while the stock market is low. Companies are allowed to impose a one-year waiting period on new hires’ participation in retirement plans, so the unemployed who return to the workforce face a “time out” period that could cost them dearly in the long run.

The workers classified as involuntarily part-time by the Bureau of Labor Statistics face even greater hurdles. According to EBRI research, in 2007, only18 percent of male and 26 percent of female part-time workers participate in employer-offered retirement benefit plans. The reason for this is twofold, said EBRI’s Copeland. These employees are less likely to have the extra income to invest in a retirement plan. In addition, most companies don’t even offer retirement benefits for those who work fewer than 20 hours a week.

Underemployment also means that a worker’s Social Security benefits could be reduced when he or she collects them in retirement. This combination of reductions in private and public income streams means that when these potentially millions of underemployed Americans exit the workforce, the government could be facing a crisis of underfunded retirees.

Implications for health insurance are also troubling. Elise Gould, health economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says that in 2007, the most recent year for which statistics are available, only 55 percent of part-time employees had employer-sponsored health insurance, as compared to 74 percent of their full-time counterparts. It’s likely that these numbers have dropped further since then, she added. “There’s been a downward trend in these since 2000, and I would expect these to have only gotten worse.”

This health care gap has serious consequences, according to David Dooley, chair of the department of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Dooley studied the mental-health effects of underemployment as compared with unemployment. Rates of depression, alcohol abuse and other markers were similar for both groups. “The general patterns is that we get the expected adverse effects of complete job loss with inadequate employment,” he said.

However, while programs such as Medicaid and COBRA exist to help the unemployed, there are no comparable health care alternatives for underemployed workers. “If people show signs of depression or increased drinking, they’re not going to have the resources for early intervention,” said Dooley. “If they’re in a downward spiral there’s not going to be anyone to slow it down.”

Despite these troubling clues, though, people like Gertrude Goldberg of the National Jobs for All Coalition say the government hasn’t been aggressive or inclusive enough in designing stimulus programs that help out the underemployed as well as the unemployed. Although the federal government has extended unemployment benefits and given states money to boost the benefits by a nominal amount, none of this helps the employee forced to work a four-day week or take a part-time job to replace lost full-time employment.

Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says not to count on the promised job creation benefits of the stimulus either. “By the time the stimulus package was implemented it was already behind,” she said. “It was only expected to create between three and five million jobs. By the time it got off the ground we were seven million jobs in the hole.” She and others warn that if the underemployed are allowed to slip through the cracks, economic recovery will be all the more elusive.

Last week the Nigerian House of Representatives voted to approve a measure that would impose a jail sentence on gays and lesbians who live together and on those who assist them. The bill says it’s illegal for “the coming together of persons of the same sex with the purpose of living together as husband and wife or for other purposes of same sexual relationship.” Violators could be imprisoned for up to three years. People who “witness, abet and aid the solemnization of a same gender marriage” face up to five years in prison.

International human rights groups and members of the European Union are calling for a suspension of international aid to Nigeria because the law violates international human rights agreements. That has America’s religious right leaders and media outlets upset.

“The European Union has certainly been infiltrated by homo-fascists. There’s just no doubt about it,” said Matt Barber of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law and Liberty Counsel. “They are using that body to essentially try to push the international homosexual agenda down the throats of countries that respect traditional values relative to sexual morality.

“We have the Defense of Marriage Act on the books [in the United States]; why aren’t they coming after the U.S.? Well, because what bullies do is they pick on someone that is weaker than they are,” he continued. “So the European Union is trying to make an example out of Nigeria because they are in a position of influence and power, yet they will not pick the same fight with the United States because they know it would be to no avail.”

Imagine that Alabama passed a law that arrested people of the same sex who lived together on suspicion of “sodomy” and the state began imprisoning the friends and family of  gays and lesbians for buying them housewarming gifts. That’s exactly what Barber is defending.

The defense of imprisoning gays and lesbians is not new for the religious right. Right here in Minnesota, the “pro-family” group Minnesota Family Council was founded to defend sodomy laws, laws that police used for decades to arrest gays and lesbians on the street, raid and shut down gay and lesbian bars, and imprison same-sex couples.

