Morning Report: ADP jobs report comes in line with expectations 6/2/16

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Brent Nyitray

Markets are lower this morning as ECB President Mario Draghi speaks. Bonds and MBS are flat.

The ECB will now start buying corporate bonds in an attempt to stimulate their economies. Truly an amazing time we live in.

We get some labor market data this morning, before the big jobs report tomorrow.

The ADP Employment Change report came bang in line with expectations at 173k jobs created. Tomorrow’s non-farm payroll expectation is for an increase of 160k jobs created in May. Small business led the way, adding 76k employees. Professional and business services increased the most. Manufacturing jobs fell.

Note that tomorrow’s payrolls number could be affected by the Verizon strike. Regardless. the number to focus on tomorrow is the change in average hourly earnings.

Job cuts fell to a 5 month low, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Announced job cuts came in at just over 30k, a drop of about 50% from April. The two biggest industries in job cuts – energy and finance – appear to be slowing down the pace of headcount reduction.

Initial Jobless Claims came in at 267k last week,

Homebuilder Hovnanian reported second quarter earnings this morning. Deliveries were up 31% and revenues were up 40%. Earnings were still below expectations. The stock is down this morning

US auto sales fell in May, which is usually one of the stronger months for auto sales. Auto sales had been increasing for 6 years, pushed by a stronger economy and ridiculously cheap financing. Yield pigs may find that doing 8 year auto loans at 3.5% is a dumb trade.

Despite being disappointed by the current crop of presidential candidates, consumers still plan to buy cars and houses. Despite all the rhetoric, the economy is not doing all that badly, and there is tremendous pent-up demand for housing, especially from younger buyers. The issue for them is affordability, and tight inventory combined with a lack of building is making it hard.

Here is a new one in the world of apartment leasing: Like our facebook page, or else.

The House included language in the 2017 budget to bring Congressional oversight to the CFPB and subject it to the appropriations process. Currently, it is funded by the Fed, who really has no choice but to give them what they want. Second, the provision would replace the single director with a five-member board appointed by the President. While this is going nowhere (we haven’t had a budget since early in Obama’s Presidency), it will be fodder for the fall elections. For the moment, it appears the CFPB is directing its attention to payday lenders.

Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |

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91 Responses

  1. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 2, 2016 at 8:42 am said:

    Who’s missing? And why?

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  2. jnc4p, on June 2, 2016 at 9:42 am said:

    Something change with WordPress? Looks different and the domain name doesn’t seem to resolve properly now.

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    • ScottC, on June 2, 2016 at 9:44 am said:

      I was just noticing that myself. The dashboard seems fine and I can see comments there, but when I try to go to the home page, I get “not available”.

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      • Kevin S. Willis, on June 2, 2016 at 6:32 pm said:

        I’m guessing the domain name expired. Although I don’t see how. Maybe something is just messed up with WordPress domain mapping? I changed it so it maps to conservaliberals.wordpress.com and that seems to solve that problem. Looks like WordPress handles the domain and it doesn’t expire until January, so I don’t know. Anyway, maybe this will fix it for now.

        Liked by 1 person

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      • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 4:29 pm said:

        Hmmmmm, I’ve had trouble with Hover trying to contact me at the old email address even though they keep contacting me at the new address as well. I went ahead and paid for another year even though it doesn’t expire until September.

        I got in because Mark sent me a new link?

        I can’t figure it out, but then I’m not really trying….have a lot going on here.

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        • Kevin S. Willis, on June 7, 2016 at 4:30 pm said:

          When? Do you have the account info? Login and PW?

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        • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 4:32 pm said:

          It started about a month ago and I informed of the new email………again and now I get emails from them at the new one but they keep letting me know they can’t reach me at the old one.

          The password is linked to the banking info I use.

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        • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 4:42 pm said:

          I just verified the email change again at Hover as they said our domain name was suspended. Maybe it will work this time?

          Like

  3. Kevin S. Willis, on June 2, 2016 at 6:42 pm said:

    Clinton Foundation stuff:

    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/geoffrey-dickens/2016/05/06/clinton-foundation-charity-fraud-nets-dont-report

    Charles Ortel’s blog. He does a deep dive into the Clinton Foundation’s chicanery.

    http://charlesortel.com

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  4. Kevin S. Willis, on June 2, 2016 at 6:45 pm said:

    Scott Adams on how people’s prediction about how a president will perform (and analysis of how well they actually did perform) are all pretty much worthless:

    http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145309172876/the-risks-of-a-trump-presidency

    For starters, ask yourself how well you predicted the performance of past presidents. Have your psychic powers been accurate?

