The Department of Labor reported Thursday that yet another 2.1 million Americans, on a seasonally adjusted basis, applied for initial state unemployment benefits in the week that ended May 23. Counting these new applications makes for a total of 40.5 million workers who have filed for initial benefits over the past 10 weeks. Add in the millions of Americans who are receiving […]
In a story they broke this morning, Jeff Stein and Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post report that the Trump regime has decided it will not deliver economic projections in the traditional “mid-session review” of the budget this summer. Budget experts the reporters interviewed said they didn’t know of any time in the past half century when an administration has […]
The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe that welcomed the pilgrims in 1620 has been fighting with the federal government over the removal of the tribe’s 321 acres of communal land from trust status. "One of the worst written documents I've ever read from any government agency": A federal judge trashed the Trump administration for changing course on […]
Still bent on opting out of treaties and international programs that the United States initiated or in which it has been a key participant, Donald Trump plans to withdraw from the multilateral Treaty on Open Skies, according to senior White House officials. The treaty, which allows signatory nations to overfly each other for unarmed surveillance, was first proposed 65 years ago in […]
The Department of Labor reported Thursday that 2.38 million workers filed new claims for unemployment benefits in the week ending May 16. That brings the total count for the past nine weeks to a seasonally adjusted 38.3 million. Add to this the unprecedented 4.8 million that the government defines as having left the labor force in the past two months—but who say they want a job. […]
Democratic Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed funding cuts to deal with what has been projected as a revenue deficit of $54 billion as a consequence of the economic response to the coronavirus. The state’s carbon cap-and-trade program pays for climate programs, which includes incentives for buying clean cars, electric buses, and off-road freight equipment, but as with […]
As first reported by Meridith McGraw and Hahal Toosi at Politico, Donald Trump has purged yet another inspector general, State Department IG Steve Linick. Like those forced out before him, Linick is being dumped for performing his watchdog job, which was causing discomfort in the White House where loyalty is only surpassed by flattery for anyone who […]
The new banner represents the first branch of the military initiated since the U.S. Air Force was separated from the Army in 1947. The new missile, Trump claims, will be 17 times faster than anything the Chinese or Russians have. As my colleague and civilian rocket enthusiast Mark Sumner wrote in January about U.S. research into […]
The deluge of bad numbers since the coronavirus struck is immense and growing. The tally that matters most—the body count from the virus—is headed for 90,000 by the end of the weekend and who knows where by the end of the month, to say nothing of the end of the year. These frightful losses are […]
Showing once again how little the Trump regime cares about the rule of law, according to unnamed insiders, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chief Andrew Wheeler will in the coming weeks defy a court order to set a drinking water standard for a toxic chemical known to cause fetal and infant brain damage. The deadline for the standard under the […]
As expected, the Department of Labor Thursday announced another tsunami of new claims for unemployment insurance benefits, a seasonally adjusted 2.98 million of them in the week ending May 9. That is slightly less than the previous week’s tally. But since coronavirus-related layoffs began in the second week of March, 36.5 million people have made new benefit claims. By […]
Economic analysts are forecasting that on Thursday we’ll see that another 2.7 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance last week. If they’re right, it would mean 36.3 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the nine weeks ending May 9. Even if those millions were the only Americans to have lost jobs […]
Monday, before leaving his outdoor press conference at the White House in a huff because of a couple of “nasty” women reporters doing their jobs, Donald J. Trump—flanked on both sides of the podium by signs claiming “America Leads the World in Testing”—said that “we have met the moment, and we have prevailed” on testing for the coronavirus. […]
Calvin Woodward and Hope Yen at the Associated Press introduced their updated fact-check story of the squatter in the White House Saturday morning with these words: “Truth can be a casualty when President Donald Trump talks about deaths from the coronavirus in the United States.” By Meteor Blades True enough, although they could have ended that […]
Mayors of megacities that are members of C40, a network pledged to addressing climate change, are saying that going back to the old normal in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is not a suitable approach to recovery. The organization represents more than 750 million people and approved a “statement of principles” committing them to ensuring that their recovery plans are driven by […]