Daily Kos

The Wall Street Journal puts up a paywall for most articles, so unless you subscribe or engage the site with go-around software, you won't be able to read the whole piece I am going to excerpt below. And since I can't get permission for a longer excerpt as I usually do, this will be short. And, like so much information about the labor market these days: frustrating, troubling, even infuriating. Reporting on a new study from the Conference Board, Kathleen Madigan writes:

U.S. wage growth between 2008 and 2010 was the lowest since at least the 1960s. The big reasons: high unemployment diminished workers’ bargaining power, and many laid-off workers and graduates were “willing to accept jobs at lower wage rates than they originally expected,” the report said. [...]

Of course, not all labor groups are created equal. One very disturbing finding is how far new college graduates have fallen behind.

The board found median wages for new graduates with a university degree declined in both 2009 and 2010. Even with a bounce in 2011, Levanon said the starting pay for new grads is below the pay in 2008—and that is before inflation is taken into account.

"Before inflation is taken into account" is shorthand for before reality is considered. In other words, it's worse than it first appears.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011:

The House Republicans plan resume their War on Women this week, passing H.R. 3, the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion" bill. You'll remember this as the "forcible rape" bill, the one that would have redefined rape so that essentially only violent, stranger rape actually counted as real rape for the purposes of abortion funding. Of course, that was the flashpoint in the bill, and uproar over it got that provision removed.

But the whole bill, with its extremely anti-woman, anti-family provisions intact, moves forward. Don't miss reading David Waldman's explanation of the larger implications of this bill and the large tax increase it includes. In a nutshell: "take the rape provisions out, and still left with a disastrous bill, just on the issue of choice alone. But to go beyond that, you're in fact got a bill that paves the way for using the tax code to select every American's health care options for them, direct from Washington."
The Joint Tax Committee confirmed this, saying that this bill would put the IRS in the position of having to do abortion audits.

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Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

A rash of new polling out today shows more good news for Mitt Romney than bad news. Quinnipiac has a big improvement for the GOP nominee in the key battleground states of Florida and Ohio, with Romney even moving into an incremental advantage in the Sunshine State.

Having said that, though, it still remains awfully difficult to see where, given current numbers, Mitt Romney cobbles together a coalition that can get him to the White House. That includes one new poll entry today that continues to give the president a solid edge in a state that was a reliably Republican state for decades.

Here are all the numbers from Thursday:

PRESIDENTIAL GENERAL ELECTION POLLING:

NATIONAL (Democracy Corps): Obama tied with Romney (47-47)

NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Obama d. Romney (47-46)

NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama d. Romney (47-45)

"CORE FOUR" STATES—FL/NC/OH/VA (Rasmussen): Obama d. Romney (46-43)

ARIZONA (Magellan Strategies): Romney d. Obama (52-43)

FLORIDA (Quinnipiac): Romney d. Obama (44-43)

OHIO (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (44-42)

PENNSYLVANIA (Quinnipiac): Obama d. Romney (47-39)

VIRGINIA (Washington Post): Obama d. Romney (51-44)

DOWNBALLOT POLLING:

AZ-SEN (Magellan Strategies): Jeff Flake (R) 44, Richard Carmona (D) 40

MT-GOV (PPP): Steve Bullock (D) 39, Rick Hill (R) 39; Bullock 41, Ken Miller (R) 35

MT-GOV—R (PPP): Rick Hill 33, Ken Miller 12, Corey Stapleton 7, Neil Livingstone 5, Jim Lynch 4, Jim O'Hara 4, Bob Fanning 1

MT-SEN (Rasmussen): Denny Rehberg (R) 53, Sen. Jon Tester (D) 43

A few thoughts, as always, await you just past the jump...

Rick Perry may not be able to count to three, and he may have to issue statements that no, he wasn't on drugs that one time, he's just naturally goofy, but at least he has God's direct line on speed dial. Via Politico:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who memorably muttered “oops” during a nationally televised Republican debate, said Wednesday that God forgives such moments — even if voters don’t.

