Jobapalooza Update

This month's job report was pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.

Blunting worries about the American economy’s momentum after a stretch of lackluster growth, the government reported on Friday that employers added a hefty 280,000 jobs in May, well above the average monthly totals logged over the last year. 

The official unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent, as more Americans dived back into the labor pool and started actively looking for work. Higher hourly wages, which rose 0.3 percent last month, may have helped lure back some sidelined workers while providing those already on the job with some long-awaited gains. 

The return of stronger job growth is also likely to strengthen the resolve of Federal Reserve officials who are hoping to start raising interest rates from their near-zero level later this year. 

“This is a confirmation that the economy is performing well and the first quarter was an aberration,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust. 

He added that he was encouraged by the growth in wages, which have now risen 2.3 percent over last year. “It’s good for workers and also a sign that capacity in the labor market is being utilized more fully.”

So May's numbers, including an upward revision in March to back over 110K, really makes it possible we could see an interest rate hike this year. If these numbers keep up, unemployment will be under 5% by the end of the year. Some 63 straight months of job growth, along with 3 million new jobs in 12 months.  We need growth like that for the rest of this year and next and if we get it, we're going to be in much better shape.

I Dunno But Alaska Just In Case

The poster child for Red State Welfare is in a heap of trouble with the price of oil at $60 rather than $90, and the state is facing a government shutdown on July 1 if Gov. Bill Walker doesn't get a budget to sign into law.

Ferry boats will stop running. The watchdog agency that fines politicians for violating campaign finance rules will close. People who break hunting and fishing laws will have a better chance of getting away with the crimes.

That's a sample of what the looming Alaska government shutdown would mean for the state, according to department heads. All told, more than 10,000 state employees will be laid off if the Legislature does not adopt a fully funded spending plan for the budget year that begins July 1, Gov. Bill Walker said Monday. 

Not all state departments will slash staff and services. Public Safety, including Alaska State Troopers, and Corrections, which runs Alaska prisons, will operate as normal. The Permanent Fund Division will continue processing dividends. 

In other departments, entire offices will be laid off, promising a ripple effect of reduced services. Each agency on Monday announced how it would operate under a shut down.

So the department that pays Alaskans their government handouts will keep on rocking, but 10,000 employees will get laid off. That seems fair. And state lawmakers are nowhere close to a deal.

The House’s budget deal included about $30 million added to a previous state spending plan — concessions made by the Republican-led majority to the Democratic minority. The deal also preserved the raises for state workers, though it balanced that cost with the $30 million unspecified cut.

Sen. Lesil McGuire, R-Anchorage, said her caucus on Monday made a counteroffer that would have preserved the $30 million in concessions in the House budget.

About half of that $30 million would go toward canceling a cut proposed to the state’s per-student education funding formula, with the other half going toward Democratic priorities like the state’s ferry and university systems.

McGuire said in an interview that the Senate was also prepared to add another $16 million in education grant money to the House deal, which would partially restore a cut originally proposed by Gov. Bill Walker. But her chamber refused to budge when it came to canceling the pay raises for state workers, some of which are contractually obligated.

Sen. Pete Kelly, R-Fairbanks, the co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee, on Sunday said those raises shouldn’t be contemplated with the state facing multibillion-dollar budget gaps that he called a “deficit tsunami.”

McGuire said she thought the Democrats would accept the deal and characterized their willingness to concede the pay raises as a “glacier that finally calved.”

But that wasn’t the case. Tuck, the Democratic leader, said his caucus remained committed to keeping the state’s contracts with union workers, given that Democrats have already given up on many of their priorities. Those include big cuts in the state tax credits granted to oil companies, as well as expansion of the public Medicaid health care program to cover about 40,000 low-income Alaskans.

“We are committed to honoring those union contracts. There wasn’t a price they could give us to go back on our word on that,” Tuck, who works as a union representative, said in a phone interview late Monday.

“If they want to honor the tax credits to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, I don’t see why we can’t do that with labor contracts.”

So Alaska Republicans would rather kill Medicaid expansion, cut state worker raises and trash school spending rather than give up oil companies' hundreds of millions in tax breaks.

And people wonder why there's a "deficit tsunami" in the state.  I can't imagine why.

StupidiNews!

