Your Saturday Afternoon Nothing Can Possibly Beat This Ever

Ever.

EVER.

EV.  ER.

Down And Out In Carolina

Unemployed in the Tarheel State after Sunday?  Good luck getting any unemployment benefits at all:  Gov. Pat McCrory and the GOP have all but destroyed jobless benefits for 170,000 North Carolinians with the state's draconian unemployment law taking effect July 1.

A new law taking effect in North Carolina over the weekend will cut unemployment benefits for new claims and disqualify the state from receiving federal funds for the long-term jobless.

According the The Associated Press, lawmakers passed the bill in February to accelerate the repayment of $2.5 billion federal debt by cutting jobless benefits and increasing taxes on businesses. Because the bill cuts benefits to those who are newly unemployed, the state also disqualified itself from receiving federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC).

The U.S. Labor Department has estimated that about 170,000 out-of-work North Carolinians stand to lose $700 million in EUC payments.

Under the law passed by North Carolina Republicans, qualifying for state benefits will become more difficult and the payments will be cut from a maximum weekly benefit of $535 to $350. The benefit period will be shortened from six months to no more than five months, and in some cases only three months.

Hope you don't lose your job in NC where you were making more than $350 a week.  You know, more than $8.75 an hour.   Because that's all you're getting from Pat McCrory.  And because those cuts bring the state's maximum benefit down to below the poverty line, the federal government won't kick in a dime.

After all, if you really needed more than $8.75 an hour, you'd go get a job, you scumbag.  And I'm sure the money companies are saving on unemployment insurance will be used to create new jobs for the unemployed instead of being pocketed as profits.  Surely.

Right?

Enjoy your austerity regime, North Carolina.  You voted for it.  Now you're getting it.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• A record heat wave is scorching the California high desert as well as Arizona and Nevada, with temps in some area approaching 130 degrees.
• New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie has blocked Medicare expansion under the Affordable Care Act, leaving hundreds of thousands without affordable health care.
• At least four are dead, including one American, as protests over Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi continue in Cairo.
• Alabama's TRAP law designed to shut down abortion clinics where doctors didn't have admitting privileges to local hospitals has been blocked by a federal judge.
• The International Energy Agency's latest estimates find renewable green energy sources will take over as the world's second-largest source of energy by 2018.

Last Call For Prop 8

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals officially lifted its injunction against gay marriage in California in light of the Supreme Court's decision on Wednesday, meaning same-sex marriages can proceed immediately as Gov. Jerry Brown has advised county clerk's offices to be ready to issue marriage licenses as soon as the injunction was lifted.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday cleared the way for gay marriages to resume in California.

The court lifted its stay on an injunction which ordered state officials to stop enforcing Proposition 8. With the court's action, counties can now begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

A spokesman for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had originally said it would takes the court at least 25 days to act after a Supreme Court ruling. Immediately afterward, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered his public health agency to advise the state's counties to "begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in California as soon as the 9th Circuit confirms the stay is lifted."

Among the first to be married today:  Prop 8 plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandra Stier.

History in the making. AG Kamala Harris preparing to marry Kris Perry and Sandra Stier in #SF. #prop8 pic.twitter.com/bQV488zrNC
— John Coté (@johnwcote) June 28, 2013

Well played, California Democrats.  Well played indeed.  And good riddance to enshrined discrimination in the Golden State (and hopefully soon the rest of the country as well!)

Schooling Instadope Yet Again

It seems like every six months or so, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds disgorges his regular "How to fix US colleges" post in an actual publication of record.  This graduation season it's the WSJ (natch) as he recycles oldies but goodies on making higher education subject totally to the "free market", calling student loans "immoral".

Now here's where the real immorality kicks in. The skyrocketing cost of a college education is a classic unintended consequence of government intervention. Colleges have responded to the availability of easy federal money by doing what subsidized industries generally do: Raising prices to capture the subsidy. Sold as a tool to help students cope with rising college costs, student loans have instead been a major contributor to the problem.

In truth, America's student loan problem won't be solved by low interest rates—for many students, the debt would be crippling even if the interest rate were zero.