“Every one of us has ‘oops moments’ every day,” the former presidential candidate told an Austin crowd celebrating the National Day of Prayer, according to The Associated Press. “America may not forgive you for it, but God will.”

Actually, Rick Perry, it's highly unlikely that most of us get tripped up on counting to three every day, but hey, if that's what you need to tell yourself to feel better, go for it. Or maybe, just maybe, you could spend a little less time speaking for God and a little more time watching Sesame Street. Because as William K. Wolfrom points out:

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson

Walmart has agreed to pay more than $4.8 million in back pay and damages to more than 4,500 current and former vision center managers and asset protection coordinators. The workers had been treated by Walmart as exempt from overtime requirements but were found by the Department of Labor to be nonexempt and therefore due overtime pay. Walmart will also pay nearly $464,000 in penalties.

In 2007, when the Department of Labor told Walmart the workers should receive overtime pay, Walmart reclassified them and claims to have paid them properly since. But Huffington Post's Alice Hines points out that this is hardly the first time Walmart has been caught denying workers overtime they'd earned:

In 2008, the company agreed to pay as much as $640 million to settle 63 federal and state class actions that charged the company with refusing to pay overtime, as well as other types of wage theft.

In a separate case in Massachusetts in 2009, the company paid $40 million -- the largest wage and hour class-action settlement in the state's history -- to settle a suit that accused it of refusing to pay overtime, denying employees rest breaks and tampering with time sheets.

And in 2007, through another Department of Labor settlement, Walmart paid $33.5 million in back wages to 86,680 workers, many of them managers who were denied overtime.

Walmart also remains under federal investigation for its Mexican bribery scandal, highlighting the degree to which the company's success has been built on dodgy and outright illegal practices. Breaking the pattern of lawbreaking is the only way workers will ever have even a small chance of fair treatment. Sign our petition calling on Walmart to pursue a real investigation into its pattern of bribery in Mexico and remove the responsible executives.

Via HuffPo, it seems America's Dumbest Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, is not quite done humiliating himself, Arizona, and the dignity of fine upstanding conspiracy-mongers everywhere. At least, not just yet:

CBS 5 News pressed [head investibator Mike Zullo] for answers upon learning that he and the sheriff are planning another news conference in late May or early June. The announcement would come roughly three months after Arpaio released the results from his six-month probe into the validity of the president's birth certificate. The controversial announcement: the document is a fake.

"We didn't make a mistake the first time. We're not making a mistake this time,"  Zullo said.

The new findings will include data on Obama's 1980 registration for the draft. Earlier this year Arpaio sent the U.S. Selective Service System a letter which requested a loan of the original document.

Oh gawd, no. Now Zullo is hot on the trail of the Obama draft card? Just like the last time, that's not even a new conspiracy theory. It's a warmed-over past one that nobody took seriously the first 10 times it was breathlessly announced.

I imagine the main reason they won't be having a news conference until May or June is to give conspiracy nut Mke Zullo time to co-write another e-book with the King of the Crackpot Conspiracy Internetz, Jerome Corsi, in order to make a few more bucks from his "investigation." And by "investigation," I mean his collection of random thoughts gleaned from internet conspiracy thoughts and stamped with the America's Dumbest Sheriff logo in an effort to prop them up for one more go-round. No word on how the first book sold, but Corsi seems to have no trouble making a living by peddling dumb ideas to stupid people, suggesting they've got a lucrative market there.

For that reason alone, I have the sneaking suspicion that this won't be the last time we hear from Sheriff Joe's conspiracy posse. There's an election coming up, and I imagine they'll be looking at pixels from now to then, at the least, and releasing new books along the way. Arpaio would seem to be in no big hurry to wind down his little pouting effort, and for his self-selected "investigators," this is the goose that laid the golden egg. Zullo, Corsi and the others will bleed this thing for every last extractable dime. By the time October rolls around they'll be implicating Barack Obama in the Kennedy assassination.