• The US believes China may behind an April hacking of US government computers that exposed the personal information of as many as four million current and former government employees.
• Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for automatic voter registration for Americans as she attacked Republicans for restricting voting rights at the state level.
• As the deadline arrives today for Greece to make a debt payment, Greek Finance Minister George Stathakis says Greece cannot accept the EU's offer on the table as is.
• Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs is expected to finalize a $2 billion plus settlement with the US government over subprime mortgage bonds that helped to cause the 2008 global recession.
• The latest NOAA global weather data shows that the trend of global warming continues to increase as 2015 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record.

Last Call For Buying The Lede

It's no secret that WikiLeaks wants to take down the Obama Administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, and the organization is asking for donations in order to raise $100,000 as a reward for information that will "expose" the trade deal's dirty laundry.

WikiLeaks is now paying for news—in this instance leaks concerning the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord that the United States, Canada, Japan, and Mexico—about a dozen countries in all—have been secretly negotiating for years.

The secret-spilling site is offering as much as $100,000 to somebody who forwards to WikiLeaks the 26 chapters of the 29 that have not been disclosed so far.

"The treaty aims to create a new international legal regime that will allow transnational corporations to bypass domestic courts, evade environmental protections, police the internet on behalf of the content industry, limit the availability of affordable generic medicines, and drastically curtail each country's legislative sovereignty," WikiLeaks said in a statement.

On one hand, a sensitive international trade treaty is going to have ongoing negotiations that won't be finalized for some time.  On the other hand, we're not party to those negotiations. On the gripping hand, neither the Obama Administration nor Democratic critics of the trade deal have been 100% honest about the process either. 

I understand the need to want to police an American presidency from an outside organization, and to be fair, WikiLeaks goes after powerful in many countries, from Russia to Sierra Leone to Qatar to Mexico.  But who guarantees that they are being honest?  At this point there's a lot of motivation for WikiLeaks to produce something as a "leak" even if it's outdated or completely untrue information, just like there's motivation for the countries involved in the TPP negotiations to mislead in order to protect what they see as their own interests.

Let's just say I don't think WikiLeaks is doing the world a favor here.

Pay Attention To The Magistrate

And while I've got you in the mood, it seems Alabama will go to extraordinary lengths in order to circumvent any SCOTUS ruling authorizing same-sex marriages.

In Alabama, resistance to same-sex marriage continues. We saw a weekend of rallies in favor of traditional marriage. Beyond that, we have legislation making its way through the house right now that could get rid of the entire institution of marriage as we know it in Alabama. 

Right now, if you want to get married you go to the courthouse and the probate judge gives you a marriage license. 

Attorney Jake Watson explains, “[SB377] does away with that and requires parties to enter into a contract and file it at the courthouse, as I understand it.” 

This alters the fundamental way we’ve approached marriage for a long time. 

Watson continues, “It really does away with the traditional sense of a marriage certificate and what we’ve been dealing with in Alabama as far as marriage certificates for more than a hundred years, I believe.” 

The bill itself disposes of marriage certificates and replaces them with a contract that you file with the probate judge. 

But that could add confusion for all kinds of folks who rely on marriage to prove a link to the federal government, insurance companies or anyone else. Plus it would put up another barrier for same-sex marriage. 

Watson elaborates, “A statement that the parties are legally authorized to be married, that’s going to be the catch. What is legally authorized to be married? Under the State of Alabama Law, that would not include same-sex marriage.”

It's a pretty clever technicality that's going to cause serious headaches for anyone getting married in the state, and most likely make sure that same-sex marriages will continue to be outlawed in Alabama regardless. The courts will be tackling the question long after any June ruling.

So the real question is "what's the unintended consequences of the state getting out of the marriage license business" and how many other red states will follow suit?

There Was Never A GOP To Fix Obamacare

Jon Cohn explains why Republicans have no intention of fixing Obamacare and simply do not care if millions of people are unable to pay their health insurance premiums.

If you want to know about the Republican Party’s priorities for health care, pay close attention to what transpired -- and what didn’t transpire -- on Capitol Hill Tuesday. 

The House Ways and Means Committee held a session to consider a number of health care-related measures. In theory, it would have been an ideal time to take up, amend and maybe even vote on a contingency plan for King v. Burwell -- the case before the Supreme Court that could wipe out health insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for more than 6 million people scattered across two-thirds of the states. 

