links for 2009-06-08

The White House says America's employment picture is worse than the Obama administration had anticipated just a few months ago. The somber admission follows the latest jobless report showing the highest unemployment rate the United States has seen in more than 25 years.

U.S. unemployment jumped a half percent in May, to 9.4 percent prompting this comment by Austan Goolsbee, a member of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors:

"The economy clearly has gotten substantially worse from the initial predictions that were being made, not just by the White House, but by all of the private sector," said Austan Goolsbee.

If the Oval Office incident was meant as a lighthearted moment, it also exposed the underlying tensions that have gripped Mr. Obama’s economic advisers as they have struggled with the gravest financial crisis since the Depression, according to several dozen interviews with administration officials and others familiar with the internal debates.

By all accounts, much of the tension derives from the president’s choice of the brilliant but sometimes supercilious Mr. Summers to be the director of the National Economic Council, making him the policy impresario of the team. The widespread assumption, from Washington to Wall Street, was that the job would be Mr. Summers’s way station until the president could name him chairman of the Federal Reserve when Ben S. Bernanke’s term expires early next year.

Labour also lost a seat in Wales, a traditional stronghold, where its share of the vote slumped 12 points to 20 percent and it was beaten into second place by the centre-right Conservatives.

Losing a seat to the BNP will give fresh ammunition to Brown's critics in the Labour Party after a traumatic week in which six senior ministers quit the government, one of whom called on Brown to quit and said he was an electoral liability.

Rebels among Labour members of parliament (MPs) are said to be canvassing support for a letter calling on Brown to stand down to boost their chances at a general election due within a year.

The Conservatives have a commanding lead over Labour in opinion polls and are on course to return to power for the first time since 1997.

The Obama administration signaled Sunday that it was seeking a way to interdict, possibly with China’s help, North Korean sea and air shipments suspected of carrying weapons or nuclear technology.

The administration also said it was examining whether there was a legal basis to reverse former President George W. Bush’s decision last year to remove the North from a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

The reference to interdictions — preferably at ports or airfields in countries like China, but possibly involving riskier confrontations on the high seas — was made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was the administration’s highest-ranking official to talk publicly about such a potentially provocative step as a response to North Korea’s second nuclear test, conducted two weeks ago.
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Risks war with North Korea.

The Japan Coast Guard issued an alert to ships Monday as North Korea has banned vessels from passing through the Sea of Japan.

North Korea set the ban before launching short-range missiles from May 25 to 29.

Watching Fox News Sunday, I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn't resort to the administrations's blather about "saving or creating jobs," but he did repeat its fustian about how last month's loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don't recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin set aside politics only briefly Saturday to help Auburn officials celebrate their inaugural Founder's Day and raise money for a museum honoring William Seward, the 19th-century U.S. secretary of state who acquired Alaska for the United States.

More than 20,000 people turned out to see the former Republican vice presidential candidate lead a parade through downtown Auburn and sign a proclamation on the steps of City Hall honoring Seward as "the one person most responsible for Alaska."

But after spending a day and a half as a tourist visiting some of the upstate New York region's most historic sites, Palin turned back into a politician at a private fundraiser for the Seward House museum, where she had sharp words for President Barack Obama's national security and energy policies and his handling of the nation's economic crisis.

Well, I’m amused to learn that I was wrong about publius’s lack of legal education. I’ve been reliably informed that publius is in fact the pseudonym of law professor John F. Blevins of the South Texas College of Law. I e-mailed Blevins to ask him to confirm or deny that he is publius, and I copied the e-mail to the separate e-mail address, under the pseudonym “Edward Winkleman,” that publius used to respond to my initial private complaints about his reckless blogging. In response, I received from “Edward Winkleman” an e-mail stating that he is “not commenting on [his] identity” and that he writes under a pseudonym “[f]or a variety of private, family, and professional reasons.” I’m guessing that those reasons include that friends, family members, and his professional colleagues would be surprised by the poor quality and substance of his blogging.