Economic Pothole
“Whatever happened to recovery summer?” special guest host Mark Simone asked kicking off Friday’s show. Earlier today, the Labor Department reported a rise in the unemployment rate to 9.6 percent in August. This is certainly not good news for Team Obama. “The president is trying to do anything to make it look like he’s trying [to fix the economy]. That’s why this past week he was arguing about the ‘jobs bill.’ The ‘jobs bill’ is actually just a title meant to mislead you – there is no such thing as a ‘jobs bill.’ The president is claiming some kind of job creation, but nobody knows what he’s talking about,” said Simone. And to top it all off, Obama is going on yet another vacation! “I can certainly understand how he must need a break. After all he’s been back at work now for what, three or four days?” Simone concluded sarcastically.

The Bastardi Power Rating
Joe Bastardi, chief hurricane and long-range forecaster at AccuWeather.com, gave Mark an update on the path of Hurricane Earl. Earlier today, Earl dropped to a Category 1 storm — down from a powerful Category 4 a day earlier — with sustained winds of 80 mph. Bastardi cautioned the listening audience that Earl could still pack a powerful punch – even with the lower hurricane classification. “What I’ve tried to get out there over the years is the ‘Bastardi Power Rating’ which incorporates the barometric pressure of the storm into the storms’ rating. The reason why is you get a situation like Hurricane Ike in Texas…where the wind in the center isn’t as strong but is spread out over a larger area. So Hurricane force winds are extending out over 100 miles. Earl is still going to be a bad storm out over Nantucket, Cape Code and Martha’s Vineyard,” Bastardi explained.

Unmasking ACORN
Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee who blew the whistle on illegal activity, spoke with Mark Simone on the NewsMaker Hotline about what she experienced working for the group. ACORN might have been disbanded, but the risk of vote fraud in the upcoming elections is still very real. “The voter registration arm of ACORN – Project Vote – is not going anywhere,” she said. “It will still be doing the same things it’s been doing since its inception in 1982.” In 2007, ACORN registered 1.4 million people to vote. In reality, MonCrief said, nearly half of those were either duplicate or fraudulent registrations. Today, former ACORN activists work for organizations with different names – for example, “Communities Voting Together” or “America Votes” – but they’re still not above cheap tricks, MonCrief explained. “If we’re going to stop them, it’s going to take a massive effort,” she said.