Last Call

Byron York at the DC Examiner would like to pretend Obama has done nothing for jobs.  Absolutely.  Nothing.

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Their job: convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009.  But the true toll of joblessness is far higher.  The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent.  And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job.  That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

He's done, nothing, nothing at all, not a...what's that, Elon Green?

I refer, of course, to the American Jobs Act, which was introduced in September 2011 and died on the table, thanks to Republicans, a month later. The failure to pass this $450 billion bill was of massive consequence to the economy in general and jobs in particular. Here’s a taste of what was in the White House bill, via Brother Benen, who wrote about it here:

* Payroll tax breaks for workers and employers * Tax credit for hiring unemployed veterans
* Modernizing 35,000 schools (FAST Act)
* Sizable infrastructure investments in roads, rail, airports and waterways
* Extended unemployment benefits and new approaches to unemployment insurance, including work-sharing and “Bridge to Work”

You will notice that nowhere in York’s column do the words ‘American Jobs Act’ appear. Let’s give him enough credit to assume the omission is intentional. The man knows his audience; they surely do not have any interest in the conclusion of the Economic Policy Institute, that with the passage of the American Jobs Act “real GDP growth for 2012 would have been 1.4 percentage points higher, bringing growth to 3.4 percent relative to the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline forecast.”

You mean the same American Jobs Act that was blocked by Senate Republicans and didn't even get a vote in the GOP-controlled House after Eric Cantor cut the $450 billion employment bill to $11 billion?  The same American Jobs Act that President Obama went around the country to promote, including a stop right here in Cincy?  The same $450 American Jobs Act that was going to pay itself off through growth and tax revenue in ten years, as an investment in America's economy?

Sure Byron, President Obama had no plans whatsoever to do anything about America's unemployment problem, and you obviously believe your readers are pretty stupid people who didn't experience politics in September and October 2011.

But that's his job, remember?  It sure isn't journalism.

The Blockhead Returns

This is getting pretty stale, guys.  Sen. Lindsey Graham goes on the Sunday shows and says he'll block President Obama's national security team nominees (CIA Director, Secretary of Defense) until he gets the "truth about Benghazi".  Only problem is he did this last month, got his hearings, and Hillary Clinton made him look like the buffoon he is.

So now he's taking it out on the President again.

BOB SCHIEFFER (HOST): I’m not sure I understand. What do you plan to do if they don’t give you an answer? Are you going to put a hold on these nominations?

GRAHAM: Yes…How could Susan Rice come on to your show and say there’s flow evidence of a terrorist attack when the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said they knew that night? I think that was a misleading narrative three weeks before our application.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just make sure, because you’re about to make some news mere, I think. Are you saying that you are going to block the nominations — you’re going to block them from coming to a vote until you get an answer to this? John McCain has already said he doesn’t think the Republicans ought to filibuster this. What will you do? You’re just going to put a hold on it? [...]

GRAHAM: I want to know who changed the talking points. Who took the references to Al Qaeda out of the talking points given to Susan Rice? We still don’t know…. I want to know what our president did. What did he do as commander in chief? Did he ever pick up the phone and call anybody? I think this is the stuff the country needs to know.

At this point we've heard from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and General Martin Dempsey.  Graham won't give up his broken record idiocy because he wants to...you know I'm not sure at this point.  Graham seems to be sure that the President committed an impeachable act, and he's going to continue to scream like a baby until he's satisfied.

That won't happen until the President is on trial before the full Senate.  And we may not have a CIA Director or Defense Secretary for months, if not years.

Droning On And On

Joan Walsh on droooooooones and wrestling with her unbearable guilt of being Joan Walsh:

There are (at least) two issues here: The use of drones generally, and their use to kill American citizens. Some values should apply to both. No doubt drone warfare is sometimes preferable to traditional combat – but can’t we debate when, and why? Isn’t it possible that removing the risk of losing American lives by using unmanned predators will make it easier for decision-makers to risk the lives of those who aren’t Americans? Shouldn’t we know more about when and why drone strikes are launched, as well as who’s been killed, at the cost of how much collateral damage, most important, the number of “non-combatants” — innocent people – who are killed?

