Unemployment Dips to 5.6%

We have still more good news on the economic front.  The national unemployment rate has dropped to 5.6% or only two tenths of a percent above the 5.4% which Larry Elder ten years or so ago said was just about perfect, and “The lowest of the past three decades”.  Larry thus was not only willing to trash Bill Clinton, but even President Reagan, to make his point.  No need to tell you that thirty years ago today the unemployment rate under President Reagan was way higher than it is today, right after he’d been reelected.  We added 256,000 jobs last month, and seemingly other past months were recalculated upward.  But Norman Goldman was not an entirely happy camper.  You see the wage rate has dropped.  There used to be a law that people who got paid in wage per hourly rate- - were guaranteed time and a half for overtime.  It used to be over half the employees were covered.  Now the rate is really low and only is true if you’re earning $23,000 per year.  Norman Goldman wrangled with callers who wanted to argue over what constitutes full time employment.  Norman is right of course that you have to go by each situation covered by a particular law that address that specific issue.  For the Affordable Care Act under employee mandate the figure is thirty hours per week.  The republicans haven’t changed that one.  First the Republicans wanted a one year delay in the employee mandate.  After a while the President decided to give them what they wanted.  Only now they didn’t want it anymore and in fact sued the president for “unilaterally changing the law on his own”.  You can’t win for losing.  But this is the point.  If they raise the “full time” level to forty hours per week, it’s a whole lot easier for an employer to cut everybody back to 39 hours per week, as opposed to cutting everybody back to 29 hours per week.  Contrary to what people like Rush Limbaugh have said- - - this “employee hours cut-back” isn’t going on hardly at all.  There is only an anecdotal example here or there.  Of course if the employer doesn’t cover your Health Care, it just puts more of a burden on the tax payers at large to cover your expenses.  I thought the Republicans were against “burdening taxpayers” but consistency has never been their thing.

Sean Hannity is a guy who prides himself on the fact that he never lies.  For instance Sean Hannity says there is not ONE documented case of water contamination due to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.   Sean Hannity also claims that when these terrorist events occur with ISIS and Al Qaeda, that the Muslim community keeps silent and never says a word.  Sean says “They are no doubt intimidated by the leadership which means this poison of hatred has infiltrated the entire Faith”.   The trouble is Sean is lying.  I’ve read source after source that the Moslem Church indeed speaks out all the time about ISIS, but the corporate media in this country ignores them, the same way that they ignore a lot of constructive issues protesting that goes on among left wing groups.  Rush Limbaugh said very recently another related lie.  He said that there is not one documented case of reprisals against Mosques for terrorist acts committed in the name of Allah.  Again he is very wrong.  Three or so Mosques were targeted in and around Paris for this terrorist attack alone.  That’s one thing the corporate media DOES report are all the reprisals against Mosques in this country.  They will target people who aren’t even Muslims.  Such as those Seiks in Wisconsin.  Their temple was firebombed or whatever a couple of years ago, with anti Islamic graffiti all around.  I used to hear from Wally George and others that neither of the passengers riding with Rodney King that night were beaten.  The trouble is subsequent to that I heard one of the passengers had died from a beating administered at the hands of the LAPD.  Now I don’t know who is right.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that the source that reported the passenger had died- - had never heard the “no beatings” story.

Norm Goldman had an unusually good show today.  He talked at length about how the United States is “An Empire” but Americans, unlike the British, don’t fancy viewing their country as an “Empire”.  But we have aircraft carrier fleets, plural, all over the world, and “boots on the ground” on almost every continent.  ISIS, on the other hand, used to be confined to just two countries, which looked at pragmatically, would not be entirely be the worst thing to ever happen in world history.  (Selah)  There is some United States troop redistribution thing now going on in Europe involving closing some bases but overall not reducing any troops.  So it seems strange to Norm when China wants to “extend their sway of influence out into the Pacific a bit” and finds it odds that the US would protest this, as if no other nation were entitled to one square mile of extra territory because after all, we’re supposed to rule the entire planet.  Of course this morning we were all treated with live coverage of the two “stand offs” of terrorists holding hostages.  It seems as if the good guys won.  Those two brothers who were hold up in a print shop and holding one hostage, were killed.  And then there was another terrorist in a kosher market with all the pre Sabbath shoppers in there and fifteen were held as hostages.  Three of these hostages did not survive when they stormed the building.  But they now are saying that those three hostages had already been killed before the raid ever took place.  Now there is one woman still at large.  But the problem of course is, “You can’t kill an idea”.  This thing called karma has a way of catching up to you.  To come full circle- - Norman was saying that maybe we would have a more peaceful “Empire” to look over, if we didn’t bomb so many nations whose people end up hating us.  Well, I guess that’s too logical for most people.

This is Friday January 9, 2015 and Richard Nixon’s birthday.  I added two more paragraphs to that rather impulsive blog posting of last evening.  I’m not even sure what drove me to want to revisit the topic of the historicity of Christianity.  But today I again Googled Luigi Casciloli.   The Wikkipedia article was in Italian and I saw no quick buttons to hit to get a translation.  I looked at his own web site, which has very little on it.  However there is a nice “video’ of the King Crimson song “Court of the Crimson King”, which of course is very Moody-Bluesish.  But I came across a new site on “Jesus is a myth” that I had never seen quite that way before.  And there is rather exhaustive research on the subject.  What I found most impressive were not only the number of nineteenth century names - - a century known for its doubt on such things- - but also twentieth and 21^st century Thinkers on the subject.  A part of me thinks it is really petty to file a legal suit against the Catholic Church on this matter.  It’s kind of like suing your parents for fraud because they told you about Santa Clause, or getting mad at the kid for lying who said that he was in possession of dinosaur eggs.  After all - - that’s what kids do.  They tell stories and make up claims about themselves.  Actually I would almost be better served if I knew everything in the Bible was indisputably true.  That way I could more confidently go after these tea party people for being unchristian, and as a group they would be among the principle people that Jesus Christ would condemn today for their conduct, beliefs, and their rampant hypocracy.  When you think about it- - my mind works like this.  “If I can somehow demonstrate that my opponents are being unchristian in word or deed, I have a cause of action against them and I have the comfort of knowing that God approves of my conduct and condemns theirs.