Time: U.S. employers added 155,000 jobs in December, a steady gain that shows hiring held up during tense fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington …. The solid job growth wasn’t enough to push down the unemployment rate, which stayed 7.8 percent last month….
…. Robust hiring in manufacturing and construction fueled the December gains. Construction firms added 30,000 jobs, the most in 15 months… Layoffs are declining, and the number of people who sought unemployment aid in the past month is near a four-year low.
The once-battered housing market is recovering. Companies ordered more long-lasting manufactured goods in November, a sign they are investing more in equipment and software. And Americans spent more in November. Consumer spending drives nearly 70 percent of economic growth.
Manufacturing is getting a boost from the best auto sales in five years. Car sales jumped 13 percent in 2012 to 14.5 million. And Americans spent more at the tail end of the holiday shopping season, boosting overall sales that had slumped earlier in the crucial two-month period.
President Obama at Island Snow, a shaved ice shop, on January 3 in Kailua, Hawaii
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Forgot to post this a couple of days ago:
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NY Mag: Newtown, Conn. has had its share of somber visits from dignitaries in the weeks since the tragedy there, but a planned Friday visit by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords is especially significant …. She’ll attend an event with no press access in a private house, and meet with families of the victims…
Star Advertiser: President Barack Obama left Washington D.C. Tuesday night and is flying to Hawaii to rejoin his family on vacation.
….. Air Force One took off at about midnight. Obama is expected to arrive in Hawaii about 10 hours later, landing at about 5:15 a.m. Hawaii time.
Family friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett, White House spokeswoman Jay Carney, and deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonac were also on the flight.
[The White House did not say how long the president would stay, but earlier security arrangements indicated the island of Oahu was prepared for him to stay until Jan. 6]
BooMan: For the first time in some of your lives, the House of Representatives just passed a bill that the majority of the majority party opposed. Ordinarily, such votes are not even allowed to happen …. this is the first time that Republicans have voted for tax increases since they helped Poppy Bush violate his “Read My Lips” pledge over twenty years ago…..
If you are worried that we will see cuts in entitlements two months from now, you are probably correct. We were never going to escape that entirely. But any cuts we see will be matched by further tax hikes. We have a president who is coming off a series of victories whose popularity will have never been higher, and he isn’t going to cave…..
TPM: During tense fiscal cliff negotiations, House Speaker John Boehner last Friday told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “go fuck yourself,” according to a Politico report published early Wednesday. Boehner confronted Reid in the White House lobby and later bragged about it to his colleagues, according to the report.
Sometimes you just have to smile at NY Daily News’ headlines:
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CNN: In a move that surprised many lawmakers and angered others, House Republican leaders wrapped up this session of Congress Tuesday night without voting on a package that would have provided billions of dollars in aid to victims of Superstorm Sandy.
The Senate passed the $60.4 billion measure last week, and senators from New York had called on the House to take it up promptly. But because the House failed to act and a new Congress will be sworn in Thursday, the entire legislative process will have to start over – delaying the package from disbursing money to affected states.
GOP leaders announced they would not bring up any legislation Wednesday – the last day of the session – as many expected. This prompted many angry Democrats and some Republicans – mostly from New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut – to demand that House GOP leaders bring members back and vote on the bill.
Washington Post: The Senate approved a bipartisan agreement early Tuesday morning to let income taxes rise sharply for the first time in two decades, fulfilling President Obama’s promise to raise taxes on the rich and avoiding the worst effects of the “fiscal cliff.” The agreement, brokered by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), passed 89 to 8 in a highly unusual New Year’s morning vote. It now heads to the House, where leaders have not guaranteed passage but top officials believe it could win passage in the next few days.
The agreement primarily targets taxpayers who earn more than $450,000 per year, raising their rates for wages and investment profits. At the same time, the deal would protect more than 100 million households earning less than $250,000 a year from income tax increases scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
President Obama: Leaders from both parties in the Senate came together to reach an agreement that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support today that protects 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small business owners from a middle class tax hike. While neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted, this agreement is the right thing to do for our country and the House should pass it without delay.