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I’m proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don’t know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn’t have to share) that you’re a terrorist. When it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki, who renounced his citizenship and made many public commitments to al-Qaida, those questions don’t keep me awake at night. But don’t we want assurances that the evidence against every citizen who winds up on that list is just as clear? Don’t we want more oversight, even after the fact?

Did I miss the part where American military action only started killing non-combatants on January 21, 2009?  Did I also miss the part where IEDs keep blowing off arms and legs and shearing off chunks of our soldiers' skulls, creating a huge number of folks coming back home with truly awful injuries?  We've had this debate about people being killed in military action since this whole American experiment began, folks.  Here's the thing, if we're going to be over there doing this kind of thing, and right now that's the policy, I'd rather see drones than boots on the ground.  You can go on and on about targeted killings of US citizens at a coldly impersonal distance without due process, and yet we've got 300 million devices in the country called "firearms" that quite often end up doing just that.  Due process is not always exercised in those situations either, guys.  People where you live can get killed guns without warning.  Maybe there's an investigation, maybe there's even a trial.  But there are plenty of times where who pulled the trigger is never found, and the killer never brought to justice.

Where's your outrage over that?  Did I miss the part where Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the only US teenager ever killed for bullshit reasons?  You know what else is a "targeted killing of American citizen?"  Any cops who draw their weapon on someone and pull the trigger, and guess what, they don't always shoot the right person.  There's oversight in those situations, but not always.  I'm a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am what's going on in Waziristan, people.  If you're going to perpetually scream "DROOOOOOOOONES YOU OBOT" at me, go to the nearest large metropolitan police department and make sure you personally solve every homicide that comes in the door.

Otherwise, have a darkened Superdome full of seats.

It is not endemic to the Obama administration, or Obama foreign policy.  Steve M. nails it:

But if you're especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they're more horrifying than everything else that's been done in the wars we've fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us -- maybe only many white Americans? -- not only assume we're entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn't apply.

To me that's a sense of privilege. So I see what's wrong with the drone program, but it's a subset of what's wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren't.

War is hell.  The Pentagon is in the business of conducting said warfare in the most casualty-efficient way possible that still achieves the goal of ending the metabolic processes of The Bad Guys.  The problem isn't drones, the problem is the perpetual war machine that's predated this President for a very, very long time.  We're screaming about al-Awlaki's kid when My Lai, the bombing of Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened.  Let's face it, for America, that's effing progress.  We still need to move forward and I'd like to see drones not have to be used at all (because we weren't in Af-Pak at all anymore) but let's not pretend that President Obama somehow has the most blood on his hands of a US President, either, shall we?

Thanks.  Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

GOP Still In It To Win It

Just a friendly reminder from Steve M. that the damage from ceding control of a majority of states in 2010 to the Tea Party GOP will continue for at least the rest of President Obama's term, and most likely the next President's term as well.

Katrina? Hey, displacement plus the demonization of the Democratic mayor of New Orleans helped make a somewhat purple state much redder. What's for Republicans to dislike?

And meanwhile, Republicans control a majority of states, which gives them the wherewithal to gerrymander, disenfranchise, bust unions, make taxation regressive, and severely restrict reproductive rights.

Why on earth would Republicans think they're failing? Things are looking pretty damn good for them.

Not to mention, as Steve points out, that the wars Bush started are still dominating Obama's foreign policy...as are a lot of Bush policies still in place under Obama.

Katrina has made Louisiana a blood red state for good, more or less.  From Texas all the way around the coast to Virginia, the GOP controls it all in the South now, and throw in the central Midwest, mountain West, Indiana, Missouri, and more...including complete control over Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida at the state level.

In other words, right now Democrats are the regional party of NY/NE,  Illinois/Minnesota, and the West Coast.  The GOP runs everything else, and they will for a very, very long time.

