The New York Times:
“The June jobs report — showing 288,000 new hires, the unemployment rate down to 6.1 percent and positive revisions to the April and May jobs numbers — gave the White House and congressional Democrats grounds for optimism.”
Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics: “All the signs are pointing toward strong payroll growth…It’s increasingly very difficult for the naysayers to argue that it’s not very good out there.” Shepherdson predicted that by November, the unemployment rate would be below 6 percent. Despite the usual cautionary notes about the jobs report being just a snapshot and the President’s lagging approval ratings, adds Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “An improving economy is a twofer…It raises the president’s approval ratings, altering the environment in ways that help us, and directly improves the prospects of each Democratic candidate.”
Booman, in responding to the psychotic columnist Maureen Dowd‘s latest incoherent screed lamenting the days of our nation seeing itself as the undefeatable cowboy John Wayne are now gone, makes a very good point:
We were disabused of that notion in Indochina before I was even born. We ought to have learned it in Korea.
That feckless North Korea fought us, JOHN WAYNE’S AMERICA, to a stalemate at the height of our military power (right after World War II). Some jungle guerilla communists outright defeated America in the 60’s and early 70’s. And yet now, NOW, is when the nation is mourning the loss of our greatness and infallibility? Hahaha. All of these pundits live in a world that is completely unrecognizable from our own. Perhaps it is time they stop inhaling their own shit.
Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal:
It was a revealing convergence Monday when the five-member conservative Supreme Court majority delivered the Hobby Lobby contraception decision even as President Obama announced that House Republicans had officially shelved immigration reform.
Both disputes reaffirmed the GOP’s identity as the champion of the forces most resistant to the profound demographic and cultural dynamics reshaping American life—and Democrats as the voice of those who most welcome these changes.
And both clashes captured a parallel shift: While Republicans took the offense on most cultural arguments through the late 20th century, now Democrats from Obama on down are mostly pressing these issues, confident that they represent an expanding majority of public opinion.
Veteran pollster Stanley B. Greenberg captures this almost unprecedented Democratic assurance when he declares flatly: “Republicans are on the losing side of all of these trends.”
Look, the liberals have won the Culture War. Marriage Equality will go nation-wide next year if the Supreme Court takes up any of the pending cases. And even if they don’t, we are five years away from every state having it by judicial or legislative order. The Hobby Lobby decision has been described as a last ditch rear guard decision that may in fact advance the liberal side rather than the conservative.
From Ha’aretz, pointing out that terrorists can be Jewish and Israeli.
“Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not ‘Jewish extremists.’ They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of ‘the Jewish state’: Those for whom every Arab is a bitter enemy, simply because they are Arab; those who were silent at the Beitar Jerusalem games when the team’s fans shouted ‘death to Arabs’ at Arab players; those who call for cleansing the state of its Arab minority, or at least to drive them out of the homes and cities of the Jews.
No less responsible for the murder are those who did not halt, with an iron hand, violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, and who failed to investigate complaints ‘due to lack of public interest.’ The term ‘Jewish extremists’ actually seems more appropriate for the small Jewish minority that is still horrified by these acts of violence and murder. But they too recognize, unfortunately, that they belong to a vengeful, vindictive Jewish tribe whose license to perpetrate horrors is based on the horrors that were done to it.
Prosecuting the murderers is no longer sufficient. There must be a cultural revolution in Israel. Its political leaders and military officers must recognize this injustice and right it. They must begin raising the next generation, at least, on humanist values, and foster a tolerant public discourse. Without these, the Jewish tribe will not be worthy of its own state.
Finally, Think Progress has the take down of Governor Perry and his lies about immigration by ABC’s Martha Raddatz. Indeed, during this current refugee crisis on the border and how it informs the immigration debate, every single conservative and every single Republican must answer this question: if our border is so insecure, then how is it that we have captured all these children and teens trying to cross it? If the border was as insecure as Republicans describe, we would not know about all these kids because they would stream across the border undetected.