The three-month tally of 605,000 jobs is the best three-month total in almost two years, though the unemployment rate still went up by a decimal point, to 7.3 percent as the labor force shrank by 720,000 in October, a reflection of the government shutdown.
obama administration
Marco Rubio’s Slimy Flip-Flop Against Judge William Thomas
Sen. Marco Rubio is blocking President Barack Obama’s nomination of Miami-Dade County Circuit Court Judge William Thomas to a seat on the federal bench for the Southern District of Florida, even though Rubio himself recommended Thomas to Obama previously.
Shutdown-Delayed Unemployment Report: Rate Down to 7.2% But Only 148,000 New Jobs
The September unemployment report due on Oct. 4 was released only at 8:30 this morning, delayed by the 16-day government shutdown. But it could have been predicted, as it follows the pattern of most reports of the past three years: anemic job growth, very slow decline in the unemployment rate, and checkered signs of improvement (or retreat, depending on your point of view) ahead.
Your Policy Is Cancelled: Insurers End Coverage That Falls Short of Affordable Care Act
The main reason insurers are cancelling policies offer is that they fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. By all accounts, the new policies will offer consumers better coverage, in some cases, for comparable cost — especially after the inclusion of federal subsidies for those who qualify.
Congressman Ron DeSantis: A Tea Party Fanatic Who’s Earned His Walking Papers
Ron DeSantis, who represents Flagler County, is not interested in governance. A standard-issue tea party reactionary, he’s a saboteur. He derails, with self-righteous bombast and distortions. He is part of the suicidal extremists willing to plunge the country in default over Obamacare, rather than fight to amend it legislatively. He should pay the price of his recklessness.
Favoring Defense Industry Over Human Rights, Obama Loosens Restrictions on Arms Exports
The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions. In 2011, the U.S. concluded $66 billion in arms sales agreements, nearly 80 percent of the global market.
The Difference Between Name-Calling and Calling Out Yahoos Holding America Hostage
Steve Robinson angered some people with his last column when he compared tea party Republicans to Know-Nothings. But, he argues, likening the narrow-minded nativist sentiments of that short-lived 19th-century party to the ideals of this current group of ideological fringe-dwellers is really not that far off.
Shutdown Geezers: The Medicare
Generation’s Immoral War on Obamacare
Opponents of Obamacare think that by doubling down on hurting Americans through a shut-down, they might stun them into submission. They must be stupider than they let on. The Affordable Care Act has its issues. Lacking for moral high ground isn’t among them.
The GOP’s Shutdown Zealotry: What John Boehner and Yasser Arafat Have In Common
Republicans’ reincarnation of Know-Nothings have let their tea party zealots control them at the expense of the nation’s welfare, and of their own party, argues Steve Robinson, consigning themselves to the dustbin of political hacks.
Shutdown Hits Home: Castillo de San Marcos and Ft. Matanzas Among Parks Off Limits
Starting Tuesday, the National Park Service closed all 401 national parks, including Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas National Monuments in St. Augustine, affecting the local tourism economy. Potential foreign visitors’ visas are facing processing delays.
Flagler Democrats Will Demonstrate For Obamacare in Front of Health Department Tuesday
The noon demonstration by the Flagler County Democratic Club marks the first day of Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, and protests Florida’s sustained opposition, and various obstacles, to the law, including the prohibition against use of local health departments to make it easier for the uninsured to get coverage.
The Trouble With American Exceptionalism
Do we have moral authority as a nation, asks Cary McMullen. Do we have the humility Obama spoke of, namely that we are acting not in self-interest but in the interest of justice? Are we exceptional not just in our history but in our standing among nations as an exemplar of righteous ideals?
Florida Groups Helping Uninsured Are Getting “Intimidating” Letters from GOP Lawmakers
Eight groups that are hiring and training “navigators” to help uninsured Floridians enroll in Obamacare have been sent letters by 15 GOP members of a U.S. House committee seeking information on their activities — a letter the Obama administration called a “blatant and shameful attempt to intimidate.”
Obama’s Born-Again Missile Envy Over Syria: Wrong on All Counts
Whether the Syrian regime used chemical weapons or not, Obama would be wrong to attack, even if Congress approves. It’s not America’s war to fight, it’s not Obama’s judgment to make, and his red line is an absurd marker when contrasted with two and a half years of atrocities, and 100,000 deaths, that never got a peep.
Unemployment Rate Ticks Down to 7.3% But Job Creation Is a Hazy 162,000
The 7.3 percent unemployment rate for August is the lowest rate since December 2008, but job creation remains anemic, and June and July figures were revised downward by 74,000 jobs. The economy is still generating barely half the jobs necessary to return to pre-recession health.