The Family Council fought vigorously in the 1980s and early 1990s to keep in place Minnesota laws that could result in the imprisonment of gays and lesbians simply based on their sexual orientation.

Those laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2001, as were sodomy laws nationwide by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.

These actions and statements reveal that “pro-family” and “traditional marriage” are code words for an agenda whose ultimate goal is the criminalization of gays and lesbians.

“I fully expect, that when the election contest is completed, if it is done fairly, with no votes counted twice, and with all voters treated equally, I will win this election. Thank you, and God bless.”

9/11. Warrantless wiretapping. Two wars. Jack Abramoff. CIA black flights. Abu Ghraib. The apparently fake turkey photo-op. Gitmo. “Mission Accomplished.” Bank bailouts. Playing guitar while New Orleans submerged. The Bush years have been, at the least, memorable, and at worst surreal. So perhaps a fitting way to remember his two-term presidency is through a look at MAD magazine covers created over the last eight years. More covers after the jump, plus other memories of the reign of “43.”

Bush’s “dumbest moments” reminds us of the president’s infamous (and un-asked-for) shoulder massage of German chancellor Angela Merkel (here with a soundtrack by Ludacris), as well as memorable gaffes like his statement about how hard it is for single moms “to put food on your family.”

Slate’s list of “top 25 Bushisms of all time” includes a few forgotten quips, like his 2007 comment that “I’ve heard [British Prime Minister Tony Blair has] been called Bush’s poodle. He’s bigger than that.”

Our sister site The Washington Independent looks at the foreign and domestic “pols that most regret supporting Bush“ — including our own former Sen. Norm Coleman.

Harper’s dedicates a gigantic edition of its famed Index to the Bush administration. A sample:

Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines: 1

Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans: 4

Portion of the $3.3 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina relief spent by Mississippi that has benefited poor residents: 1/4

And local blogger Jeff Fecke, formerly of MnIndy, has been doing his own rundown of the Bush years at Moderate Left, but perhaps the best closer is this music video he reminds us of: the less-than-prophetic conservative hard-rock anthem, “Bush was right!”

Sean Hannity’s “Great American Panel” last night was anything but. Epitomizing America — if I can interpret the name — were cacophonous guests Rev. Al Sharpton, rocker Meat Loaf and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who had a shoutathon about government stimulus packages, “angry and mean” rap and heavy metal, race in the “age of Obama,” school spending and why African Americans tend to vote for Democrats. Net sum: For once, Bachmann doesn’t come across as the nuttiest of the bunch. The competition there is fierce.

With those fixes made and one no-longer-timely sentence dispatched, the Pioneer Press set about breathing clean Minnesota air into a wheezy editorial from Wall Street for the (dubious) benefit of local readers, many of whom will see the column for what it is — tainted and undeserving.

But Michael Brodkorb of Minnesota Democrats Exposed declares a partisan failing in one canvassing board’s attempt at providing transparency.

He writes: “‘Non-partisan’ Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office has joined forces with the partisan liberal video-blog The UpTake to provide a live video feed of today’s State Canvassing Board meeting.”

Ritchie’s “SHAME,” as Brodkorb — characteristically in ALL-CAPS — puts it?

Writing via official SoS communique that “a live feed will be provided through ‘The Uptake.’” As City Pages notes, “The live feeds usually provided at the state Capitol are not in use this week and The Uptake has been providing an amazing service to people interested in the race by offering free and live video feeds of the state Canvassing Board meetings on their site.”

The UpTake offers the streams without added editorial comment. While their edited videos tend to be perspective-based, the Canvassing Board video feeds have been raw and live — more like C-Span than MDE. “This would be like Governor Pawlenty telling Minnesotans to go to [MDE] to find out information about his budget proposals,” Brodkorb insists. “While my blog is more credible, you get my point.”

A tempest in the teapot? Just an insider media squabble about who’s “legitimate media“? Maybe not.

