May Jobs Report - Terrible

As I stood on the set of CNN American Morning, I was nearly speechless as Christine Romans scribbled down the Bureau of Labor Statistics results for last month. The May Jobs report was terrible. Yes, there were 431,000 new jobs created, but don't fall for this head fake. Of the jobs created, a whopping 411,000 were census workers hired on a temporary basis by Uncle Sam.

Let's put that into perspective: the U.S. economy needs to add something in the neighborhood of 125,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with new entrants to the work force and analysts believe that it will take a bunch of 250,000+ jobs a month to really put a dent in the unemployment rate. This was a terrible report.

Adding to the concern: those census workers who were happy to find income even on a temporary basis, will be let go in the coming months. In fact starting in June, the impact of the Census on the payroll report will be negative.

The other area that is worrisome is the stubbornly high number of long-term unemployed. There are 6.8 million people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, which constitutes 46% of the 15 million total unemployed. Did I mention that this was a terrible report? - CBS News Story

Obama Team Attacks Arizona Immigration Law

The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court decision that upheld Arizona's right to punish employers for hiring illegal immigrants.

The Arizona law gives the state the right to suspend or terminate business licenses.

"If you hire

a person in this country illegally knowingly, you'll lose your license. First offense, 10 days. Second offense, revocation, never to do business in the state of Arizona again," said Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, a Republican who helped draft the new controversial Arizona law that cracks down on illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration apparently worries letting that law stand would leave in place a precedent that states have a legitimate role in enforcing immigration laws – a notion the administration fiercely opposes.

"The argument that the Justice Department is making here, is you know, the fundamental question, which is where does state authority begin and end when it comes to federal immigration law?" said Benjamin Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council.

The Arizona statue relies on a law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1986, which made clear federal law preempts the states on immigration – but left one exception: "The provisions of this section preempt any state or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ unauthorized aliens."

"Congress said very clearly that licensing and similar laws can be used to impose consequences on employers who hire unauthorized aliens at the state level," said Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. "And that's exactly what Arizona did."

Oddly enough, the law in question was signed in 2007 by then-Gov. Janet Napolitano, now Obama's Homeland Security secretary. - FOX News Story

Jobs Numbers Look Good - But They really Aren't

WASHINGTON -- A wave of census hiring lifted payrolls by 431,000 in May, but job creation by private companies grew at the slowest pace since the start of the year. The unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent as people gave up searching for work.

The Labor Department's new employment snapshot released Friday suggested that outside of the burst of hiring of temporary census workers by the federal government many private employers are wary of bulking up their work forces.

That indicates the economic recovery can only plod along and won't have the energy to quickly bring relief to millions of unemployed Americans.

Virtually all the job creation in May came from the hiring of 411,000 census workers. Such hiring peaked in May and will begin tailing off in June.

By contrast, hiring by private employers, the backbone of the economy, slowed sharply. They added just 41,000 jobs, down from 218,000 in April and the fewest since January. - FOX News Story

Obama Transparency - Back Room Deals

The White House faced fresh questions over back-room dealmaking after the White House acknowledged one of President Obama's top advisers had suggested to a Democratic candidate the potential for an administration

job in lieu of challenging the candidate whom the president favored in the Colorado Senate race.

Former Colorado House of Representatives Speaker Andrew Romanoff on Wednesday night released a copy of an e-mail in which White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina described three federal international development jobs that might be available to him if he were not challenging Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination.

Click here to read the e-mail from Messina to Romanoff.

"He added that he could not guarantee my appointment to any of these positions," Romanoff said in a statement. "At no time was I promised a job, nor did I request Mr. Messina's assistance in obtaining one."

Earlier in the day, a White House official said no formal offer was ever made and insisted there was nothing inappropriate in the contacts -- rhetoric similar to the explanation given last week when the White House admitted it orchestrated a job offer to Senate candidate Joe Sestak in the Pennsylvania primary. - FOX News Story

Obama Administration Answering More Questions of Job Offers

The White House acknowledged having made overtures to Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff about a possible administration appointment Thursday, the morning after the former state legislator said White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina offered to consider Romanoff for three posts as an alternative to his Senate campaign.

In a statement released at 6:25 a.m., press secretary Robert Gibbs said Messina reached out to Romanoff to see if it would be possible to steer him away from a primary challenge to appointed Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, and that Romanoff had applied previously for a position at USAID during the presidential transition.