Who's your state senator and representative?  Do you even know?  Odds are real damn good it's a Republican.  There's lots of love for Ohio's state Senator from Cleveland, Nina Turner.  You know what?  The GOP in Ohio's state senate outnumber the Dems 23-10.  It's 59-40 in the General Assembly.  Ohio Republicans can pass whatever the hell they want to now.

Gov. John Kasich for example has a new budget proposal out, and while it would expand Ohio Medicare to thousands of people, it would also add sales taxes to services that aren't taxed at all now, raising taxes on all Ohioans.

At the same time, the wealthiest Ohioans would get ten times that tax hike on sales taxes in savings from a 20% income tax cut.  The 1% would see about a $750 rise in sales taxes...and save $10,000 in income taxes per year.  Meanwhile, everyone else in the state would get hit with the sales tax increase of hundreds of dollars a year.

So yeah, Republicans are getting what they want.  Sure, they're pissed about the White House, but so what?  They control, what, 35 states?  They've gerrymandered the House through 2020?  We're just now beginning to see the damage they are doing, and will keep doing for the next decade.

The Great North Carolina Regulator Purge Of '13

Back home where the Zandarparents live, Republicans in the state legislature are now leading a complete purge of the state's regulatory commissions and boards in order to replace all of them with Republicans loyal to recently elected GOP Gov. Pat McCrory.  Gosh, that doesn't sound like political hackery or anything fascist.

The North Carolina state senate has approved a bill to fire all the members of the states' regulatory bodies, including all the members of the Utilities Commission, the Coastal Resources Commission, the Environmental Management Commission, and the Wildlife Resources Commission.

The bill, which would affect 131 regulators, will now be considered in the state house. Dumping all the current members of the commissions would allow the newly instated Republican governor, Pat McCrory, to replace them. The Charlotte Observer has more on the plan.

And of course the goal is to replace all the members (or in some cases, hire back) regulators who see their job as lobbyists for the companies they are supposed to regulate, not as oversight.

The new "administration may see fit to have the people on boards and commissions that, let's say, are more like minded and who are willing to carry out the desires, if you will, or the philosophy of the new administration," [Sen. Bill] Rabon told committee members.

Sure does.  What better way to give the companies that bankrolled the GOP takeover of North Carolina's legislature everything they want from the state than to fire everyone making those decisions and hire on cronies, rubber-stamped by the same GOP state senate?

But remember, it's Obama and the Democrats who are fascist, un-American thugs with no respect for rule of law, right?  Republicans would never do such a thing...

...Unless they can get away with it without anyone to stop them.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• More than half a million in New England are without power as Boston to Bangor, Maine has been clobbered with more than two feet of snow.
• The KKK is promising the "largest Klan rally in Memphis history" to protest the renaming of three parks with Confederate era monikers.
• White House officials are proposing to cut the nation's nuclear stockpile by one-third, saying it will not harm the country's national security and will save billions yearly.
• Venezuela has devalued its currency, the bolivar, by nearly one-third, the fifth such move in nine years.
• After taking out its human competition in Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM supercomputer Watson is taking on a new foe:  curing cancer.

Last Call

Yo dawg, Rand Paul heard you like rebuttals, so he's giving a rebuttal to Marco Rubio's rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address.

Tea party leaders are turning to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, to deliver their message following President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, a speech that will compete with the official Republican response.

Paul will make his remarks soon after Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, wraps up the GOP response Tuesday night, a Paul spokeswoman confirms to CNN.

"We are giving a voice to the tea party movement when the mainstream media and the Republican establishment wants to write us off as dead," said Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. This is the third year in a row that Kremer's organization has sponsored the tea party response.

The dueling GOP speeches come at a time when a very public rift is developing between the Republican establishment and conservative activists over the direction of the party. Some grassroots activists are specifically angry at Karl Rove and other Republicans for stating that they will choose sides in upcoming Republican primaries and only financially help candidates who have a chance of winning in the general election.

In Paul, tea party leaders have chosen a nationally known senator, who is identified more for his embrace of a libertarian ideology than aligning himself with his own political party's leaders.

The back-to-back addresses Tuesday night also features two young stars in the GOP, each of whom are expected to seriously consider running for the White House in 2016. 

