Month: December 2014

The headlines in the New York Times this morning:

• U.S. Economy Added 321,000 Jobs in November; Unemployment Rate Is 5.8%: The gain was the largest monthly jump in payrolls in nearly three years, and average hourly earnings surged 0.4 percent, twice what analysts expected.
• More Jobs and Higher Wages: Recovery Starts to Hit Home: Employers added 321,000 jobs in November, echoing other positive economic data recently and far exceeding analysts’ expectations that payrolls would increase by 230,000.
• These Are the Best Jobs Numbers in Months, Maybe Years: The increase in jobs is good, but the hints that wages are starting to rise is even more so.

Even the reliably Republican Washington Post was forced to report the good news:

• Data put U.S. on track for best job growth in years: The economy added 321,000 jobs in Nov., according to government data, in a sign that the labor market is returning to pre-recession health.
• This is what a real recovery looks like: The economy added 321,000 jobs in November: It was good news all around as the economy added 321,000 jobs in November, 44,000 more in revisions, and workers even got small raises.

Despite the best efforts by Tea-Publican insurrectionists and economic terrorists in the Congress and statehouses to sabotage any economic recovery over the past six years to prevent President Obama from claiming victory in turning around an economy that these Tea-Publicans quite literally blew up with their failed economic policies and nearly destroyed our financial system and the world’s economy, resulting in the Bush Great Recession (actually a depression) just a few short years ago in 2008, the economic rescue policies enacted during Obama’s first two years in office under a Democratic Congress, and the tax increases on the two percent he negotiated after his reelection and the “fiscal cliff” hostage taking by the GOP  in 2013 are working nonetheless.

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The high priest of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norm Ornstein, weighs in on the U.S. Supreme Court decision to hear Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, in the National Journal. The Pernicious Effects of Gerrymandering:

Almost invariably, whenever I speak about our polarized politics, the first or second question I get is about redistricting. Most Americans who know that our political system is not working the way it is supposed to don’t know what specifically is wrong. But gerrymandering is something that clearly stands out for many. That is true even for Bill Clinton, who spoke about polarization and dysfunction at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative and singled out gerrymandering as a prime cause.

The reality, as research has shown, is that the problem is more complicated than that. The “big sort,” in journalist Bill Bishop’s term, where Americans increasingly concentrate in areas where they are surrounded by like-minded people, is a major factor in the skewing, and the homogeneity, of districts. Other partisan residential patterns, including the fact that Democrats tend to live in more high-density urban areas, while Republicans tend to cluster in suburban and rural enclaves, matter. And the Senate, which represents states, not districts, is almost as polarized as the House.

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