This agreement will also grow the economy and shrink our deficits in a balanced way – by investing in our middle class, and by asking the wealthy to pay a little more.
What’s more, today’s agreement builds on previous efforts to reduce our deficits. Last year, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to cut spending by more than $1 trillion. Tonight’s agreement does even more by asking millionaires and billionaires to begin to pay their fair share for the first time in twenty years. As promised, that increase will be immediate, and it will be permanent.
There’s more work to do to reduce our deficits, and I’m willing to do it. But tonight’s agreement ensures that, going forward, we will continue to reduce the deficit through a combination of new spending cuts and new revenues from the wealthiest Americans. And as we address our ongoing fiscal challenges, I will continue to fight every day on behalf of the middle class and all those fighting to get into the middle class to forge an economy that grows from the middle out, not from the top down.
Steve Benen: We’ve reached the point at which the looming fiscal deadlines are so close, we can count them in hours, not days….
….. And so, we’re waiting. The respective Senate leaders will try to reach a resolution with the intention of holding a vote [Sunday]. If they succeed in crafting a plan, and it passes, Boehner has agreed to bring it to the House floor – even if most of his caucus disapproves – probably on Monday, the last possible day to act.
This is a machine with plenty of moving parts, but looking ahead, there are two main questions to keep an eye on: (1) what might the Senate plan look like? and (2) what would happen if a Senate plan doesn’t come together?
NYT: Never much known for restraint, Joseph R. Biden Jr. did not hold back during a presidential primary debate in 2007 when a voter asking about gun rights in a recorded video displayed a fearsome-looking semiautomatic rifle and declared, “This is my baby.”
Mr. Biden shook his head. “I tell you what, if that’s his baby, he needs help,” he said. “I think he just made an admission against self-interest. I don’t know if he’s mentally qualified to own that gun.”
….. Five years later, that same type of weapon, a Bushmaster AR-15, is at the heart of a renewed national conversation about gun laws because it was used this month by the mass killer in Newtown, Conn….
Sun Times: President Barack Obama is urging the Illinois General Assembly to legalize gay marriage in his home state as lawmakers are poised to take up the measure as early as this week in Springfield.
“While the president does not weigh in on every measure being considered by state legislatures, he believes in treating everyone fairly and equally, with dignity and respect,” White House spokesman Shin Inouye told the Chicago Sun-Times on Saturday.
“As he has said, his personal view is that it’s wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed relationships, and want to marry, from doing so. Were the President still in the Illinois State Legislature, he would support this measure that would treat all Illinois couples equally,” Inouye said.
Michael Tomasky: The Republicans’ Moment of Truth ….. Will McConnell and Boehner allow votes on any last-minute deal? A more emphatic way of phrasing it is, will they finally put the country ahead of their party for a change, and ahead of their party’s unaltered view that any posture toward Obama other than belligerence equals capitulation to an enemy? …. We’re going to learn a lot about the post-election Republican Party this weekend.
….. The only thing the Republicans are ready to play, as usual, is roulette, with the cocked gun against the country’s temple, unfortunately, and not their own …. Never have the priorities for survival and success of a major party’s Washington politicians been so utterly at odds with the priorities required for the country’s survival and success. These Washington Republicans represent the one-third of the country that hates government, despises Obama, and considers obstruction victory.
The rational two-thirds wants compromise, good-faith bargaining, higher taxes on the wealthy, a reasonably strong safety net, and lower defense spending. But the obstructionist one-third wants the opposite. McConnell and Boehner aren’t ideologically committed to that one-third in the way that Jim DeMint and Paul Ryan are, but so far, they have never once stood up to it for the country’s sake. We’ll find out this weekend who they really are.