Yes, let America get a good look at the "rising stars" of the GOP right now: a pandering poster Latino that his own party despises, and a quasi-racist hypocrite who wants states to be free to discriminate.  Sure.  Good luck against Hillary, boys.

Acceptable Levels Of Criminal Behavior

The same people screaming that background and identification checks will never, ever stop criminals from committing crimes with guns are hyperventilating over possible voter fraud in Ohio and the need for voter ID laws.

The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud following months of investigation after the 2012 election.

Twenty-eight subpoenas have been issued as a result of the investigation, which includes 19 Hamilton County voters and nine witnesses who still need to answer questions to satisfy the board.

The board started with 80 suspicious cases and now are down to 19. Officials say the majority of the cases turned out to be simple misunderstandings.

Melowese Richardson, a Madisonville resident, first learned of the allegations when approached by 9 On Your Side reporter Tom McKee Wednesday. Even though she admits to voting twice in the last election, she said the news came as surprise.

"I would think that something this important would come to me first and that I wouldn't have to be enlightened about this through you," said Richardson.

According to county documents, Richardson's absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.

"There's absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud," said Richardson.

The wingers promptly want the woman crucified on national television.  So we must have voter ID laws or...wait a minute.  If she voted absentee, and then voted in person, how would voter ID laws have stopped her at the polls?

Nobody seems to have an answer for that.  I wonder why.

Am-Bushed On The Internets

This is simultaneously awesome and horrific.

The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents, The Smoking Gun has learned.

Oh awesome.

Included in the hacked material is a confidential October 2012 list of home addresses, cell phone numbers, and e-mails for dozens of Bush family members, including both former presidents, their siblings, and their children. The posted photos and e-mails contain a watermark with the hacker’s online alias, “Guccifer.”

Correspondence obtained by the hacker indicates that at least six separate e-mail accounts have been compromised, including the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, daughter of George H.W. Bush and sister of George W. Bush. Other breached accounts belong to Willard Heminway, 79, an old friend of the 41st president who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut; CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, a longtime Bush family friend; former first lady Barbara Bush’s brother; and George H.W. Bush’s sister-in-law.

Both Heminway and Nantz corresponded with Bush, 88, about playing golf and visiting the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The hacked e-mails, sent between 2009 and 2012, include correspondence between Nantz and George W. Bush’s scheduler about an October 2010 golf outing in Dallas. One e-mail includes the street address for Bush, 66, as well as the four-digit code Nantz needed to enter at a security gate. A second e-mail includes details of where Nantz and Bush planned to have dinner after their Saturday golf outing.

One of the hacked Heminway e-mails was sent to him by Brit Hume, the Fox News political analyst, days after the 2012 presidential election. “Election outcome disappointing, but there are many silver linings,” Hume wrote in the November 9 e-mail.

Our liberal media?

Look folks, hacking the email accounts of the Bush family is probably one of the all time worst ideas I can think of.  Poppy Bush was former head of the CIA and well as president, and Dubya, well, he's a vindictive little jackass, so yeah, there will be a head rolling at some point.

But hey, some stronger privacy laws on the internet might be a good idea, yeah?

StupidiNews!

• California law enforcement officials continue to search near Big Bear Lake east of Los Angeles for the rogue ex-LAPD cop wanted for the deaths of three people.
• Cities from Philadelphia to Halifax, Nova Scotia are hunkering down for what could be the worst nor'easter blizzard in decades, forecast to drop more than 2 feet of snow.
• Pakistan's Supreme Court continues to struggle with the country's military leaders over secret detentions of suspected Islamic terrorists.
• Several German firms have sued Wall Street big mortgage banks over the global financial crisis as court cases wind through US courts.
• Adobe has issued a series of Flash Player emergency updates to plug security holes being exploited to install malware on PCs and Macs.

Last Call

Orange you glad No Labels is back?

Next week when Obama addresses the House of Representatives and the Senate in a joint session, 40 lawmakers from the two parties hope to add some beef: Under their official congressional lapel pins, they’ll wear orange buttons identifying themselves as Problem Solvers and displaying their pledge, “Committed to fix not fight.”