    I’m not good at predicting the performance of presidents. I thought Reagan would be dangerous, but he presided over the end of the Cold War. And I thought George W. Bush would be unlikely to start a war, much less two of them.

    But it gets better. Even AFTER the presidency, can you tell who did the best job? I can’t. You think you can, but you can’t. And the simple reason for that is because there is no base case with which to compare a president. All we know is what did happen, not what might have happened if we took another path. You can’t compare a situation in the real world to your imaginary world in which something better happened. That is nonsense. And yet we do it. Watch me prove it right now.

    So, how did President Obama do on the job? Was he a good president?

    If you have an answer in your head – either yes or no – it proves you don’t know how to make decisions. No judgement can be made about Obama’s performance because there is nothing to which it can be compared. No one else in a parallel universe was president at the same time, doing different things and getting different results.

    Liked by 1 person

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  5. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 3, 2016 at 8:42 am said:

    Baby, why you make me hit you?

    “At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Liccardo said.

    http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/03/angry-leftist-mob-physically-attack-trump-supporters-outside-california-rally/

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  6. jnc4p, on June 3, 2016 at 12:17 pm said:

    Scott Adams thinks Clinton has finally figured out how to take on Trump

    “Now It’s a Fair Fight

    Posted June 3rd, 2016 @ 8:50am in #Trump #clinton2016

    It appears that the Clinton campaign has wisely decided to abandon its claim to reason, facts, and other losing strategies, and go “full fear” as their persuasion theme. The idea is that pairing Trump with nuclear war will make him unelectable.

    That could work!

    Fear is a strong motivator. It is even stronger than Make America Great, because fear generally tops opportunity in our emotional priorities. If Clinton turns up the fear-o-meter to maximum, that’s all anyone will remember.

    The downside of using fear as a campaign theme is that it might inspire more street violence, as we saw yesterday against Trump supporters. That isn’t a good visual to have in the public eye, especially when some of the anti-Trumpers are waving Mexican flags.

    Still, this marks a new and more effective phase of the Clinton campaign. Now we have a real fight. Clinton had to become Donald Trump to pull it off, but that’s a small price to pay for victory.”

    http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145354924661/now-its-a-fair-fight

    Liked by 1 person

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    • Kevin S. Willis, on June 3, 2016 at 3:04 pm said:

      Adams knows what’s what, and has a lot of great insights. Watching the PL folks blithely dismiss him (suggesting he’s misogynist because he observes that young men lusting for women is a universal characteristic of the cis-gender male seems amazingly unobservant, and that that also invalidates every other thing he says is just flawed logic even if he were a misogynist) just goes to prove, to me, that the people who find their thoughtfulness and erudition to be such fundamental characteristics are oddly narrow when they even suspect they may not agree with a person.

      His argument that western democracies are matriarchies, fundamentally, seems very persuasive, even if one can quibble with details. He also observes that real patriarchies tend to give us Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan but that’s doesn’t seem to be exculpatory.

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      • jnc4p, on June 3, 2016 at 4:03 pm said:

        His linking of the threat of Islam being directly tied to whether or not women can vote is the sort of point that Nicholas Kristoff from the NYT makes all the time.

        Liked by 2 people

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  7. jnc4p, on June 3, 2016 at 4:04 pm said:

    Good summation:

    “The Democratic Establishment Prevails

    Both political parties experienced populist uprisings this year. But while Republicans were consumed by theirs, Democrats have defeated their insurgent wing, even if they haven’t tamed it.

    Molly Ball 6:00 AM ET Politics

    It is always tempting to see symmetries in politics, particularly in a two-party system. And so, this election cycle, many have witnessed the parallel rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—two men with very different political orientations, but similar antiestablishment sensibilities—and concluded that both major parties are being disrupted by populist revolution from within. The Republican Party has been taken over and remade in the image of Donald Trump, and the Democratic Party is likewise being reshaped by Bernie Sanders.

