Breaking: Hilda Solis has resigned as Secretary of Labor.

Pretty much out of nowhere: as of an hour ago CNN was reporting that the White House was touting Hilda Solis as a mark of its diversity.

Solis-resignation

Mind you, they were doing so as part of a post about how Barack Obama’s Cabinet is becoming, and I quote CNN here, ‘a boys club.’  At any rate, this was and is very much a surprise, so there are two questions to ask:

  1. Did Hilda Solis resign, or was she pushed?  Or is she running like blazes before the revelations detonate?
  2. What white guy will Barack Obama pick as her replacement?  – Because it probably will be one.  Philip Klein suggests that the President should not waste our time this go-round and just nominate Dick Trumka; while that would be a mistake, it does have the virtue of essential honesty.

This is going to be an interesting few weeks.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh, Hey! It’s like Romney wants to be President, or something.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) From Team Romney’s ripping on PolitiFact’s proxy ripping on Team Romney’s common sense observation that women aren’t doing too well during President Obama’s term of office: Continue reading #rsrh, Hey! It’s like Romney wants to be President, or something.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis uses gay-baiting slur in public.

It’s not turning into a good year for the Obama administration – in fact, it’s not been a good administration for the Obama administration – but I think that this is hardly an excuse for a Cabinet level official to use low-rent sexual epithets in public:

At the Florida Democratic Party State Convention over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis insulted members of the Tea Party, referring to the activists as “teab[*]ggers.” Teab[*]gger is a pejorative term used to refer to a certain sexual act. Liberal talk show hosts such as Rachel Maddow brought the phrase into the mainstream in 2009, using it as a tongue-in-cheek insult.

As reported by Tallahassee Democrat and Sunshine State News, after voicing her support for large federal programs, Solis warned, “I’ll be darned if I’m going to set that aside now because a few teab[*]ggers want to somehow muzzle my voice,” Solis said.

(Sanitizing mine.)

Continue reading Labor Secretary Hilda Solis uses gay-baiting slur in public.

Department of Labor: unemployment rate 10.2%.

Tell me again why we’re not doing something about this?

The unemployment rate rose from 9.8 to 10.2 percent in October, and nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline (-190,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The largest job losses over the month were in construction, manufacturing, and retail trade.

Household Survey Data

In October, the number of unemployed persons increased by 558,000 to 15.7 million. The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 10.2 percent, the highest rate since April 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by 8.2 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 5.3 percentage points. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (10.7 percent) and whites (9.5 percent) rose in October. The jobless rates for adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (27.6 percent), blacks (15.7 percent), and Hispanics (13.1 percent) were little changed over the month. The unemployment rate for Asians was 7.5 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

Aside from the fact that if this administration does do something about this, they’ll have to explain why what they did back in the beginning of the year didn’t actually work. They probably don’t want to discuss the problem that Democratic legislators are more interested in passing cap-and-tax and health care rationing for their pet fringe groups than they are in fixing the economy. They definitely don’t want to talk about how a lot of this is due to moral cowardice on the part of the current ruling party…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.