The Ways and Means chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), has said repeatedly that his party will have a contingency plan ready to go if the court sides with the law’s challengers. He’s also vowed, again and again, to craft an Obamacare alternative that will achieve better results at lower costs. It’s the same set of promises that countless other Republican leaders have made, although Ryan would seem uniquely positioned to deliver on them. He is supposed to be the leading policy intellectual of his party, plus he presides over a powerful committee with direct jurisdiction over health care financing. 

But take a look at the official agenda for the Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. You’ll see a bill to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical device makers and a proposal to repeal the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board, which sets reimbursement rates under Medicare. You’ll see some other legislation, too, including some other adjustments to Medicare. 

Here’s what you won’t see: contingency plans for the upcoming Supreme Court ruling or alternative schemes for expanding insurance coverage.

So no, Paul Ryan was never going to fix Obamacare should the Supreme Court break it in a matter of weeks.  And as Greg Sargent points out, Republicans really don't give a good god damn about poor people anyway and if that's the case, they'll face voters in 2016:

Untold numbers of these people could lose coverage. In many of these states, vulnerable GOP incumbent Senators face reelection. If the Court rules against the government, presumably they’d be asked if they’ll support Congress doing a simple fix to keep subsidies flowing to hundreds of thousands of their constituents. (It’s no accident that vulnerable Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson rushed out his own contingency plan.) Two presidential contenders — Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — come from the state where well over a million people will lose subsidies. 

It’s not yet clear how much all this will matter for the presidential and Senate races, but many Republicans appear worried. And Democrats will certainly try to make it matter.

Meanwhile, many state officials from red states that stand to lose subsidies are concluding that they don’t have any real options to fix subsidies themselves. Even in states where some want to do that, other Republicans may stand in the way. If that happens, state officials will likely demand that the federal government — meaning Congressional Republicans — act. Scott Walker is already doing this. But it’s looking like Congressional Republicans won’t act. Even if they do manage to offer a contingency fix, it will likely also repeal the provisions that make Obamacare work — which means it will be all about drawing a presidential veto for the political blame game that follows. 

Thus, in all probability nothing will be done for all these people, leading to a very nasty, protracted political battle over the fallout. Which explains why Republicans are already laying plans to blame Obama and Democrats for it.

That's the plan: take affordable health insurance away from tens of millions and blame Obama when it happens.

If Republicans run on that in 2016, they are toast.

StupidiNews!

• One-time Rhode Island GOP Senator and Independent Gov. Linc Chafee is running as a Democrat in a long shot bid for the White House in 2016.
• Hurricane Blanca has grown to a Category 4 storm in the Pacific, threatening the Baja California coast of Mexico, but is expected to weaken before landfall sometime this weekend.
• The FBI bribery and corruption investigation into soccer's world governing organization FIFA has now grown to include the winning 2018 Russian World Cup bid and that of Qatar in 2022.
• Another big telecom merger finds carrier T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, in talks to buy US satellite provider Dish Network.
• An investigation by USA Today finds DEA wiretap orders have tripled from 2005 to 2014, with agents going to less stringent state courts to authorize them in order to bypass federal regulations.

Last Call For The Party Of Caitlyn Jenner

America met Caitlyn Jenner (nee Bruce) Tuesday, and it took less than 24 hours for the Republican party she supports to turn on her completely.  Brendan O'Neill at the Spectator:

The worship of Caitlyn, and the hectoring of anyone who refuses to scrape before her icon, has graphically exposed the intolerant edge to trans thinking. The insistence that we not only refer to Bruce/Caitlyn as ‘she’ but also project this backwards – recognising, in the words of the Guardian, that she has ‘always been a woman’ – is borderline Orwellian. It’s a rewriting of history, a memory-holing of old inconvenient facts. Strikingly, the Guardian writer says people like Bruce/Caitlyn have ‘always been women… even when they were “fathering” children’. Notice it’s the ‘fathering’ bit that is in scare quotes, suggesting it wasn’t real, while the description of Bruce as a woman is treated as an incontestable truth. War is peace, freedom is slavery, man is woman.

Nice.  And then today, El Rushbo went on the offensive:

Limbaugh said on his radio show Tuesday that liberals are trying to “redefine normalcy” in an effort to stigmatize conservatives and that conservatives shouldn’t agree to their terms by accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman.

He likewise dismissed a conservative blog that wrote that Republicans should embrace Jenner as one of their own to seem more humane, saying that doing so would constitute falling into a liberal trap. 