Freddy Krueger Act: Donald Rumsfeld’s False Notes Against Intervention in Syria
Donald Rumsfeld, who helped orchestrate an invasion on false pretenses to hunt for weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, is the last man to be giving President Obama lessons about what to do in Syria, argues Steve Robinson.
Family Insurance Premiums Rise 4% for 2nd Year, Still More Than Double Inflation Rate
With average family plan premium topping $16,000 for the first time, with workers paying on average $4,565, workers will feel an increased pinch: More than a third have annual deductibles of at least $1,000 before insurance kicks in, while wages continue to grow far more slowly than health insurance costs.
Unemployment Falls Slightly, Job Rolls Grow Slightly, Austerity’s Anemia Persists
There’s nothing terribly bad about the July unemployment report, released this morning. There’s nothing terribly good about it, either: the economy added just 162,000 jobs, and the 7.4 percent unemployment rate is the lowest since December 2008, but improvements are at a crawl.
Obama in Jacksonville Thursday in Economy Tour as GOP Ridicules Visit
President Barack Obama plans an appearance Thursday in Jacksonville to talk about economic issues, and the Republican Party of Florida has already launched a counter-attack.
Obama on Stand Your Ground and Zimmerman Aftermath: “Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me 35 Years Ago”
As protests have continued and grown, President Obama Friday afternoon spoke on the stand your ground law, the Zimmerman trial aftermath, Trayvon Martin and race more expansively and in more personal terms than he had since his speech on race from Philadelphia as a presidential candidate in 2008. The full text and video are included.
Gun Rights Advocates and Church Join in Suit Against NSA as Companies Petition White House
Sixty-three companies are asking the federal government to allow companies that receive foreign-intelligence surveillance requests to publicly discuss those requests in basic terms, while gun rights advocates have joined the Unitarian Church and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a lawsuit against NSA spying on First Amendment grounds.
The Undoing of Barack Obama
President Barack Obama is no longer on a roll. We have become a laughingstock in the international community, writes Donald Kaul, obstructionist House Republicans are treating the immigration bill as their favorite hostage, and many more landmines await.
Selective Memory Surveillance: Obama, the NSA and September 11
Those making the argument that the NSA’s domestic spying program would have stopped the 9/11 attacks had it been in place have ignored a key aspect of historical record, including the fact that USA intelligence already knew the identity of a hijacker long before the attack and could have found him.
Memo to the NSA: You Have One of 725 Domestic Steve Robinsons Spooked
Our own Steve Robinson discovers not only that there are 724 other Steve Robinsons in the country, but that with the NSA tapping into every Tom, Dick and Harry’s computer histories, the pasts of shadier Robinsons, if not his own pot-luck history, could short-circuit his own.
NSA Black Holes: 5 Things We Still Don’t Know About Spy Agency’s Snooping
The FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies. But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered. Here’s what we still don’t know:
U.S. Economy Adds 175,000 Jobs But Unemployment Rate Rises Again, to 7.6%
The May unemployment rate of 7.6 percent is a decimal increase from April, and only a small decline from the 8.2 percent rate from a year ago as the U.S. economy continues to dawdle along, and in the face of further drags.
President Barack Aux Scandals
The Benghazi story is a bogus scandal. IRS targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s hacking of reporters’ phones is not. The Obama presidency is getting derailed, and that’s without going down the path of even more serious scandals Washington and the electorate are accepting as business as usual.
Grinding Down: U.S. Unemployment Falls to 7.5% as 165,000 Jobs Are Created
The national unemployment rate ticked down to 7.5 percent in April, from 7.6 percent in March, as the economy added 165,000 jobs, a bit more than analysts had predicted. But job-creation figures for the two previous months were revised upward, with 332,000 jobs created in February (instead of 268,000) and 138,000 in March (instead of 88,000).
Militarizing the Border: Where Those Billions for More “Security” Will Go
The U.S. spent nearly $18 billion dollars on immigration enforcement agencies last fiscal year, more than all other law enforcement agencies combined. Where would another $4.5 billion go? Here’s a closer look at what is being proposed, and how the government has spent (and often wasted) border money in recent years.
Boston’s Home-Grown Terrorism: Echoes of London and Madrid
While hundreds of police officers pursued the 19-year-old during a nationally-televised rampage across Boston Friday, a former classmate recounted memories of the refugee who, according to counterterror officials, became a U.S. citizen on an ironic date: Sept. 11, 2012.
Break Up the Banks: It’s Not a Fringe Idea Anymore
Moments of consensus between left and right don’t come frequently in Washington, and we should heed them when they occur. Right now, that means breaking up the banks, argues Amy Dean.
One Nation, Without a Clue
If our generations had been around in the 1930s, we’d still be in the Great Depression with prominent lawmakers telling each other we need a smaller government, argues Donald Kaul.