With congressional approval ratings at historic lows, the 23 Democrats and 17 Republicans say they want to move beyond mere symbolism as they tell their peers that they’ve pledged to try to end hyper-partisanship and work across the aisle to solve the country’s most pressing problems.

“We’re meeting on a regular basis, Democrats and Republicans just talking about areas where we think we can work together in a bipartisan way,” said Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat who defeated incumbent Republican Rep. Dan Lungren in November.

“The idea is we’ve got to move past being only Democrat or Republican,” Bera said in an interview. “It’s very evident in my freshman class. All of us got elected knowing there was an expectation that we would work together.”

Aww.  Aren't these guys precious?  And let's remember, the top priority of these totally bipartisan sentinels of awesome bipartisanship that is bipartisan is the House GOP Super Austerity Budget so we can get rid of that awful debt crisis that doesn't actually exist.  And yet they're against sequestration, too...because that would cut defense spending, a big no-no.  See, the kind of deficit reduction these guys are looking for has to be made up of all of us taking it in the shorts so the 1% can get more money, and then gift us with life like the overclass they were always meant to be.

In short, the primary constituency of No Labels is totally Villagers like Joe Klein.

For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude. We simmer with anticipation each time a new bipartisan initiative or Gang (of Six, of ... anything) is offered--and we are inevitably disappointed. The results are either too pedestrian, in a Solomonic slice-the-baby way, or far too ambitious. Abolish the Electoral College! Grant public funding for election campaigns! Start a third party! In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for President via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly. Oh, there are worthy think tanks with names like the Bipartisan Policy Center and Third Way. And there is the memory of a centrist research group, the Progressive Policy Institute, that provided Bill Clinton with many of his best proposals in 1992. But we moderates generally suffer from too much righteousness, too little populist grit and too many compound sentences.

I am, however, slightly optimistic again. On Jan. 10 I witnessed a public act of humility by 24 members of Congress, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. The event was sponsored by a centrist group called No Labels. It was revolutionary not only in its humility but also in its agenda. There was no agenda. They simply agreed to start talking to one another.

Oh there's an agenda there.  It completely involves bipartisan agreement to streamline and fix broken Washington and the political process, which I agree with.  They want to really, actually, totally reform the filibuster, which I agree with.  They want the parties to come together to form a large majority to pass major legislation, together, which I agree with.  They want to form a huge voting bloc of power enough to break the deadlock of Washington politics, which I agree with.

And then they want to take those badly needed structural repairs to our political machine in order to immediately ram through a massive austerity package and cause economic suffering of an overwhelming majority of American citizens for the benefit of enriching people with eight or more digits in their personal net worth numbers, which I kinda have a major friggin' problem with.

So yes, you No Labels guys can take your Right Ideas Used For Impressive Amounts Of Evil and go have a seat during the State Of The Union addy.  Thanks.

The Cold Core Remains Of What Began With A Passionate Start

But that can’t happen to us, cause it’s always been a matter of trust.

PPP’s annual poll on TV news finds that there’s only one source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS. 52% of voters say they trust PBS to only 29% who don’t trust it. The other seven outlets we polled on are all distrusted by a plurality of voters.

Just like its actual ratings, Fox News has hit a record low in the four years that we’ve been doing this poll. 41% of voters trust it to 46% who do not. To put those numbers into some perspective the first time we did this poll, in 2010, 49% of voters trusted it to 37% who did not. Fox has maintained most of its credibility with Republicans, dropping just from 74/15 to 70/15 over that period of time. But it’s been losing what standing it had with Democrats (from 30/52 to 22/66) and independents (from 41/44 to 32/56).

We find once again this year that Democrats trust everything except Fox, and Republicans don’t trust anything other than Fox. Democrats put the most faith in PBS (+61 at 72/11), followed by NBC (+45 at 61/16), MSNBC (+39 at 58/19), CBS (+38 at 54/16), CNN (+36 at 57/21), ABC (+35 at 51/16), and Comedy Central (+10 at 38/28). Out of the non-Fox channels Republicans have the most faith in PBS at -21 (27/48),  followed by NBC (-48 at 18/66), CNN (-49 at 17/66), ABC (-56 at 14/70), MSNBC (-56 at 12/68), CBS (-57 at 15/72), and Comedy Central (-58 at 8/66).