Under this system, “conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks,” the pundit said, “and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior. I mean, if less than 1 percent of the population is engaging in it, it’s marginalized behavior. It isn’t normal, no matter how you define it.” 

“We should not be celebrating this, we should not be lionizing this, we should not be encouraging this. These people have a very serious problem, and they need treatment,” he said. “They need help, not encouragement.”

You didn't honestly think that with Bruce being a long-time Republican that Republicans would accept Caitlyn, did you?

Moderately Radical In Congress

As I said last week, the notion that the Democrats are somehow as radically ideological as Republicans is nonsense, and the data is so overwhelmingly indicative of the complete opposite of Peter Wehner's accusations that it almost proves just how radically conservative the GOP has become in the last 40 years.

Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, "Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition."

The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on votingdeveloped by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:

In other words, House Democrats are almost as liberal as they were in the 1920's, and have been drifting back towards that level since WW II after a sharply moderate turn during the Great Depression.  House Republicans on the other hand have been skyrocketing towards radical conservatism since the Carter administration.

That's not the shocking part.  This is the shocking part.



Some 90% of Republicans are partisans, with 10% moderates (or squishy, traitorous RINOs are they are called in 2015.)  90% of Democrats are in fact moderates, precisely the opposite.  And again, House Republican radicalism skyrocketed since 1976 or so.  If anything, from Eisenhower through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford the Republicans had a higher percentage of moderates than the Democrats.

This is why our Congress is broken and has been for basically my entire lifetime.

New Republicans, Old Problems

Twenty years after Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, the Republican party of today has adopted many parts of his militia manifesto.

Republican presidential candidates gathered last month at the Oklahoma City Cox Conference Center, just a few blocks from the site of what was the Alfred R. Murrah Federal Building. Two decades ago, anti-government militia sympathizer Timothy McVeigh blew it up in what he called an act of war against the U.S. government. It was the worst crime of domestically bred terrorism in American history. McVeigh was executed in 2001, but since then, some of his militia ideals have gone mainstream and even been introduced as laws in many states, including Oklahoma. 

Legislators in dozens of states have submitted proposals to nullify or block federal laws—a longtime goal of militias. These have included exempting states from federal gun laws and educational standards, as well as, of course, Obamacare. That doesn’t make these anti-federal statutes part of McVeigh’s madness, but Republican politicians now often echo conspiracy theories once relegated to troglodyte pamphlets. And several states have passed laws making gold a currency—a step toward returning to the gold standard—even though currency is a federal responsibility. 

When Cliven Bundy engaged in an armed standoff with Bureau of Land Management agents in 2014, after a federal court order demanded he get his cattle off federal land, as he hadn’t paid grazing fees for 20 years, several of the current Republican presidential candidates sided with the outlaw. As armed militia members converged in Nevada to protect Bundy, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called the events “the unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path President Obama has set the federal government on.” Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, said: “I have a problem with the federal government putting citizens in the position of having to feel like they have to use force to deal with their own government.” Mike Huckabee opined: “There is something incredibly wrong when a government believes that some blades of grass that a cow is eating is [such] an egregious affront to the government of the United States that we would literally put a gun in a citizen’s face and threaten to shoot him over it.”

Tarso Ramos, executive director of Political Research Associates, which tracks right-wing extremism, says these and other formerly fringe ideas mainstreamed after McVeigh’s assault—just not right away. “The Oklahoma City bombing had a sobering effect for a while,” he says. “Then, with the election of Obama, you get a whole new wave of Patriot activity and a new variant of conspiracy-ism, including the birther stuff and the idea that Obama is an agent of powerful elites.”

And the worst part is if you listen to the Huckabees, the Rand Pauls, the Ted Cruzes of the GOP, the things they are saying now are the things the militias of 20 years ago said then and still say today: that this government is an enemy of the people, that states are not subject to federal laws they disagree with, and that the tree of liberty requires blood again.

It's a combination of toxic Bircher hatred and white supremacist doctrine that has given birth to a monster.  And most likely one of that monsters many heads will be the Republican nominee for President.

There is a direct line from Tim McVeigh to Cliven Bundy and that line is a bright, bloody red.

StupidiNews!

