…as the president might ask. Nope, they’re not. This EPI economic snapshot points out that real hourly and weekly earnings not only fell last month, but they have now fallen in six out of the last seven months. All the basic data on these trends can be found in this nifty new release from Bureau of Labor Statistics on “Real Earnings in June 2004“. And there is a substantial article on the real wage decline problem in today’s New York Times. The trend that dared not speak its name is starting to be heard.
Note that the 1.1 percent drop in real hourly earnings in June is actually the largest drop in hourly earnings since mid-1991, when Bush’s father was at the nation’s helm.
I think I’m starting to detect a pattern here……
Dude, Kerry/Edwards IS a cross overticket. Policy-wise, Kerry is a Reaganite. That he is successfully painted as a liberal just shows how far to the right we’ve gone.
Out here in working-class Republican Western Colorado, people seem to be getting irritated by the endless bad news from Iraq and the high gasoline prices … still $2 a gallon.
If the Democrats had a cross-over ticket — say, Clark/Edwards, this place would be deserting Bush in droves …
And this is major Bush country!
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
Kerry a Reaganite? Are you out of your mind?
Check this out: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Click on US Primaries 2004
Dude, Kerry/Edwards IS a cross overticket. Policy-wise, Kerry is a Reaganite. That he is successfully painted as a liberal just shows how far to the right we’ve gone.
Out here in working-class Republican Western Colorado, people seem to be getting irritated by the endless bad news from Iraq and the high gasoline prices … still $2 a gallon.
If the Democrats had a cross-over ticket — say, Clark/Edwards, this place would be deserting Bush in droves …
And this is major Bush country!
I’m sending this to Kerry.