Elizabeth Warren is not a professional politician. That's one of the things that we like most about her as a candidate. She's not running for Senate for her own self-aggrandizement, but to make a difference for the 99 percent in Massachusetts and in the country.

The downside, however, of being a novice politician has shown this week in her continuing flat-footed responses to the character attacks coming at her from the Right, over whether or not she truly has Native American blood (by all accounts she does) and whether she used that heritage to further her career (by all accounts she didn't).

This is as clear a case of the politics of personal destruction as we've seen in a while, and if you don't believe that, you need to read this column in the Boston Herald, the original source for the story. You're not going to find a more sexist and racist potrayal of Warren, one that exposes precisely what the Right is trying to do to her here. It's a smear job, straight out of the Lee Atwater-Karl Rove playbook, not-so-subtly telling a key segment of voters that this uppity woman (who may or may not also be a minority) took a job away from a white man.

Yes, it's bullshit. Yes it's a blatant character attack without substance. But it's dominated the news cycle this week, and it's time it went away. Warren has to make that happen. The voters of Massachusetts don't care about her grandfather's high cheekbones or her family oral history or her Oklahoman pride in her heritage. She's not running for governor of Oklahoma, she's running for the Senate in Massachusetts, a job for which she is eminently qualified, just as every university who has hired her has attested. It's indisputable that she's where she is today because of her glowing qualifications and hard work, not because of her bloodline or gender.

So it's time for Warren to pivot and stop getting sucked into letting her personal story become fodder for the Right. In retrospect, it was a mistake to check an innocuous box on a questionnaire for a law school faculty directory in 1985, and she should say so. Likewise, if Warren was aware that Harvard touted her as a Native American hire in 1996, she should acknowledge that it was a mistake on her part not to object at the time. She needs to simply own those mistakes, and move on to the real story: what's at stake in this election.

That's whether Massachusetts will continue to be represented by a senator who is nothing but a standard-issue, George W. Bush Republican, backed by Karl Rove. Massachusetts voters need to know that Scott Brown has committed to endless obstruction of President Obama's efforts and that he wants to take the country back to the disastrous policies of Bush.

They're using the Rove attack playbook because they're scared of Elizabeth Warren and the success she has had a consumer advocate. Scott Brown is a reliable lackey for the Republicans and for Wall Street, and they don't want to lose him. That's what this story is about. And that's what Warren and her campaign need to talk about, every day.

Help her tell that story. Chip in $5 to help Elizabeth Warren get the message out about what's important to Massachusetts.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Meteor Blades Whatever is shown by the numbers of Friday's much-awaited April jobs report, the analysts will be digging into them like a Roman seer pawing through rabbit entrails for evidence of the direction of the labor market and the greater economy. One thing that typically gets missed in all the amateur and professional analyses of labor-force participation rates, the rise and fall of manufacturing jobs and the impact of seasonal adjustments to jobs is the quality of those jobs and how much they pay.

Though not the first to do so, the National Employment Law Project points out that the plunge in the rate of wage gains in the past five years is holding back the recovery. Workers simply cannot buy as much as is needed to increase demand so that more workers can be hired to meet that demand:

...in fact, as of March 2012, hourly wage change was nearly 44 percent below the rate of change as of March 2007, prior to the Great Recession. Not only is wage growth slowing, but the real value of hourly wages—once adjusted for inflation—is also declining when compared to the prior year. From March 2011 through March 2012, real average hourly earnings fell 0.6 percent for all private sector workers and declined by even a great degree—1.0 percent—for nonsupervisory and production workers.