    There’s just one problem with this analysis: In one party, the populist insurgency won. In the other, it is about to lose.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/the-democratic-establishment-won/485378/

    Liked by 1 person

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  8. jnc4p, on June 3, 2016 at 4:13 pm said:

    I assume the Obama administration will be all over this violation of Title IX the same way that they are with transgender access to bathrooms of their choice in North Carolina.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/public-pool-brooklyn/485489/

    Liked by 1 person

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  12. jnc4p, on June 6, 2016 at 12:32 pm said:

    Selective defense of duly enacted laws when challenged by the Department of Justice is apparently now the new normal:

    “DOJ won’t defend measure that facilitates VA firings
    By Joe Davidson | Columnist June 6 at 7:00 AM”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/06/doj-wont-defend-measure-that-facilitates-va-firings

    The hilarious, or disgusting, part of this is that the law was signed by President Obama whose administration now declines to defend it. So either he was incompetent when he signed it, or is being disingenuous now by not defending it.

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    • ScottC, on June 6, 2016 at 1:45 pm said:

      jnc:

      So either he was incompetent when he signed it, or is being disingenuous now by not defending it.

      I don’t think it’s an either/or thing.

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  13. jnc4p, on June 6, 2016 at 2:19 pm said:

    Interesting read in retrospect:

    “The Passion of Muhammad Ali
    ​​By Leonard Shecter”

    http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a45493/the-passion-of-muhammad-ali/

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    • jnc4p, on June 6, 2016 at 4:17 pm said:

      Yep, Trump is the flip side of the left’s diversity arguments.

      “When Sonia Sotomayor said that being a “wise Latina” influences her decisions for the better, that—we were told—was not merely nothing to worry about but a sign of her judicial temperament and fitness for the High Court. When Trump says being a Latino will influence this judge’s hearing of his case, he’s Hitler.”

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    • ScottC, on June 6, 2016 at 8:56 pm said:

      McWing:

      For Scott

      Thanks. An excellent point. For the record, I say it is not conscious/deliberate on Trump’s part. If it is, he’s a genius.

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      • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:10 am said:

        I don’t think it’s deliberate. Perhaps he’s being buoyed by some collective necessity, some larger hive-mind or something, acting as some sort of societal balancing agent . . . I dunno. I don’t for a second believe he’s acting out of anything but a lust for battle and a belief in his own invincibility, and an innate understanding that no matter how vilified he is, his behavior will get a pass or full-throated support from many of his supporters.

        His acting in any way as an illustration of the logical fruition of identity politics, or some primer as to how multiculturalism, as commonly practiced, is no more productive than old school racism and racial supremacism is pure coincidental.

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    • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:19 am said:

      Man, Daily Caller as a site is such a mess. I suppose I shouldn’t be ungrateful for free opinion news, but trying to find the article amongst the ads is a pain, and my adblock does nothing. Nothing!

      That being said, dude isn’t a boy. He identifies as a girl, so he is a girl. This cannot apply to bathrooms and showers and whatever but not to sports. Or women’s services, or women’s scholarships, or women’s clubs or groups or sororities. We cannot selectively say that this person is a girl, except when she’s a boy. And I’m guessing the legal precedent is going to start trending that way. “Sorry that this girl is better than the rest of the girls, be she’s definitely a girl, despite whatever gender she was originally incorrectly assigned at her birth!”

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  16. ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 7:05 am said:

    A day late, but definitely worth reading:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/

    UNLIKE what happens to other great battles, the passing of the years and the retelling of the story have softened the horror of Omaha Beach on D Day.

    This fluke of history is doubly ironic since no other decisive battle has ever been so thoroughly reported for the official record. While the troops were still fighting in Normandy, what had happened to each unit in the landing had become known through the eyewitness testimony of all survivors. It was this research by the field historians which first determined where each company had hit the beach and by what route it had moved inland. Owing to the fact that every unit save one had been mislanded, it took this work to show the troops where they had fought.

    How they fought and what they suffered were also determined in detail during the field research. As published today, the map data showing where the troops came ashore check exactly with the work done in the field; but the accompanying narrative describing their ordeal is a sanitized version of the original field notes. This happened because the Army historians who wrote the first official book about Omaha Beach, basing it on the field notes, did a calculated job of sifting and weighting the material. So saying does not imply that their judgment was wrong. Normandy was an American victory; it was their duty to trace the twists and turns of fortune by which success was won. But to follow that rule slights the story of Omaha as an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster. On this two-division front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach. Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could start to fight. Several contributed not a man or bullet to the battle for the high ground. But their ordeal has gone unmarked because its detail was largely ignored by history in the first place. The worst-fated companies were overlooked, the more wretched personal experiences were toned down, and disproportionate attention was paid to the little element of courageous success in a situation which was largely characterized by tragic failure.