"Andrew Romanoff applied for a position at USAID during the Presidential transition. He filed this application through the Transition on-line process. After the new administration took office, he followed up by phone with White House personnel," Gibbs said. "Jim Messina called and emailed Romanoff last September to see if he was still interested in a position at USAID, or if, as had been reported, he was running for the US Senate. Months earlier, the President had endorsed Senator Michael Bennet for the Colorado seat, and Messina wanted to determine if it was possible to avoid a costly battle between two supporters." - Politico Story

Thank You Soldiers

Obama's Rookie Mistakes Could Help Take Down Dems

Bill Clinton’s picture is again a fixture on cable news.

Republicans are sternly demanding a special prosecutor.

And legal commentators are bickering over the finer points of federal criminal statutes on bribery and graft.

It feels like 1997 — but it’s 2010. And Barack Obama can’t be happy.

The White House’s confirmation Friday that it enlisted former President Bill Clinton in an effort to get Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary has sent the regular players in Washington’s scandal industry to their battle stations — to pick over the very sort of insider special dealing that Obama had promised to make a thing of the past.

“That’s not the image he wants to project right now with all the things that are going on,” said Mark Rozell, a George Mason University professor who has written at length on the Clinton-era scandals.

The use of Clinton as the conduit to offer Sestak an advisory board position is like catnip for cable television and for Republicans who have plenty of experience painting the former president as ethically challenged.

“I’m sure there’s substantial precedent for an administration to subtly suggest to a potential candidate, ‘Maybe you’d like to step aside.’ But [the fact that] this controversy involves a former president who just happens to be married to a member of his Cabinet just moves this to a whole different level,” Rozell said. “Clinton’s administration was involved in a number of ethics controversies and investigations just like this. ... This looks like a rookie administration type of mistake.” - Politico Story

Obama on The Hot Seat with Sestak Job Offer

President Obama said at his press conference today that he "can assure the public that nothing improper took place" in conversations between the White House and Rep. Joe Sestak, who suggested earlier this year he was offered a White House job in exchange for dropping his primary challenge against Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter.

Sestak stayed in the race and eventually defeated Specter, at which point Republicans made a renewed push for the White House and Sestak to reveal the nature of the conversations.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa, who has been pressing this issue for months, called for a special prosecutor in April. He alleges that the White House may have violated anti-bribery provisions of the federal criminal code as well as prohibitions on government officials interfering in elections and using federal jobs for a political purpose if it made the offer.

(Credit: AP)

Yesterday, the seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee joined that call, and some Democrats, among them Sen. Dick Durbin and Rep. Anthony Weiner, have called on the White House to make clear exactly what took place. - CBS News Story

Small Donors Support Republicans over Democrats

For the first time in a decade, Republican candidates for Congress are raising more than Democrats from small donors.

GOP candidates for the House and Senate this year have raised $70 million from small donors, compared with $44 million brought in by Democratic candidates, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance data.

The trend is another sign that Republicans have turned their political momentum into money. Reports covering the first quarter had shown that GOP candidates were closing the gap or exceeding Democrats in key races and that corporations have started to shift behind the party.

The giving also fits a pattern in which small contributors loyal to the opposition are more motivated to give while their party is out of power. The last time Republicans received more small donations than Democrats was during the 1998 midterms, when Democrat Bill Clinton held the presidency.

In suburban Detroit, for example, 70 percent of the $450,000 raised by Republican House candidate Rocky Raczkowski has come in checks of less than $200.

"We have our own MoveOn dot Rocky," said Raczkowski, who is competing in the GOP primary and hopes to face freshman Democratic Rep. Gary Peters. "These aren't rich people, they are just committed -- and angry." - CBS News Story

Obama Approval across the Arab World is Declining quickly

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Taking back some of the gains U.S. leadership enjoyed in 2009, four out of six Arab League countries Gallup has surveyed each year since 2008 are now less approving of U.S. leadership than they were in fall 2009. Egyptians' approval ratings have declined the most since last fall (18 percentage points), followed by Algerians' (13 points). Approval did not decline significantly in Iraq or the Palestinian Territories as the changes are within the margin of error. - Gallup Poll

The most telling in this poll is that Obama hasn't been able to sustain the relations in many Arab Nations. What is worse, is that it is lower in Iraq than it was in 2008.