Changes in the number of hours worked per week by both groups did not make up for the loss in wages: an uptick in the hours worked among all private sector employees left their real total weekly wages (a product of the hourly wage and hours worked per week) unchanged, while an increase in hours for production and nonsupervisory workers still resulted in 0.5 percent decline in real total weekly wages.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has noted that for all of 2012, aggregate wages went up 1.7 percent. But inflation for the year was 3 percent. In other words, workers overall lost ground.

Worse yet is that low-wage occupations are the ones dominating the recovery. And worse still is that fully 30 percent of job openings from now until 2020 will pay around the $20,000 level. Those are poverty wages for a household of four. The litany of wage problems goes on and on. New entrants are being paid less than before. Unemployed people who finally find a job are often paid less even if they get hired in the same field. Those who had to switch fields to find employment took even harder hits. And people who have been out of work the longest typically find it hard to do anything but switch fields because their skills have atrophied and they aren't as attractive to employers as workers with more up-to-date skills.

People at the very bottom end of the job market are paid a minimum wage (or less)  that has far less buying power than it did at the peak in 1968, $7.25 an hour. To reach parity with the '60s, that minimum would now have to be $10.55 an hour. And if it had kept up with productivity gains, it would be $22 an hour.

As Laura Clawson explained recently, the low wage floor, when combined with the drop in unionization and shredding of employment protections have made the U.S. the "global leader in low-wage work: the US labor force is made up of a larger share of low-wage workers than any other comparable economy."

All this has been a major contributor to income inequality. It did not happen overnight or solely as a consequence of the Great Recession. That downturn only worsened a trend that has been on-going since the mid-1970s for all but a few years of the Clinton administration. The median, inflation-adjusted wage has only increased 5.7 percent in the past 30 years.

Raising the minimum wage or finding other means to provide income support to low-wage earners along the lines of how many European nations have done it, is a crucial first step in rectifying this situation. But it will take a good deal more than such tinkering to truly improve matters for U.S. workers. Progressive tax reform and cooperative forms of ownership are key to making that happen. In the current political climate, short of a movement focused on comprehensive economic reform, making those changes is simply off the table.

Making it a priority will mean reducing the number of elected Republicans determined to go the other direction in such matters. But it will also require electing leftist Democrats and changing the minds of a lot of already elected Democrats whose best efforts of late have been addressed at rearguard actions to protect gains we once thought were permanent. Getting better Democrats into place and making better Democrats of those already elected will be no easy task. But it's one essential to the future well-being of American workers. And it will take prodigious efforts, with both movement and electoral activists cooperating instead of pretending that they don't need each other to make the changes we so desperately need.

 

When we last checked in with former New York city mayor and past Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, he was screaming "911!" at passing cars while rattling a tin cup. Not much has changed since, but here's what he has to say about Presumptive Candidate Mitt:

“It’s a war that continues that we have to still be vigilant about,” Giuliani continued. “Governor Romney certainly understands that and has from the very beginning been a leader in the effort to make certain that America remains safe.”

Wait, what? Gov. Romney has been "a leader" in the effort to make America safe? Not to get all technical here, but how do ya figure, sport?

Was it the Bain Capital days that established Mitt Romney as an anti-terrorism leader? Did he issue a slew of makin'-America-safe resolutions as Massachusetts governor that the rest of us never quite heard about? Maybe it was the Olympics; there's a whole lot of ethnic people in the Olympics, so maybe that counts as foreign policy experience. Or his innovations in high-speed pet quarantine? Is his Cayman Islands money secretly an elite team of terrorist-thumping commandos that sneak out of their vaults every night to hunt down members of al Qaeda and give them really nasty paper cuts? Help us out, Rudy, you're going to have to be a bit more specific here.

Yes, Mitt's the nominee now, but I think any efforts to build up his foreign policy credentials maybe ought to be a wee less hamhanded than Giuliani's attempt. Given that Mitt's recent expressions of expertise in the subject consist of "whatever Obama did, I wouldn't have done that" and "don't hire a gay foreign policy spokesman because it makes my base very, very crabby," I'd say those attempting to flatter Mitt on the subject have their work cut out for them.

