Friday Open Thread [7.5.13]

Pope Francis clears John Paul II for sainthood, decides to canonize John XXIII without a miracle. Yes, in order to be canonize, you need two independent miracles that defy scientific or medical explanation. In John Paul II’s case, two people prayed to him to cure their diseases, and they were cured.

Jobs report: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that, seasonally adjusted, the private sector added 202,000 new jobs in June while government shed 7,000. The official unemployment rate remained steady at 7.6 percent. The private sector has now added more jobs than it has lost for 39 consecutive months.
The monthly tally makes no distinction between full-time and part-time jobs, nor does it consider how much those jobs pay or provide in non-wage benefits compared with the ones that have been lost. June is also tough for the BLS to measure accurately because of the large number of youth who enter the job market that month. The 175,000 jobs gain the BLS reported for May was revised to 195,000. Gains in April were revised from 149,000 to 199,000.

Typical Republican attitude:

“The senators are your voice here on all matters. They are the only ones we’ll be hearing from today.”

— North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest (R) to women in the Senate gallery protesting surprise abortion legislation passed last week. Hell, he might as well as replaced the word Senators with men, and his meaning is just the same.

NATIONAL–RECENT SUPREME COURT DECISIONS–ABC/Washington Post: 56% approve of the Supreme Court’’s decision providing legally married same-sex couples with the same federal benefits given to other married couples. 41% are evil bigots. 51% support the Supreme Court’s decision to a lower court ruling that allows gay marriage in California stand (the effect of the Prop 8 ruling), while 45% do not. There is a 3.5% margin of error on this poll, so perhaps that explains the 4-5% difference between these two results. Or perhaps fewer approve of the Prop 8 ruling because they are smarter than the poll question and know the Supreme Court really just punted the issue rather than address the merits of the case directly.

Meanwhile, only 33% approve of the Voting Rights decision. 51% disapprove. Imagine that. People don’t like it when you deny the vote to people.

But the internals here are more interesting:

The thing that surprised me the most in the poll was that on the question of voting rights, southerners were actually more opposed to the court’s decision (53 percent opposition) than the country as a whole (51 percent opposition). Moreover, older people were more opposed to the ruling than younger people. 48 percent of people under 40 opposed the ruling, but 54 percent of 40-64 year olds and 52 percent of people older than 65 opposed it. Basically, people old enough to remember why we passed the Voting Rights Act in the first place are more likely to support it.

Perhaps that’s because older people actually remember real poll taxes and Jim Crow laws. Well, the young people are about to get some experience with wherever the Racist Republican Party is in power.