If we want to solve the very real problem of excessive student-loan debt, college costs need to be brought under control. A 2010 study by the Goldwater Institute identified "administrative bloat" as a leading reason for higher costs. The study found that many American universities now have more salaried administrators than teaching faculty. 

Actually the major problem in universities and colleges is that states have made massive cuts to university system budgets since the 2007 financial crash.   If they were serious about lowering tuition and loan costs, states would invest more in higher education, not less.  That's pushing college tuition up.

Second, student loans were, until recently, a massive cash cow for the same banks that nearly collapsed our economy.  They were profiting handsomely on student debt and will still continue to do so for older loans for some time.  Also pushing prices up.

Third, the influx of H-1B visas used to recruit science, technology, engineering and math graduates from other countries isn't covering any shortages.  If there were shortages, engineers would be making tons of money.  They're not.  What's going on is that firms that hire these folks are hiring them at garbage salaries and then complaining they can't find anyone to fill the positions except for immigrants.  That's pushing prices up too.

Fourth, for-profit higher education universities continue to push prices up by again using profit motive on an oligopoly to move prices higher.  His fixes address none of these issues:

A serious student-loan fix would change this incentive. First, federal aid could be capped, perhaps at a national average, or simply indexed to the consumer-price index, making it harder for schools to raise tuition willy-nilly. Second, schools that receive subsidized loan money could be left on the hook for a percentage of the loan balance if students default. I would favor allowing students who can't pay to discharge their loan balances in bankruptcy after a reasonable time—say, five to seven years, maybe even 10—with the institutions that got the money being liable to the guarantors (i.e., the taxpayers) for, say, 10% or 20% of the balance.

You can bet that under this kind of a rule, universities would be much more careful about encouraging students to take on significant debt unless they are fully committed first to graduating, and second to a realistic career path that would enable them to service that debt over time. At the very least, schools would be more likely to warn students of the risks.

What Reynolds's recommendations would do is make college completely unaffordable and unavailable for Americans who don't have $150,000 or so to attend a university.   In fact, his plan would be to shut down all but the most profitable college degree programs and get rid of most university faculty.  If we only send people to college because of profit motive rather than to learn, universities stop becoming universities, and start becoming even more of a barrier to income equality than they are now.

Which is the point:  to limit universities (and the ability to land an upper-class job) to the rich and the rich only.  That's immoral, but don't tell Instadouche here.

The Keys To Ben's Helicopter

Don't look now, but Helicopter Ben Bernanke's term as Fed Chairman is almost up.  Somebody's going to need to fly the thing without crashing it into a mountain. The White House has made it pretty clear that spending political capital on getting Ben another term in January isn't going to happen, so much so that the search for his successor is starting now, seven months ahead of time.

Wall Street Journal reporters Peter Nicholas and Jon Hilsenrath are reporting that the White House has "quietly begun assembling a short list of candidates" to take over as chairman of the Federal Reserve when current Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's term expires in January.

Earlier this month, President Obama said in an interview, "Well, I think Ben Bernanke's done an outstanding job. Ben Bernanke's a little bit like Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI - where he's already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to."

Yeah.  The smart money is on current Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen.

By every account, Yellen is a thoughtful and brilliant economist, which has allowed her to rise to where she is today.

"Ms. Yellen climbed the Fed ranks by being methodical rather than iconoclastic," writes Wall Street Journal reporter Jon Hilsenrath in a recent profile of the Fed vice-chairman. "She shows up at policy meetings with carefully crafted statements. Those who work with her say she arrives at the airport hours early."

"[Yellen] is very low-key, but impresses people quickly with the depth of her understanding and the sincerity of her views," said fellow Berkeley professor Andrew Rose in 1994, describing her as "collegial, persuasive and effective."

She has also worked with the academic elite of the economics sphere her entire career. Her mentor at Yale, where she received her Ph.D. in 1971, was Nobel-Prize winning economist James Tobin, whose legacy is enshrined in today's economics textbooks. After graduating from Yale, she taught at Harvard for five years. Then, she did a two-year stint (1976-1978) as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve, where she met her husband, fellow economist and future Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof.

After the Federal Reserve, Yellen was faculty at the London School of Economics for two years. Then, in 1980, she accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, where she stayed until her appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1994 by President Bill Clinton.

