US News & Weekly Report – The computers and Internet industry has given 66 percent of its money in the 2010 election cycle to Democrats, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

JS Online – Wisconsin’s private sector lost nearly 10,000 jobs last month, the steepest losses yet this year among the employers who are essential to a turnaround.

Economic Policy Journal – There’s already plenty of inflation at the basic commodity level. Commodity prices have been soaring across the board. Now comes the first indication that price inflation is starting to creep into the consumer level.

CBS Los Angeles – Home sales in California plunged nearly 18 percent last month from the previous year as historically low mortgage rates failed to draw new buyers.

Washington Post – The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is likely to cost taxpayers an additional $19 billion and may cost as much as $124 billion more if the economy starts shrinking again, according to a government projection released Thursday.

Global Economic Analysis – There are a lot of claims by mainstream media regarding cash on the sidelines and corporate cash levels. Except for a handful of isolated companies, predominantly technology, claims are far-fetched. This interactive script showing the top 50 companies in the US by market cap is proof.

Zero Hedge – In the latest amusing discrepancy to come out of the BLS, today’s reported unemployment data by state indicated that at the end of September, there was a total of 129,699,600 people employed across the various states. Not very surprisingly, the biggest deterioration occurred in California which lost 63.5 K jobs, followed by New York at 37.6K (Wall Street layoffs?) and Massachusetts at 20.9K. The total change from August’s 129,923,400 employed was a drop of 223,800. Well, this is a little confusing as the NFP number for September indicated that total jobs lost were 95,000, a slightly more than 50% improvement compared to the job losses at the state level. As Zero Hedge has demonstrated, the data coming out of the BLS is statistically impossible to say the least, and at best, worthless. But now at least we are getting confirmation that just like in the Fed, there may be those within the BLS, who actually know how to count. Too bad, those are not the people in charge of actual propaganda dissemination.

Consumerist – Officially the unemployment rate is 9.6%, but there’s a lot more people out of work than that. If you add on top of that people who have dropped out of the labor-force, as well as people who work part-time but would prefer full-time if they could get it, AND people who have been out of work for over a year, as economist John Williams has done, you get a whopping 22.5% underemployment rate for September.

Yahoo Finance – Natural gas prices on Thursday fell to a new low for the year after the government reported that U.S. supplies grew more than expected last week.

Ned Hardy – What 500K buys you around the world

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