In the shadow of the intelligence failure that culminated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lighting an explosive aboard a Detroit-bound flight, the titular head of the U.S. intelligence community was busy fighting another war. For months, in fact, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence (DNI), had been waging an epic bureaucratic offensive. His job had been created in the wake of September 11 to foster cooperation and accountability among the 16 agencies sifting through the mounds of inbound data about threats to U.S. interests.

The latest edition of MetroMonitor--our ground-up view of the recession and recovery--is out today, looking at economic indicators through the third quarter of 2009. The bottom line: It’s still a big country. Some places had largely recovered by September, while others still hadn’t bottomed out yet. Check out the report for all the details, but here are a few amuse- bouches to whet your appetite:

The manufacturing belt surges… but it may be temporary. One of the big stories over the course of the recession has been the devastation wrought in “auto country,” particularly the upper Midwestern portion in metro areas like Detroit, Grand Rapids, Toledo, and Youngstown.  But during the months of July through September, output grew, and job loss slowed, in these and other auto-focused metro areas. Signs point to the cash-for-clunkers program, which seemed to have a hand in boosting auto and auto parts production in these and many other regions across the country. Whether the trend continues into the current quarter, after the program expired, remains to be seen.

Education continues to be a mainstay… but government is slipping. Employment in educational services continued to grow in the third quarter, rising by 1.4 percent overall, and increasing in 77 of the 100 largest metro areas. And many centers of education--Austin, Madison, Syracuse, Washington, D.C.--continue to rank among the best-performing metropolitan areas over the course of the recession. However, government employment--a mainstay over the past two years—showed signs of slipping in a number of metro areas, particularly those including state capitals where budget crises loom. Honolulu, Nashville, Baltimore, Columbia (SC), and Albany saw government job growth in the second quarter turn into job loss in the third quarter.

One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air Force One and was built to wage retaliatory nuclear war from the skies.

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning, based on new figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that unemployment rates continued to climb in July in metropolitan America.

It’s probably true, based on BLS estimates that the nation overall shed another 247,000 jobs in July. 

But BLS’ metropolitan data don’t exactly show us what’s going on from month to month.

That’s because they don’t take account of the natural fluctuations in employment levels that occur everywhere due to seasonal labor market changes. Or, in data-wonk terms, they’re not “seasonally adjusted.” 

Why does this matter for July unemployment figures? Well, school’s out. And more young people on the labor market generally translates into higher unemployment rates in June, July, and August. You can see the seasonal pattern in national unemployment figures over the past few years in the chart linked below. (The article acknowledges this distinction implicitly, by comparing metropolitan rates to the national unadjusted figure for July.)

The other seasonal unemployment trend comes at the end of the year, when people are hired for retail positions over the holidays, then resume looking for work in January.

From the Editors: February marks the thirty-eighth anniversary of President Nixon’s landmark visit to Beijing, and, back in 1972, TNR was one of the few media outlets able to get a first-hand report from the trip. John Osborne’s report, “Mission to China,” provided a snapshot of a country far removed from the modern economic power it is today. “China, feared though it has been and mightier now than it has ever been before, is still a poor country and, in the scales of world power, a weak country,” Osborne wrote.