I would feel sorry for FOX News, but they brought this upon themselves with a business model designed specifically around building an echo chamber and then complaining about the acoustics to everyone else.  Dick Morris is gone, as is Snowmobile Snooki, but they’re picking up Assclown Assclownson and Professional New England Himbo Scott Brown, proving once again that wingnuts never really get discredited, they just fail along various vectors with a partial positive component.   In other words, if FOX is only bleeding credibility among the GOP at the rate of only one percent a year, they have a very long and lucrative time left wrecking our country.

Call it the Calculus of Derp.

Enjoying The Northern Lights

When it comes to light bulbs in the 21st century, it may be time to look to that world-famous bastion of technological innovation...

...Canada.

A trio of Canadians claimed Wednesday to have invented the world’s most energy-efficient bulb: a 12-watt LED light that shines as bright as a 100-watt incandescent one.

Product developer Gimmy Chu told AFP the NanoLight design consists of a circuit board dotted with LED lights and folded into the shape of a bulb that plugs into a regular light fixture.

“We needed the light to shine in all directions to mimic a traditional incandescent light bulb,” said Chu, who with pals Tom Rodinger and Christian Yan launched a company last year to market the product after working on it for three years.

The idea has raised more than $100,000 on a US crowdfunding website and generated pre-orders for more than 3,000 bulbs in the last month, according to Chu.

The best thing about the NanoLight is the fact it's a Kickstarter project.

The NanoLight is still dealing with an issue common to LED lightbulb replacements: cost. A 100W equivalent NanoLight will set you back a $45 pledge. If you want the super-bright white version that outputs 1800 lumens, it will cost you $100. Depending on the cost of electricity in your area, you may be able to recover the investment over time, especially considering the expected longevity of the LEDs.

Interest in the NanoLight has been pretty intense. With 44 days left to go on the project, it has already nearly quadrupled the original $20,000 funding goal. Kickstarter may well be giving us an early glimpse into the future of household LED lighting.

Indeed, looking at the page this morning, the NanoLight has left that $20,000 goal in the dust and is over 150 grand with a month to go still.   Considering the success of Kickstarter tech projects like the Pebble watch as full-fledged tech start-ups these days, it's nice to see that Thomas Edison's Menlo Park digs lives on here on the net, with a global reach.

And yeah, I just might drop a couple bucks on a light bulb with corners.

StupidiNews!

• On a trip to Egypt, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had to dodge shoes thrown at him by men in a crowd in Cairo.
• President Obama has ordered the release of administration memos on drone strikes to Congress ahead of today's confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan.
• The President's pick for Interior Secretary is Sally Jewell, the CEO of outdoor outfitter REI, leaving both conservationists and energy lobbyists cautiously optimistic.
• Ahead of its PlayStation 4 console release later this spring, electronics giant Sony posted its eighth consecutive quarterly loss as it continues to struggle versus Apple and Samsung.
• Microsoft's next Xbox console is expected to use a persistent internet connection to lock out used games and prevent re-sale of game discs.

Last Call

Last call for Saturday mail, folks.

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service says it plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays, but continue delivering packages six days a week.

In an announcement scheduled for later Wednesday, the service is expected to say the cut, beginning in August, would mean a cost saving of about $2 billion annually.

The move accentuates one of the agency's strong points — package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010. The delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and other Internet use.

Let's recall why the USPS is struggling:  because Republicans in Congress forced the agency to pay their retiree helth care costs decades down the road up front in 2006, then refused to give them the money to do that.  As a result, the USPS made massive workforce cuts and forced thousands into early retirement, which of course means the USPS has to pay those health care benefits up front, putting them into a death spiral.

The financial woes of the U.S. Postal System have become a point of contention on Capitol Hill. The Postal Service is supposed to make a $5.5 billion payment to its retiree health care fund by November 18th... but doesn't have the money.