Having been kicking around the Fed for 20 years is a pretty big bullet point on the resume, admittedly.  Republicans on the other hand are going to extract their pound of flesh, since both they and the Paultards believe the Fed created the financial crisis by themselves (and the banks had nothing to do with it, which is like blaming the fire department for arsonists.)

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Former Joint Chiefs vice chairman Marine Gen. James Cartwright is the subject of a leak investigation over the Stuxnet computer virus that targeted Iran's nuclear program in 2010.
• Italy has passed a ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors, but consumer and safety groups want to see the products banned completely.
• Cost overruns for the Savannah River nuclear plant in South Carolina may prompt the Department of Energy to cancel the project.
• India's growing middle class is literally getting larger as suitmakers are having to make clothing in bigger sizes in order to meet demand.
• Google's next big product may be an Android-based gaming console, with a smart wristwatch in the works as well.

Last Call For The Senate Immigration Bill

It passed 68-32, with all 54 Democrats voting for it.  Too bad that the House GOP leadership is vowing that the Senate bill will never get a House vote.

Rep. Paul Ryan says the House won’t be taking up the Senate immigration bill, but it will be working on its own legislation that he says will create a “workable legal immigration system.”

The Wisconsin Republican told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Wednesday that the border security amendment to immigration reform passed by the Senate brings that bill closer to the House position, but he wants to make sure there are “triggers” in the final bill.

Guess what those triggers are.

 

“We’re not going to bring up the Senate bill, we’re going to do it our own way, on our own very methodical way, because we want to make sure we get this stuff right,” Ryan said. “We want to have real triggers on the border, real triggers on what we call the e-verify.”

And of course Orange Julius says that no compromise with the Senate will get a vote in the House unless House Republicans support it.

Speaker John Boehner says he will not bring up any eventual House-Senate immigration compromise for a vote unless it has the support of the majority of House Republicans.

“For any legislation — including the conference report — to pass the House it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members,” Boehner told reporters Thursday.

So far the 2006 playbook is continuing apace, and I'm confident the results will be the same:  the House GOP won't even be able to pass immigration reform among its own members and the Senate bill will die.

Right along with the GOP's chances in 2014 and 2016.

Moving Ahead At His Own Perry, Again

Well, that didn't take long, did it.

Gov. Rick Perry is calling lawmakers back immediately for another special session to deal with abortion issues, and also to consider transportation funding and new sentencing guidelines for 17-year-olds convicted of capital crimes.

Unlike the last 30-day special session, Perry is not waiting 16 days before adding abortion to the agenda. It will start immediately.

“Through their duly elected representatives, the citizens of our state have made crystal clear their priorities for our great state,” Perry said in his proclamation.

“Texans value life and want to protect women and the unborn. Texans want a transportation system that keeps them moving. Texans want a court system that is fair and just,” he said.

Perry also alluded to the throngs who flooded the Capitol Tuesday night and disrupted the Senate just as it was poised to break the filibuster of Sen. Wendy Davis and push through abortion regulations.

“We will not allow the breakdown of decorum and decency to prevent us from doing what the people of this state hired us to do,” Perry said.

The people of the state of Texas want you to violate the Constitution?  OK.  Well, it'll get blocked in federal court, so have fun with that, chumpy.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

After this week's historic SCOTUS rulings, Steve M. asks:

When I consider the possibility that the difference is that powerful economic interests don't lose anything from gay equality, I think: but why does there seem to be progress on immigration? Well, the party the powerful like best, the GOP, allegedly can't win the White House without Hispanic votes. But, then, why are abortion rights under attack in just about every state where Republicans are in charge? Why do Republicans still think a hard-line stance on abortion has no political downside? And why don't they seem to feel that way anymore about gay rights? How did gay rights get decoupled from abortion as part of the traditional-values wedge-issue package that always kept Middle American whites voting for the party most unabashed in its defense of the plutocracy?

Three reasons.

1. Because unlike African-Americans, LGBTQ folks don't vote 95%+ for the Democrats.
2. More than a few of them are white.
3. We didn't just re-elect an LGBT president.