Forget about death panels—Stephen Colbert reminds us that when it comes to health care, Americans should be worried instead about debt panels:

Without exception, since 1960, the winner of the White House has won at least two of the Big Three battleground states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. It's hard to picture a presidential contest that doesn't revolve around those three states, and indeed, those three states are among the top four in Obama campaign field offices to date: Ohio (20), Virginia (17), Pennsylvania (14), and Florida (13).

Yet the rise of the Latino electorate is shifting the nation's balance of power, giving rise to a more electorally relevant Southwest—a combination of blistering population growth and pro-Democratic demographic shifts.

In 1960, the states of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona totalled 17 electoral votes. Today, they total 31. And while in 1960 Ohio and Pennsylvania had 57 electoral votes between the two, today that number is just 38 (though if you include Florida, the total has remained at a constant 67).

What this all means is that if Democrats sweep the competitive Southwestern states, Ohio, Penn and Florida become that much less important. Let's start with a base map, plus giving Obama Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. I gave Missouri to the GOP, and Wisconsin and Michigan to Obama because those are marginal swing states—if Obama wins Missouri, he's already crushed on the rest of the map, and vice a versa with Wisconsin and Michigan.

As you can see, sweeping those Southwestern states puts Obama just 17 electoral votes shy of victory, while Romney is a whopping 90 electoral votes out. Indeed, Romney could sweep the Big Three, and look what it does:
The race is still not decided, with Romney still 23 electoral votes shy of victory—something no single state will provide. At that point, it's a matter of math—several combinations do the trick. But note, Virginia has consistently given Obama some of his biggest polling margins to date. Romney would have to sweep North Carolina, Iowa and New Hampshire to win the race.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Obama will lose the Big Three, or that they're not important. They are still likely to be the hardest fought states this cycle. And I'm also not suggesting that Arizona is in the bag for Team Blue. It still leans Red. But changing population patterns and demographics (mostly Latinos) are evolving the electoral college map. There are new paths to victory.

And by broadening the playing field (Arizona this year, and Texas, Georgia and Montana in future cycles), and locking down old battlegrounds (Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and possibly Wisconsin and Michigan) the GOP's path to presidential victory becomes increasingly complicated.

The inability for Mitt Romney to even mock someone without screwing it up is getting a bit depressing to watch. I mean, please, Mitt:

"His new slogan is: Progress - no, forward. Forward! That's it. Progress would be better," Romney said, according to a pool report. "I must use that one myself, actually. Forward is his new slogan, and it's like, forward, what, over the cliff?"

"Ha ha ha! What a silly word Barack Obama is using! 'Progress!' Oh, I mean 'Forward,' what a ridiculous word! The word 'Progress' is an acceptable word to me. I am a fan of 'Progress.' You might even call me Progress-ive, so to speak, so much do I like momentum in the frontwardish directions. So long as it is called 'Progress,' which is good, and not 'Forward,' which is bad. Do I have that right yet? Yes, I think I have satisfactorily determined the relative value of those two words. Now give me your money."

This fellow is just agonizing to listen to. And he rose to the obvious bait so quickly; he knew that whatever Obama was for, he had to be against, and so if Obama uses a word in an ad, that word now has to be the Worstest Word Ever. So Obama chose "Forward" as a campaign slogan, and Mitt, reflexively, has to oppose it. Grr!

Well, at least he's not calling the word Marxist, which is what the conservative base has been reduced to. And speaking of reduced to, Karl Rove also rose to the bait:

Oh, what a card. You'd think that a guy whose administration screwed up two wars, wrecked the economy, and left historians scratching their heads as to what communicable disease could best be compared to the abomination of the Bush presidency would have the very good sense to shut his pie-hole when the grownups were talking, but I suppose if Bush administration officials were capable of feeling shame or remorse, we'd have heard of it by now.