US Postal Service workers have a retiree health care benefit in addition to their pension. Before Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, the USPS operated under a pay-as-you-go model for retiree health care funding. The new law requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its benefit obligations.

"The idea is that enough money is saved over the course of a career that the benefit is fully paid for by the time the worker retires.

Thanks to these prefunding payments, the Postal Service has greatly reduced its unfunded obligations for retiree health benefits. At the end of fiscal year 2010, these obligations were under $49 billion – a substantial sum, but much more manageable. If the Postal Service continues making its prefunding payments, its unfunded obligations for retiree health benefits will be around $33 billion by the end of the decade. And the postal service will be on course to pay these benefits over time," a Congressional insider explained.

Sure, unless you force early retirement so that the benefit is paid for well ahead of time, thus leaving the USPS unable to pay for anything else.  Like, you know, operating costs.  It's like the government came to you and said "OK, you're 25 years old, but you have to pay for every dime of your Medicare that we project you will use for the next ten years, rather than over the next 40 years.  We'll be docking half of your paycheck until you get to that number.  Good luck paying your rent or feeding your kids."

Also, let's remember who lost the roughly 160,000 jobs since the PAEA was passed:  middle-class civil service workers, a disproportionate amount of them African-American.

African-Americans make up about 20 percent of U.S. Postal Service workers - and are the majority in some urban centers, representing 75 percent to 80 percent of the 5,000 letter carriers in the Chicago area, according to Mack Julion, president of the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

But the public sector has cut nearly 600,000 jobs since 2009, due to shrinking government budgets and a range of other issues, according to the Bureau of Labor Relations. The slower recovery for African-Americans in the labor market has, in part, been the result of government layoffs after the end of the recession was declared, according to the DOL report. In December, the black unemployment rate was 14 percent, roughly double that of whites.

While some other sectors of the economy are seeing recovery, the biggest problems may be just beginning for the Post Office, the nation's second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart with about 536,000 career workers.

Death spiral accomplished, right?  There's a reason why the Postal Service was targeted folks, it was a source of tens of thousands of middle-class jobs, especially for minorities.  Since We Can't Have Nice Things, the PAEA was passed and BLAMMO, a recession coupled with structural failure in the Postal Service all but guaranteed a massive loss of jobs.  And the USPS still has another 4 years to go to pay off the $22 billion or so it has left to pay off, thanks to Dubya.  On top of all this, there are plenty of folks who keep saying the only way to save the USPS is to privatize the mail system completely.

In the case of the Postal Service, though, privatization has become the best path forward, mainly because it would take Congress out of the picture. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently argued, “the problem is that neither the management nor the workers really control the Postal Service. Even though the post office has been self-financed since the 1980s, it remains shackled by Congress, which simply can’t bring itself to allow the service to make its own decisions.” And Congress won’t do so, as long as the post office remains part of the government.

The Postal Service has many assets that could be managed more efficiently, if Congress got out of the way. In addition to its 32,000 post offices, it has 461 processing facilities, monopoly access to residential mailboxes and an overfunded pension plan. These assets would attract bidders. Consider, for example, that many processing facilities and post offices sit on valuable real estate, and it may be smarter to sell many of them than to keep them.

Which awful glibertarian scold said that?  You get points for coming up with none other than former Obama OMB head and current Citigroup exec Peter Orszag before clicking on the above link.  Saving the USPS is not something that's apparently very high priority for the current administration either, and this is one of the times I disagree with them on economic policy.  These are jobs that aren't going to be coming back, either, especially here in Cincy.

So yeah, part of me feels like going postal on just about everybody in DC.  This was one of those "self-inflicted wounds" to the economy that President Obama was talking about yesterday, and not a hell of a lot happened to try to fix it.  Ironically, it's postal service in rural areas that will be cut back the most because of these changes, but this was a needless anchor thrown around the neck of the USPS, and nobody in DC threw them a lifeline when the opportunity was there.  Postal jobs aren't sexy.

See ya, Saturday mail.  It was cool while it lasted.