Really is that simple.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama's African trip continues as he visits Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa.
• GOP House Government Oversight Committee chair Darrel Issa instructed the IRS to leave out evidence that liberal political groups were targeted for additional scrutiny as well.
• FEMA will increase funding for relief grants to New Jersey's coastal towns still recovering from Hurricane Sandy.
• Japan's exemption from US sanctions against countries that import Iranian crude oil has led to Tokyo's oil imports doubling from Tehran.
• Microsoft says that Windows 8.1 will include native 3-D printer drivers for a more uniform experience.

Last Call For The Gulf Ecosystem

Reminder:  the millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico three years ago, not to mention all the chemicals used to break up that oil, didn't just "go away".

The Gulf of Mexico could see a record-size dead zone this year of oxygen-deprived waters resulting from pollution, US scientists have cautioned based on government data models.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s forecasts said the dead zone could be as large as New Jersey, or up to 8,561 square miles (22,172 square kilometers).

Dead zones are toxic to marine life and are caused by excessive nutrient pollution due to agriculture runoff. They are influenced by weather, precipitation, wind and temperature.

When there is little oxygen in the water, most marine life near the bottom is unable to survive.

“This year’s prediction for the Gulf reflects flood conditions in the Midwest that caused large amounts of nutrients to be transported from the Mississippi watershed to the Gulf,” NOAA said in a statement.

Oh yeah, and the fact the Gulf seabed is a nightmare of oil, chemicals, and other pollutants.  Enjoy!

More On DOMA's Demise

Section 3 of DOMA is toast, but Section 2, which does allow states to discriminate still on same-sex marriage, may be ripe for challenge.  James Joyner explains:

It occurs to me, however, that the impact of Windsor is effectively to render gay marriage the law in all 50 states.

Recall that the chief motivating fear of the Defense of Marriage Act was to prevent a judge in one state—Hawaii, where gay marriage remains illegal, was thought to be the likely culprit—declaring limiting marriage to one man and one woman violated the Equal Protection Clause, people flocking to that state to marry, and returning back home and,  because of the Full Faith and Credit Clause, being deemed legally married at home.

Well, SCOTUS has now said that the Equal Protection Clause prevents Congress from discriminating against gays as a class, at least in the arena of marriage, which is fundamentally the province of states. Given that, then, doesn’t the Equal Protection Clause mean that residents of Alabama are now free to travel to California, tie the knot, and then able to demand recognition of their marriage back home?

If not, why not?

I personally think the court is now waiting for this exact challenge.   The logic striking down Section 3, that singling out same-sex couples for federal discrimination is itself unconstitutional, would have to apply to the individual states as well.

Or it would, if the courst would be given a reason to say so.  That appears to be the next step:  someone getting married in say California or New York and moving to Florida or some other anti same-sex marriage state, and then suing under DOMA.

I would have to think that would be the thing to do.  Somebody will, just a question of how quickly that case gets to SCOTUS.

When it does, bang.  Five votes to say denial of same-sex marriage violates the Fifth Amendment.

The Great Prop 8 No Hate Debate, Season Finale

DOMA Section 3 banning federal recognition of same-sex marriage, ruled unconstitutional on 5th Amendment grounds.  5-4 ruling.

California Prop 8 case dismissed for standing grounds, lower court ruling stands, Prop 8 is unconstitutional.  Also a 5-4 ruling.

Bottom line, CA can start limited same-sex marriage where officials believe the lower court ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional is valid.  Federally, where states have same-sex marriage, they are entitled to all federal marriage benefits and must be recognized by the US.

Carry on.

StupidiNews!

• Texas Democrats, led by State Sen. Wendy Davis, managed to filibuster a bill that would close 90% of the state's abortion clinics past a midnight deadline, killing it.
• Democrat Ed Markey won the special election for John Kerry's Senate seat over Republican Gabriel Gomez, securing a 9-point win.
• President Obama's climate change plan announced yesterday singled out coal-fired power plants as the nation's largest source of carbon dioxide.
• Denmark, the country with households in the deepest amount of debt, faces a major test with mortgage rates spiking on the US Fed scaling back bond action.
• Security data shows the vast majority of malware attacks come from legitimate sites that are compromised, not specific attack sites.