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    • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 7, 2016 at 12:56 pm said:

      Wow! I wonder how many realized, before D-Day that they were going to the fodder for a human wave? The strategy was to overwhelm the Germans with soldiers. The tactic works but the human cost is unimaginable.

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      • ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 1:46 pm said:

        McWing:

        It really is staggering. I just can’t imagine it.

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      • markinaustin, on June 7, 2016 at 6:33 pm said:

        And, in hindsight, it explains Ike’s decision to leave closing the ring on Berlin entirely to Zhukov, and Truman’s decision on Hiroshima. They were right to do what they did.

        BTW, the decision to leave Berlin to the Soviet Army was Ike’s and when Churchill protested to FDR, FDR told Churchill the final decision lay with Eisenhower – he was Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

        OTOH, I doubt Truman would have entrusted the A-bomb decision to Nimitz.

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        • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:24 am said:

          Absolutely. This fantasy that certain leftist’s hold that Japan was about to surrender and we just bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not to mention the firebombing of Tokyo) to be monsters is just insane. The record is clear that they were looking at losing a million soldiers trying to take Japan with ground troops. And the battle of Okinawa is a clear illustration of the high cost of taking Japan on the ground, as every man, woman and child would likely end up battling to the death. The cost would not have just been higher for American forces, but many more Japanese would have ultimately died. Including men, women and children, as we fought a bloody front into the heart of Japan from the outer islands.

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    • ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 9:25 am said:

      McWing

      From Reynolds:

      Without relying on colleges as a foundation for credentialism, we’d have to find some other way to assess candidates. But odds are it would be something more closely associated with actual performance on the job: A competency test, for example, or an apprenticeship program.

      If I am not mistaken, many places used to use IQ tests to assess candidates, but the Supreme Court made doing so legally questionable (Griggs v Duke Power, I believe). And that is one thing that led to the ubiquity of the college degree requirement. Companies were prevented from assessing the IQ of employees directly, so they relied on third parties (colleges) to do it indirectly.

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    • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:34 am said:

      “Five weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Americans reminded of their mortality or the events of September 11, 2001, reported that they intended to vote for President George W. Bush by an almost 3:1 margin. Americans in a control condition reported that they intended to vote for Senator John Kerry by a 4:1 margin”

      This sounds questionable, as how there could be a control group not reminded of 9/11 prior to the 2004 election? What kind of super-low-information voter would that be? And that 4:1 margin for Kerry sounds ridiculous. And the entire idea that they managed to control for ideological or partisan bias . . . eh, nonsense.

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  20. markinaustin, on June 7, 2016 at 11:37 am said:

    Did anyone send an email to Brent with the appropriate link to the site?

    I sent one to Kelly, YJ, FB, and some others. I forgot Brent and Lulu, and I assumed NoVA and JNC had it. But we should let everyone know or Brent will never write another Morning Report for us.

    Liked by 1 person

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    • ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 12:46 pm said:

      Mark:

      Did anyone send an email to Brent with the appropriate link to the site?

      I did not. The link from my “favorites” bar still works, so I thought it still resolved itself properly. Do you want me to send one out to him? The last time I tried to e-mail lms it got bounced back to me, so I don’t have an updated e-mail for her.

      Liked by 1 person

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    • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 4:47 pm said:

      I’ve been trying to settle things with Hover for the last month off and on. I’m sorry it affected everyone here.

      I just tried again as they said our domain name was suspended because they couldn’t reach me at the old email address, even though I entered my new one a month or so ago.

      They kept telling me they couldn’t reach me when they were actually reaching me at the correct email address…………sheesh!

      I’m sorry if this screwed everything up but I just changed it for the umpteenth time and maybe this time it will stick. I’ll check later to see if we’ve been unsuspended.

      I haven’t checked in here like I should have………..we’re having a pretty serious health issue going on here with Walter so things have been a little chaotic and stressful lately.

      I’ll try to fix it again if it hasn’t been fixed yet.

      I signed in from Mark’s link in the email he sent this morning.

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  21. markinaustin, on June 7, 2016 at 6:34 pm said:

    Lindsey Graham, as y’all know, is one of my favorite Senators. No irony intended.

    Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, another former primary rival of Mr. Trump’s, urged Republicans who have backed Mr. Trump to rescind their endorsements, citing the remarks about Judge Curiel and Mr. Trump’s expression of doubt on Sunday that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the same lawsuit, given Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim noncitizens entering the country.