Missing Memorials to Two Lost Wars
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, but as Iraq and Afghanistan have been lost, the focus of memorials has shifted from wars to the cult of the soldiers, while victims of war are as always passed over in silence.
U.S. Economy Adds 236,000 Jobs as Unemployment Falls to 7.7%, a 4-Year Low
The last time national unemployment clocked in at 7.7 percent was in December 2008, before Barack Obama was president. It did so again in February as the economy added 236,000 jobs, totaling just over 1 million jobs in the last six months. Most sectors gained, including construction and manufacturing.
What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding
President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn’t pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it.
Where Obama’s Drone War May Have Gone Too Far: Targeting U.S. Citizens
The Justice Department memo on targeting U.S. citizens references a “broader concept of imminence,” which it holds “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”
Zero Dark Thirty’s Tortured, Losing Premise
Zero Dark Thirty is a movie the CIA wants you to see. Torture is illegal under U.S. and international law and it is utterly immoral. It doesn’t “work,” but that’s beside the point to the movie-makers, argues Chris Toensing. The result is disturbing for all the wrong reasons.
U.S. Economy Adds 600,000 Jobs in 3 Months, But Unemployment Edges Up to 7.9%
The nation’s economy added 157,000 jobs in January, and revisions to November and December figures added 127,000 jobs to previous calculations, for a total of 600,000 new jobs in the last three months. Still, the unemployment rate went up a fraction, to 7.9 percent: job growth hasn’t been robust enough to go beyond the natural growth in the workforce.
Obama II
Far from a dud, as these second inaugurals tend to be, Obama’s today was bracing in its realism, and hopeful, ironically, for having finally shed the imagery of hope for hope’s sake, replacing it with an agenda for equality, little heard of since the days of the New Deal and the Great Society.
57 Republicans Who Voted for Bush’s Katrina Aid Voted Against Obama’s Sandy Aid
When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Congress passed two relief bills almost unanimously. But when it comes to Hurricane Sandy,179 Republicans and one Democrat opposed aid. Signal differences are the occupant in the White House and the states getting help.
Obama’s Inauguration Sells Out
President Barack Obama, reversing his own honorable precedent for his first inaugural, has chosen this time to have corporations pay for his second round of big shindigs. This multimillion-dollar infusion of corporate cash is a crass intrusion by favor-seeking private interests into what ought to be a purely public occasion.
Obama Rule Gives 1 Million Undocumented Immigrants Clearer Path to Legal Status
Many of Florida’s 700,000 undocumented immigrants would be eligible for the new path to the permanent residency status that is also a step toward citizenship as the Obama administration recalibrates the immigration issue.
Economy Unimpressively Adds 155,000 Jobs in Holiday Month as Unemployment Rises to 7.8%
The American economy cannot shake its anemia, adding 155,000 jobs in December–not quite good enough to keep up with normal growth in the labor force, as unemployment edged back up to 7.8 percent.
What’s So Bad About the Deficit, Anyway? A Primer on the Nation’s Fiscal Bluffs
As Washington tries to hash out a deal, we’ve taken a step back to break down the numbers behind our deficit — how it grew so big, why it is actually shrinking and whether a deal can bring it under control.
Despite Sandy, Unemployment Rate Falls to 7.7%, Best Since December 2008
Despite Hurricane Sandy and economists’ predictions of a poor jobs report, the economy added 146,000 jobs in November, for a combined 416,000 jobs in the last three months. But the numbers are still lower than what they should be for a robust recovery.
Mazel Not: Israel and the United States, Married on the Wrong Side of History
Israel likes to claim that Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist. the reality is the opposite. Israel has spent the last six decades denying Palestinians’ right to exist in fact, going as far as denying them their history and identity. The UN vote for Palestinian statehood begins to right the injustice.
The Conservative Case Against Compromise
A Democrat and one a conservative say Republicans in Congress need to compromise so the government can “get things done,” and that it is better to do something than nothing. No. It is not, argues Lloyd Brown.
Fox News and the Politics of Hurricane Obama
On Fox News, Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath was replaced with endless and largely manufactured claims of an Obama cover-up of the attack on the American consulate in benghazi. Fox’s latest Swiftboat attack on the president foundered.
U.S. Economy Adds 171,000 Jobs in October, Topping Half a Million in Last 3 Months
The economy added 171,000 jobs in October, exceeding economists’ expectation of 135,000, and figures for August and September were revised upward, adding 84,000 to previous tallies, for a total of 511,000 jobs in the last three months.
Big Bird Debate: How Much Does
Federal Funding Matter to PBS Anyway?
The amount of tax dollars PBS receives is roughly .012 percent of the $3.8 trillion federal budget – or about $1.35 per person per year, compared to $22.48 in Canada and $80.36 in Britain. Public broadcasting is a popular target among conservatives, who’ve long portrayed it as an example of wasteful government spending.