rssPosts by Ed Brayton
GOP fighting Obama plan to defer state interest payments
Dave Camp may represent Michigan in Congress but he apparently has little concern about helping the state avoid more budget cuts and business taxes. He and the rest of the GOP are opposed to a White House plan to delay repayment of state unemployment insurance loans:
Obama administration
Prime Minister Harper asks Obama for quick decision on pipeline
As expected, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper did push President Obama for a quick decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada to the the Gulf Coast of the United States, during their meeting Friday.
The Vancouver Sun reports: More…
Jobs report: unemployment rate down, but few new jobs available
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly jobs report for January this morning and, once again, what appears to be very good news on the surface is really bad news when you look at the details.
The good news on the surface is that the national More…
Obama, Harper to discuss oil pipeline
President Obama will meet today with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the subject of the Keystone XL pipeline, still under consideration for approval by the State Department, will almost certainly be a topic of conversation.
The Keystone XL pipeline would carry highly polluting Canadian tar sands crude oil from More…
President of American Family Association: Martin Luther King Jr. would be anti-gay too
Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, did an interview with Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality in which he claimed that because Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian, he would be on the anti-gay side in today’s politics:
I mean,
Bill to be submitted to extend Tier 5 unemployment
A bill to create a Tier 5 of federal unemployment benefits to help those who are languishing in long-term unemployment will be submitted in Congress sometime next week. The bill would add an additional 14 weeks to available unemployment benefits.
Would-be mosque bomber in Michigan had long history of violence
Roger Stockham, the California man arrested in Dearborn this weekend for an alleged plot to blow up the Islamic Center of America mosque, has a long history of extremism, violence and mental problems.
According to the Reno Gazette Journal, in 1985, Stockham was arrested and later convicted
Why the unemployed are marginalized
Mike Konczal, a writer for the Atlantic, makes a very prescient statement on his blog about the difficult time the unemployed have had in getting their interests taken as seriously as the interests of the wealthy and powerful:
We just had to bribe the top 3% with massive tax
Another reason to doubt the ‘lazy unemployed’ meme
Gallup has a webpage that tracks global unemployment numbers. Felix Salmon looks at the data and provides another argument for why the claim that unemployment benefits keeps people from taking jobs is false.
Reality for the 99ers
Annie Lowrey, our former colleague at the Washington Independent, is now writing for Slate — and is still doing the brilliant job she did for our network of telling the story of the 99ers, those who have been unemployed so long that they have exhausted their unemployment benefits.
More…