    “This is the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” Mr. Graham said. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it,” he added. “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

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    • ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 7:05 pm said:

      Mark:

      “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

      It is precisely love of country that makes me so wary of Hillary in the first place. I am not at all sure that Trumps attitude towards “Mexican” and Muslim judges is any more of a danger to the country I love than is the obvious disdain of the constitution that is the hallmark not only of the administration of which Hillary was such a large part, but indeed of the larger political movement of the left for which she seeks to be the standard bearer.

      BTW, why does The Wise Latina (and implicitly Obama) get a pass for explicitly proclaiming that her ethnicity will influence the way she judges, but Trump is in so much trouble for taking her at her word and assuming it applies to others?

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      • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 7:58 pm said:

        I swore I would never vote for Hillary, she’s not someone I want in charge, but guess what I voted for her today and will probably vote for her in November…………..Trump is a loose cannon as far as I’m concerned and better the enemy I know than the one I don’t!

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        • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 7, 2016 at 8:19 pm said:

          I’m good, thank you. I hope all is well.

          Like

        • lmsinca, on June 7, 2016 at 8:24 pm said:

          More or less McWing, more or less!

          Like

        • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:45 am said:

          This is logical, and I’m assuming a lot of people who might not have voted for Hillary if Jeb! were the candidate or Kasich will vote for Hillary because it’s Trump. Thus, I do think Hillary is likely to win (but still say it’s by no means guaranteed). What’s more, I expect a Hillary victory in 2016 makes the Democrats much more vulnerable than they will ever believe in 2020 (this is natural, and happens to both parties over time), at which point they may well lose big. Especially if the business cycle takes a big dip around 2020, because human beings irrationally attribute present economic performance to the current occupant of the Whitehouse, and politicians themselves encourage that view—so, live by the sword, die by the sword.

          My sense is that Hillary is likely to be more of a hawk and more likely to get us militarily engaged in other battles (NATO lead or something, of course) than Trump. Belligerence aside, I don’t see Trump actually wanting more military quagmires on his watch, or a lot of military KIAs. This is speculative but I’d bet money on it.

          As for the rest, who knows? Likely anything he doesn’t care much about, which might be a lot, gets handed over to Republican leadership to control, such as SCOTUS appointees amongst other things. And I think we could have worse than a loose cannon, but I just don’t see Trump winning in November with Gary Johnson running. Although I also just don’t see a landslide victory for Clinton.

          This is a year where both sides could have used a deeper bench to draw on.

          Like

        • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 8, 2016 at 9:56 am said:

          I want Trump on the left of Hillary on trade deals and hammer away at it, it fractures the D’s.

          Like

      • markinaustin, on June 7, 2016 at 8:56 pm said:

        I don’t give her a pass.

        I also think, from context, that her statement didn’t carry the import you gave it, but it does carry some weight with me and that weight is a negative.

        Many judicial scholars have argued that “who you are” influences your view of a fact set, in ways that are not motivated by partisan politics. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this. As an example, in the local practice, divorce lawyers opposing an alleged alcoholic spouse try to get hearings before the judge known to be actively in recovery, and a meeting goer at AA.

        But a Supreme Court justice is often called upon to announce the policy of the law, because appellate court justices have disagreed on it in good faith. And that is distinct from one’s view of a fact set.

        So it is somewhat confusing and a cause for question when a nominee for the high court suggests she has special wisdom by reason of gender and ethnic heritage, because she might not be talking about “fact sets”.

        When I talk about fact set distinctions, based on “who you are”, as an example I think at the Supreme Court level that it is typical for formerly active prosecutors like Alito, Kennedy, and Garland to be very “law and order”. They have come, over time, to usually trust the forces of the police and distrust the accuseds.

        For a former defense attorney who has seen many cases of police abuse of authority, those experiences might well lead her to see the fact set in a criminal case from a different vantage point. And lawyers who never dealt with crime at the trial level have a more “theoretical” view of fact sets in those cases.

        Was she talking about fact set viewpoint? Was she talking about some sort of ethnic superiority/racism? The chance of the latter is strong enough to make your question legitimate and the chance of the former is enough for me to give her a bit of leeway. That she never should have said what she did is clear.

        Let us distinguish Trump’s situation here. Trump has the absolute right to have his case heard by a fair tribunal. Were there a ruling that smacked of bias or “interest” in his case his lawyers could move that the judge recuse himself and they could take that Motion to the conference and to the Circuit.
        That has not been done because there has been no such ruling.

        Thus Trump’s outburst clearly had nothing to do with the suit, but only his apparent contempt for parentage of some native born Americans. Where was Trump’s grandfather born? It wasn’t Atlantic City.