Here's a question, though: Do you think Karl Rove really thinks Obama has been moving America "backwards," making it worse than it was under the Bush administration? Here's hoping he's just his usual shameless, ridiculous, lying-ass self, because if he really thinks of his old administration as being the better of the two, I can't even imagine what craptitudes he's dreaming a Mitt Romney administration could be goaded into. Simultaneous wars with Iran, India and three of Jupiter's nicer moons, perhaps, coupled with a new program to confiscate the paychecks of every American and toss them in a wood chipper.

Yes, I'm a fan of this new Obama slogan. I've had my differences with this administration, heaven knows, but "Forward" is already driving opponents to distraction. It's not quite as good as my own preferred slogan, "Obama '12: I believe America should not murder children," but I suppose seeing the Mitt Romney and Karl Rove ads objecting to that one might be a little too nauseating even for me. Because you know they'd do it.

The bracket thus far is here. Today's winner will face off in the second round against Romney's Etch-a-Sketch.

1. RON PAUL OPPOSES HONEST RAPES

Did you know that some rapes are such liars you just can't trust them?

MORGAN: You have two daughters. You have many granddaughters. If one of them was raped -- and I accept it's a very unlikely thing to happen -- but if they were, would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?

PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen....

Like all fierce opponents of abortion rights, Ron Paul stumbles when dealing with the issue of rape and incest. Because if abortion is truly murder, then there should be no justification for ending a pregnancy. But if a "shot of estrogen" (his attempt to avoid saying "morning after pill") is such a trivial procedure and one without moral qualms, then why work so hard to deny it to all women?

But that's just a boilerplate contradiction in the conservative war against choice. It was Paul's talk of "honest rape" that made this moment stand out. What exactly was he proposing? Hooking up the rape to a lie detector test? An adjudication board that would render legal judgments as to the veracity of the rape? Or as Kaili wondered, "Is this a job for PolitiFact, who can offer its services to rate rapes as true, mostly true or pants on fire?"

Again, Kaili:

What is also stunning about this interview is that Dr. Paul is admitting he would administer emergency contraception in the case of rape, but he refuses to use that terminology. See, Politician Paul knows that "pro-lifers" oppose emergency contraception because they believe, wrongly, that it is a method of abortion. Dr. Paul knows it isn't, but instead of using the words "emergency contraception" or "Plan B" or "morning-after pill," he says he would administer a "shot of estrogen."

Which is rather odd, considering that the various morning-after pills available contain other hormones. A "shot of estrogen" is not the standard emergency contraception medication. So either Dr. Paul doesn't actually know how emergency contraception works, or he simply prefers his own homemade brand. Either way, that's a pretty odd sort of treatment coming from a doctor.

Reminds me of this guy:
2. RICK SANTORUM IS AGAINST WELFARE FOR "BLAH" PEOPLE

On the campaign trail in Iowa:

I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.

Now that sort of thing plays great with conservatives, but not so great to a national audience. Thus, Santorum had to go into damage control. First, he blamed the comments on the documentary Waiting for Superman:

"I've seen that quote, I haven't seen the context in which that was made," Santorum told Pelley, of the Sunday remarks. "Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it? 'Waiting for Superman,' which was about black children and so I don't know whether it was in response and I was talking about that."

Then, he decided that it was just a "mumble":

“In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn't say ‘black.’ I started to say a word and sort of mumbled it and changed my thought. I don't recall saying black. No one in that audience heard me say that,” he said.

Then, finally, he settled on his final answer, which was that he was actually talking about those welfare-sucking blah people.

SANOTURM: I’ve looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video. In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.

And btw, this is all stupid because, you know, he's the black Martin Luther King:

You guys, you guys — it’s really sad that you are bringing this up. It’s just sad news. I’ve done more in the African-American communities as a Republican than any Republican in recent memory.”

Talk about a low bar.