WASHINGTON -- New claims for unemployment benefits rose sharply last week to 386,000, the biggest jump in more than a year as the labor market continued to show signs of struggling amid the weakening recovery.Stuck in low gear alright.
The increase of 34,000 in initial jobless claims came a week after a dramatic drop to 350,000, the lowest level in more than four years. But that figure now looks like an outlier amid an avalanche of other data that show the economic recovery is stuck in low gear.
President Obama, you’re killing us out here.
Bulgarian media have named the suicide bomber who blew up the bus with Israeli tourists on Wednesday, killing seven. The terrorist is alleged to be Mehdi Ghezali, an Algerian-Swedish Islamist who spent two years in Guantanamo Bay.
With a black baseball cap pulled tight over a mop of stringy long hair and a patchy, close-cropped beard, Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali looked more like a Metallica roadie than a disciple of Ayman al-Zawahiri. He addressed the scrum of reporters in a clipped, heavily accented Swedish and accused the American government of wrongly detaining him for three years and "physically and mentally" torturing him. A book about his experiences was in the works; a documentary crew, cobbling together a film about American human rights abuses, had requested an audience; and his legal team was plotting a lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld. It was 2004, and Ghezali was a free man.More the link.
In late 2001, Ghezali, a Swedish national, had been detained during the battle at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, handed over to the American military, and sent to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. According to his lawyers, he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he spoke none of the local languages, Ghezali told his captors, in the midst of the Taliban's retreat into the mountainous hinterlands of Afghanistan, he had crossed that country's border with Pakistan to study Islam.
After an intense lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson--and a vague promise that the country's intelligence services would keep a watchful eye on him--Ghezali was delivered to Sweden (on the government's private Gulfstream jet). The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter noted that Ghezali had achieved "rock star status" upon returning to his homeland, a native victim of America's rapacious imperialism. And after two-plus years in isolation, the emotionally fragile former prisoner would be happy to discover "that a majority of Swedes were glad that he was home."
That his story was threaded with head-scratching omissions and inexplicable gaps in chronology--the years in Cuba were, apparently, not enough time to concoct a consistent narrative--seemed to have little effect on his credibility. To his supporters, he was merely a bit player in a larger morality play. But even his most credulous supporters winced when, during a press conference in his hometown of Örebro, Ghezali offered the following opinion of Osama bin Laden: "I don't know him as a person and therefore can't pass judgment on him. I don't believe what the Americans say about him."
Israel accused Iran of orchestrating the bombing of a bus packed with Israeli tourists in a Bulgarian resort town Wednesday that killed at least six people and injured 30 others, adding to tensions across the Middle East.
Fire engulfed the bus and nearby vehicles in an airport parking lot in Burgas, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, sending up plumes of dark smoke. Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said his Bulgarian counterpart told him a bomb was planted on the bus.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised retaliation.
"This is an Iranian terror attack that is spreading throughout the entire world," he said. "Israel will respond with force."
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows Mitt Romney attracting 47% of the vote, while President Obama earns 46%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) more are undecided.
The collapse of blue California is picking up speed. California’s largest college, which enrolls 90,000 students, faces closure within a year unless the school can essentially reinvent itself. Bad administration, wasteful personnel spending, poor organization, a lack of strategic vision and a series of budget cuts as the state of California frantically hacks at its own budget deficit have brought City College of San Francisco to the brink.Ain't it a shame?
As the Mercury News reports, the college has been ordered to prepare for closure by next March even as administrators and politicians search for ways to keep the school open. Threatening to pull the plug is the state’s accrediting commission that supervises junior and community colleges. Without major reform, the commission says, the College will lose its accreditation in March of 2013 and without accreditation it would lose access to the state funding that keeps it alive....
How exactly the school got itself into so much trouble is hard to figure out. It appears that both the administration and the board were incompetent and out of their depth; there are reports that board members (who get paid) were often no-shows at meetings. 92 percent of the total income was spent on personnel expenses; programs don’t seem to be well thought out and no overall strategy or shaping vision guided a school in which, apparently, the inmates took over the asylum and ran it into the ground....
But CCSF’s problems point to an important local failure: deep blue San Francisco is not doing a good job at helping low income people. The noble rhetoric about justice and compassion that liberal politicians so eloquently express doesn’t seem matched by particularly inspiring results. To let the community college that offers low income people their most hopeful route of escape from the poverty trap fall into ruin is not the mark of a compassionate or justice seeking political movement.
Declining confidence in the nation’s economic prospects appears to be the most powerful force influencing voters as the presidential election gears up, undercutting key areas of support for President Obama and helping give his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, an advantage on the question of who would better handle the nation’s economic challenges, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.Continue reading.
Despite months of negative advertising from Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies seeking to define Mr. Romney as out of touch with the middle class and representative of wealthy interests, the poll shows little evidence of any substantial nationwide shift in attitudes about Mr. Romney.
But with job growth tailing off since spring and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, wondering aloud whether the labor market is “stuck in the mud,” the poll showed a significant shift in opinion about Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, with 39 percent now saying they approved and 55 percent saying they disapproved.
In the Times/CBS poll in April, when the economy seemed to be gaining momentum, 44 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved.