Within a few hours of his first post, Brodkorb added another, by GOP chair Ron Carey, whose candidacy Brodkorb championed as Carey’s 2007 campaign manager (Brodkorb has also reportedly been hired as media director for the Senate Republican Caucus.)

Like Brodkorb, Carey apparently would also prefer a Canvassing Board blackout instead of commentary-free UpTake streams: “It’s amazing that a partisan, liberal blog” — a description nearly identical to Brodkorb’s — “has been made the official provider of the video for the Canvassing Board,” Carey said.

Then he gets to what might be the real strategy behind such a benign-seeming service as unmanipulated video feeds of public proceedings: Casting doubt on a recount process that shows Carey’s candidate headed for an increasingly likely defeat.

“To make a group with an agenda and a record of attacking one of the candidates before the Canvassing Board the purveyor of information is beyond improper, it calls into question the judgment of those who made the decision for this partisan website to be the sanctioned broadcaster of these important proceedings.”

Thank you for counting my vote!

I guess desperate times call for desperate measures: Coleman leads by just two votes and now Franken is projected to win.

If you accept taxpayer money, you have to accept that you’re going to receive public scrutiny.

That simple point seems to be eluding Minnesota Teen Challenge (MNTC), the faith-based drug treatment program which secured a federal earmark in early 2008 arranged by Rep. Jim Ramstad and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, for its “Know the Truth” program which aims to prevent drug use.

Operating close to the border of church and state, the group’s members are unrealistic if they think their work is not going to get attention.

Klobuchar’s deputy chief of staff, Andrea Mokros, explains the senator’s role in requesting the earmark. “The Senator joined several members of the state delegation, including Jim Ramstad and Keith Ellison, in submitting the request for a Minnesota program to prevent drug abuse. As a former prosecutor, she has long been concerned about the impact of drug abuse on both individuals and the community, and she has worked with a range of groups that work to prevent and treat drug addiction.”

MNTC officials were upset by my coverage of their public statements, publicly available employment application materials and publicly available information about their ties to the national organization that spawned the local operation. Maia Szalavitz, a Huffington Post writer with expertise in traumatized youth, also wrote about the Ramstad earmark. While Szalavitz and I published similar articles on the same day, we haven’t ever communicated with each other.

In response, MNTC executive director Rich Scherber sent a nearly identically worded letter to both the Minnesota Independent and the Huffington Post.

The point of my article was not to suggest that MNTC was not successful or beneficial, as Scherber implies. Rather it was to point out the overtly religious nature of the organization and that the program has historically been controversial. In the interest of brevity, I left some examples out. For instance, MNTC’s stance on Halloween verges on the comical (”Halloween is a day set up totally for Satan … The more people who go out dressed as demons, ghosts, witches and goblins, the more glory Satan receives”). Scherber’s claim that the Holy Spirit told an MNTC bus driver to avoid the 35-W bridge on the day of its collapse in August 2007 is touching but, let us say, unverified.

I don’t question that faith-based programs can be very effective for those that share the programs’ faith. Faith is a huge motivator in people’s lives. I think MNTC has been very effective for the clients it serves. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate for judges, prosecutors or public defenders to suggest the program as an alternative to jail. (Szalavitz, by the way, vehemently disagrees with MNTC’s claims about its success rate).

I also wrote about a local media report that points to the possibility that Know the Truth staff have discussed their religious conversions in relation to their recovery at a local church. That’s not a bad thing in itself, except the Know the Truth program is paid for by people who don’t share that religious faith. Were those Know the Truth representatives telling the same stories in public schools? Scherber didn’t address the issue in any complaint letters.

At least one Twin Cities school has decided to pass on MNTC’s offer to appear. Know the Truth had a presentation scheduled at South High School in Minneapolis next month. The school canceled the appearance after tightening the restrictions on outside groups that speak at the school, a concerned parent told the Minnesota Independent.

One thing is clear. The pressure to keep a positive public image is important to MNTC at this time. As the group’s Web site acknowledges, MNTC invested money in Fidelis Foundation, an institution created by Christian philanthropist Tom Petters, who is now under investigation for organizing a Ponzi scheme and defrauding investors such as the Fidelis Foundation. MNTC lost a lot of money and Klobuchar’s proposed earmark will certainly help ease the burden a little. What else could explain sending form letters to every media outlet that runs an article critical of the organization?

