The U.S. economy added 187,000 jobs in July, signaling a healthy gain but a cool-down in the labor market, fueling optimism about the economy’s ability to avert a downturn this year.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Friday, near 50-year lows.
Combined with June’s downward revised jobs gain of 185,000, the past two months have marked the weakest level of job growth since December 2020, but the jobs numbers are still considered solid. May’s job gains also were revised downward notably in Friday’s report. That added to growing evidence that the labor market has softened in response to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow down the economy with more than a year’s worth of interest rate hikes.
The combination of continued solid job growth along with a marked easing of inflation, which was 3 percent in June, has pushed aside fears of a recession anytime soon.
What people "feel" about the economy and what the macro signs are indicating haven't been in sync for some time. Work harder, Democrats; think harder, voters.
In an interview released on Thursday, John Eastman restated that he’s an unreconstructed believer that the 2020 election was stolen by the left.
Chairman of the Claremont Institute’s Board of Directors Tom Klingenstein conducted the interview, which was released in three parts, the last of which was published on Thursday.
Klingenstein asked Eastman whether he would have acted in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, referencing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s election from Richard Nixon.
Eastman replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 represented an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”
The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to reference the Declaration of Independence, saying that “our founders lay this case out.”
“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”
“So that’s the question,” he added. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”
Eastman (a.k.a., co-conspirator #2 in the Special Counsel's indictment) is facing disbarment in California, which will be the least of his problems once he's indicted for his role in the January 6 coup plot. This little putschist power remora need to get some serious jail time.
... If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority. [snip]
To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.
“I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.
A gerrymandered Republican legislature doesn't want an issue enshrining abortion rights to pass in Ohio, so it wants to raise the bar for ballot initiatives from 50% to 60% before the election. Sounds legit.
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