For all of the Washington chatter that Mr. Romney’s campaign has seemed off-kilter amid attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital and his unwillingness to release more of his tax returns, the poll shows that the race remains essentially tied, with 45 percent saying they would vote for Mr. Romney if the election were held now and 43 percent saying they would vote for Mr. Obama.
Including voters who lean toward a particular candidate, Mr. Romney has 47 percent to Mr. Obama’s 46 percent.
Historically, the best predictor of a president’s re-election chances has been approval rating. Since World War II, every president with an approval rating at least a few points above 50 percent has won re-election. Every president with a rating clearly below 50 percent has lost.That said, these are national polling numbers, and the election's going to come down to the decisions across a few battleground states. While the Times survey has some danger warnings for Romney, the race is essentially tied. As always, the trick will be for Romney to deflect the left's unscrupulous smears and regain the narrative.
Far be it from me to be intolerant or judgmental, you understand, but when I check Memeorandum and see a story like this . . .More at that link.
Web campaign targets Romney’s ‘extreme anti-LGBT agenda’
A pair of liberal super PACs are teaming up on a new Web campaign that accuses Mitt Romney of advancing an “extreme anti-LGBT agenda” that would make life worse for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans.
Each time an Obama apologist tells you that Bain Capital is the root of all evil in the economy, remind them that President Obama has accepted $34,250 from employees of Bain Capital so far this cycle.Jonathan Lavine is still at Bain. He's listed as a Managing Director & Chief Investment Officer."
Most of the donors are senior executives who were with Bain when it made all of those allegedly controversial decisions from 1999 to 2002 that the Obama campaign is so focused upon.
Obama’s donors include managing director Joshua Bekenstein (at Bain since it began, including the Romney years); chief compliance officer Alan Halfenger; managing director & chief investment officer Jonathan Lavine (an Obama “bundler” of large donations from multiple donors), who has been with Bain since 1993; managing director Seth Meisel (began in 1999); managing director Mark Nunnelly (began in 1993); managing director Stephen Pagliuca (began in 1989); deputy general counsel Ranesh Ramanathan; and managing director Ted Berk (joined in 1997).
Of the above, Halfenger, Lavine, Meisel, Nunnelly, Pagliuca, and Ramanathan have donated the legal maximum of $5,000; two separate payments of $2,500 to Obama’s primary and general-election campaigns.
Obama raised almost $125,000 from Bain Capital employees, including three who gave the maximum amount of cash the law allows. One of the donors was even helping the campaign raise money from other sources. "$125,000 is a lot of money from people who work at a company the Obama campaign and its allies vilify," Bash pointed out.Well, the bloggers are back on the story now. And CNN's actually been doing some solid reporting on the Bain lies this last week, so we'll see how it goes.
It is one thing for Obama to be a hypocrite by knocking Romney and Bain Capital while raising money from the financial sector and from the head of a private equity firm. It is an even bigger story, however, if he railed against Bain's practices and yet raised money directly from Bain employees. That is exactly what Bash reported, and yet that story has been largely – if not entirely – ignored by CNN.
Although CNN questioned the Obama campaign's attack ad on Romney and Bain, which first aired May 14, they did not report his donations from Bain employees in the hours after the ad broke.
Visitors to the Kansas City Royals Hall of Fame, beyond left field at Kauffman Stadium, can watch a short film about the history of the franchise. Nowhere in the film is the name Don Denkinger mentioned.There's video from the 2010 blown call here.
Denkinger was the first-base umpire for Game 6 of the 1985 World Series between the Royals and the St. Louis Cardinals. He missed a crucial call at first base that sparked a ninth-inning comeback for the Royals, who won the championship the next night. It was probably the most significant missed call in baseball history.
“I went down to the Cardinal clubhouse, and I was on the platforms and everything for the Denkinger call,” said the broadcaster Tim McCarver, then working his first World Series, for ABC. “And a horde came out of the woodwork to disassemble what I was standing on. So I figured I’ve got to get out of here, because they are actually moving the stuff underneath me.”
Perhaps the Royals were due for such a cosmic break; they had reached the postseason five times without winning before 1985 and have not returned. In any case, they benefited from the so-called human element, the imperfection in umpiring that baseball seems so eager to preserve.
All these years since the Denkinger call, baseball still resists the wide implementation of instant replay. Home run calls have been reviewable since 2009, but blatant mistakes by umpires have become so pervasive that even “The Simpsons” recently poked fun at them.
Commissioner Bud Selig should be lauded, to a point, for proceeding carefully with technology and wanting to preserve the traditional rhythms and pacing of the game. But Selig also seemed out of touch Tuesday when he insisted that nobody really wanted expanded replay, anyway.
“We’ve added some more, we’re going to continue to do that,” Selig said. “But I can tell you very candidly, the appetite for more instant replay in the sport is very low. Everyone. There are some people who think we’ve maybe gone too far already.”
It is hard to accept that, though, when viewers at home clearly see Todd Helton being awarded a putout while standing three feet off first base, or Dewayne Wise getting credit for a catch he never made.
The recent missed call with the most historical impact, of course, was the one that cost Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game in 2010. The first-base umpire who blew that call, Jim Joyce, worked the same spot at the All-Star Game on Tuesday.