Correction: The article previously read, “According to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Web site, the senator is requesting (PDF) an additional $500,000 this year — a sum that would more than double the program’s budget.”

The document on Klobuchar’s site is for fiscal year 2009, although the document itself does not indicate as such. She requested the same earmark as Ramstad. Additional money is not being requested for FY2010.

The signers of the ad, a cadre of religious-right figures calling themselves No Mob Veto, said, “beginning today, we commit ourselves to opposing and publicly shaming anyone who resorts to the rhetoric of anti-religious bigotry.”

Sporadic skirmishes have arisen since the passage of Proposition 8, a California initiative that rescinded the right for same-sex couples to marry in that state. Someone sent an envelope containing white powder to Mormon temples in California and Utah recently — owing to the church’s investment in supporting the measure — and a school board member punched and kicked a gay man in Bakersfield, Calif., during a Prop 8 protest in October.

And the ad has touched off another round of heated rhetoric by both sides.

“Several signatories to the ad are generals in the culture wars,” said Rev. Susan Russell of All Saints [Epsicopal] Church in Pasadena, Calif. Russell works on religious issues with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBT group that opposed Prop 8.

“They lied about gay people in the campaign, and now they are lying again when they say we are in favor of mob intimidation and violence,” she said.

The No Mob Veto ad vows to shame anyone who resorts to anti-religious bigotry — and the ad’s signers know something about anti-religious bigotry: Many have engaged in it themselves.

Click to view the ad in a new window.

“Mormonism either affirms historic Christianity, or it doesn’t. Since it doesn’t, it can’t call itself Christianity — a fact that all the good will and public relations in Utah can’t change,” wrote Chuck Colson, a central Watergate figure who, after being “born again” as a Christian, started the Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Colson is a signer of the No Mob Vote ad. He also told The Washington Monthly in 2005, “While Mormons share some beliefs with Christians, they are not Christians.”

On Muslims, Colson told ABCNews in 2007, “Islam is a vicious evil.”

Meanwhile, National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Rich Cizik, another signer of the ad, spoke for the majority of evangelicals on Mitt Romney’s chances as a Mormon presidential candidate. “Most evangelicals still regard Mormonism as a cult,” he told Washington Monthly in 2005. “That will shape, I’d imagine, their reactions to Romney as a candidate for the White House.”

Signer William Donahue of the Catholic League also has a laundry list of controversial statements to his credit.

“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it,” he told MSNBC when asked about opposition to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. “That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the Messiah.”

Donahue also went after President Bush in 2005 for allowing the White House to hand out holiday cards that didn’t specifically reference Christmas. “The Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and … they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

He has also gone after Sen. Charles Schumer, folk singer Joan Osborne for her God-inspired song “One of Us,” ABC drama Nothing Sacred, indie filmmaker Kevin Smith, alt-rocker Marilyn Manson, the fantasy film The Golden Compass, conservative radio host Michael Savage, comedian Kathy Griffin, CBS’ prime-time series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigations” and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

Donahue blamed gays for the sexual abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said in 2005, “Since 2002, Donahue has continued to opportunistically exploit the crisis in the Catholic Church to link adult homosexuality (and gay people in general) with child sexual abuse — ignoring the fact that such abuse of power is not reflective of any healthy adult sexual orientation — gay or straight.”

Not all religious leaders agree with the latest religious tactic to paint themselves as persecuted.

Bishop John Selders of Amistad United Church of Christ in Hartford, Conn., commented in an HRC press release Monday, “As an African-American, I’ve heard this before. A few frustrated members of a minority group respond in anger to a new indignity and the oppressor calls them anarchists,” he said.

“Satan, sometimes called the Father of Lies, is at work when powerful people seek to dehumanize those who are less powerful.”

Rev. Russell agreed. “Many of the leaders cited in this ad preach hate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, then look the other way when LGBT people are the victims of hate crimes,” she said. “This ad is an act of individual and corporate hypocrisy.”