• South Koreaan officials say two are dead as some 30 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) have led to hundreds being quarantined in the country.
• California's state Senate has voted to raise the state's legal smoking age to 21 as the measure now heads to the state Assembly, matching recent legislation in Hawaii.
• As promised, President Obama signed into law the USA Freedom Act just hours after the NSA reform measure passed the Senate yesterday in a 67-32 vote.
• As Friday's debt default deadline approaches, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras and EU leaders will meet to decide the country's fate with a final offer from the troika presented today.
• Gaming software service Steam will begin offering refunds for customers who have played a game for less than two hours and have had the game for fewer than 14 days.

Last Call For Blattered, Bruised And Broken

A week after being re-elected, Sepp Blatter is suddenly resigning as FIFA President.  My question is what did they have on him, as clearly he was doing victory laps over the weekend. Whatever it was, the guy went from king of the castle to royally screwed in record time.

Of course, maybe John Oliver was the one to finish him off.  

Nothing Will Be Done About Campaign Finance Reform

Even if recent Supreme Court rulings hadn't destroyed campaign finance reform, the notion that voters actually care about fixing the system is laughable.

As the 2016 presidential race begins, 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in political campaigns now. Criticism of the role of money cuts across party lines - large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all think money has too much influence.

Most Americans see widespread problems with how election campaigns are funded in the United States. Forty-six percent think the system for funding political campaigns has so much wrong with it that it needs to be rebuilt completely, and another 39 percent think that while there are good things in the system, fundamental changes are needed. Just 13 percent of Americans think only minor changes are needed.

Americans across the political spectrum are critical of the way campaigns are financed, but independents are the most negative. Fifty-one percent of independents think the system must be completely rebuilt. And 46 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans agree.

On the surface it seems extremely simple: five out of six Americans think money has too much influence on politicians.  But like gun control or climate change, Americans just don't give enough of a damn to make fixing it a priority.

Most who think changes are needed are not optimistic that such changes will be forthcoming: 58 percent are pessimistic that changes will actually be made.

Nevertheless, very few Americans prioritize campaign finance over other domestic issues when asked to name the most important problem facing the country today. Americans' top issue priority continues to be the economy and jobs; health care and immigration follow. Less than one percent volunteer campaign fundraising as the most important issue facing the country.

It's hard to care even remotely about the billions going to pay off our politicians when you're out of work and can't put food on the table, I guess.

Democrats Can't Be This Lucky

Conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt has a great idea for helping Republicans Democrats in 2016 by suggesting the GOP should embrace fresh, bold new ideas double down on white guys on the ticket.

Saying it's "obvious," best-selling author and national talk show host Hugh Hewitt is urging all of the nearly two dozen potential Republican presidential candidates to pick 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney as their vice presidential choice. 

In his upcoming book The Queen, directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hewitt said that Romney has the influence and status of former Vice President Dick Cheney, making him a formidable campaigner and White House partner. 

That, he added in the book provided to Secrets, will force Clinton to make an equally top-notch pick, not somebody like Joe Biden, the "lovable dolt" chosen by Barack Obama. 

The eventual GOP nominee, wrote Hewitt, should pick Romney for just one term, using his fundraising power and credibility to beat Clinton. By serving just one term, Romney wouldn't be a political threat to the president he serves and it would create loyalty from potential successors.

Romney's "credibility" will beat Hillary.

OK.

Sure.

Wake me up when that happens, I'll be over here in reality.

Seriously, if Hewitt's plan to win with somebody from the Clown Car Crew requires the gravitas of Mitt Romney to the formula, then you're still multiplying a number by zero and expecting to get a number that magically is not zero.

Or, in the wordds of the guy who cleaned Romney's clock: "Please proceed, governor."

StupidiNews!

• Several hundred people are still missing in China as a passenger ship sank in the Yangtze River near the city of Nanjing with more than 400 aboard.
• Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is vowing to improve airport security after ABC News reported on TSA agents failing to detect mock weapons and explosives 95% of the time.
• GOP lawmakers in North Carolina have overridden Republican Gov. Pat McCrory's veto on a bill that would allow public officials to opt out of performing same-sex marriages.
• HBSC, Europe's largest bank, may cut as many as 20,000 jobs over the next year as a response to tough new British banking regulations.
• Intel is expected to acquire chipmaker Altera for $17 billion as consolidation in the industry continues on the heels of last month's $37 billion deal between Avago and Broadcom.