NBC: This Sunday, David Gregory sits down exclusively with President Barack Obama. This will be Mr. Obama’s 11th appearance on Meet the Press, his second time as the commander in chief …. His most recent appearance was on Sept. 20, 2009 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
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President Barack Obama talks on the phone in the Oval Office, Dec. 28 (Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
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Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) speaks to a gathering outside the US Capitol to protest inaction by Congress to pass legislation to avoid the fiscal cliff, December 28
NYT: Republicans haven’t made it easy for the Northeast to get the $60.4 billion in aid it needs to recover from Hurricane Sandy. They have objected to the amount and tried to slash it. They have demanded that $3.4 billion of the aid for flood control be offset by spending cuts in other programs. And in the Senate, as on virtually all bills, they filibustered the aid package proposed by President Obama.
That filibuster was broken last week, allowing the Senate to pass the bill late on Friday. But it is not clear whether the House will even take up the bill in the remaining days of the session. If it does not, that will push desperately needed aid off until the next session of Congress, wasting weeks of time preparing and voting on a fresh bill…..
Business Insider: The Obama campaign’s digital operations proved to be a crucial point of success that led to the re-election of President Barack Obama in November.
Based on a sophisticated effort and larger emphasis on digital and new media, the Obama campaign engaged supporters and raised an unprecedented amount of money through its digital efforts.
How did the Obama campaign become so effective in the digital realm? Engage, an interactive digital political agency in Washington, D.C., recently published a report entitled “Inside the Cave.” It features a 93-page, step-by-step in-depth look at the secrets to the Obama digital team’s success.
We’ve collected 15 of the report’s key topics and published them here.
Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, December 22, Honolulu, Hawaii (Photos: Pool/Getty)
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Anyone worried that Bo got left behind ….. 0:38 …. 😎
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NYT Editorial: Wayne LaPierre would have been better advised to remain wherever he had been hiding after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, rather than appear at a news conference on Friday. No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and video game players.
Charles Blow: Seriously, what was the National Rifle Association performing on Friday? I thought it was going to be a press conference. It wasn’t. I really don’t know how to describe it. A soliloquy of propaganda? A carnival of canards? A herding of scapegoats?
Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, blamed gun violence in general, and mass shootings in schools in particular, on everything except for the proliferation of brutally efficient, high-capacity guns and his organization’s efforts to resist virtually any restriction on people’s access to those weapons.
It was an appalling display of deflection and deception. So much smoke and so many mirrors.
Eugene Robinson: Absurd, unbelievable, tragic, obscene — I grope for words to describe the National Rifle Association’s proposal for how the nation should respond to last week’s slaughter in Newtown: More guns in the schools.
The idea is so insane that as far as I’m concerned — and, I hope, as far as a still-grieving nation is concerned — the NRA has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on matters of public policy. Newtown is still burying six-year-olds and Wayne LaPierre, the organization’s chief, wants more freaking guns in the schools. Wow.
Gail Collins: Well, the Mayans were sort of right.
The world didn’t implode when their calendar stopped on Dec. 21. But the National Rifle Association did call for putting guns in every American school in a press conference that had a sort of civilization-hits-a-dead-end feel to it.
And we learned that negotiations on averting a major economic crisis had come to a screeching halt because Speaker John Boehner lost the support of the far-right contingent of his already-pretty-damned-conservative caucus. We have seen the future, and everything involves negotiating with loony people.
Washington Post: The main thing that has held Republicans together philosophically is the belief in holding down taxes. Not one of them in Congress has voted for a significant increase in more than two decades.
Now that very issue is tearing the GOP apart and making it an all-but-ungovernable majority for Speaker John Boehner to lead in the House.
Disarray is a word much overused in politics. But it barely begins to describe the current state of chaos and incoherence as Republicans come to terms with electoral defeat and try to regroup against a year-end deadline to avert a fiscal crisis.
The presidential election was fought in large measure over the question of whether some Americans should pay more in taxes. Republicans lost that argument with the voters, who polls show are strongly in favor of raising rates for the wealthy. But a sizable contingent within the GOP doesn’t see it that way and is unwilling to declare defeat on a tenet that so defines them.
The Obama Diary 
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