        I would be tempted as a federal judge, if he were a party in my court, to gag order him to refrain from commenting on the litigation outside the courtroom during its pendency, and I would issue the same gag order to his lawyers and the prosecution, as well. But I probably would not do it, in the face of a presidential campaign where the man will be questioned about the litigation. I think the gag order would NOT survive an appeal.

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        • ScottC, on June 7, 2016 at 10:16 pm said:

          Mark:

          Here is The Wise Latina’s speech, from 2009. You can judge for yourself exactly what she meant.

          I think this passage is particularly relevant.

          Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

          Note that there were no specific facts pertinent to her claim. Simply that in deciding unspecified and generic “cases”, she “hopes” (and almost certainly expects) that a wise Latina women will reach a better conclusion than a white male, because of the nature of being a Latina woman. A “better” conclusion. Because of her racial and sexual identity. Could a white man possibly say such a thing about white men and hope of getting even a whiff of the Supreme Court? More likely he’d be hounded from whatever office he already held, no matter how low.

          Like

        • Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 8, 2016 at 7:47 am said:

          How is her belief in her racial superiority not, in itself, completely disqualifying?

          Liked by 1 person

        • markinaustin, on June 8, 2016 at 8:38 am said:

          I cut her some slack, as I wrote below, but I would have felt justified as a Senator to examine her closely enough that if I thought she was arguing for ethnic/gender superiority rather than the noted differences in looking at fact sets, then I would have voted against her nomination.

          To belabor a point with actual examples, differences in fact set views based on life or professional experiences often raise their head on the Court. The Supremes have messed up the state of dual/multiple state taxation in commerce in large part because none of them are tax lawyers and they did not understand the effect of their pronouncements, which were based on understanding the legislative intent incorrectly. Unanimously, in the worst cases. When a poor woman in a southern state was denied a free lawyer as her child was being taken away she appealed all the way to the Supremes, claiming denial of a fundamental right. All the then 7 male justices originally were set in the notion that there was no legal right to free counsel in a civil case. The two women, SDO’C and RBG, immediately pointed to case law that made parenting a fundamental right that could not be taken without due process, and that fundamental rights deserved fundamental protections. They eventually won over most of their brethren. Seems like law, but everyone was correct on the law – only civil cases that could lead to incarceration had ever raised right to counsel outside the criminal law domain, and the Court had also often lauded parent/child relationship as “fundamental”.

          So just how fundamental was it? Was it as fundamental as government caused loss of liberty or only as fundamental as government caused loss of property? Well, the women thought the facts made it more like a liberty case, because in takings cases the poor litigant could get a lawyer to work on a contingent fee. Property cases have market protections and thus much less [or no] need for extension of the 6th Amendment right to a free lawyer to give equal protection and due process to the poor litigant. So it was fact situation based reasoning.

          I’m now out of here for the day. Hope Brent publishes!

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        • ScottC, on June 8, 2016 at 1:40 pm said:

          Mark:

          …if I thought she was arguing for ethnic/gender superiority rather than the noted differences in looking at fact sets, then I would have voted against her nomination.

          It is difficult for me to construe a generic claim that a “wise latina” would more often than not reach a “better” conclusion than a “white male” to indicate anything other than ethnic/gender superiority. What else could she possibly have been saying?

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        • ScottC, on June 8, 2016 at 1:10 pm said:

          McWing:

          How is her belief in her racial superiority not, in itself, completely disqualifying?

          It’s an excellent question.

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      • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:50 am said:

        Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

        I see no way in which saying that is any different from saying, “Second, I would hope that a wise white man with the richest of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusions that a Latina woman who hasn’t live that life.”

        I’d like to see how that played, had that been in John Robert’s record.

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        • Kevin S. Willis, on June 8, 2016 at 9:51 am said:

          Or what about “Second, I would hope that a wise Christian man with the richness of their faith would more often than not reach a better conclusion than an atheist or agnostic who hasn’t truly lived in faith.”

          I could think of a lot of ways where the same implication would be completely disqualifying.

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  22. lmsinca, on June 8, 2016 at 9:45 am said:

    Is the site working okay again for sure? I can’t tell because I’m using the link that Mark sent me yesterday and don’t have the old one. I don’t see the dashboard or anything.

    I just want to make sure everything is fixed!

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  23. Let the mutherfuker burn!, on June 8, 2016 at 11:54 am said:

    On a positive note, Rene Elmers lost her primary.

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